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Susan Stamberg

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

Nationally renowned broadcast journalist Susan Stamberg is special correspondent for NPR.

Stamberg is the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program, and has won every major award in broadcasting. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. An NPR "founding mother," Stamberg has been on staff since the network began in 1971.

Beginning in 1972, Stamberg served as co-host of NPR's award-winning newsmagazine All Things Considered for 14 years. She then hosted Weekend Edition Sunday, and now serves as guest host of NPR's Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday, in addition to reporting on cultural issues for Morning Edition.

One of the most popular broadcasters in public radio, Stamberg is well known for her conversational style, intelligence, and knack for finding an interesting story. Her interviewing has been called "fresh," "friendly, down-to-earth," and (by novelist E.L. Doctorow) "the closest thing to an enlightened humanist on the radio." Her thousands of interviews include conversations with Laura Bush, Billy Crystal, Rosa Parks, Dave Brubeck, and Luciano Pavarotti.

Prior to joining NPR, she served as producer, program director, and general manager of NPR Member Station WAMU-FM/Washington, DC. Stamberg is the author of two books, and co-editor of a third. Talk: NPR's Susan Stamberg Considers All Things, chronicles her two decades with NPR. Her first book, Every Night at Five: Susan Stamberg's All Things Considered Book, was published in 1982 by Pantheon. Stamberg also co-edited The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road, published in 1992 by W. W. Norton. That collection grew out of a series of stories Stamberg commissioned for Weekend Edition Sunday.

In addition to her Hall of Fame inductions, other recognitions include the Armstrong and duPont Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Ohio State University's Golden Anniversary Director's Award, and the Distinguished Broadcaster Award from the American Women in Radio and Television.

A native of New York City, Stamberg earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, and has been awarded numerous honorary degrees including a Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College. She is a Fellow of Silliman College, Yale University, and has served on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award Foundation and the National Arts Journalism Program based at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Stamberg has hosted a number of series on PBS, moderated three Fred Rogers television specials for adults, served as commentator, guest or co-host on various commercial TV programs, and appeared as a narrator in performance with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra. Her voice appeared on Broadway in the Wendy Wasserstein play An American Daughter.

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Opinion
4:53 am
Sat August 4, 2012

India's Blackout A Reminder Of How Far We've Come

Credit Channi Anand / AP
A girl prepares a meal by candlelight in Jammu, India, during the massive blackout last week.
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Originally published on Sun August 5, 2012 10:43 am

This week, the world's largest democracy experienced the world's largest power outage. Nearly 700 million — that's more than half a billion — Indians were said to have been without power Tuesday. No air conditioning. No traffic lights. No metro system.

Most of the power is back now, but the outage had resonance for me from the long-ago years when I lived in New Delhi and experienced power failures almost as regularly as I did steaming cups of dark, sweet Indian tea.

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Fine Art
2:03 am
Tue June 19, 2012

Vuillard: A Parisian Painter And His Jewish Patrons

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Credit Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Lucy Hessel, depicted above at the seaside in 1940, was Vuillard's friend, muse and lover for more than 40 years. She was also the wife of art collector and Vuillard supporter Jos Hessel. Vuillard was with Hessel when he died in June 1940.
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Thadee Natanson at His Desk, c. 1899, oil on cardboard, mounted on panel.
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FLA167564 Credit: Vallotton and Misia in the Dining Room at Rue Saint-Florentin, 1899 (oil on cardboard) by Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)Private Collection/ Flammarion/ The Bridgeman Art LibraryNationality / copyright status: French / out of copyright
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Credit Private collection / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
Lucy Hessel was the wife of Vuillard's close friend Jos Hessel, a noted art dealer. She was also Vuillard's friend, muse and lover. She is shown here in Vuillard's studio, on Boulevard Malesherbes in 1911.
Credit The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Self-Portrait with Waroquy, 1889, oil on canvas
Credit Collection of Helen Frankenthaler / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
Thadee Natanson, depicted here at his desk in an Edouard Vuillard oil painting from 1899, was from a prominent family of bankers. He was one of Vuillard's loyal supporters and helped the artist achieve recognition in Paris in the 1890s.
Credit Collection of William Kelly Simpson / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
Vuillard depicts Misia Natanson and artist Felix Vallotton in this 1899 oil on cardboard: Vallotton and Misia in the Dining Room at Rue Saint-Florentin.
Credit Collection of Guy-Patrice Dauberville / Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris
Jos Hessel was senior partner at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, where Vuillard began exhibiting his work in the early 1900s. Messieurs and Mesdames Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, Avenue Henri-Martin, 1905, oil on cardboard, on panel.
Credit Lore Ross Bequest / The Jewish Museum
Lucy Hessel Reading, 1913, oil on canvas
Credit Private Collection / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
Vuillard worked on several versions of this portrait of Gilberte Bloch and her children. (Click here to see the portrait in different stages.) The portrait was left with friends when the family fled the Nazis during World War II.
Credit Private collection / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
"I don't do portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people in their surroundings." He is show here in his studio at 56 Rue des Batignolles, Paris, circa 1898.
Credit Private collection / Courtesy The Jewish Museum
Natanson and his wife, Misia, shown here in Cannes in 1901, were prominent tastemakers in French cultural life — they brought together Paris' intellectual and artistic superstars.
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Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait with Waroquy, 1889, oil on canvas.
Credit Thannhauser Collection / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Vuillard created several paintings of a park he could see from his Paris window. These panels (1908-1910) depicting Place Vintimille were commissioned by his patrons.
Credit The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Vuillard's paintings are full of patterns. This lively 1914 portrait depicts Marcelle Aron, Lucy Hessel's first cousin, in the conservatory of her Paris apartment. She was married to writer Tristan Bernard.
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Originally published on Tue June 19, 2012 2:19 pm

