Or the blogwaves are theirs; it hasn’t quite all shaken out yet. The point is that bloggers and WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station, are finding themselves in various forms of collaboration, both more and less formal, this month.
First up, ALN friend and fellow culture blogger Sam Golden Rule Jones has been brought on as the book critic of Ed Lifson’s new Sunday arts show, Hello Beautiful. This is a brilliant move. Sam will focus on Chicago writers; last week he reviewed a book with “strong bones,” Irene Zabytko’s story collection Luba Leaves Home. Sam reflected on the relative paucity of well-known fiction about women coming of age in Chicago–relative to the bevy of Bellows and Farrells writing about young men–and found that Zabytko is “particularly good at showing a young woman’s difficult devotion to both her bonds and her dreams.” Hear Sam’s sparkling review for yourself. He returns next week with a review of Ward Just’s latest, An Unfinished Season. I’ll be listening.
The shoe is on the other foot too this week, as Gretchen Helfrich, who anchors WBEZ’s consistently fascinating interview show Odyssey, will be guest blogging at Preposterous Universe beginning Friday. Gretchen is fiercely smart and knowledgeable and has a sense of humor, so it will be fun to see what happens when Preposterous‘s regular proprietor (oog, try saying that five times fast), physicist Sean Carroll, hands her the reins. Go check it out now, while Sean’s still in the house–only about half of his content is about physics, making fully half of it comprehensible to science know-nothings like me.
In other switcheroo news, I’m going to teach my mother’s fifth-grade class for a day while she edits, blogs, and goes home to watch seven consecutive episodes of “Law and Order.” Somebody should write a book about it.