Blakeney Schick

Federal court papers that were unsealed on Tuesday revealed that six suspected hackers who are affiliated with Lulzsec, part of the hacking collective Anonymous, had been arrested. The papers also revealed that one of them, Hector Xavier Monsegur, had pleaded guilty to 12 counts of criminal hacking and had been working as an informant for the FBI.

You can find out more about how Anonymous and LulzSec organize and carry out their attacks by listening to Leonard’s interviews earlier this year with Quinn Norton, who’s covered Anonymous for Wired Magazine’s Threat Level blog.

A collection random facts, insights, and impressions from the Lopate Show this week.

Every month, as part of the Leonard Lopate Show Book Club's e-newsletter, we're bringing an author interview from our archives. This month, listen to a rare 2002 conversation that Leonard had with Canadian writer Alice Munro. She had just published her short story collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The Lopate Show's week in review.

A compilation of the random, unknown, and maybe important things we at the Lopate Show learned during the week of January 30.

The Lopate Show's week, in review.

The Leonard Lopate Show's week in review.

The Lopate Show's Week in Review

A producer explains how working on the Lopate Show makes managing her reading list pleasantly complicated.

A Lopate Show producer wanted to see what all the fuss about the McDonald's sandwich was about. She found out.

In the early 1970's, two high school students named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in an electronics class. The rest, as they say, is history. The pair went on to co-found Apple Computers, changing the way the world thought of the machines that few of us can do without. In 2006, Leonard spoke to Wozniak about founding Apple, prank-calling the pope, and his relationship with Jobs.

On June 12, the 65^th Annual Tony Awards took place. Leonard has spoken to a number of the winners of the last few months and you can listen to those conversations by following the links.

Back in May, we spoke to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer about her article, “The Secret Sharer” as part of our Backstory series. Mayer’s article discussed the case of former National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake who is facing charges of violating the 1917 Espionage Act as part of the Obama Administration's efforts to crack down on national security leaks.

In today’s Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima reports that the government has withdrawn some of the documents that Drake had been accused of leaking to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Legal experts say that this weakens the government's case.

UPDATE: on Friday, June 10, The Wall Street Journal reported that Thomas Drake will plead guilty to the unauthorized use of a government computer, a misdemeanor offense. The government will drop the rest of the charges.

On Tuesday morning, the 2011 Tony Award Nominations were announced. You can hear Leonard's conversations with some of this year's nominees below!

After all the rain we've been getting here in the New York area, it's great to walk down the sunny sidewalk and see tulips in full bloom and the trees starting to show their leaves. The down side of that natural beauty: it means that allergy season is here. A few years ago, we looked at allergies on Please Explain, and if you're wondering why you're sniffling, sneezing, or have itchy eyes, just take a listen:

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that federal prosecutors in New Jersey are now investigating whether some smartphone applications are illegally grabbing or transmit your personal information without the proper disclosure. It’s an issue that came up during Leonard’s discussions with WSJ editor Julia Angwin in August 2010 and last month.

The online music service Pandora is one of the companies that has received a subpoena, but the WSJ tested 101 apps and found that 56 of them were transmitting information about the device without the user’s consent.

Do you think that you’ll change the way you use your smartphone? Will you cut back on the apps you use on your iPhone or Droid? Should information gathering be a criminal offense? Let us know what you think in the comments section below. 

Today we aired our interview with Tracy Thresher and Larry Bissonette, two autistic men who are featured in Geraldine Wurzberg’s new documentary film “Wretches and Jabberers.” They use computers and iPads to communicate with the rest of the world.

It was unlike any other pretaped interview we’ve done on the show. Along with Tracy, Larry, and Geraldine, there were 2 professional aides in the studios, helping Tracy and Larry slowly type their answers to Leonard’s questions. The taping took us 41 minutes to get about 13 minutes of conversation, with our engineers making sure that we had the equipment and the studio time we needed to record the whole thing.

Parts of the interview are moving, others funny. We hope you enjoy this unusual conversation as much as the Lopate Show team has enjoyed bringing it to you. 

A conversation that happened on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 in the Lopate Show offices...

Blakeney: On Wednesday's Patricia T. O’Conner segment we’re talking about “cat words”—like “cat’s pajamas” and “kitty corner.”

Steven: That’s exciting. I’ve always wondered what’s up with the phrase “sitting in the cat bird seat.”  It doesn’t make any sense to me. At all. Is it about a cat that that is perfectly poised to catch a bird sitting in a seat? Since when do birds sit in seats? Has it caught and eaten a bird and is sitting in the bird’s seat? I do not understand this idiom! Then again, as a child, I imagined the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” involved shooting fish out of some kind fish shooting device into a barrel on the other side of a field, not using a gun to shoot fish swimming around in a closed container. So, maybe I’m not the right person to be thinking about these things.

Blakeney: I think it’s about being in advantageous position. As in: you’re a bird, sitting in the seat above the cat. But we could just look it up… >>>

"I think, I really fear, that the countdown to civil war in Yemen has just begun. It’s not just about protests in Yemen. You have some major defections by army generals in the last 24 hours. You have internal divisions within the ruling party of Pres. Ali Abdullah Saleh. Some elements from his own tribe are calling for him to step down. You have now a military standoff between special forces led by his son and the first division of the army of which the generals, some of his closest generals, have defected. You have turmoil engulfing most of the Yemen. You have a separatist movement in the South; you have a tribal insurgency in the North. But most important of all, I would argue, the new democratic revolt that has been sweeping the Arab world has reached Yemen with a vengeance."

Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics. For more of the interview, click here.