Linda Holmes

Certain facts regarding movie ratings are not in dispute.

Amy Poehler joined Saturday Night Live in 2001 — a time, she says, when no one was really sure comedy was going to ever be okay again. She left in 2008 after playing Hillary Clinton during the show's coverage of an election cycle when, she tells Ari Shapiro on Thursday's Morning Edition, "the country was really paying attention to politics."

We have a bit of history with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick here at Monkey See. It was the second selection in our I Will If You Will Book Club after Twilight (true story!), and we read the entire thing together in the spring of 2010.

Today on All Things Considered, Alisha Niehaus of the Girl Scouts of America talks to host Guy Raz about a big update: for the first time in a quarter-century, they've updated the badges that Scouts can earn.

When the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was announced last night, if you were following Twitter, what you saw was a spasm of grief. Writers, actors, musicians, your friends, comedians ... the genuine sadness was palpable, not only because he was 56 years old, but because so many saw the news while holding one of his products in their hands. This is very much what popular culture is: this hive mind, this hum of collective response.

You know regular product placement, right? Top Chef and its plugs for frozen meals and Gladware, cars being name-checked by action stars speeding away in them, and — of course — the carbonation-off currently taking place between American Idol (COKE! COKE! COKE!) and The X Factor (PEPSI! PEPSI! PEPSI!). But as Elizabeth Blair reports on Wednesday's Morning Edition, you haven't seen anything yet.

Today was widely expected to bring the announcement of the iPhone 5 — maybe with a bigger screen, a different home button, or a differently shaped case — at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California.

It didn't.

That's not to say Apple didn't say anything of note at its rather lengthy presentation. Not at all. But the big game-changing piece of new hardware didn't come to pass. Aficionados waited, wondering and chattering on liveblogs and on Twitter to see if it would come at the end in Apple's traditional "one more thing" fashion.

It didn't.

A discussion on today's All Things Considered between host Guy Raz and comedian Samantha Bee begins with his noting that she has reduced parenting to the words "vomit" and "urine."

ABC News and Yahoo! announced today that they are teaming up in a "strategic online news alliance" they hope will reach 100 million U.S. users a month. And they're not starting small: George Stephanopoulos will interview President Obama at 2:35 this afternoon for a webcast on ABCNews.com and Yahoo.com. The partnership will make ABC News, according to the press release, "the premier news provider on Yahoo! News." The press release says that Yahoo!

Sunday night, 92-year-old Andy Rooney bid farewell to his regular weekly segments on 60 Minutes, explaining that he sees himself as a writer and not a "television personality," and after all, "writers don't retire," but he's no longer going to be talking on television every week about fruit or the post office or whatever other nagging matter has his attention.

Tune into All Things Considered tonight for additional coverage of the Kindle Fire from NPR's Laura Sydell and Margot Adler.

Today, Amazon announced the debut of its 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire. Available for $199, the Kindle Fire is being positioned as a device that will deliver Amazon's e-books, MP3s, magazines, web browsing, and streaming video for less than half the price of full-featured tablets like the Apple iPad. The Fire is available for preorder starting today, and will ship November 15.

Idris Elba tells Linda Wertheimer on Wednesday's Morning Edition that he didn't come to the United States from the UK to play "black roles," but merely "roles." And he has: roles like Stringer Bell on HBO's dark drug epic The Wire and John Luther, the central character of Luther, a drama series that returns for a second season tonight on BBC America.

Netflix has figured out that people are very upset about its decision to split streaming video and DVD delivery — a decision that got it in huge hot water earlier this year. Customers who had previously gotten both streaming and DVDs for a single price would now have to pay separately. If you only use one or the other, you could pay less, but if you still wanted both, you'd pay more.

Watching Sunday night's Emmy Awards was a little bit like going to the very bad wedding of people you really love: the happiness you feel for the people involved almost makes up for how otherwise unremarkable the experience is.

It's a big week for Jane Lynch. Her memoir, Happy Accidents, was released on Tuesday, and this Sunday night, she'll be hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards. And she's a reasonably good bet to pick one up, too: her second in a row for playing the scheming cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Fox's Glee. On Friday's Morning Edition, she talks to David Greene about her career, her book, and the difficult process of telling her parents she was gay.

