But this weekend on NPR's "All Things Considered," the latest stop on his celebratory media tour, Salter was asked by host Arun Rath about his women characters -- and he gave what might be as bizarre an answer as has any male writer these days, suddenly faced with direct questions about literature and gender that they might not have been asked before.

Here's the transcript:

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If that were really the case, author Ken Stern argues, then D.A.R.E., the darling drug abuse education program started by former Los Angeles Police chief Daryl Gates and now in more than 75 percent of the school districts of this country, wouldn’t raise a dime, most after-school programs would be bankrupt, and the next disaster the Red Cross should be attending to would be in its own executive offices.

The ability to survive, even thrive, with programs that have been proven not to work is just one of the many oddities With Charity for All documents in the topsy-turvy, misunderstood, and mostly ignored world of nonprofits.

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From the New York Times:

NPR will partner with [Boston University station] WBUR to turn the one-hour “Here and Now” into a two-hour show, with contributions from NPR News staff and other local stations. A co-host, Jeremy Hobson, will join the current host of the program, Robin Young.

The partnership marks the first time that NPR, a national supplier of newscasts and shows, has linked arms with a station in this way. 'Together, we’re addressing both what the audience is looking for and what member stations have been looking for,' said Kinsey Wilson, the chief content officer for NPR.

NPR's “Here and Now” will air on weekdays, beginning July 1, from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern time.

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A Southern California NPR affiliate, KPCC, has this month launched a bracket pitting NPR shows both national and local against one another. The Elite Eight in this tournament include "This American Life," "Fresh Air With Terry Gross" and "Radiolab," which surprisingly beat "Morning Edition" in the public vote. Local programming has gone the way of Harvard this year -- two shows focused on the Latino experience in particular, "Alt.Latino" and "Latino USA," fell in the first round. (So, too, did PRI's "The Tavis Smiley Show.")

"I was super concerned about this," said Mike Roe, a Web producer for KPCC. "I had this idea first and I didn't want to go with it. I was worried about the politics within it, within the whole public radio world." He decided to make all KPCC-produced shows No. 1 seeds, though as the brackets garnered national attention, they quickly fell.

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On abortion:

GROSS: In one of the decisions that you wrote about pertaining to abortion, you explain why you would not agree to overturn Roe v. Wade. And you wrote: The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to a point that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the state to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the state to insist upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperative and her place in society.

Did being a woman and being a mother inform how you wrote that?

O'CONNOR: Well, I'm sure it would have.

GROSS: Can you elaborate on that?

O'CONNOR: Well, no, just I'm female. I am a mother. I've gone through all of that. And I'm sure in something as sensitive as the issues that we were considering with abortion rulings and so forth, that my own personal background would've had some affect on my decisions. It couldn't help but have.

GROSS: In Casey versus Planned Parenthood, which was a decision in Pennsylvania about a state's right to add restrictions on access to abortion, you had harsh words for Judge Alito. This was before he was a Supreme Court justice, but he had written part of the decision in Casey. In his decision he upheld a certain restriction, which was that a woman had to seek her husband's approval before getting an abortion. A wife had to seek her husband's approval. And in your decision in the Supreme Court overturning that aspect of the decision you called that view repugnant to our present understanding of marriage and to the nature of the rights secured by the Constitution. Women do not lose their constitutionally-protected liberty when they marry. Can you elaborate on that at all?

O'CONNOR: No. I don't think I'll try.

GROSS: OK.

O'CONNOR: That's very sensitive and I did the best I could in that decision and I'll leave it there.

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A growing culture of reform has turned the campus quad away from preparing students for citizenship -- that combination of “intelligence plus character” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. once famously described. In its place, we now have campus environments that hold certain aspects of student life hostage to corporate interests, molding students into consumers at the same time the voices and opinions of the student body are increasingly silenced. As a result, higher education, often noted as the best insurance policy toward social mobility, is now no such thing (at least good insurance policies pay their claims).

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Before Beirut, we had lived in Turkey and Iraq, the latter of which was my wife Kelly's base. (She’s a correspondent for NPR.) Those weren't fun times, spending so many months apart. Among other problems, it was difficult to be a man, changing diapers, while my wife swash-buckled her way across Mesopotamia. With the mother of our daughter based in Baghdad, I learned how to excel at various domestic chores and also how to worry. What would happen if a mortar fell or if bad guys tested the glass on her armored truck? What would people think of a blonde woman traveling to Anbar Province? The Middle East, for my wife, was the big league. For me, it was a place to find a good doctor and maybe some daycare. Alone on a Friday night, I'd pour myself another glass and wonder: Was this it?

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Here's the question: Who is to blame?

Theory 1: The panel of experts is to blame
The panel of experts are suspiciously all white. NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote that “Much of the criticism was directed at the white panel of experts," but he added, "the censure is misplaced.”  Panel member Pamela Paul, features editor and children's book editor at the New York Times Book Review, confirms Schumacher-Matos’ claim via email, writing:

Our role on the expert panel was simply to advise on how to make sure the readers' nominations fit the definition of "YA novel." Many of the readers' nominations were actually adult or middle-grade books, and we helped them weed out those titles. But I didn't make any judgment with regard to quality in determining the final list, which were all reader-generated.

