Most Recent Posts

Lisa Robinson has done just about every kind of music writing there is. She's followed Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones on tour, covered the scene around CBGB in the 1970s, been a syndicated newspaper columnist, written live reviews for The New York Post and cover stories for Vanity Fair. In that time –- four decades plus, beginning as a filing clerk for a late-night radio DJ — she got to know everybody, and held her own as a woman in the quintessential boys' club of rock and rock journalism.

Robinson's new memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, is an insider's look at some of the biggest personalities in music, and how their hopes and fears changed as the industry changed around them. She spoke with NPR's Wade Goodwyn; hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

It's sometimes astonishing, and perhaps a little frightening, the age in which our destinies can be set in motion. You write that your destiny began with a transistor radio, listening to Symphony Sid's jazz radio show as a kid in New York City.

In Bayonne, they take their ham very, very seriously.

This medieval fortress of a town is minutes from the French seaside ports of Barritz and St. Jean de Luz, and not far from Spain's St. Sebastian. It has reigned as a cultural and commercial center for a millennium, according to historian Mark Kurlansky in The Basque History of the World.

Its most famous item since the Middle Ages? The jambon de Bayonne. The town's celebrated ham even has its own festival on Easter weekend.

First, some background. Bayonne may be technically in France, but its people call themselves Basque and claim ancestry from four Spanish states and three French states. It is said, in this case, 4+3=1.

Above all, the Basque have a rich culinary tradition combining sea exploration, the spice trade and foods raised in the fertile valleys of the nearby Pyrenees. And since 1464, the Foire au jambon de Bayonne or Ham Fair, has celebrated this remarkable food.

i i

The signs came early that Abhina Aher was different.

Born a boy biologically and given the male name Abhijit, Aher grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of Mumbai, India. The son of a single mother who nurtured a love of dance, Aher would watch enthralled as she performed.

"I used to wear the clothes that my mother used to wear — her jewelry, her makeup," Aher, now 37, recalls. "That is something which used to extremely fascinate me."

Draped in a bright sari, gold earrings and painted nails, Aher is, by outward appearance, a female, preferring to be addressed as a woman.

She has undertaken a long and arduous journey, rejecting her biological sex and opting to become a hijra — a member of an ancient transgender community in India, popularly referred to as eunuchs.

i i

A survey of emergency contraceptives in Lima, Peru, turned up worrying results: More than a quarter were either counterfeit or defective.

Some of the morning-after pills tested contained too little of the active ingredient, or none at all. Other pills contained another drug altogether, researchers reported Friday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Swallowing these fakes can result in dangerous side effects, not to mention unwanted pregnancies.

"The biggest implication is the quality of emergency contraceptives in developing countries cannot be taken for granted," says Facundo Fernandez, a chemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who contributed to the study.

Shots - Health News

Poll: Americans Favor Age Restrictions On Morning-After Pill