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March is Women's History Month!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Manifestations Of Grief And Extra Book Material

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What's that you say? You wanted more Barrie Hardymon? Well, this week, Stephen is in Wisconsin probably eating some cheese or something, so we have Barrie back for a second consecutive week (hooray!).

Both topics this week are pretty personal: We start off talking about public remembrances and, among other things, how they've changed since the time of the single definitive newspaper obituary. Glen talked about remembering comics legend Joe Kubert, and we talked at length about remembrances of David Rakoff. (If you haven't seen the video from the live This American Life performance from this spring, please watch it.)

A discussion of the Rakoff book Don't Get Too Comfortable takes us into our second topic: epigraphs, introductions, and other bonus material that comes with books we read. Do we like them? Do we cringe at them? Self-indulgence can be warm and sweet, or it can be silly and uncomfortable — is there a line that can be crossed? And what's the extra material that Trey brings up that makes us all groan and grumble in unison? We mention Chip Kidd's TED talk, which is well worth a watch.

We then move on to What's Making Us Happy This Week, our ... well, our happiest segment. Glen is being made happy by this podcast, as well as this performance — which is the late, second-added show after the first one sold out. This one will, too, I bet. Trey is happy about this. Barrie is excited about a book — as she so often is. I am happy about taking advantage of TLC reality shows to get work done in my house. I'm also happy about something PBS will bring to you next year that you might have missed this year. And I also highly recommend that you track down this movie, currently streaming on Netflix.

So find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Trey, Glen, Barrie, producer Jess Gitner, producer emeritus and music director Mike, and absent panelist Stephen.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.