Like the premiere? An audio download (.zip 37 MB) is now available.

The Summer 2009 premiere provides a glimpse of the works featured by the NPR Summer 2009 Interns in a 30-minute produced radio show.

A 30-minute premiere may not be enough time to feature all media produced, but it will give you taste: ride the subway pantless, visit a man whose condition causes uncontrollable laughing and crying, check out D.C. Bike Polo and more.

Random Acts of Comedy
Margaret Katcher

Freshest of All Time
John Asante and Katie Hayes

Why Baldwin Moved to France
Taylor Harris

Britney’s Music becomes Opera Fodder
Claire Happel and Sarah Metcalf

On the Court with D.C. Bike Polo
Georgia Rhodes

Fondre en Larmes: A Story of Pathological Laughing and Crying Disorder
Genevieve Wanucha

Check-out Donations Breathe New Life into Giving
Amanda Dyer

Audio: Produced by Megan Pellegrino
Engineered by Stephen Chesley

Video: Produced by Katie Hayes and Megan Pellegrino

Hosts: Brent Baughman and Sarah Metcalf

Songs:
7/4 Shoreline- Broken Social Scene
My Only Swerving- El Ten Eleven
Quiet Little Voices- We We’re Promised Jetpacks

In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, jazz fans flocked to the clubs on U Street to hear the most popular jazz musicians of the day. Today, jazz music still flows from the clubs on U Street to the Washington Monument. (Illustration by Alexandra Dimodica/IE/NPR)

In the 1930’s, musicians pleased eager crowds at the jazz clubs on U Street.  Today, jazz can be found all over the city from the White House to the National Mall, and even in the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden. Events such as the annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival and frequent jazz nights at clubs on U Street invite D.C. residents and tourists to enjoy the many diverse forms of jazz.

The link between D.C. and jazz goes far beyond geography and history.  People are still discovering, and others are rediscovering a love for jazz.  It is an American art form, and many jazz enthusiasts and performers proclaim jazz is a part of this nation’s identity.  D.C. jazz musician Thad Wilson says that jazz is “the epitome of what we call our democracy.”

After having survived years of transient fads and cultural changes, it seems that jazz is here to stay.

Alexandra Dimodica is a music library intern for NPR.

This, at least, is the thesis of New Yorker film critic David Denby’s 2009 book Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. Give me your angry, your clever, your feckless masses — Denby argues — yearning to post nasty things anonymously on unregulated comment boards. Then give them the Internet, and you’re going to need a helmet and a pair of shin guards.

Snark is the attempt to express in words a sensation that has no sound: The hybrid punctuation ?! -- that feeling of indignation mixed with utter disbelief. (Illustration by Nathan Wells)

Denby leaves to one side the abhorrent voices of hate groups and malevolent trolls. But even then, when he takes a big whiff of the Web, he’s frightened by what he smells. “Snark is a teasing, rug-pulling form of insult that attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness,” he writes. “It appeals to a knowing audience that shares the contempt of the snarker and therefore understands whatever references he makes.”

On the surface, it’s high-minded stuff. Denby is concerned with how the hypothetical spiteful commenter launching venom into the cybervoid relates to snark’s larger implications for our political and cultural existence.

What does it mean, Denby wonders, when a vice presidential candidate can stand before a nation and sneer that “a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities”? Denby is so alarmed by the fact that people take snarky Maureen Dowd seriously as a political commentator that he devotes an entire chapter to her. Denby wants us to share his fear that snark bodes the end of journalism itself.

It doesn’t.

David Denby is a deeply talented writer with a sharp, yet generous critical intelligence and decades of experience to his credit. But there are two reasons his book is wrong.

The first (and less important) of the two has all to do with how Denby defines snark — or rather, avoids defining it. He knows he’s against snark, but not in every case; even in his own book, he uses snark the way high-end restaurants use drizzles of sauce on mod plates — as an ornament. And he’s certainly not against irony or sarcasm in general. He ardently supports the exercise of wit. So what is this screed actually about?

For Denby, snark is born in the snarker’s sense of wounded inadequacy. The snarker, weak and defenseless, lashes out like a cornered animal. The only way to understand Denby’s logic here is to accept that, for him, the snarker exists in the same fantasy world in which bloggers are Fritos-eating schlubs in moldering pajamas, slouched in their parents’ basements, where they tap out their vitriol on laptop keyboards.

But virtually everyone acknowledges the poverty of this construction. These days, the bloggers we take seriously are almost all somewhere on the spectrum of ‘professional’, and the same goes for snarkers. Gawker and The Daily Beast — two of the most prominent purveyors of Web snark — are serious media outlets, and they’re fiercely good at what they do.

Why would Denby bother rolling around in the muck with the hacks who prowl comment boards picking fights? What he’s actually against is simply the strain of malice that often surfaces on the Internet — but you can’t sell books with a trend piece on meanness.

