Two new books examine how sex fits into suburban and small-town life, respectively. First, Erin Somers explores marriage and desire in her novel The Ten Year Affair. In today’s episode, she speaks with NPR’s Andrew Limbong about combining a multiverse plot with domestic fiction. Then, Robyn Royle knits a dozen short stories together in Sex of the Midwest, in which the residents of a small town receive an email inviting them to participate in a sex survey. In today’s episode, Royle tells NPR’s Scott Simon about the many misconceptions surrounding small-town life.
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Is having boyfriend embarrassing? Are we living in an era of "heteropessimism"? Are women over marriage? These questions have gone viral in recent weeks as the country continues to grapple with changing gender norms and the effect the right wing radicalization of men has had on women's' attitudes toward marriage and child bearing. This week, a new study showing that, for the first time, female high school seniors were less interested in marriage than male seniors provoked an online debate about whether this was a consequence of growing male conservatism, or alternatively, whether men were facing "bigotry" from women who were making broad and essentialist claims about men. Eighteen year old Zohran volunteer deemed "hot girl for Zohran" by the New York post found herself on one side of the argument, while Drop Site news journalist Ryan Grim found himself on the other. Bad Faith brought them together to hash it out: Whose fault is the male loneliness epidemic, and if the root of the problem is economic, how should the left express sympathy for victims of the root cause without lacking sympathy for the female victims of misogyny?
As a genocidal protest breaks out in front of an Orthodox synagogue in New York City, elsewhere in the cultural capital, a books-awards group hands out garlands to explicitly anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic work. This continues a trend that is alienating readers and movie audiences and others—the wild politicization of forms of education and entertainment. Give a listen.
FEMA was meant to help only when disasters exceeded state capacity. Yet today it functions primarily as a national subsidy machine, encouraging development in floodplains, bailing out wealthy coastal states, and shifting costs onto taxpayers far from the danger zones. The Cato Institute's Dominik Lett and Chris Edwards discuss how well-intentioned federal aid has created perverse incentives, bureaucratic delays, and a long tail of spending that continues decades after storms like Katrina.
At the end of the Second World War, Europe was a mess. The economies of most countries were in shambles and the threat of communism loomed over the continent.
In a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a plan which could help get Europe back on its feet. The plan is widely considered one of the most successful foreign aid programs in history.
Learn more about the Marshall Plan, how it came about, and how it worked on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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In this episode, Hans Boersma joins Rusty Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about his recent essay, "Modernity and God-Talk," from the November 2025 issue of the magazine.