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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London Mayor Sadiq Khan has responded to President Trump's comments about London and the U.K.
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Former CIA Director John Brennan is out of the agency but not the public eye. He's made a point of attacking President Trump ever since his Inauguration. Critics say that can sow discord, but Brennan says he's doing what he thinks is right.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Alex Whiting, a former prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and Harvard law professor, to get a sense of how war crimes charges against Assad could work.
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Regulators, and sometimes the public, still have a tough time getting a handle on just what Facebook is. And that makes it difficult to determine just which laws should govern it.
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Firms like Facebook use a business model that makes use of people's data. But not all data is created equal. Sharing purchasing habits? Most say that's OK. But private communications? No way.
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The last major deployment of the National Guard to the border was overseen in 2006 by retired Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum. He says their work freed Border Patrol agents to focus on their primary job.
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Newly announced Chinese tariffs will raise prices on many U.S. crops. How will that affect American farmers? NPR's Mary Louise Kelley spoke with Jim Zion, a Californian nut distributor, to find out.
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In Russia, a small number of women have spoken out publicly against powerful men who they say have sexually harassed them. Journalist Daria Zhuk is one of them. She says a powerful politician sexually harassed her in 2014 and that Russian women can learn from the #MeToo movement in America.
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Ahead of Sunday's presidential election in Russia, NPR spoke with a Putin supporter, an opposition supporter and a Russian who sees no point in voting.
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Before the Soviet period, "Russian food had color," says Vladimir Mukhin of Moscow's world-famous White Rabbit restaurant. He aims to honor those flavors, as well as locally source his ingredients.