Glen Weldon
Glen Weldon is a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. He reviews books, movies, comics and more for the NPR Arts Desk.
Over the course of his career, he has spent time as a theater critic, a science writer, an oral historian, a writing teacher, a bookstore clerk, a PR flack, a completely inept marine biologist and a slightly better-ept competitive swimmer.
Weldon is the author of two cultural histories: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, McSweeney's and more; his fiction has appeared in several anthologies and other publications. He is the recipient of an NEA Arts Journalism Fellowship, an Amtrak Writers' Residency, a Ragdale Writing Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Fiction.
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The Peacock reality show The Traitors has become weekly appointment television, as the always impeccably dressed Alan Cumming presides over an unfriendly game full of alliances, secrets, treachery and murder. -
An Academy Award in Best Casting will be the newest prize at the Oscars in March. An NPR panel examines what an achievement in casting might mean.
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Actor Robert Duvall died Sunday at 95. Critic Glen Weldon looks back at his career playing icons of American masculinity.
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Duvall appeared in over 90 films over the course of his career, imbuing stock Hollywood types — cowboys, cops, soldiers — with a nuanced sense of vulnerability. -
O'Hara observed people closely; she found the tics, the mannerisms, the specific beats of drunkenness and used them to open us up to her characters' frailty, their vulnerability, their humanity. -
There are no dragons, no maps and no internecine family trees in this Game of Thrones prequel about an underdog knight and his would-be squire. -
There have been many TV crossovers over the years, but it's a tricky balance to get right — for every mashup that feels organic, there are plenty more that amount to little other than weird stunts. So we decided to dream up the ultimate TV crossovers. -
Hope springs eternal, and that is nowhere more true than in the realm of New Year's Resolutions. Today, we give ourselves goals for 2026. And because we believe in accountability, we'll tell you how well we stuck to our resolutions for 2025. -
NPR's Books We Love is a roundup of the best books from the past year, sorted and tagged to help you find exactly what you're looking for. This year we've got hundreds of book recommendations, so today, we're highlighting some of our favorites. -
What's the best Christmas gift you ever received? You probably didn't have to think about it; you knew it in your bones. Today, in this encore episode, we're talking about the actual, tangible gift you found waiting for you under the tree and still think about it from time to time.
