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February 1, 2012 

Sidebar: Coffee Cake

Whoa, this isn’t a post about an NPR segment, what’s going on? I had my food blog debut today and I’m really excited about it so I’m breaking form.

I had some friends over this past weekend and made my Grandma’s coffee cake recipe. It was a huge hit and I was invited to write about it my friend and co-worker Jess’ foodblog on the spot! Excerpt and link to recipe below.

 

My memories of visiting my Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Denver are defined by food: a bottomless supply of pistachios and jellybeans in strategically placed bowls, See’s chocolates, and build-your-own sandwich assembly lines. And always, when we arrived, there’d be a batch of coffee cake already made and and arranged in a tin with wax paper.

There was nothing better than pattering into their funny retro kitchen, prying open the lid, pouring yourself some coffee, and just easing into your vacation morning. It is absolutely the perfect food: vanilla-y and fluffy, with a little sugar, cinnamony crunch. It ruins you for anything else.

Read more and get the recipe »

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February 4, 2011 

Born This Way

Born Gay, Born This Way: A Photo Blog

The Picture Show

A recently launched blog called “Born This Way!” does something very simple: It pairs a snapshot of a gay person as a kid with a personal essay about what he or she sees when looking at the photo.

“I always knew I was different from other boys, even at an early age. This photo definitely proves it,” JC writes in a post. “Looking at it now, as a 31-year-old, it only reaffirms what I’ve always believed — that my being gay wasn’t a choice.” Read more on NPR.org

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December 30, 2010 

Remembering Brian Howard

Remembering The Remarkable Lives Lost In 2010

Remembrances

On our fifth annual obituary show, we remember those who may not have made the front pages when they died but whose lives still made an impact.

Brian Howard, Apple Engineer
Remembered by Selena Simmons-Duffin

Howard

Brian Howard was the 32nd employee of Apple Computer, and one of the original four members of the Macintosh Project team. Early Apple employees describe how Brian’s personality — calm, full of warmth and self-effacing humor — was instrumental in making the original Macintosh come to fruition. Jef Raskin was the Mac’s visionary, but he and Steve Jobs couldn’t stand each other. Brian acted as a go-between, and without him there would be no Mac. He worked there for 30 years and was Apple’s longest continuous employee (longer than Steve Wozniak or Jobs).

Although I was always in awe of Brian’s role in computer history, his loss is also very deep for those of us who knew him otherwise. Besides being an engineer, he was also deeply creative. He sang in choirs and played early music instruments like the cornetto and the recorder. That’s how he entered my life: He met my parents in an early music ensemble at Stanford and ended up as a close friend, even acting as a best man at their wedding. As a family friend, he was a fixture in my  life, and even when I was the littlest kid he talked to me like I mattered, like I had something to say.

Brian died of cancer on Feb. 1. He was 65. Even in his last days, when he came home from the hospital after many years of cancer treatments, he still had a sense of humor. When asked if he needed anything he replied, “I could use some hair.” He is missed for all these things: the sweetness, the humor, the music and the historic role he played in making the machines that are now so instrumental to our lives, including the very laptop on which I write this remembrance. More remembrances on NPR.org

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May 11, 2009 

Gender Neutral College Dorms

Gender-Neutral Rooms, Negative Reaction

Opinion

Of all the ways that parents engage in their children’s lives once they’ve gone away to school, writing a national editorial about your daughter’s slipping moral character is a new one.

“We told our daughter that we would not pay for her final quarter,” the author, Karin Venable Morin, writes in an editorial for the National Review. “Our morality is not for sale.” What sin had her daughter committed? She had been living in a room with one female and two male roommates, and the university had not seen fit to inform her parents. Morin wrote to Stanford University’s president and the housing office demanding that her daughter change rooms, but nothing was done because the daughter was happy where she was.

Now it has become a strangely media-mediated, very public family conflict. The New York Times blog The Choice picked up the story, with education writer Jacques Steinberg saying the mother’s article would send “shivers up the spines” of parents of high school seniors. The daughter responded, and soon what should have been a private family issue became a nationwide debate.

Through all this back and forth, it has become clear that the issue of coed rooming has struck a nerve: When Steinberg reached Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin, she said, “We’re working to improve our communication with parents so that they understand what co-op housing involves.”

I know firsthand what co-op housing involves. Read more on NPR.org

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