Month: October 2021

Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country and you noticed that one of the country options was the “United States Minor Outlying Islands”? If you have you might have wondered, what are these island? Who lives there? And why are these islands considered minor? Learn more about the United States Minor Outlying Islands and how they ended up on almost every drop down list of countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show and independent media, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate.

A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first.

Music

• By the Ash Tree and Semolina by Slow Meadow

• Opals by Catching Flies

• Mechanical Fair by Ola Kvernberg and the Trondheim Singers

• La Copla by the great Atahualpa Yupanqui

• Holm Sound by Erland Cooper

Notes

• You can find the original recordings, photos, and film clips taken on the 1935 expedition and after in the remarkable online library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

• Of the many books on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the one I enjoyed and relied upon most here is Phillip Hoose’s The Race to Save the Good Lord Bird.

The year 1972 saw two epic contests between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first was American Bobby Fischer defeating Soviet Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov for the world chess championship. The other took place on a basketball court in Munich in the gold medal game of the Olympics. It was one of the most controversial moments in Olympic history, and the ramifications of that game are still reverberating today.

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1902, the French governor of Indochina faced a huge problem in the city of Hanoi. They were suffering from a massive infestation of rats and the rats could carry diseases, including the plague. The governor implemented a plan to get rid of the rats. Thousands of people were recruited in the effort. However, the program had a serious flaw. Not only didn’t it solve the problem, but it made things worse. Learn more about The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902/

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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.

Located on the French Riveria, just a few kilometers from the border of Italy, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, is the tiny country of Monaco. Monaco has several distinctions among the countries in the world, not just for its size, but for its population and its history. Learn more about Monaco, the smallest and wealthiest principality in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard gained an international reputation thanks to his breakout autobiographical series My Struggle -- but he actually made his literary debut in the world of fiction. Now, he's returned to that world with his novel The Morning Star, a dark tale of the uncanny events that unfold after a new star appears in the sky. Unlike his previous series, the book features multiple perspectives and otherworldly incidents that seem ripped from the pages of the Bible. But as the author explains to NPR's Leila Fadel, those acts of God happen alongside the mundanity of everyday life, in true Knausgaardian fashion.