NRU -- NPR masculinity edition

I am not near a radio enough during the "drive home" since I am usually not driving home from somewhere during All Things Considered.  But... I heard this piece that was part of a series on masculinity.  Actually, I caught two more since then.

I thought I would go in and there would be a link to all the pieces from the series ... but I didn't find it. [OK...after looking for a few more, I did find a link to the series... why is it not included on all of the pieces?!]

So, I decided to share the links here.  You can listen as you have time, or you can just read the transcripts.  They are all pretty interesting.

I think Fridays might be a good day to link the audio and transcript from show pieces that kept me in the car and sent me looking for more online.

This is the first one I stumbled into ...  The title itself, The 3 Scariest Words a Boy Can Hear, is catchy and it puts out the premise for the series.  I am not sure when I heard it the first time that I really caught on to the series part.  I don't think I heard the whole thing but then the grief angle sucked me in.

I really enjoyed this piece on the shades of masculinity in the gay community.  I think it breaks open the ideas we have about men and women and gender in surprising ways. It is refreshing to hear men muse about gender, we don't often get to hear that perspective.

This is the latest piece I heard about being Black men in America. I wonder if they just figured it out after Ferguson blew up, or if they decided to hold it back because of it. 

Here are a few more that caught my eye, I vaguely remember hearing pieces of these.  I listened online and read the transcripts as I was deciding which to post ... there are many more!

Vegans and masculinity - it offers another refreshing perspective on a topic we have probably heard to much about -- angry rants from both sides, but mostly women.

The *new* American Father - this one covers a lot of ground but could have gone deeper on a few parts.  At first blush, as in reading the title, you might think it was about immigrants, but it is only tangentially about the different kinds of fathers in America.

Men and the military - from the perspective of father and son and their experiences with the military.  I wish they had thrown in one more family member that chose not to serve, just for fun.

This one caught my eye because I am still so intrigued by the school where they taped this edition.  It is an all male school run on a cattle farm in California in the middle of nowhere, not like in some glamorous part of California. This one is less interview and more essay, but super interesting, at least, to me.

An interesting aside is that it seems that it was always women doing the interviewing ... maybe by design for contrast or because they thought men would be more open with women as interviewers?  Not sure...

There is a lot of good stuff, so dig deep into the well and see which caught your ear (eye).