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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Three decades ago, the newly independent country of Ukraine was briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world. A lot has changed since then. -
This past weekend, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wasn't a leading scientific voice on the pandemic — he was another worried parent whose young daughter had just tested positive for COVID. -
Aging can be hardest for strivers, says social scientist Arthur Brooks, because they sometimes mourn that their biggest successes are in their rearview mirror. -
Jeremy Konyndyk, executive director of USAID's COVID task force, shares his perspective on the U.S.' efforts to donate and distribute vaccines to low-income nations. -
NPR travelled towards the "temporarily occupied territories" on the Ukraine-Russia border, where the people who live there are in limbo – cut off from both Ukraine and Russia, cut off from the world. -
The standoff between Ukraine and Russia is about global security and an attempt to "rewrite rules on which the world is based," says Ukraine's foreign minister. -
It Russia takes the path of aggression, it will face "extremely severe consequences immediately," says the U.S. charge d'affaires Kristina Kvien. -
Ukraine's former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk says the military is stronger than it was the last time Russia invaded in 2014. But he still thinks the U.S. should help should Russia make advances. -
Imani Perry discusses what it meant to write a book about her own home, and why the South is so important to comprehend the rest of the nation. -
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker says we cannot live in fear. He and three congregants were held hostage by a man who knocked on the synagogue door and came in for tea.
