Robert Siegel
Prior to his retirement, Robert Siegel was the senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered. With 40 years of experience working in radio news, Siegel hosted the country's most-listened-to, afternoon-drive-time news radio program and reported on stories and happenings all over the globe, and reported from a variety of locations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. He signed off in his final broadcast of All Things Considered on January 5, 2018.
In 2010, Siegel was recognized by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with the John Chancellor Award. Siegel has been honored with three Silver Batons from Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University, first in 1984 for All Things Considered's coverage of peace movements in East and West Germany. He shared in NPR's 1996 Silver Baton Award for "The Changing of the Guard: The Republican Revolution," for coverage of the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. He was part of the NPR team that won a Silver Baton for the network's coverage of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China.
Other awards Siegel has earned include a 1997 American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for the two-part documentary, "Murder, Punishment, and Parole in Alabama" and the National Mental Health Association's 1991 Mental Health Award for his interviews conducted on the streets of New York in an All Things Considered story, "The Mentally Ill Homeless."
Siegel joined NPR in December 1976 as a newscaster and became an editor the following year. In 1979, Siegel became NPR's first staffer based overseas when he was chosen to open NPR's London bureau, where he worked as senior editor until 1983. After London, Siegel served for four years as director of the News and Information Department, overseeing production of NPR's newsmagazines All Things Considered and Morning Edition, as well as special events and other news programming. During his tenure, NPR launched its popular Saturday and Sunday newsmagazine Weekend Edition. He became host of All Things Considered in 1987.
Before coming to NPR, Siegel worked for WRVR Radio in New York City as a reporter, host and news director. He was part of the WRVR team honored with an Armstrong Award for the series, "Rockefeller's Drug Law." Prior to WRVR, he was morning news reporter and telephone talk show host for WGLI Radio in Babylon, New York.
A graduate of New York's Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, Siegel began his career in radio at Columbia's radio station, WKCR-FM. As a student he anchored coverage of the 1968 Columbia demonstrations and contributed to the work that earned the station an award from the Writers Guild of America East.
Siegel was the editor of The NPR Interviews 1994, The NPR Interviews 1995 and The NPR Interviews 1996, compilations of NPR's most popular radio conversations from each year.
-
Playwright Harold Pinter came into prominence at a time when Tennessee Williams' and Arthur Miller's plays were being performed in the U.S. and Bernard Shaw and the Boulevard Comedies dominated London's West End. In contrast to the work at the time, Pinter's plays dealt with the theater of menace.
-
His story is fiction. Names, dates and other facts have all been revised in the 75 years since he hit the airwaves. But he's always on horseback. He always wears a mask. And he never accepts praise or payment.
-
Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a decade is an idea-driven film based on a Romanian philosopher's delicate novella. It's about an aged academic who becomes young again when he's struck by lightning.
-
Joe Wright's film, Atonement, is a loyal and lush translation of English writer Ian McEwan's novel. It's only Wright's second feature film. He explains his approach to literary adaptation — and how being dyslexic helps him.
-
Christopher McCandless, the subject of the book Into the Wild, lived — and died — in a bus outside Denali National Park in Alaska. The bus became a shrine to him — but now, as a movie version of the book is released, a piece of that bus has been auctioned on eBay.
-
Not just a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance was also the name of a famous ballroom in the New York City neighborhood and a barrier-breaking basketball team. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written a book that chronicles their histories.
-
Known since the 1970s for his distinctive, gravelly voice, singer-songwriter Tom Waits has since given up whiskey for family life. But echoes of his hard-living ways can still be heard in his music.
-
A new, two-volume anthology of U.S. speeches offers ample evidence that political speaking has framed and rallied every great event from the Revolution to the present. Editor Ted Widmer talks about the famous and not-so-famous orators in American Speeches.
-
In her memoir, Lessons in Becoming Myself, actress Ellen Burstyn recounts how sorrow has informed her long acting career. Burstyn won an Oscar for best actress in 1974 for her role in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
-
French-born Helene Grimaud is busy this season. She has a new CD, Reflection, and her autobiography, Wild Harmonies, has been published in English. The works explore the pianist's different loves, in both her musical and personal life.