Mary Louise Kelly
Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered,NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.
Previously, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to Russia, North Korea, and beyond (including live coverage from Helsinki, for the infamous Trump-Putin summit). Her past reporting has tracked the CIA and other spy agencies, terrorism, wars, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.
Kelly first launched NPR's intelligence beat in 2004. After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad — so tough she wrote an essay about it for Newsweek — she decided to try trading the spy beat for spy fiction. Her debut espionage novel, Anonymous Sources, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. It's a tale of journalists, spies, and Pakistan's nuclear security. Her second novel, The Bullet, followed in 2015.
Kelly's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has lectured at Harvard and Stanford, and taught a course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly serves as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, moderating newsmaker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.
A Georgia native, Kelly's first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting, joining the team that launched BBC/Public Radio International's The World. The following year, Kelly moved to London to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for the BBC World Service.
Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with degrees in government, French language, and literature. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in European studies at Cambridge University in England.
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Smith says she started writing Keep Moving as her marriage was ending. It began as a series of affirmations she wrote for herself on Twitter; she found that the posts were helping other people too. -
A new book by the journalist-author duo Peter Baker and Susan Glasser delves into the story of the once-powerbroker. "I think he always has this idea that things can be fixed," Peter Baker says.
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Anita Hill, chair of the Hollywood Commission, discusses a new report's findings on sexual harassment in the industry. She also discusses Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation battle and Joe Biden.
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When Kim Darroch described Donald Trump's White House as "inept" and "deeply dysfunctional," an international scandal ensued. He writes about the experience and his time in D.C. in Collateral Damage.
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Voting by mail is easier now across the U.S. Officials in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, a swing region in a critical state, are making changes to manage the time-consuming process of counting ballots.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder of the Say Her Name campaign, about how the Black Lives Matter movement can be more inclusive of Black women.
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J. Courtney Sullivan's new novel examines the relationship between a mother and her child's caregiver — both women with significant degrees of privilege, despite their surface economic differences.
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Models developed by mathematical epidemiologists project that tens of thousands of lives across the U.S. can be saved by more people wearing face masks.
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Hear the cellist talk about the purpose of music in the face of racial tension and health crises, plus his new album, Not Our First Goat Rodeo, which reunites him with old bluegrass buddies.
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Jacob Frey acknowledges a need to shift a culture that has "failed black and brown people" for years. But he says calling for the dismantling of police without an alternative in place is "not a plan."
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Author L.L. McKinney created the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag, where black and white authors are comparing their book advances. "You can now use this to fight for what you are worth," she says.
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Nearly 41% of jobs in the state's food and accommodation industry have been lost. The overall levels are comparable to the Great Depression, says David Schmidt, a state economist.
