Oh, the decadence: NPR in the shower

It’s pretty decadent, I admit.

But when my in-laws gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday last fall, I already knew what I wanted to spend it on: a wireless shower speaker, so that I could start my day-long NPR fix just a few minutes earlier.

As it is, I listen to NPR while I’m running, while I’m driving, while I’m cooking and doing housework. If I’m by myself and not reading or writing, I’m usually filling up my brain with a steady stream of news, culture or commentary from NPR.

And the silence in the shower was starting to seem like a waste of time when I could be catching the headlines or the first couple of stories on Morning Edition.

I confess, I’m a little bit sheepish about it. Surely there’s something to be said for reflective silence once in a while, even if one has to impose it upon oneself grudgingly. Surely there must be a price to pay for my choice to remove even the silence of the shower from my day. Will it curtail my creativity, I wondered? Will I never again come up with a random thought, if even when showering I can be listening to someone else’s voice?

Before buying the wireless shower speaker, I read reviews on Amazon. “It used to be that the only thing I could do in the shower was get clean!” proclaimed one highly enthusiastic new user. I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be facetious or not. It used to be that getting clean was the sole function of a shower, but now it’s a time for absorbing the headlines as well. Is that bad?

Sometimes I do feel remiss in taking so many measures to eliminate reflective silence from my life. I inhale audio content whether I’m exercising or working around the house or, now, even during the lather-rinse-repeat cycle. Along with the silence, am I eliminating any possibilities of unbidden musings or meandering digressions of the imagination?

Yes, probably. And yet I’ve always found that some of my most useful unbidden thoughts come to me not in times of silence but rather accompanied by white noise. Sometimes it’s exactly the distraction of a BBC commentary or an interview with an obscure jazz composer that leads me to think up article ideas or essay topics.

The bottom line is that I love listening to the news in the shower. It just feels like a more interesting way to start the day. Gretchen Rubin, author of “The Happiness Project,” writes that there’s no shame in admitting we like our material possessions. So there it is. It’s the ultimate decadence, NPR streamed into the shower, but it’s a wonderful way to start the day. Learning about international events that occurred overnight; finding out the weather forecast for the day ahead; catching a movie review on the cusp of the weekend.

And I also get clean, which has come to seem almost like a bonus. But it’s a pretty good way to get the day launched.

Pledge drive time

After another week-long pledge drive on our local National Public Radio station, I’m ready to stick molten railroad spikes in my ears to make it stop.

Somehow the sound of fundraising on the radio strikes me like the proverbial nails on a chalkboard. I think it could be used in hostage negotiation situations to make hostage-takers give up, at least if they were also public radio fans. I dislike the way it goes on and on. I dislike the way newscasters and personalities who sound so intelligent and insightful when delivering news or conducting interviews start tripping over their words, making meaningless quips and generally sounding like nincompoops when required to ad-lib some banter during pledge drive time. And mostly, I dislike the fact that it introduces skepticism into the otherwise impeccable reliability of National Public Radio. “We need only twelve thousand calls in the next three minutes to reach our goal!” the announcer will say exuberantly at 7:57 a.m. And then at 8:01, “Thanks, everyone! We made it!” Really? I believe NPR when they report on government scandals or papal secrets, but am I really to believe it when my local station claims to have logged twelve thousand phone calls in three minutes?

But yesterday I discovered something that made me feel a little bit sheepish. The station had a great raffle item for which every pledge caller would be eligible within a two-hour window, and that motivated me to call. I didn’t win the raffle, but I discovered to my surprise that the sound of fundraising was a lot less annoying to me for the rest of the day. This made me realize that perhaps it’s not actually the words or tone of the pleading itself but the guilt I feel when I listen to it without pledging. Listening to their supplications in the hours after I pledged, and knowing they were no longer talking to me, made it all so much more bearable.

Charitable giving is always a tricky topic for me. I try to support my alma maters, my church, our independent community newspaper, and National Public Radio, plus any cause for which a friend or family member is running, walking, dancing, jump-roping, or shooting baskets to raise money. But I confess that my chief motivation for sending in a check to my prep school every spring is knowing that the school publishes an annual list of donors by class and I don’t want my name to be missing. I can’t explain why I support my cozy suburban church more than, say, Oxfam, or my college rather than The Nature Conservancy. And I can’t even pretend there’s any direct correlation between where I send money and what matches my core values.

But for today, at least, I can listen to the last day of the NPR pledge drive with a clear conscience. I didn’t win the raffle prize, but I won a day of painless listening as the pledge drive ends. Maybe next time I’ll be lucky enough to get both.

