I’ve never liked NPR. Throughout its long and venerable half-century run‚ the public radio network has served as a seamless delivery system for lifestyle smugness. When my mother would reflexively flip it on during long car rides in my adolescence‚ I’d greet its confident dispatches from the East Coast citadels of cultural consensus in the same manner I did all parent-approved meditations on civic life: as an elite monopoly’s hostile declaration of war on my attention span. Everything about its...