In 1598 the Dutch Empire acquired the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
There they found a short, fat, flightless bird that was only found on that island. The bird had absolutely no fear of humans, but perhaps it should have.
In 1662, just 64 years later, the last known bird was sighted, and after that, the entire species went extinct.
Learn more about the dodo bird and how it disappeared on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945–1970 (Anchor Books, 2021), Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, and Mary McCarthy, adroitly pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, boxing, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy and Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita. Here is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," alongside Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.
Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.
(Encore episode.) Archival records may help researchers figure out how fast the sea level is rising in certain places. Millions of people in coastal cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels and knowing exactly how fast the water is rising is really important. But it's a tough scientific question. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer explains how scientists are looking to historical records to help get at the answer.
If you'd like to help transcribe old tidal data, you can get started here.
The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly white and male travelers. In an increasingly globalized world, many writers are beginning to raise questions about the ethics of travel writing and its tropes, especially the way western travelers tend to characterize cultures that are unfamiliar to them. These new books challenge the conventional approach, instead asking readers to consider perspectives other than their own.
As a young native woman and member of the Karuk tribe, Ursula Pike joined the Peace Corps because she’d always dreamed of helping others. She was ecstatic to learn she would be assigned to serve in small town Kantuta, Bolivia. While at first Pike looked forward to helping the native people of Kantuta, she quickly realized they had less need for her help—and more to teach her—than she had imagined. In this thoughtful debut, An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, Pike examines the complicated ways we help one another, asking timely questions about how one can become of service to a community as an outsider.
Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Ursula Pike to learn more about her memoir, An Indian Among Los Indígenas, available now from Heyday Books (2021).
Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020).
Only a handful of blood-clotting cases have been reported among recipients of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but it's predominantly women who have developed these rare symptoms. To answer questions about the “one dose fits all” mode of medical research that can occasionally lead to these kinds of outcomes, we spoke to Rosemary Morgan, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She’s currently studying the gendered effects of COVID-19 on several international communities.
Plus, for headlines, we’re joined by comedian and actress Sasheer Zamata: a class action settlement for Fyre Fest attendees, a Canadian lawmaker accidentally goes nude on Zoom, and scientists grow human embryos in monkeys.
Show Notes:
Chicago Tribune: "In several fateful seconds, video appears to show 13-year-old Adam Toledo toss gun, turn with empty hands before police shooting (warning: graphic content)" – https://bit.ly/3gaYvOh
Three L.A. comedians are quarantined in a podcast studio during a global pandemic. There is literally nothing to be done EXCEPT make content. These are "The Corona Diaries" and this is Episode 129. Music at the end is "Weekend" by Dr. Dog.
Rep. Russ Fulcher, R-Idaho, isn't from a southern border state, but he says illegal immigration still adversely affects the Gem State.
"I mean, drug- and sex-trafficking impacts everyone," Fulcher says.
"And we're feeling the effects of that," he adds. "Our citizens, our taxpayers as well. We have to pay for services through federal taxes that are being expended here. We have a very large dairy and egg industry. The dairy industry in particular has relied upon immigrants for a lot of the labor, and that's not always been legal."
He joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss those issues.
Plus, he weighs in on vaccine passports and his perspective of the Biden administration four months in.
We also cover these stories:
Democrats have begun a formal effort to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court, proposing to add four justices.
President Joe Biden has placed new sanctions on Russia for its election interference and cyberattacks.
Is there a disparity in criminal charges between those pressed against the U.S. Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 and rioters in Portland, Oregon? That was the question Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., asked FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Paris Marx is joined by Elizabeth Renieris to discuss why we should be concerned about proposals for vaccine passports and how they could create a precedent for a larger rollout of digital identity documents.
Elizabeth Renieris is a practitioner fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab and a tech + human rights fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Follow Elizabeth on Twitter as @hackylawyer.
🎉 In April 2021, Tech Won’t Save Us celebrates its first birthday. If we get 30 new supporters at $5+ per month, we’ll start a weekly newsletter in addition to the weekly podcast to provide a new way for people to access critical perspectives on technology. If you like the show, become a supporter and help us reach our goal!
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.
Hosted by Gustavo Arellano, “The Times: Daily news from the L.A. Times” will bring you the world through the eyes of the West Coast. Expect award-winning reporting, hard-hitting investigations and random randomness from the biggest newspaper west of the Mississippi right to your ears. Whether it’s farmworkers, Silicon Valley, Hollywood or car chases, we’ll give you deep dives and snippets, rants and discourse, laughers and weepers, with a diversity of voices and a bunch of drama and desmadre. Our first episode premieres Monday May 3. Learn more at latimes.com/the-times.
