In Lieu Of Focus...

I've volunteered to write a post for the blog, and have found, that while several news-ish items caught my eye, they are either 1) Too dirty for NPR, 2) Too light to extend into a blog post, or 3) a merely visual joke. So, instead of focusing on one thing, I'm just going to list the things that are catching my interest. It's Barrie's round-up! It's the Talk of Barrie's Nation! TOBN!!

1) The literally always-interesting Jezebel (if you're not reading it, you're missing out on a thousand interesting conversations you could be having with your girl (and boy, I suppose) friends) has a really nice post by Moe Tkacik about... yes, it's about Britney. It points to a new Rolling Stone cover story about the songstress (look! I just snapped up an Us Weekly word!), and makes a nice point about our consumption of these stories.

2) This is a great painting of Homer Simpson. I stole this from my most-fair-one.

3) Slate's "TV Club" posts on The Wire are blowing my mind and simultaneously filling me with rage. The Wire -- which kills me softly with every shot of dreadful and beautiful Baltimore (and then kills its characters hard) -- is worth every bit of over-intellectualizing Slate puts it through. Yet still I am slightly embarrassed to have devoured this feature so darn quick.

4) New York Magazine's John Heilemann essay on media coverage of Senators Obama and Clinton is definitely worth a read -- and I am so sick of political coverage that it must be good.

5) Check this out (below).I'm going to make one of these handy-dandy little clocks! Totally ingenious!

International Clock

That's it. Send in your own reading list, and I'll be grateful. Especially if it has nothing to do with superdelegates.

Barrie Hardymon

9:46 AM ET | 02-20-2008 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

How to Get on Talk of the Nation

So, here's the thing, people. We LOVE you. We really, really do. Every show/segment/guest we book we always ask "What will our callers do?" (WWCD?) We care what you think -- we love when you flip out over a guest or a topic, and when you say really revealing and brave things on the air. We even love when you curse us over the phone, correct our grammar, say things that seem a little morally repugnant and threaten to pull every bit of funding you've ever given to public broadcasting.* Partly, we love you because of all that, because you are so passionate -- and so are we. We are here because of you and we love that about this job.

That said, we are always trying to get you involved in this little thing we call Talk of the Nation. That's why Sarah (my FG -- Food Guru -- she knows how to get pomegranate seeds out really easily) put up that little thing at the top of the page called Talk of YOUR Nation. Because we want you involved. Except that, even though we desperately want to involve you in this, you aren't cooperating in exactly the way we'd hoped. While we do want your ideas, what we really want is your buzz. Don't think like a producer, think like a citizen -- a local citizen, too. "Here in Boston, we are worried that we're becoming the new New York, because our sports teams are KICKING SO MUCH $%#." "I live in Michigan, and I'm talking about trying to sell my house." Even, "I live in Florida, and all we could talk about at my kids' soccer game was how the women on Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice are reduced to eating cake and chasing men even though they've got medical degrees for goodness' sakes."

Help us... we can't do this without your input. While we're glad that your grammar is so good, we really need what's going on at your dinner table -- and we don't care if you dangle your participles. What's the Talk of YOUR Nation?

*Also, I want to reveal right here and now that before I worked in public radio, I was a frequent caller to my local talk show, before I ended up producing it. I have been on both ends of the screening telephone, and I have cursed a little at the person on the other end, myself. I AM YOU.

Barrie Hardymon

10:36 AM ET | 11- 5-2007 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

What's the Talk of YOUR Nation?

Every morning at 9 o'clock, the TOTN staff gathers 'round to take stock of the day's news. Heaven help the producer who overslept and failed to even catch the headlines... on rare occasion when this happens to me, I feel behind all day. Once we get the major stories covered, we like to dig a little deeper to see what's going on that people are truly talking about at the dinner table, in the morning carpool, and queued up at the grocery store. We have various strategies for it -- our executive producer seems to host and/or attend an immeasurable number of dinner parties stocked with interesting people, which always get the gears in her brain grinding on new topics, whereas I like to go online to check out the local papers in places I used to live, and places where my friends and family still reside. We can't cover the entire country every day, however, which is where you come in. You, our loyal TOTN listeners, literally DO span the country and the globe. So we want to know: What's going on in your town? What is everyone talking about? Maybe you live in Dubuque, Iowa, where the noise levels in the city's only dog park grate on residents' nerves. Or maybe you live in Memphis, where the death of famed photographer and local legend Ernest Withers is the talk of the coffeehouse or barbershop. We want to know about these stories, and even if they seem of limited interest -- geographically, demographically, whatever -- if people are talking about it, there's generally a nugget in there that speaks to a broader human discussion or truth. So tell us: what's the buzz where you live? We want to turn your stories into on-air content, so if you've got links, please send them along...

Sarah Handel

10:06 AM ET | 10-23-2007 | permalink | comments (131) | e-mail post