Doomsday prepping seems more and more logical to us on the Life Raft team. Climate change-induced weather disasters are only getting worse, and it never hurts to be prepared, right?
Today on the show we’re going to get a glimpse into the world of prepping through the eyes of Sharon Ross, who wanted to be prepared for anything, but later found herself the odd one out.
This story comes to us from our friends at Wyoming Public Media. It’s from a terrific podcast called HumaNature, which tells stories about human experiences in nature.
You can read more about Sharon Ross and her efforts here, and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Support for WWNO’s Coastal Desk comes from the Greater New Orleans Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and listeners like you.
If you like what you hear from Life Raft, consider making a donation to WRKF and WWNO to help keep the show going!
After months of deadlock, a covid-19 relief package has passed, but the battles continue. We ask how things got so dire and what President-elect Joe Biden will inherit. A deadly shootout in London more than a century ago still resonates today; we examine one of the world’s first breaking-news stories. And the colour black reaches new depths in art.
Adam Wathan has been obsessed with computers since he was a kid. In fact, he was introduced to computers by his 1st grade librarian.. and his first programming project was using Q-Basic, following a tutorial on how to make a pro wrestling simulator.
During his time in university, he wasn’t enjoying the programming curriculum and ended up dropping out to play in his band, and working odd jobs to support his music career. During this, he got into the production side of music, and started a home studio to record local bands. Four years after he quit programming, he started tinkering with the same framework used to make Winamp – called reaper – and fell in love with pogromming all over again. At this point, he tried school again, but post internship, he decided to go straight into the field without finishing his degree.
These days, he is married with a young family. Besides staying busy with that, he still finds time to play games with his remote friends, and occasionally trains for powerlifting. He met his business partner, Steve, in college, and hacked on side projects together. These side projects led to the creation of a mini CSS framework, which Wathan started using throughout other projects, growing it into something he was quite proud of. In fact, while live-streaming some coding, he was surprised by the influx of people asking what it was… and where they could get it. He decided to open source the framework in 2017, and it has steadily grown and grown in usage – to the tune of millions of downloads a month.
This is the creation story of Tailwind CSS and Tailwind Labs.
If there is one song almost everyone knows it is Happy Birthday to You (yes, that is the actual title of the song, even though everyone just calls it Happy Birthday).
Not only has the song been sung at countless children’s birthday parties, but it has also been mentioned in Supreme Court decisions and was the subject of one of the most important copyright cases in history.
Learn more about the most famous song in the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In which a fiery apocalypse outside Rome, New York marks the cultural endpoint of the 1990s, and John spends his whole childhood reading about armaments in Janes publications. Certificate #27287.
Over the summer, comedian Laurie Kilmartin took to Twitter to joke about something that wasn’t funny: Her mom was dying. JoAnn Kilmartin, Laurie’s mother, had contracted the coronavirus in her nursing home and was on her deathbed only a few miles from Laurie’s home in southern California.
Dave Barry is the rare humor writer who has also been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. For anyone looking to inject some humor in their writing, Dave has some simple advice to follow.
In the aftermath of World War II, a succession of mass supernatural events swept through a war-torn Germany. As millions were afflicted by a host of seemingly incurable maladies (including blindness and paralysis), waves of apocalyptic rumors crashed over the land. A messianic faith healer rose to extraordinary fame, prayer groups performed exorcisms, and enormous crowds traveled to witness apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder. What linked these events, in the wake of an annihilationist war and the Holocaust, was a widespread preoccupation with evil.
While many histories emphasize Germany's rapid transition from genocidal dictatorship to liberal democracy, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–WWII Germany (Metropolitan, 2020), places in full view the toxic mistrust, profound bitterness, and spiritual malaise that unfolded alongside the economic miracle. Drawing from a set of previously unpublished archival materials, acclaimed historian Monica Black argues that the surge of supernatural obsessions stemmed from the unspoken guilt and shame of a nation remarkably silent about what was euphemistically called "the most recent past." This shadow history irrevocably changes our view of postwar Germany, revealing the country's fraught emotional life, deep moral disquiet, and the cost of trying to bury a horrific legacy.
Monica Black is a historian of modern Europe. Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany, with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. Since 2010 she has been Associate Professor of History at the U of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first book, published with Cambridge UP in 2010, was Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany. She is the Editor since 2019 of the journal Central European History.
Dr. Syed Moin Hassan was riled up. "I don't know who needs to hear this," he posted on Twitter, "BUT YOU ARE NOT LAZY IF YOU ARE WAKING UP AT NOON." Hassan speaks to Short Wave's Emily Kwong about de-stigmatizing sleeping in late, and why a good night's rest is so important for your immune system. (Encore episode)