Why Ira Flatow's fascination fascinates me

Sometimes I inadvertently download the podcast for NPR’s Science Friday and end up with the show on my playlist while I’m out running. This happened on Saturday. I’m really not interested in Science Friday in terms of the subject matter, but there’s still something I love about listening when I find myself stuck with it: the host, Ira Flatow, has to be one of the most genuinely enthusiastic professionals I have ever hard speak.

Ira Flatow simply adores science, and I have such tremendous respect for that even though the topics he chooses to discuss are hardly ever of interest to me. To hear Ira talk about this experiment or that discovery, you’d think you were talking to a whiz kid at a high school science fair or possibly a newly matriculated graduate student. But not someone who is a veteran radio journalist in his sixties, as Flatow in fact is.

What I especially like is how sincere he is about what surprises and fascinates him. In the segment I was listening to, another reporter was describing the way a group of fire ants can form themselves into a floating raft if they fall into a body of water. “I saw that report too, and I could not believe it!” Ira exclaimed to the reporter. “I just cannot understand how they do that!”

He’s an award-winning radio and TV personality, and yet when he says he can hardly believe something, you realize what it means to be truly fascinated by your work. Despite all that he has witnessed, uncovered and reported in six decades, the talents of fire ants still have the ability to catch him completely unaware.

I don’t hear this same sense of wonder, of awe, in many of his media colleagues. Some of NPR’s most experienced personalities will sometimes profess to be surprised by something, but often you know what they really mean is “My surprise about this comes from the fact that I’m such an unparalleled expert on this topic, and it’s really rare for me to stumble upon something I didn’t know.” So they don’t sound truly awed, just dubious about the idea that a fact slipped past them earlier. Even Terry Gross, whom I find to be very modest on air, puts so much research into her interviews that her surprise usually has an undertone of “How is it possible that I wasn’t aware of this one small detail?” Whereas Ira Flatow’s tone of surprise comes across as humility in its best form, as if he is saying, even after almost 40 years in the business, “Can you believe how fantastic and amazing the world of science is?”

Maybe this resonates with me so much because as a journalist, I love talking to people about their work or creative pursuits. “Any time you find someone pursuing a passion, you have a story,” one of my Globe editors told me years ago. He’s right: not only the story of what the person’s passion is, but how it came to have that role in their life.

I sometimes feel I’ve made a career out of this reality: people talking about what fascinates them tend to engage me. I want to know what they know that I don’t, but more importantly, what they care about that I don’t. It’s humility. It’s the opposite force to arrogance. And it’s a wonderful quality for a person to have: the ability to communicate that they are absolutely flabbergasted by the wondrous world that surrounds them.

Tim and me - Live on NPR!

Admitting this may irredeemably brand me as a nerd, but I have to confess it nonetheless: being interviewed by an NPR personality was a truly thrilling experience for me. The broadcast aired today, and I’m pleased to say I’ve listened to it from start to finish only once. It’s not the sound of my own voice that brings me such delight; it was the interview process itself. Today I get to have my fifteen minutes of micro-fame – after all, this is NPR, not Oprah – but it was the taping two weeks ago that really caused my heart to sing.

This is for two reasons. The first is the same reason that probably most NPR interview subjects are happy to be on the air, especially those in feature stories like this one. It’s just really gratifying to have someone take an interest in something we’ve done. Tim and I embarked on a daily running challenge in August 2007; for the next two years, we both ran a mile or more every single day, usually together though sometimes separately. When Tim gave up the streak after exactly two years, we had logged a total of 732 consecutive days of daily miles. During that time, we struggled through snow, ice, heat waves, thunderstorms, arguments, and chest colds, but I never imagined that someday an NPR personality whom I listened to daily during the four years he was broadcasting from Boston would be asking me about it.

And Tim, though he’s not the NPR fanatic I am, knew this was something special too. After all, he got to leave school two hours early for our taping session at the WGBH studios in Boston last month, and when I gave the reason as “media appearance,” his teachers asked him about it. He doesn’t have the same reverence for NPR figures that I do, but he still felt honored – as anyone would -- that someone was asking him about himself.

But for me, the second reason this was such a thrill is more specific to my situation. I’m a journalist myself, and the bulk of my portfolio comprises stories like these: human interest stories about interesting people doing unusual things. But I’m always, always, the one asking the questions. Until now. I make a living taking an interest in asking other people questions about their lives, and I genuinely enjoy it. I wouldn’t be in the field otherwise.

At the same time, there’s always a tiny part of me that feels like no one ever asks about me. I like to imagine an apocryphal New Yorker cartoon featuring my professional role model, Terry Gross, attending a cocktail party at which someone innocently says to her “I want to tell you about this great project I’m involved in” and Terry snaps, “Oh no, tonight it’s all about ME!”