In 1940, a week after the Germans occupied France, a popular painter died of a heart attack outside Paris in the embrace of his powerful patrons. An exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York explores the life of Edouard Vuillard, a non-Jewish artist, and the circle of Jewish tastemakers who supported him.

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Books
2:34 am
Fri May 25, 2012

15 Summer Reads Handpicked By Indie Booksellers

Credit Harriet Russell
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Originally published on Tue July 24, 2012 6:58 am

Booksellers know how important a good story is — one that reaches out, pulls you in and keeps you reading late into the warm summer night. As readers seek out recommendations for their summer travels, booksellers are scouring their shelves for the stories that shine.

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Movies
2:19 am
Tue May 22, 2012

Power Couple, Covering War (And Waging Their Own)

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Credit HBO
HBO's Hemingway & Gellhorn tracks the relationship between Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) as Gellhorn begins to develop her voice as a war correspondent, beginning with the Spanish Civil War.
Credit Hulton Archive/Getty Images
1941: Hemingway and Gellhorn, married in 1940, stand on deck aboard a ship, wearing leis and holding cocktails. They divorced in 1945.
Credit Keystone / Getty Images
In Italy in 1944, Gellhorn talks to Indian soldiers of the British army on the 5th Army's Cassino front.
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Originally published on Tue May 22, 2012 7:11 am

Before Christiane Amanpour, before Ann Garrels, before Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, there was Martha Gellhorn, one of the first great female war correspondents.

From the Spanish Civil War through Vietnam, she covered every major conflict of the day. But Gellhorn's reputation as a journalist was sometimes overshadowed by her marriage to one of the great American writers, Ernest Hemingway.

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Fine Art
2:00 am
Thu May 17, 2012

A Museum Visit For Art Lovers With Alzheimer's

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Credit The Kreeger Museum
Students and seniors discussed Claude Monet's Sunset at Pourville during a recent visit to the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C.
Credit Staff photo / Courtesy of the Kreeger Museum
The Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C., was once the residence of David Kreeger, former GEICO chairman, and his wife, Carmen Kreeger. It was designed in 1967 by Philip Johnson. The Kreeger is one of several museums in the country that have a special program designed for people with Alzheimer's.
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Originally published on Thu May 17, 2012 5:58 am

Many art lovers feel completely in the moment when they stroll through the galleries of a museum. That feeling was particularly true on a recent morning at the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C. The Kreeger runs a special program for people with Alzheimer's — seniors, their caregivers and middle school students are paired together to enjoy the art and one another's company.

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Arts & Life
1:18 am
Thu May 3, 2012

Colorful Visions At African-American Art Exhibit

Credit Gene Young / American Art Museum
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 9:50 am

The African-American experience is reflected, right now, on the walls of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Exuberant dancing in Chicago. Laundry on a line in the nation's capital. A girl smiling out from her father's warm jacket — all captured in photographs, paintings and sculptures from the 1920s through the 1990s.

