for such a time as this.

Mother And Daughter Come Together At The Card Table In ‘The Bridge Ladies’

In her new memoir called, The Bridge Ladies, middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner invites herself into her octogenarian mother’s long-running Bridge Club as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close its chest.  Maureen Corrigan writes: 

“Lerner tells us that she began sitting in on the Bridge Club, “hoping to find remnants of a 1970s encounter group.” She even “noodged” the ladies with intrusive questions about their husbands and sex lives. But, to her dismay, what Lerner found was that, week after week, year after year, her mother and the other Bridge Ladies met for a nice lunch complete with napkin rings, chatted about events like births and graduations and then chiefly concentrated on playing bridge. Lerner says, “I’ve learned by now that their reticence is largely generational. For them, the word share meant splitting a sandwich.”

Photo credit: Betsy Lerner

Body language can be a dead giveaway of where you’re from. People can tell whether you’re from Australia or the U.K. by the way you smile. They can tell whether you’re from China or Egypt by the way you count using your fingers. And they know whether you’re American or German depending on how you express sympathy.

But when it comes to expressing negative emotions, our body language might be much more universal than we realize. The proof is in a single facial expression that crosses over cultures and languages around the world: the “not face.”

It’s A Small World When It Comes To :-/

Photo caption: The facial expression for “that’s not a good idea” is the same across native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language.

The Sesame Street of your childhood has changed. Elmo has moved into a new apartment, Big Bird has a new nest and Oscar the Grouch is hanging out in recycling and compost bins, alongside his usual trash can.

But the biggest change may be how you watch Sesame Street. The 46th season of the classic children’s show premieres Saturday on HBO, the subscription-based network that’s home to provocative shows like Game of Thrones and Girls. New episodes of Sesame Street will air on its traditional home, PBS, nine months later.

With Leap To HBO, Big Bird’s Got A Brand-New Way To Get To ‘Sesame Street’

Five years after a wave of uprisings, the Arab world is worse off than ever. But its people understand their predicament better

For more than a quarter of people around the world, for as long as they’ve been alive, there’s always been Wikipedia. This week, the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia turns 15.

It’s come a long way: With some 35 million articles, Wikipedia speaks hundreds of languages and cites 80,000 volunteers around the world as editors. Its goals are lofty: to become a better Encyclopedia Britannica, a freely accessible “sum of all human knowledge.”

And arguably, it’s overcome the biggest hurdle. “We’ve moved beyond the era when people would say to the kids, ‘Don’t use Wikipedia, it’s not very good, it’s full of errors.’ And now we say, 'Here’s how to use Wikipedia,’ ” says co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Wales spoke with NPR on Wikipedia’s push for editors who are non-techy geeks, its struggle to grow its female ranks, advice for cleaning up newspapers’ comment sections, and the future of the organization.

Wikipedia At 15: The Struggle To Attract Non-Techy Geeks