I’ve heard that Terry Gross actually doesn’t like to be interviewed at all, and submits to interviews reluctantly only when she’s promoting one of her own books. I’d like to think I’m equally modest, far more interested in hearing about other people than talking about myself. But in this case, first when we were interviewed two weeks ago and then hearing the broadcast today (okay, and admittedly, then sending out the podcast link to the 200 people at the top of my personal contacts e-mail list), it’s only fair to confess that I really loved the switcheroo, the chance to be the one graciously thanking the interviewer as I attempted to answer questions with clever sound bites and evocative descriptions.

Tomorrow it’s back to being the one asking the questions. I have four interview stories to conduct over the next week. One is with a shop owner, one a champion in the sport of orienteering, one an opera librettist and I’ve already forgotten what the fourth is. Oh, right, a woman who started a public service organization in Rwanda. Which is way cooler and more important than going running every day for a year. But today I got to sit on the other side of the counter for a change, and let me just admit it outright one last time: What a thrill.

The end of browsing

Charles Rosen blogged earlier this week for the New York Review of Books on the lost pleasure of browsing, likening the experience of buying a book online -- and therefore unseen and untouched -- to purchasing a mail-order bride. Carolyn Kellogg then explored Rosen’s discussion with her own blog entry in the Los Angeles Times.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately too. Like Rosen, I used to choose books by physically finding them at bookstores, libraries or other people’s houses. (I once attended an open house for prospective home-buyers and spent the whole time I was there in the master bedroom copying titles from what was evidently the wife’s bookshelf. The house didn’t interest me much, but what great taste she had in reading!) These days, I’m much more likely to choose what I want to read based on a book review, a book blog, an interview on NPR or a personal recommendation, and order the book online from a bookstore or library. What this means is no more trawling the shelves and no more “stumbles” – no more chancing across books whose covers or titles catch my attention before I know anything else about them.

But it’s not only with books that I find a reduction in my browsing habits. As most of my friends would attest to, I’m an NPR fanatic. I used to listen to hours of NPR: when cooking or doing housework, when driving, and when out running. Then I acquired an iPod and discovered podcasts. Suddenly every single one of my favorite NPR shows was available to me as a download 24 hours a day. Telling other people about what this discovery has meant to me, I echo the famous credit card commercial: “Never again being stuck on a 7-mile run listening to Car Talk: priceless!” (Car Talk is one of the most popular NPR shows ever, and I don’t mean to knock it, but trust me when I tell you it’s one of the few forms of entertainment that can actually make a long run feel longer.)

Nonetheless, back when I used to be stuck with whatever NPR show hit the airwaves at the particular time I was out running or driving, I occasionally found myself listening with interest to something that I was initially certain I wouldn’t like. Not being a sports fan, I tried to avoid “Only a Game,” and yet dozens of times I would be stuck listening to it anyway and discover a story about a high school team facing an unusual challenge or a new book about female basketball players and find myself really intrigued. Now that I can choose only those broadcasts I most want to hear rather than “browsing” the radio, I never have to listen to anything boring, but I also never find myself surprised by things I thought would be boring (sports stories, technology stories, BBC features) but aren’t.

This is one reason I’ve refused to give up my newspaper subscription even though I know the same content in available on line. Once I can click directly on the articles I know I want to read, I’ll lose the benefit of random headlines: my eye first skimming over a headline, then going back for a closer look, then reading the entire article. I’d spend a lot less time reading an on-line newspaper, knowing precisely which topics and sections matter most to me. But I’d skip a lot too, the same things that now I sometimes plan to skip and find myself reading anyway.

Being able to home in directly on what it is that you want to read or listen to definitely saves time. Back when I used to browse the library or bookstore shelves, there were a lot of misses. Fifty pages into a book (I always make myself stick with the first 50 pages), I’d often decide I wasn’t sufficiently engrossed to continue. Now that I read pre-selected books, that doesn’t happen much anymore; I almost never waste time on a book I don’t end up finishing.

But I also miss a lot. A few weeks ago, I found myself in the unusual position of having nothing left in my “to be read” stack and nothing in yet at the library from my reserve list. So I headed to the bookstore to browse, just to see what might look interesting that I hadn’t already decided I wanted to read. And I re-discovered how satisfying it was to gaze at all the possibilities, the hundreds of books I could choose to read or not read, all the volumes to pick up, glance through, put back or keep. It may not be the most efficient use of time, but on that particular afternoon it felt great to be browsing again.