Lifestyle
Bonding Over Books and Long Car Rides
“Guess where this photo was taken” was the prompt John Sasscer Sanders Jr. gave alongside a photo on his Hinge dating profile. The image captured Mr. Sanders at a book-signing event for the sociologist Matthew Desmond during the 2023 National Book Festival in Washington.
Shannon Shiyi Wu had volunteered at the festival that year, and was familiar with Mr. Desmond’s work. So when Mr. Sanders liked one of her profile photos in September 2023, Ms. Wu checked out his profile and saw the photo from the festival. “I know exactly where that is,” she responded. “That book is ‘Poverty, by America.’” They chatted about how Ms. Wu had read Mr. Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Evicted,” and visited the exhibit it inspired at the National Building Museum in 2018.
It was the first of many shared interests for the couple. Their first date, days after they matched on Hinge, however, got off to a rough start when Mr. Sanders went to the wrong location of the coffee shop where they had agreed to meet. Once they pieced together the snafu and found each other 30 minutes later, the conversation flowed easily.
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
She was “very easy to talk to, very engaging and fun,” Mr. Sanders said. “I thought she had a wonderful, distinctive laugh.”
Ms. Wu, 33, is the director of payment policy at the American Hospital Association. Born and raised in Libertyville, Ill., she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Princeton and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Mr. Sanders, 37, who was born and raised in Chevy Chase, Md., has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Rice University, a master’s degree in accountancy from Notre Dame, and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is the senior manager of technical accounting at International Game Technology, a company that provides products and services for lotteries and casinos.
Their next dates through the fall of 2023 were a series of thoughtful pursuits, such as seeing a comedy show, trying Peruvian food, visiting the Rothko exhibition at the National Art Gallery, and dining at the Dabney, a Michelin-star restaurant in Washington.
It was on their first weekend away together that December, when Mr. Sanders invited her to his family home on the eastern shore of Maryland, that Ms. Wu realized their relationship had real promise. Looking over at him in the car en route, while listening to her favorite song by her favorite band (“I Need My Girl” by the National), she realized she didn’t want the ride to end. “‘Oh my gosh, I could be really serious with this guy,’” she recalled thinking.
Car rides were also where Mr. Sanders felt his affection blooming, albeit with different audio material. He loved listening to audiobooks like “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou or “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin together while driving. “She has an incredible intellectual curiosity that was engaging from the start,” he said. “I learn so much from her.”
In November 2024, just over a year after they met, Mr. Sanders proposed to Ms. Wu near the Touchstone Gallery in downtown Washington. It was where they had gone on their second date, and steps from the spot where they first kissed. “I had previously said to him, I didn’t want a big scene or anything,” said Ms. Wu of their engagement conversations.
Their wedding on Feb. 28 was low-key as well. They married at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in a ceremony officiated by George Barbour, the branch chief of the marriage bureau, with just their parents and Mr. Sanders’s brothers and toddler nephew.
“I cried a little when I was reading my vows, and I think he also had to take a few breaths there,” Ms. Wu said. “I can’t imagine doing that in front of 100 or 200 people.”
The small group then shared a family-style meal at Ambar, a Balkan restaurant on Capitol Hill, ending with a hazelnut torte from the Heidelberg Pastry Shoppe in Arlington, Va. Their one more formal wedding touch: taking their portraits amid the soaring spaces and millions of books at the Library of Congress, which organizes the National Book Festival every year.
Lifestyle
Bill Maher is getting the Mark Twain Prize after all
Satirist Bill Maher is this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Maher will receive the award at the Kennedy Center on June 28th. The show will stream on Netflix at a later date.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
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Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Bill Maher will be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor after all.
There’s been some confusion about whether the comedian and longtime host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher would, indeed, be getting the top humor award. After The Atlantic cited anonymous sources saying he was, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “fake news.” But today the Kennedy Center made it official.
“For nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,” said Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations in a statement. “For even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse – one politically incorrect joke at a time.”
Is President Trump, chair of the Kennedy Center’s board, in on the joke?
Maher once visited Trump at the White House and he tends to be more conservative than many of his comedian peers but after their dinner Trump soured on Maher, calling him a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” on social media.
Maher’s acerbic wit has targeted both political parties and he’s been particularly hard on Trump recently, criticizing his decisions to wage a war with Iran and his personnel choices.
“Trump said, ‘when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.’ Um, who’s ‘we?,’” Maher said in a recent monologue.
Past recipients of the Mark Twain Prize include Conan O’Brien, Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy and Carol Burnett.
In a statement released through the Kennedy Center, Maher said, “It is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”
Maher will receive the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center on June 28. The show will stream on Netflix at a later date.
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Suit asks court to force Trump administration to use ‘The Kennedy Center’ name
Workers react to the media after updating signage outside the Kennedy Center on Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
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Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force President Trump and the board and staff of the Kennedy Center to revert to calling the arts complex The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The motion, which Beatty filed on Wednesday, asks a federal circuit court judge to reverse the Trump administration and the center’s current board and staff’s decision to call the complex “The Trump-Kennedy Center.”
In the filing, Beatty’s attorneys wrote: “Can the Board of the Kennedy Center — in direct contradiction of the governing statutes — rename this sacred memorial to John F. Kennedy after President Donald J. Trump? The answer is, unequivocally, ‘no.’ By renaming the Center — in violation of the law — Defendants have breached the terms of the trust and their most basic fiduciary obligations as trustees. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the Kennedy Center as the ‘sole national memorial to the late’ President in the nation’s capital.”

In a statement emailed to NPR Thursday, Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, wrote: “We’re confident the court will uphold the board’s decision on the name change and the desperately needed renovations which will continue as scheduled.” NPR also reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive a reply.
In December, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the complex would heretofore be called “The Trump-Kennedy Center.” Although the new moniker was never approved by Congress, the Center’s website and publicity materials were immediately updated to reflect the administration’s chosen name, and the same day as Leavitt’s announcement, Trump’s name went up on the signage of the complex’s exterior, over that of the slain President Kennedy.
Later that month, Rep. Beatty who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, sued Trump, members of the Kennedy Center board appointed by Trump, and some ex-officio members, arguing that the complex’s name had been legislated by Congress in 1964. Wednesday’s motion is part of that lawsuit.

In a press release sent to NPR on Wednesday, Rep. Beatty said: “Donald Trump’s attempt to rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not just an act of ego. It is an attempt to subvert our Constitution and the rule of law. Congress established the Kennedy Center by law, and only Congress can change its name.”
For many patrons, artists and benefactors of the Kennedy Center, the name change was the last straw in politicizing the performing arts hub. Following the White House announcement of the new name, many prominent artists withdrew planned performances there, including the composer Philip Glass (a Kennedy Center Honors award recipient, who received his prize during the first Trump administration), the famed Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz and the 18-time Grammy-winning banjo master Béla Fleck.
The Washington National Opera (WNO), which had been in residence at the Kennedy Center since 1971, also severed its ties in January after ticket sales dropped precipitously. Earlier this month, WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello told NPR, “We did try as best as we could to encourage [the patrons] that we are a bipartisan organization, but people really voted with their feet and with their pocketbooks. And so we realized that there was really no choice for us.”

On Monday, a coalition of eight architecture and cultural groups also sued Trump and the Kennedy Center board in federal court over the complex’s scheduled closing in July for unspecified renovations. Their suit seeks to have the White House and board members comply with existing historic preservation laws, and to secure Congressional approval before moving ahead with the renovation plans.
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