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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LaTosha Brown — the co-founder of Black Voters Matter — details how she's thinking about the election to come in Georgia, and the threat of voter suppression and disinformation. -
These experts argue technological developments have changed warfare more in the past several years than the decades spanning from the introduction of the airplane. -
Nancy Pelosi opens up about wielding power — and what she was doing in the days leading up to President Joe Biden announcing he was abandoning his race for a second term
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Sofia Nelson — a former friend and law school classmate of JD Vance — has made public dozens of email and text exchanges with the vice presidential candidate. -
Antony Blinken talks speaks on everything from the prospect of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, to the war in Ukraine and what the U.S. is doing to bring home Americans detained in Russia. -
Stephen King is out with a new collection of short stories. As you might expect from the reigning King of Horror, some are terrifying. Some are creepy. Others are laugh-out-loud funny. -
The United States is millions of homes short of demand, and lacks enough affordable housing units. And many Americans feel like housing costs are eating up too much of their take-home pay. -
Sam McAlister was the BBC booker who persuaded Prince Andrew to go on record about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It's the subject of new Netflix movie Scoop. -
If the Russian president continues to burn through his reserves of oil and gas money, ordinary people will become a threat to his power, according to one outspoken activist. -
When the U.S. launched airstrikes over the past week in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the idea was to send a message to another country: Iran.