It's been rumored for a few days, and now it's official: Eddie Murphy will host the Oscars in 2012, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences announced today.

Fans of Hugh Laurie on House -- a show for which he's been nominated for six Emmys — know that grumpy Dr. House doesn't get at all of Laurie's talents. He was previously best known for comedy, particularly what he did with Stephen Fry on shows like Jeeves And Wooster. But on House, while he does plenty of dark comedy, he also plays heavy drama.

And now he's released an album of New Orleans and Delta blues. (He knows its' a little counterintuitive. But that's okay.)

It's a piece of necessary wisdom that will be shared with countless college students this fall by nervous parents: Tell a story at a party, and it's heard by a handful of people, whose reactions you perhaps have some ability to predict. Tell it on the internet, and it will be heard by the people you know and the people you don't — and the latter outnumber the former by several orders of magnitude. Don't put your picture on Facebook flashing the camera or looking drunk or kissing someone you might later regret kissing.

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I spent all day Saturday watching The Weather Channel. It started very early in the morning when I woke up nervous and headed out to the living room. The hurricane hadn't even made landfall yet, but they already had a guy on the beach who had been assigned to watch over a wooden pier to see if it would collapse. "I appreciate The Weather Channel's nonstop coverage of America's Pier," I said to practically nobody, since practically nobody was awake.

When Steve Jobs stepped down from his position as CEO of Apple yesterday, he handed the reins immediately to chief operating officer Tim Cook, who has had such a significant hand in day-to-day operations that many expect that Apple won't immediately suffer much in the way of effects on either its ability to turn out beloved products or its business position.

This morning in Jonesboro, Ark., Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, known as the "West Memphis Three," will reportedly appear at a surprise hearing where many outlets are reporting that they — or at least Echols and Baldwin, with some reports saying all three — will be released after spending 18 years in prison for the 1993 murders of three young boys. Echols had been sentenced to death.

Last night, Christine O'Donnell, who was a much-discussed Senate candidate in Delaware last year and author of a new book, walked out on her interview with CNN's Piers Morgan after he asked her to talk about gay marriage, which she said was rude, because she was there to discuss — in her words — one of "the issues that I choose to talk about in the book." Ultimately, their disagreement came down to her assertion that as a host, it's rude to ask her things other than the things she wants to be asked about.

The new film Another Earth stars Brit Marling as a woman who watches a duplicate planet hover beside ours as she struggles to escape from her own devastating past. But Marling doesn't only star in (and, some say, steal) the film — she also co-wrote and co-produced it with director Mike Cahill.

Consider the discontented viewer.

We live in this hypothetical person's golden age, when the complaints he used to share with patient friends can now be shared with the entire online world, and they may even make their way to the eyeballs of the creators of the entertainment he's so angry about. Unsatisfying season finale? Terrible third act of a movie? Too much lens flare? Tweet, tweet, tweet!

This was the weekend that the production of Stephen Sondheim's Company filmed during a brief run with the New York Philharmonic in April enjoyed a limited run in movie theaters across the country. (If you missed it, there are rumblings of a one-shot encore date in July, but they're not yet listed on the official site, so stay tuned.)

How you see J.J. Abrams' Super 8 largely depends on how you react to its relationship with movies that already exist.

Okay, the National Geographic Bee isn't being shown live; it ended in late May. But you can watch some of the competition beginning tonight at 6:30 PM on Nat Geo Wild, a cable channel that you actually might get, even if you think you don't. It is the home of shows like Crimes Against Nature and Python Hunters and the awesomely named Rebel Monkeys, but tonight, it gives itself over for 30 minutes to academics. The competition will run all this week.

If Sunday night's Tony Awards are any indication, Broadway loves its Mormons, its Larry Kramer plays, and its really big horse puppets.

Feel like you're drowning in a flood of so-called "reality" television, Canadian series imports and new cable shows?

It's not you, it's TV; specifically, the oddball land of summer television.

As the big networks try to avoid looking like they've gone fishin' for summer and cable amps up its schedule, there's a new universe of programming for small screen fans to sort though. And there's a few standout series worth seeing — and avoiding — in the weeks to come.

On last night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart got a little too enthusiastic with a segment satirizing Rep. Anthony Weiner's ugly press conference from Monday afternoon. Stewart wound up accidentally slicing his wrist open and needing to be bandaged.