Vowell explains the ideals of Puritanism

"She sounded unlike anyone else on the radio . . . which is what you want," says This American Life's Ira Glass in this Washington Post profile of Sarah Vowell. The TAL contributor and author appeared on the Daily Show last night and will be in D.C. tomorrow to promote her latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, in which she explores and explains America's Puritan heritage. The unruly English colonists of the the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose writings and quarrels are the focus of her book, are "my ideal of America," she says in the Post.