Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.

Hearing it in her words, it makes it all the more real. It’s something that’s hard to get across in print, hard to do in any other way. … We all hear about AIDS in...

You’d think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

For most people when you say – public radio – they automatically think it’s like medicine. We only do stories that amuse and interest us. For people who haven’t heard the show, we describe it...

But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.

But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you’re being sincere all the time.

…uncorny, human sized drama

I suppose I shouldn’t go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there’s not much evidence of it.

It’s not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he’s fun to read out loud.

Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn’t fun?

One reason I do the live shows – and the monthly speeches at public radio stations – is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in...

Often they don’t take advantage of the latitude they have. They spend a lot of their early career trying to be the – official version – of a reporter. It’s all about replicating a kind...

We’re Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

Any journalist who doesn’t stick to the day’s news is sort of part journalist, part anthropologist. Once the excuse for the story stops being – it happened today – then you’re square right in the...

When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I’m just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.

Her vision of what the country is, and what she should be writing about, is totally her own. She’s utterly in step with the current moment, … She’s in touch with contemporary culture and the...