In 2009, Oprah announced that she was founding the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Gauteng province, South Africa. The show on which she discussed the opening of the school was a mix of charity, celebrity savoir-ism, and complicated American-African dynamics.
Special Guest: Elizabeth Todd Breland, historian who studies education and education reform.
Five different times during the Earth’s history, the planet has entered a prolonged period of reduced temperatures. When this happens, massive ice sheets form, and sea levels drop.
While some of these events occurred billions of years ago, not all of them were in the distant past.
In fact, the last such event had a profound impact on the development of humans as a species.
Learn more about ice ages, how they affect the planet and how they affect humanity, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Nobody does love and heartbreak like an Ephron. And Delia Ephron knows a lot about it. Her new memoir is Left on Tenth, and it details the trauma of loss and the incredible hopefulness of falling in love. And as she tells NPR's Scott Simon in this Weekend Edition interview, in the end, love is all that really matters.
In William Golding’s 1954 novel, the Lord of the Flies, a group of young boys find themselves on a deserted island. Stuck there, they create their own civilization which eventually turns violent and savage.
The book was a statement on the fundamental nature of humanity.
The book was fiction, but many people have wondered what would happen if such an event actually took place.
Well, as it turns out, in 1965 it did.
Learn more about the real-life Lord of the Flies, and if young boys left alone would descend into a state of anarchy, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
When you think of an epic, what comes to mind? The Iliad, the Odyssey, maybe Beowulf? Well, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers points out that epics are almost always about white men. She told former Morning Edition host Noel King that she didn't want to tell that story because that story has already been told...many times. So, Jeffers set out to write a different kind of epic about heroic Black women in The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois.
Amanda Holmes reads Boris Pasternak’s poem “The Color Blue,” translated from the Russian by Olga Dumer. 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.
Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle. Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people.
Yet, the birds which exist today are often very different birds from the ones which were domesticated over ten millennia ago. Much of that change has occurred in just the last 70 years.
Learn more about the chicken, and how they became one of the most common birds in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
