This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to award-winning American writer Bryan Washington about his moving novel Memorial.
Benson, a Black day-care teacher and Mike, a Japanese-American chef, live together in Houston, but are beginning to wonder why they're a couple. When Mike flies off to visit his seriously ill, estranged father in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother arrives for a visit, Benson is stuck looking after his boyfriend’s mother, in a very unconventional domestic set-up. As both men cope with their difficult circumstances they undergo life-changing transformations, learning more about love, anger, and grief than they had bargained for along the way.
Poignant and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the outer limits of love.
(Picture: Bryan Washington. Photo credit: Louis Do.)
It’s only been a year since people were able to mint a bored looking ape NFT for about $200. But in that year, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club has recruited celebrities, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, acquired the IP of other key NFTs, launched its own cryptocurrency, and most recently, sold plots of virtual land for its forthcoming metaverse.
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Consensus 2022, the industry’s most influential event, is happening June 9–12 in Austin, Texas. If you’re looking to immerse yourself in the fast-moving world of crypto, Web 3 and NFTs, this is the festival experience for you. Use code BREAKDOWN to get 15% off your pass at www.coindesk.com/consensus2022.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with today's editing by Jonas Huck and Rob Mitchell, research by Scott Hill and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsors is “Catnip” by Famous Cats and “I Don't Know How To Explain It” by Aaron Sprinkle. Image credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.
Saba’s latest album “Few Good Things,” took almost four years to finish. “Part of the personal evolution that you hear is just the time spent sitting with the record, tweaking the record, and being able to be present,” he told Reset. The Chicago hip-hop artist takes us inside his follow-up to 2018’s “CARE FOR ME” and tells us how vulnerability fuels his process.
For more Reset interviews, subscribe to this podcast. And please give us a rating, it helps other listeners find us.
For more about Reset, go to wbez.org and follow us on Twitter @WBEZReset
Barely a month after the Normandy Landing in 1944, the allied powers were already thinking of what the post-world would look like.
One of the big issues was the creation of a monetary system that could replace the then abandoned gold standard.
So, in at a resort in New Hampshire, representatives from 44 countries hammered out a new international monetary system that would govern the world for the next 25 years.
Learn more about the Bretton Woods System and how parts of it still influence the world today on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Earlier this week, we told you about the Disinformation Governance Board. It’s a new group within the Department of Homeland Security. Officials say it will fight the spread of misleading or false information that could have real-life consequences, especially when it comes from the Russian government or human smugglers.
But there’s not a lot of information yet about how it will work. Some even worry it will turn into something like the fictional “Ministry of Truth” that pushed state-sponsored propaganda in the novel “1984.”
We hope to break down the arguments from both sides of this and clear up any confusion you may have after seeing some of the headlines. To help us do that, we’re welcoming back the woman known as “America’s government teacher,” and host of the popular podcast “Sharon Says So,” Sharon McMahon.
This episode is brought to you by Pampers.comandkiwico.com(Listen for the discount code)
This latest podcast is a conversation with Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Founding, on his new book, Power and Liberty, which details how Americans drafted, ratified, and incorporated written constitutions as fundamental laws into their politics and government.
On the creation of the American Constitution, Wood observes, "Instead of reforming the Articles [of Confederation], they throw them out and create an entirely new government, the federal Constitution that we have with us today, something that nobody in 1776 even imagined in their wildest dreams. I know of no one in 1776 that anticipated the kind of federal government that emerged 10 years later. Something awful had to happen in those 10 years to explain the Constitution. I find that it's harder to explain the Constitution than it is to explain the Revolution itself."
Wood also takes on the 1619 Project: "What's interesting about the Revolution is that the Revolution makes slavery a problem for the first time in Western civilization and leads to a massive assault on the slave systems of the New World. . . . The Northern states, almost immediately in 1776, mount a massive assault on slavery, which had been legal in all of these Northern states. By 1804, all the Northern states have abolished slavery, the first states in the history of the world, or at least the modern world, to abolish slavery."
Although the climate-changing effects of Carbon Dioxide emissions are well known, they are changing our oceans too, making them more acidic. But how much?
Tim Harford explores the statistical quirks of ocean acidification, from pH to the mysteries of logarithmic scales. With Dr Helen Findlay from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK.
In the early 90s, American economist Jeffrey Sachs was a part of a team that tried to transform Russia's economy. It did not go as planned. He tells us what he thinks went so wrong. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