……

Before moving on to the second reason why snark isn’t a death knell — indeed, why snark may actually be good for us — let’s take a detour through a typical segment on The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow is the human embodiment of the Bostonian phrase ‘wicked smart’: In this Rhodes Scholar the wicked and the smart exist in equal measure, constantly playing off each other.

Maddow’s journalism is of the fact-checked, responsible variety, and her interviews are sharp and engaging. If she wanted to play it straight, she probably could. But she almost always starts her pieces by smirking her way through a snarky gem of an introduction, as if to say, “Really? Can you believe this nonsense?” Her style is grounded in a skepticism that all too often turns out to be deserved. When Maddow uses snark, she is mapping the uncharted space in journalism between Walter Cronkite and The Daily Show.

Snark — in the form practiced by Maddow and others, its most exalted form — is the attempt to express in words a sensation that has no sound: The hybrid punctuation ?! — that feeling of indignation mixed with utter disbelief. The hypocrisy and tone-deafness of politicians — ?!. Staggering malfeasance on Wall Street ­— ?!. The success of the latest Transformers movie — ?!. Here’s the real reason we need snark: It’s the speech we turn to when the only other option is speechlessness.

For Denby, snark is anathema to substantive engagement in politics or culture. And there is; we have to admit, something impotent about snark. It’s not going to change anything by itself. But no one is saying it should. When expectant Iranians heard June’s election results, they felt ?! (or maybe even ?!?!). They didn’t snark — they flooded the streets and bellowed from rooftops, and rightly so.

But what did they do after they came down off their roofs? According to an anonymous Iranian journalist writing in The New Yorker, they sat around in their apartments telling Ahmadinejad jokes.

The crucial thing to understand is that the true snarker is actually a closet idealist. We turn to snark when a set of expectations and norms is violated — norms about how government officials should behave, about how respectfully media outlets should treat us, about what we will and will not put up with. When snark isn’t motivated by a vision of a better politics, a better engagement, it’s just spite and we can ignore it. But the good stuff, the very best snark is not only fulfilling and riotously funny, but also — dare I say it? ­— deeply, achingly hopeful.

Ben Hyman is a digital media, arts & entertainment intern for NPR.

Chuck Brown, known as 'The God-Father of Go-Go,' talks about the music genre he created in the 1970s.

Go-Go music has long been a staple in DC culture. Amidst the rules, regulations and government scandals lies a hard-hitting, percussion driven sound that is the beat of the city. For over 30 years, Go-Go has thrived inside the nation’s capital and its surrounding metropolitan area. However, beyond its early days, it hasn’t had the commercial success outside of the Beltway that other genre’s like pop, hip-hop, rock and rhythm and blues have had.

Recently, it has taken big-name artists, like Beyoncé, sampling the Go-Go sound to help the music spread outside of Washington. So, what’s so special about this genre? “Take Me out to the Go-Go” answers that question and more as Stephen Chesley shines light on the Go-Go sound, why it hasn’t gone national and what it means for DC culture.

Stephen Chesley is the audio engineering intern for NPR.

Every summer, people across the country venture to that most American of summer activities—the state fair. This annual event provides a platform for each state to showcase its particular agricultural and artistic talent. At many state fairs, butter sculpture takes center stage with its combination of both agronomy and art.

Since the early 1900s crowds have marveled at the novelty of butter sculpture.  Today at the Iowa State Fair, the ‘Butter Cow’ remains the most-visited exhibit at the fair.  Yes, it’s 600 pounds of butter sculpted into the very animal that produced it.  Pamela Simpson, Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University, attributes its popularity to several reasons—the circular nature of a cow being produced from its own material, the sheer difficulty of creating it, and the novelty of something that is usually spread on toast becoming a lifesize monument.

While Iowa chooses to commemorate bovines and celebrities, Minnesota showcases their dairy industry through butter likenesses of their twelve dairy princesses.  Each day of the fair, a finalist in the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contest spends 5-6 hours in a refrigerated butter booth having her bust carved by sculptor Linda Christensen for every fairgoer to see.  The live demonstration of butter sculpting has become such a popular part of the fair that last year the Midwest Diary Association inaugurated a larger butter booth to provide better sight lines for spectators.  At the end of the two-week event, each candidate takes home her own likeness and is allowed to do with it what she will.  For some, it’s kept in a freezer for future use, and for others, it’s used as a condiment for pancakes, sweet corn, toast…you get the idea.

In this most ephemeral of art forms, eating the art itself is perhaps the most appropriate reward for one’s work.  And after the fair gates close, the artist is left to dream of the glories that will be created next summer—in butter.

Claire Happel is the arts & information intern; Sarah Metcalf is the business development intern.

