Our relationship to food goes far beyond its nutritional value. What we eat can help us tap into something deeper, whether it brings up treasured memories or allows us to escape our own lives for just a few bites. That duality is captured by two different books in today's episode; while Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner explores how cooking Korean food helped the author grieve her mom's death, Gastro Obscura by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras takes readers to each continent to learn about its cuisine. In interviews with NPR's Ari Shapiro, Zauner and Wong talk about how food shapes our worlds.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has seen large expansions in school choice programs in recent years under a Democratic governor. Marc Leblond of the Commonwealth Foundation describes how the politics aligned to make it happen.
Last year 26,000 students applied to the city’s eleven selective enrollment high schools. Less than five thousand were offered spots. CPS says new changes to the admissions process will promote equity and access.
Reset hears from the head of High Jump, a non-profit helping talented low-income middle schoolers prepare and apply for high school.
Last week the White House announced a plan to help move the port of Los Angeles into 24/7 operating status. But that will only "open the gates" of the clogged global supply chain, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told NPR on the NPR Politics Podcast.
Another crucial supply chain link is the trucking industry, which is short tens of thousands of drivers. Bruce Basada, President of the Diesel Driving Academy in Shreveport, Louisiana, explains why.
Democratic officials express optimism about a potential deal on Joe Biden’s economic plan, journalist Amy Westervelt from the climate podcast Hot Take joins to talk about whether we can still save the planet with Joe Manchin in the Senate, and Dan and Jon discuss why reporters are whining that President Biden's not taking more questions from them.
We’ve talked a huge amount the past 18 months, for obvious reasons, about the way that white blood cells protect us from infection. But red blood cells – it’s probably among the earliest things I learned in human biology that they’re simple bags for carrying oxygen around the body. But over recent years, immunologist Nilam Mangalmurti, University of Pennsylvania, has been finding several clues to challenge that dogma – including molecules on the surface of red blood cells known from other parts of the immune system.
The Last Ice Area, home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, is expected to act as the last refuge for ice-dependent wildlife as the rest of the Arctic melts. Kent Moore, University of Toronto-Mississauga, tells us that the formation of a 3,000 square kilometre rift in the area means the ice is not as resilient as we once thought.
Also on the programme, an obituary for the renowned Dutch climate scientist and physicist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (October 22, 1961 – October 12, 2021), and, Dominique Gonçalves, Gorongosa National Park, explains how ivory poaching during the Mozambican civil war led to the rapid evolution of tusklessness in African elephants.
Image: Confocal microscopy of CpG-treated human RBCs stained for Band 3. Credit: Mangalmurti Lab / Nilam Mangalmurti, MD)
Last year, Paul Tudor Jones wrote a paper called “The Great Monetary Inflation” that would end up creating narrative motivation for many traditional retail and institutional investors to allocate to bitcoin as an inflationary hedge. On today’s episode, NLW looks at the rising discussion of inflation in the media and in mainstream American society. He discusses why the inflation conversation, even more than the ProShares bitcoin futures ETF, might be driving bitcoin’s current rise. He also shares Paul Tudor Jones’s latest comments from “Squawk Box” on CNBC regarding the inflation issue.
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Only in Time” by Abloom. Image credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.
