Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese intelligence officer during World War II, stationed on a small island in the Philippines. When the Japanese army evacuated, Onoda stayed and fought for 29 more years, living in the jungle and resisting all attempts to convince him the war was over. Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog tells a fictionalized account of this story in his first novel, The Twilight World. In an interview on All Things Considered, Herzog told Ari Shapiro that he's always been a writer and that this book is finally putting into words a story he had in him for two decades.
Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption explores how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge speak with top Meta executives and some of its biggest critics and ask how the company has shaped our lives, and what lies ahead. New episodes begin Wednesday, July 13th.
In the latest season of Wondery’s Even The Rich, hosts Brooke and Aricia tell the story of Elton John. Before he was Reginald Dwight. Reginald hates who he is: a chubby, awkward kid from a fractured English home. So he escapes through music, and reinvents himself as Elton John. The journey take him far away from his neglected childhood and morphs him into a spoiled, coke-addicted rock superstar. But underneath the glitz and glamour, an inescapable sadness persists. No matter how many hit records he makes or lines he snorts, Elton can’t escape himself. His world eventually crashes down in a torrent of addictions, depression, and self-loathing. But when he finally learns to love himself, he grows into the person he was meant to be, enabling thousands of others to do so and becoming an LGBTQ icon.
Life expectancy in the U.S. has always been different for people of color. And since the pandemic, that gap has widened. In her new book, Under the Skin, journalist Linda Villarosa uncovers the hidden toll of racism in America and how racial disparities impact all aspects of healthcare. In an interview with Karen Grisby Bates on the podcast Code Switch, Villarosa talks about the biases that lead to worse care for communities of color and how medical students are pushing against them.
Located in the heart of North America is one of the most important rivers.
It isn’t the longest river in the world and it doesn’t carry the highest volume of water. However, its location makes it one of the most valuable rivers on Earth
It has been the subject of songs, the location of military battles, and is one of the most important economic transportation corridors on the planet.
Learn more about the Mississippi River and what makes it so different than any other river in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In Sudhir Venkatesh's The Tomorrow Game, two teenagers on Chicago's South Side face each other in a story that conveys the pressures and motivations boys face when buying guns. Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University, tells a true story (with names changed to protect privacy). In an interview with Weekend Edition Saturday, Venkatesh tells Susan Davis about the systemic and cultural challenges that kids face in poor neighborhoods, and says that if we want to solve the problem of gun violence, we must include them in the conversation.
Amanda Holmes reads the eighth stanza of the sixteenth part of “Maud,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 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.
