BLOCK: That's Pachelbel's "Canon in D," and it appears on one of the hottest releases of the year, "Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Yes, the classical album. It's composed of works that inspired author E.L. James while she was writing her steamy best-selling trilogy. And it has spent 11 weeks on Billboard's Classical Traditional Albums chart, 10 of those in the top slot.
Jake Tapper is the longtime chief White House correspondent for ABC News and has just written a new book called The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor.
We've invited him to play a game called "It's Mr. Bojangles to you." Three questions for a guy named Tapper about an actual tapper: Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who some say was one of the greatest tap dancers of all time.
Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at University of Rochester and host of the 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog on NPR.org.
I don't read self-help books. On any given day my self seems to need so much help that 200 pages of cheerful advice and end-of-chapter exercises miss the core of my dilemma. The real question keeping me up at night is this: What the hell is a self anyway? How did I get one and why is it so damn desperate for help?
"The word random is the most misused word of our generation — by far," he proclaims to a tittering audience of 20-somethings. "Like, girls will say, 'Oh, God, I met this random on the way home.' First of all, it's not a noun."
This month the book club takes to the skies with the Tom Wolfe classic The Right Stuff, a behind-the-curtain look at the 20th century's most famous test pilots--including Chuck Yeager. Yeager joins the club to talk about his long career, and what he considers "the right stuff."
Photographer James Balog on Climate Change and 'Chasing Ice' — In the new documentary "Chasing Ice," photographer James Balog attempts to capture how the world's glaciers are being affected by climate change. As the film debuts across the country, Balog discusses the project, and what needs to be done to save Earth's shrinking glaciers.
There are achievements born of calculated conceptions, rewards we reap that come to fruition through our deliberate plotting and planting of seeds. Then there are those fruits of our labors that blossom on vines whose growth we hadn’t foreseen. The most gratifying moments in life, it seems, are those which smack of that divine synthesis, when the strategic meets the synchronistic.
