Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.
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In Los Angeles, the financially troubled Museum of Contemporary Art gets a bailout from arts patron Eli Broad. He'll match donor funding dollar-for-dollar up to $15 million and will also give MOCA $3 million a year for exhibits over the next five years.
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Tall, direct and fiercely intelligent, Michelle Obama sparks a vast array of reactions. A group of African-American women in Los Angeles discuss whether America is ready for a black first lady and what Barack Obama's choice of wife says about him.
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What business did a young black woman in the Northeast have indulging a fascination with the slave-owning heroine of Gone With the Wind? NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates explains the complicated business of Scarlett fever. -
On Sunday night, the Golden Globes will become the biggest, high-profile casualty of the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike. The cost to Los Angeles' economy in lost business from the cancelled ceremonies and after-parties is estimated at $80 million.
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No new talks are planned on the screenwriters strike, but a new survey shows that the public supports the screenwriters.
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On this day in 1927, the state of Massachusetts executed two Italian immigrants for the murder of two payroll clerks that the men insisted they didn't commit. A new book and documentary draw parallels to our feelings about immigration then and now.
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The recent book The Race Beat examines how the media covered the civil rights movement. Its co-author, a journalist with Southern roots, went on a mission to discover the era's heroes in the press.
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With the arrest of James Seale Wednesday on kidnapping charges related to the murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964, a decades-old case is closer to resolution. Charles Moore's brother, who was 20 years old at the time of the murders, played a key role in finding Seale.
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If you're still crossing items off your holiday gift list, remember this: You don't have to worry about the right fit or color, if you pick a book. Karen Grigsby Bates found plenty of titles worth adding to your shopping list, in categories ranging from novels to cookbooks.
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Jane Leder's new book Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex and World War II tells the story of the "wandering wives" — women who traveled from town to town to stay near their military husbands before they shipped out.
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On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of ordinary citizens joined some of the world's best photojournalists at the World Trade Center towers to chronicle the horror and bravery of that day.
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Susan Straight is a collector of stories with a uniquely Californian view of the world. That viewpoint animates her latest novel, the saga of a mixed-race slave girl in the American South, which explores the human drive to escape captivity and find a measure of personal liberty.
