The 2012 Tony Awards were presented on June 10, and you can hear Leonard’s conversations with some of the winners!

A collection of the amazing, profound and funny things we heard on the Lopate Show this week.

Topher Grace really enjoyed making out with Scarlett Johansson in the movie “In Good Company.”

There's going to be a lot of action (drilling for oil, mining, shipping, melting ice) in the Arctic very soon.

Humans have been making cheese for 4,000 years.

This story about Guatemala is amazing. (You should also check out This America Life's episode about it.)

It’s better to get your vitamins from eating a well-balanced diet than to get them from supplements.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners were announced in April, many people were surprised that no fiction award was given this year. The publishing industry is understandably irritated by this decision—or indecision. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers for Columbia University, explained that a three-person jury chooses three finalists out of hundreds of books, then sends the finalists to the Pulitzer board, which, this year, was unable to determine a winner. The finalists were Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, published after the author’s death.

Susan Larson, a Pulitzer fiction juror, spoke with NPR’s Lynn Neary about the board’s not picking a winner.

Novelist and bookstore owner Anne Patchett wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about her disappointment. 

The New York Times asked eight experts to weigh in on who they thought deserved the award this year.

Weigh in: What novels do you think should have won this year? Leave a comment below to let us know!

A collection of the unexpected, somewhat random things we learned on the Lopate Show this week.

The nominations for the 2012 Tony Awards were announced on Tuesday, May 1, and you can hear Leonard's conversations with many of this year’s nominees. (You can find a full list of the nominees here.) The awards will be presented on June 10.

Looking for ways to cut back the amount of garbage you're producing? We have some helpful hints!

Our weekly roundup of the quirky, profound, and unexpected things we heard on the Lopate Show this week.

Documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson  was in our studio Monday where he discussed his takeaway from the front lines in Afghanistan. In his reporting, Anderson shadowed three different battalions of NATO forces over the course of four years. He documented his experiences in his new book, No Worse Enemy, which draws from the more than 300 hours of footage he captured during his time there. Much of that footage was even used in a documentary he produced for HBO in 2010, The Battle For Marjah.

Both documentary and commercial filmmakers have used our ongoing conflicts in a number of feature films released in the last few years: Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, No End In Sight, In The Valley of Elah, Generation Kill, Green Zone, and Lions for Lambs all centered on the operations in Iraq. But The Battle for Marjah is one of only a few films that focus specifically on Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington’s chilling documentary Restrepo is another).

This got me wondering about our relationship with Afghanistan in cinema. Recent films about the Iraq War have largely been box office blanks, even the ones that were well reviewed—Bob Tourtellotte wrote about this on Reuters' Fan Fare blog. Has that kept studios and filmmakers from focusing on the important subject of Afghanistan? Are there films about Afghanistan worth looking into that we’ve missed? Do you think filmmakers will revisit the subject in years to come?

A collection of the touching, funny, and off-beat things we heard on the air this week.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, and a few of the winners have been on the Lopate Show discussing their work.

John Lewis Gaddis won for his biography George F. Kennan: An American Life. Kennan set the strategy of containment that defined U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, and was an architect of the Marshall Plan. He discussed Kennan's life and influence of Kennan with Leonard in December.

Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, also won. He was on the Lopate Show in December talking about how a nearly forgotten manuscript by the Roman philosopher Lucretius sparked the Renaissance and changed the world.

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan, and Chris Hawley, of The Associated Press, won for their investigation of a New York Police Department surveillance of mostly Muslim neighborhoods. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman were on the show in February to talk about investigative reporting.

Ever day on the Leonard Lopate Show we learn something new and surprising. Here are some highlights from last week:

How to throw a knuckleball: dig your fingernails into the ball behind the horseshoe, then release it at the exactly perfect moment to keep it from spinning. How to catch knuckleball: Some say the best way is to wait until it stops rolling and pick it up.

At the New York Public Library, the use of ebooks is increasing 100% a year.

Lifesaving advice: There’s a time for praying, and there’s a time for running.

You can’t surprise a robot! And most of the volcanoes and earthquakes on the earth occur at the bottom of the ocean.

Teju Cole was on Morning Edition this morning talking about composing Tweets about small, easily overlooked articles in the newspaper. Listen to that interview here!

And start reading his novel Open City and leave a comment or question for our Book Club discussion on May 7.

A collection of the odd, wonderful, and even funny things we learned on the Lopate Show this week.

A roundup of the interesting, strange and profound things we learned on the Lopate Show this week.

A collection of the random, profound, true, and funny things we heard on the show this week.

The top object in our countdown is perhaps the most accidental of New York icons. In its heyday the Anthora cup, with its crisp blue and white Greco design, was the way you drank hot beverages on the go. But, as Leonard pointed out, sometimes the coffee itself wasn’t always that great. Oh, the power of nostalgia. (continue reading)

A roundup of the random, interesting, and unexpected things we learned on the show this week.

It might seem odd that our listeners chose an object that hasn’t been used in New York City for nearly a decade as number two on our list. But as Robert Del Bango of the New York City Transit Museum told us, it’s actually “a very smart object” to tell the story of New York. (continue reading)