Rebecca Lavoie

Sean Hurley's story on Monster Trucks got us thinking about all those awesome Monster Truck names, like Gravedigger and Big Foot. Anyone with a TV knows those names sound great with heavy metal and lots of reverb designed to make us run (NOT WALK!!!) to the arena on Sunday (SUNDAY, SUNDAY!!!) So we were  surprised to find so many Monster Trucks have names that are...well...kind of lame. Check out our list, and listen to what a commercial might sound like if they got top billing:

Word of Mouth is taking a break for the holidays...to check out a complete list of the special programming airing in our stead, click here.

We'll be back on the air in the New Year with some fresh ideas, new conversations, and radio to satisfy your curiosity.

Have a great holiday week!

-Rebecca, Taylor, Zach, Jon, Ali, Bill, and Virginia

Like any major life event, the annihilation of life as we know it deserves a soundtrack.  It’s easy to decide what to listen to when the four horsemen of the apocalypse are coming around the bend…So, for everybody hosting an “end of the world party” in the next 48 hours, we compiled a few suggestions to help you kick out the jams one final time.  

A new TV trend has emerged, "hate-watching," or staying true to shows that make you feel a little bit bad about yourself the morning.

This year we found hate-watch blogs on TV Guide, The Root, and TV.com, among other places. We've also compiled our own list, curated by Senior Producer and resident television addict Rebecca Lavoie.

Today's interview on the legacy of Myers-Briggs with Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham got me wondering about the personality"types" working right here at NHPR.

Earlier this week, Word of Mouth aired a segment on "Machine Gun Safari," a recreational attraction in New Hampshire that allows visitors to fire assault rifles in a safe, controlled environment. In response to today's breaking news from Connecticut, we have unpublished the blog associated with that segment. We made this decision not to create the illusion that we did not air this story, but in keeping with our desire to be sensitive to our audience and staff as details of today's tragic story unfold. 

Today we spoke with Robin Whitten, founder and editor of AudioFile magazine about the best books read by celebrities in 2012.

I hate Monopoly. Always have. The reason is simple: it's impossible to play the game and feel good, even if you win. Monopoly, simply put, is all about crushing  your fellow players through bankruptcy, even if they're your own kids. Turns out, there might be a reason for my hatred of Monopoly.

The most popular game in the world, according to this amazing article in Harpers, is, simply put, theft. And it has an incredible, almost unbelievable history:

When we first saw Robert Ito's Pacific Standard piece on folks who've fallen in love with their robots, we were all....huh? So of course, we booked him on the show. You can listen to that interview here:

But all that talk about human-robot love got us thinking...if a robot is the love of your life, how do you show it? Here are some ideas we dug up:

1) Buy him a snazzy costume!

It’s not often that we stumbled across a story like the one we found in the latest edition of one of our favorite magazines, Mental Floss. It’s a profile of Alexandra Horowitz, who earned her PH.D. in cognitive science and teaches psychology at Barnard College.

More Specifically: We're talking debate memes, and how they are made.

Virginia and be attending the PRPD conference this week, and will be airing some vintage episodes of Word of Mouth. Never fear, though, we'll be back live on the air on Monday.

The popular website glassdoor has thousands of people posting their salaries, reviews of their companies, and other juicy corporate tidbits online for all to see. Does this mark the end of salary secrecy? And what do companies think about it?

Science is one of those topics it seems you either get or you don’t. If you fall in the latter category, you might have wished at some point – maybe during a high school physics test – that you could just make up the answers and get credit for being clever.   Well, our next guest makes his living doing exactly that. Phil Edwards is the author behind the Fake Science blog, and a new sort of textbook called Fake Science 101.

According to New York Times Comedy Reviewer Jason Zinoman, comedian James Adomian could very well be the first openly gay male comedy star. One question comes to mind...why hasn't there been one before?