This just in: NPR is the best.

So I was going to write a blog post about something I heard on NPR today – about the importance of factual vs. emotional truth in writing – but I realized I they already did that, and that I could link to it like this. I was not disheartened for very long, though, because as I was searching for that article (which was on On the Media, on WUTC at 10 weekdays), I found this article, the second installment of All Things Considered‘s “NewsPoet” segment, where a poet hangs out with news people and writes a poem about it (this one’s a villanelle). While thinking, “Oh, that’s cool, but I need to find that first story,” I found <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/02/24/146817285/what-science-fiction-books-does-a-futurist-read">this one about a futurist's (yes, that is his job) favorite science fiction books.

Finally, I did find the first article (it’s about a book, by the way, Lifespan of a Fact). But by that point I realized two things. I didn’t need to rewrite all those articles that I came across, in fact I couldn’t; they’re already great pieces written by good journalists, and besides I’m not a journalist anyway. And I remembered that I don’t listen to NPR (or APM or PRI or whatever else – you know, public media) nearly as much as I should. I mean, it’s free, it’s incredibly informative, funny, and sometimes just weird enough to appeal to everyone, and it goes on all the time. I don’t know how many of you guys read, listen to, or watch public media (let us know in the comments if you do!), but it’s something we all should do, daily. Wouldn’t it be nice to tear away from Facebook, from Twitter, Memebase, and all the other “alternative news” (which really, are by now totally mainstream) and flat-out time-wasters that we usually spend our internet time on, and actually learn something informative and interesting for once? Something that takes more than thirty seconds to read. Something made for the pure joy of learning, not for ad revenue or political pandering. So yeah, NPR rocks. Just in case you didn’t know.