Word of Mouth

A black man is President of the United States, an increasing number of women are running large companies, and same-sex marriage is legal in a  number of states. Still, hate crimes and societal and institutional discrimination continue across the country.  We tend to hear about the most egregious examples. We’re going to focus in this segment on the more subtle exercise of bigotry that academics call “microaggressions”.

 To the average American, Chinese music might evoke a stereotype, the atonal, plucky sounds of soundtracks to martial arts films, or the ambience in Chinese restaurants. But like Chinese culture, the traditions of Chinese music reach back thousands of years and pull from myriad styles that reflect the diverse landscape of the worlds most populous nation. And weaving through much of it is the distinctive strain on the pipa, the ancient, four stringed instrument sometimes referred to as the Chinese Lute.

If you're sitting on the couch alone watching an event like the State of the Union, you can feel less alone if you follow its hashtag on Twitter, a lot less alone. It’s your choice, really, whether you want to join the conversation, and I (as Word of Mouth) didn’t necessarily plan to last night, but it can be kind of hard not to tweet about what we might say if we were on the air at that moment.  

Traditional news organizations pride themselves for upholding clear divisions between their business and editorial operations. The partition is often reflected in the floor plans and culture of print and broadcast facilities, and preserved with a piety rarely seen in the skeptical journalist crowd. That attitude may be precisely why the news industry is in trouble, writes Dorian Benkoil.

Produced by Chris Cuffe

The Academy Award nominations were announced this morning with some expected names – Meryl Streep and George Clooney, and a few surprises, Bridesmaids got asked to the party, for example…and who the heck is Demián Bichir?

Maps are a calling for Dave Imus. Late last year, his teeny company -- Imus Geographic’s beat out National Geographic, and the US Census Bureau to win the annual “best of show” award from the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. It’s pretty much American mapmaking’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. We were intrigued by an article about Dave’s map of the United States in Slate Magazine.

The latest twist in the Obama administration’s so-called Asian pivot. The president’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, has said the US would benefit from cooperating with China on future space missions. But federal legislation now prohibits NASA from pursuing such efforts with a little known clause that’s popped up in two pieces of legislation within the past year.

From this year’s popular revival of Jim Henson’s Muppets in a new film starring Jason Segal, to our recent coverage of Wakka Wakka’s production, Baby Universe, an interplanetary puppet odyssey that took the stage in Hanover, it seems like puppets are popping up just about everywhere. 

Sweden is trying something new these days. Each week, the Swedish government’s twitter account, “At Sweden,” is being handed over to a Swedish citizen. And for seven days, that person can say anything they want to the account’s 25,000 plus followers. The government calls it “the world’s most democratic twitter account.” J.

This segment begins with a recording of a 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in Leonard Bernstein’s Arrangement of Mambo. Dudamel is the most energetic young thing on the podium. Before being named music director of Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden, he was a violinist in the Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela.

This weekend, newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by a two digit margin over Mitt Romney. Or, in the words of the gamer generation, Mitt Romney got “pwned”. Political rhetoric has been forever imbued with fierce competitive language – so it’s only natural that today’s campaigns would borrow psychology and strategy not only from war and sport, but also from the emerging power of games.

The alarming spike in type-1 diabetes. Though type-2, commonly known as adult-onset diabetes, has been in the spotlight recently with Food Network star and butter-abuser Paula Deen's announcement that she is living with the condition, type-1 is also on the rise. The worldwide annual growth rate has climbed past three-percent. With its serious health risks and lack of a cure, public health researchers are scrambling to find the cause of type-1's recent spike.

Part 1: Revenge of the Web-nerds