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The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.

If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available online immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.

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Many people, including my actual parents, think I turned out pretty OK. And Flanagan, whose book "Girl Land" I reviewed here, usually restricts her professional vocation of annoying feminists to print. So what was I doing defending my very existence on the radio?

"Do you know about Quakers? They try to find the good in everyone, and I felt you tried to do that in Flanagan's book," the producer at NPR's "On Point" told me, as he tried to convince me to take part in the on-air discussion. (If you read my review, you'll see this says more about the laceration Flanagan received elsewhere than any unusual empathy on my part.) I told him I was reluctant to engage in something that could turn into a catfight, but was persuaded that the thoughtful tone of the show and its host would prevail. Ultimately, too, I didn't want to shy away from a fight that I thought was important.

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Michael Woodward comments, below the story:

Kevin Dawes was not a "medical aide worker" he is a self styled medic who taught himself the "skills" through youtube. He has no firearms training and is suffering severely from delusional and paranoid behavior. He is a danger to himself and others. In other stories about him, it is said even that battle hardened rebels are afraid of him and think he is crazy. This story is not researched and needs to be fact checked. I am sure that if you do search for some of his old screen names (try Caro)you will find some of his postings. Also, check out his blog and youtube channel- you will find he is not what this article portrays him to be.

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"It overblown. Everyone's overreacting," Simeone told Salon in a phone interview. "It's like McCarthyism."

Simeone, a former weekend host of NPR's "All Things Considered" show, had not worked directly for the network since 2002. As a freelancer contracting with WDAV, a music and arts station in Davidson, N.C., she hosts NPR's "World of Opera" program.  NPR and WDAV released statements today saying they are "in conversation" about Simeone's future.

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Juan Williams, again, works for Fox News. The closest Fox News gets to a regular minority presence is brunettes. (And Geraldo, I guess.) It's the channel of aggrieved white people who think they don't count as "elites" because they don't ... listen to NPR.

"NPR editors and journalists found themselves caught in a game of trying to please a leadership team who did not want to hear stories on the air about conservatives, the poor, or anyone who didn’t’ fit their profitable design of NPR as the official voice of college-educated, white, liberal-leaning, upper-income America," he writes.

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Because there's such a gap between our dream (or nightmare) of the media and the reality, this gig requires a highly developed sense of irony. Say you're doing a story (as Gladstone did last fall) about the fact that the press will come down harder on a politician who lies about himself than on a candidate who lies about his opponent, and that it's much easier to get away with misrepresenting policy than with fibbing about personal matters. As a result, slandering your opponent's position on healthcare reform causes less of a fuss than claiming you dodged sniper fire on a diplomatic mission to Bosnia when you didn't.

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The newly elected Republicans who recently took control of both of Minnesota's legislative houses, though, are residents of Tea Party America, and in Tea Party America the government has no business spending money on anything besides arming militias, to shoot abortion providers. Take it away, House Majority Leader Matt Dean:

Dean also singled out a $45,000 payment of Legacy money that was made last year to science fiction writer Neil Gaiman for a four-hour speaking appearance. Dean said that Gaiman, "who I hate," was a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota."

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BBC, the largest broadcaster in the world, takes in $7.5 billion in income a year. If Americans were right, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have a bigger budget than every military on Earth besides our own. NPR would beat China in an arms race.

What would the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even do with that kind of money, besides continue to have a liberal bias and support the establishment of sharia law? We have some guesses:

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Our earlier pieces on the funding threat to NPR have generated plenty of punches, both pro and con. And although most of the comments were welcome, and encouraged further thinking about the value of public media in a democratic society, a few reminded us of the words of the poet and scholar James Merrick: "So high at last the contest rose/From words they almost came to blows!"

Nonetheless, reading those comments and criticisms made us realize there are a couple of points that these two wizened veterans of public broadcasting -- with the multiple tote bags and coffee mugs to prove it -- would like to clarify.

For one, when we described the right-wing media machine as NPR’s "long-time nemesis," it was not to suggest that somehow public radio is its left-wing opposite. When it comes to covering and analyzing the news, the reverse of right isn't left; it's independent reporting that toes neither party nor ideological line. We’ve heard no NPR reporter -- not a one -- advocating on the air for more government spending (or less), for the right of abortion (or against it), for or against gay marriage, or for or against either political party, especially compared to what we hear from Fox News and talk radio on all of these issues and more.

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The bill, passed 228-192 along mainly partisan lines, would bar federal funding of NPR and prohibit local public stations from using federal money to pay NPR dues and buy its programs. The prospects of support in the Democratic-controlled Senate are slim. Seven Republicans broke ranks to vote against the bill.

"It is time for American citizens to stop funding an organization that can stand on its own feet," said Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., the sponsor. He said it was not a question of content -- which many conservatives say has a liberal bias -- but whether taxpayer dollars should go to nonessential services. "As a country we no longer have this luxury."

Other Republicans also denied that the measure was a vendetta against NPR, although the organization left itself open to conservative attacks last week when an executive, talking to conservative activists posing as members of a fake Muslim group, was caught on camera deriding the tea party movement and saying the NPR would be better off without federal funding. Both the executive and the president of NPR resigned after the incident.

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