Lots of organizations use 5ks and "fun runs" to raise money for charity – few involve sitting on a couch for hours at a time. Today, how a super-fast, bizarre style of video-game playing has become a fundraising cash cow. Plus, we’ll celebrate the 30th anniversary of the video game industry’s most lucrative character of all time: Mario! Then, as the Daily Show’s “Senior Muslim or Foreign Looking Correspondent,” Aasif Mandvi helped Americans laugh at their own prejudice. We’ll hear why he almost refused the job.
Listen to the full show.
Mario Turns 30
Jon Irwin teaches writing at Georgia State University and is author of a book about Super Mario Bros 2. He’s also a contributor to Killscreen, which celebrated Mario’s 30th birthday with a collection of articles.
Speedrunning
Paul Bisceglio is an associate editor at Zocalo Public Square and a contributor to Pacific Standard, where he recently wrote about “Awesome Games Done Quick”, a fast-growing event that’s raising millions for charity.
Video Games for Science
In case you’re looking for one more reason to convince your parents or spouse that video games are good for you, try this on for size – video games are helping to advance scientific research. Stefanie Vogt and the podcast Experimental and brought us an update.
You can listen to this story again at PRX.org.
Paul Zaloom
Paul Zaloom is a puppeteer and political satirist, but you may know him best as the zany scientist from Beakman’s World. He’ll be taking on more nuanced questions at this year’s Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival in Vermont. White Like Me: A Honky Dory Puppet Show is a two-part production about race and privilege and the role of a once mighty white man in a country where Caucasians are fast becoming a minority.
Aasif Mandvi's "No Land's Man"
It was never Aasif Mandvi’s goal to be a muck-raking “gotcha” journalist; funny fake reporter is just one of the many roles he’s taken on as an actor. But then Mandvi had a number of identities thrust on him since he moved from India to England, and then to Florida as a high school junior. He writes about many of them in his collection of essays called No Land’s Man, which comes out in paperback this week.
Read more about his conversation with us and videos of his work on The Daily Show at this link.
