NPR

Frequent flyers are keeping the one-dollar coin grounded

I’m a late discoverer of the ridiculous  genius of Nabokov. I read Lolita in university, and watched the film a bunch of times, but while I understood – from the famous opening lines – that he was a writer who had the English language by the tail, I was too lazy, or too intimidated, or both, to read more of his books.

Ujjal Dosanjh, now pretty much a member of the Obama administration, keeps up his efforts to defend the nation, this time on NPR. The full discussion, including the former head of the Canadian Medical Association, can be found here. Dosanjh has uploaded his contribution to YouTube.

Friends travelling to New York City sometimes ask where they can go to hear good jazz. It depends who’s playing. This week I’d have sent them to the Village Vanguard to hear Los Guachos, the biggish band of youngish Manhattan jazz stars who play compositions by the cultish Argentinian pianist/arranger Guillermo Klein. Fortunately, thanks to the bounty of National Public Radio, here’s a full set of Klein’s band recorded a few nights ago at the Vanguard.

Driving back from Montreal last night I caught a great speech on NPR’s Word for Word by former CBS correspondent Roger Mudd, reminiscing about the glory days of broadcast journalism. Mudd is enough of a fogey to be wistful for the days when people had “twenty four hours and not ten seconds” to digest the news of the day, but he’s self-aware enough to realise that it isn’t all doom and gloom, and that what really matters is not the technology but the story – as long as there are stories to be told there will be quality journalism.