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Fine Art
2:37 am
Fri March 2, 2012

In 'Ocean Park,' Gentle Portraits Of California Light

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Credit The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn / Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
Richard Diebenkorn's 1975 work Ocean Park #79, features pastel blues, lavenders and aquas — and thin strips of deep red and green at the top to draw the viewer's gaze upward.
Credit Colin C. McRae /
Over the course of more than 20 years, Richard Diebenkorn created 145 paintings for his Ocean Park series. Nearly 80 of those works created between 1967 and 1988 are on display at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California. Diebenkorn, pictured above in 1982, died in 1993.
Credit The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn / Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery
Diebenkorn's studio sat on a hillside; he looked out and up at the geometry of the hill, and how the streets crossed one another. Above, his 1969 oil painting Ocean Park #24.
Credit Leo Holub /
Diebenkorn and many other artists flocked to Ocean Park in the late 1960s — rent in the then-derelict area was cheap. He's pictured above in his Ocean Park studio in Santa Monica in 1984.
Credit The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn
Diebenkorn played music in his studio while he painted — he loved Bach and Mozart — and it's reflected in his composition of colors. "I really do see them as kind of music," says curator Sarah Bancroft. Above, Diebenkorn's 1984 work, Untitled #26 — gouache, acrylic and crayon on joined paper.
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In the late 1960s, while America was in turmoil over the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, a painter in Santa Monica, Calif., was creating a series of tranquil, glowing canvases that made his reputation and transfixed art lovers. Those works — the Ocean Park series — are now on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, about an hour's drive from the place where they were painted.

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Hollywood Jobs
11:01 pm
Thu February 23, 2012

The Extraordinary, Ordinary Life Of Alexander Payne

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Credit Tiziana Fabi / AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Payne's The Descendants has been nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editor and Best Actor. Payne co-wrote and directed the film, which stars George Clooney as an indifferent dad struggling to raise two daughters.
Credit Merie Wallace / Fox Searchlight
Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer left alone with his two girls after his wife falls into a coma.
Credit Cindy Carpien / NPR
Life is a "collection of extraordinarily ordinary moments," Payne says. "We just need to pay attention to them all." Above, Payne stops at a farmers market near his home in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Credit Cindy Carpien / NPR
Payne heads off for a luncheon at the American Film Institute during what he says is an atypically busy week leading up to the Oscars.
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Alexander Payne watches a movie every day — or tries to, anyway. Lately, the writer and director of The Descendants has been busy going to nomination and awards dinners, in advance of Sunday's Oscar night — when the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay prizes could be his.

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Movie Interviews
11:01 pm
Wed February 22, 2012

Private Screening: How Hollywood Watches Its Work

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Credit Cindy Carpien / NPR
At the Charles Aidikoff Screening Room on Rodeo Drive, filmmakers can screen their works in progress for an invite-only audience in the small, 57-seat theater. The screening room is also rented to show films to members of the Academy and the press.
Credit Courtesy Charles Aidikoff Screening Room
Filmmaker Judd Apatow (left) screened his film Bridesmaids at the Charles Aidikoff Screening Room to a group of family and friends, including actor Seth Rogen (right). Click here to see the Charles Aidikoff Screening Room Wall of Fame.
Credit Thaddeus Bridwell / Charles Aidikoff Screening Room
Charles Aidikoff, 97, learned the art of projection from his father, who ran silent movies in a Coney Island theater in the early 1900s. Aidikoff's grandson Josh carries on the family tradition — he became manager of the screening room at age 19.
Credit Cindy Carpien / NPR
Josh Aidikoff mastered the complicated business of running film projectors when he was still in his teens. Now, the Aidikoff Screening Room has a digital projector, too, and Josh predicts that in a few years he won't be handling film at all.
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Before they made it to the Oscars, the nominated films — not to mention all the films that didn't make the cut — were viewed by some 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Many of those movies were shown in small, private, rented screening rooms all over Hollywood.

The studios have their own screening rooms, of course, but often directors want a more private place to screen works in progress — with no studio suits in sight.

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Author Interviews
11:01 pm
Mon January 16, 2012

The Charmed and Charming Life of Rosamond Bernier

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Credit Michele Mattei
Rosamund Bernier is the author of Matisse, Picasso, Miró — As I Knew Them. A longtime contributing editor to Vogue, she as made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1999.
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In 1947, Vogue magazine sent Rosamond Bernier to Paris, to cover European cultural life as it recovered after World War II. She met everyone who was anybody — Pablo Picasso befriended her, Henri Matisse wooed her, Alice B. Toklas baked for her. Bernier's memoir Some of My Lives is a lively compendium of this moveable feast of art and genius – and of the author's own considerable charm.

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