Links:

Iowa State Fair

Princess Kay of the Milky Way

On a cold January day in 2002, an aspiring actor, Charlie Todd, and a few of his friends took off their pants in a New York subway car acting as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. They got all the right wide-eyed stares from their fellow passengers. The shock and confusion was just what their urban “prank” group was looking for and so the act caught on.

“The guys who did it had such a good time that the following year they told their friends and the size doubled to about 25 people and in subsequent years it kept expanding in New York City where it would be 60 people, 150 people, 3 hundred people, then 9 hundred people two years ago, and then 12 hundred people in New York last year,” Alex Scordelis, a member of this prank group explained. “So it just keeps growing, and keeps spreading to new cities.”

Alex is a “Senior Agent” of Improv Everywhere, the group responsible for dozens of “scenes of joy and chaos.” Among these scenes: a spontaneous musical in a mall’s food court, an invasion of Best Buy with agents wearing the store’s blue and khaki uniform, and the expanding no-pants subway ride. But this particular hilarious mission isn’t the only thing that is catching world-wide curiosity. The fundamental idea of public-performance-turned-comedy has sparked interest all around the world.

With the internet as its core, a community of pranksters, performers and flash-mobers has developed and grown into a phenomenon. While all have slightly different mission statements, the principal aim is to “make people stop and have a bit of a laugh,” as Jessi Tilbrook, a prankster in Sydney, Australia, said. They share prank success stories, borrow ideas from each other and coordinate world-wide pranks.

These proliferating groups of pranksters are without a doubt blurring the line between public and private, between audience and participant and between stage and street.

Margaret Katcher is an All Things Considered intern at NPR.

Want to see more flashmob fun? Two other interns filmed a flashmob in Philadelphia at the Art Museum in June.

Elephant Kandy (L) looks to her half sister, a new born baby elephant 11 April 2007 at the Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg, northern Germany. (Roland Magnuia /AFP/Getty Images)

The youth vote and their enthusiasm for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was a major headline in the 2008 presidential election. Nearly two-thirds of voters under the age of 30 voted for the Illinois Democrat, but millions of young people also supported the Republican presidential candidate, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Young Republicans are increasingly concerned that their peers see the GOP as out of touch. These individuals believe The Republican Party should de-emphasize some social issues like abortion and gay marriage. Others believe the party should return to its conservative roots on fiscal issues, but not dilute its social message.

Despite disagreements on how to move forward, Young Republicans were united in their belief that – no matter what course the party chooses to take – the GOP must breach its technology gap with Democrats in order to reach younger voters.

Gary James is a Morning Edition intern at NPR.

circa 1900: Black rats foraging near a trap. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

When Tristan Ahtone moved to New York City three years ago to pursue a career in journalism, he quickly found himself in a war with the city’s most reviled squatters: rattus norvegicus – the dreaded brown rat.

It’s been said there are eight-million stories in the city of New York, but there are about the same ammount of rats… Give or take a few million.

While there’s no such thing as a rat census, if you look, you’ll find them, and sometimes, they find you.

This is one New York story – one story with a lot of vermin.

Tristan Ahtone is a digital media, arts & entertainment intern at NPR.

Over 40 break dance crews showed up to battle at the 2009 Hip-Hop Theatre Festival in D.C. When the fire alarm halted the competition inside, the dancers took to the street.

John Asante is the Weekend All Things Considered intern; Katie Hayes is a multimedia intern.

Digital music technology allows artists to do some amazing things in the studio, and even behind personal laptops.  But some bands reject the fancy bells and whistles, opting for cheap and sometimes outdated recording methods.  These ‘lo-fi’ musicians record whole albums in anywhere from their garages, basements and even bedrooms. The result can sound fuzzy, washed out and even amateurish. Though you may not be familiar with lo-fi music, anyone who can hum the intro riff to “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes has at least encountered it.

Washington D.C.’s Secret Pop Band utilizes the “do it yourself” mantra of lo-fi recording due to monetary reasons. (Courtesy Secret Pop Band)

For many artists, lo-fi is a practical and frugal way for them to record their music, but it can be as much of a stylistic decision as it is a financial one.  Many insist that the simple sound maintains a purity to the aesthetic of the band’s music and focuses on the substance of a song rather than the frills. But as bands grow in their popularity and their bank accounts, there comes a time where they have to choose whether to keep making lo-fi music and stick to the idealized aesthetic of the 1960s or move on to greener studio pastures.

The term lo-fi was originally used to describe a small sector of indie-rock artists in the eighties and nineties, but as more and more diverse artists including Iron & Wine, No Age and Beck are pegged with the lo-fi title, it becomes harder to define.  Is it a genre, or is it merely a technique?  Is it something one should aim to grow out of, or something one should embrace?

Camden Andrews the All Songs Considered intern; John Asante is the Weekend All Things Considered intern; and Luis Torres is the communications intern.