Month: October 2021

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Bammers - Watching the Tide in Empty Stadiums

Alabama limited Bryant-Denny Stadium's capacity to 20 percent during the 2020 national championship season, meaning about 20,000 fans would attend each home game. With so many COVID-19 restrictions in place, did the fans who attended the games still enjoy them the same way they would during a normal season?


Guests: 

Hunter Johnson, Die-hard Alabama fan you know from Twitter as HunterLJohnson (or BurnerLJohnson)

Hannah Saad, UA journalism graduate and former photo editor for the campus student newspaper The Crimson White

Roger Myers, Alabama fan and season ticket holder.


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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Louvre: The World’s Greatest Museum

Located in the heart of Paris, along the banks of the River Seine, lies the Louvre. It has over 750,000 square feet of gallery space, it has over 615,000 items in its collection, and in a non-pandemic year, gets over 10 million annual visitors. Yet, it wasn’t always a museum, and the way it acquired its collection wasn’t always above board. Learn more about the Louvre, the world’s greatest museum, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Read Me a Poem - “There’s a Moon Inside My Body” by Kabir

Amanda Holmes reads Kabir’s poem “There’s a Moon Inside My Body,” translated by Rabindranath Tagore. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.


This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.


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NPR's Book of the Day - In ‘The Matter of Black Lives,’ generations of Black thinkers probe American racism

Back in June 2020, during a summer of protests for racial justice, the New Yorker republished 'Letter from a Region in my Mind," a seminal James Baldwin essay calling out the ignorance of liberal white Americans. In the following months, writer Jelani Cobb put together a collection of essays from the magazine that fit a similar theme: Black writers, including Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote pieces for the New Yorker about race and racism that still ring true today. In this interview, Cobb reflects on the essays and what it took for those Black writers to break into the magazine.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - Wedding Traditions

Weddings are full of traditions. Almost every aspect of a traditional western wedding involves customs that may date back hundreds or thousands of years. However, most people have no idea where these customs or traditions come from. They simply do them because that’s what you do when you have a wedding. Learn more about wedding traditions and learn where they came from, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Hunting Down the Polluters

Tom Heap discovers fresh ways to quantify greenhouse gas emissions with help from satellites, artificial intelligence and former US Vice President Al Gore.

Emissions data from companies and countries can be inaccurate, incomplete or sometimes just plain deceitful. The team at Climate TRACE, led by Al Gore, have devised innovative ways to calculate accurate emissions data from power stations, factories, ships and even planes. That data can be used to reveal unexpected sources of carbon dioxide and methane and to provide independent figures for international negotiations on climate change.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Professor Raphael Heffron from the University of Dundee and Professor Paul Palmer from the University of Edinburgh. Image courtesy of Transition Zero.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Low Carbon Crisps

Ever thought about the carbon cost of a packet of crisps? At CCM Technologies they think of little else. Their revolutionary fertiliser offers a big step to carbon-free snacking.

Waste from crisp factories or from sewage treatment works can be routed and treated to form the basic building blocks of new fertilisers that can be spread on the ground to grow a new harvest of potatoes- or any other crop we need. The system avoids waste and takes a big cut out of the carbon emissions of traditional fertiliser production. Tom Heap tours the CCM fertiliser plant on the outskirts of Birmingham and discusses the carbon benefits with Dr Tamsin Edwards of King's College London.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Dr Kate Schofield from the University of Plymouth and Dr Abigail González Díaz from the National Institute of Electricity and Clean Energy.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Windcatchers

Wind energy is vital in the battle against climate change, but can we make improvements to harness more from them? Tom Heap visits Kelburn windfarm in North Ayrshire to discuss whether 'wakesteering' - reorientating the turbines could see them harness more power collectively. Meanwhile some potential sites are refused or restricted due to the damage caused to wildlife. Hubert Lagrange talks about his childhood obsession with bats which are often killed by the pressure around turbine blades. He's worked to develop a system to sense bat and bird activity and allow the turbines to operate longer through a refined system. Dr Tamsin Edwards discusses how much more potential there is and how much carbon this could save.

Producer: Anne-Marie Bullock Researcher Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Asst Professor Michael Howland from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Nick Jenkins from Cardiff University.

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NPR's Book of the Day - The zoo that history nearly forgot in ‘When Two Feathers Fell From The Sky’

If you visited South Nashville today, you might not suspect that, over a century ago, it was home to a zoo and amusement park called the Glendale Zoo. Among other attractions, the zoo had a popular attraction called "horse diving," in which a performer rode a horse off a tall platform into a body of water. In her book, When Two Feathers Fell From The Sky, Verble imagines the life of a young Cherokee girl named Two Feathers, who horse dives for a living at the zoo in the year 1926 — set against the background of the Jim Crow South and widespread mistreatment of Native Americans.