Month: February 2023

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NPR's Book of the Day - ‘Shubeik Lubeik’ imagines a world where you can buy and sell wishes

In Arabic, the rhyme Shubeik Lubeik means "your wish is my command." So it's an apt title for a new graphic novel by Deena Mohamed, which explores a world in which wishes are commodified and classified for consumption. Cheap wishes are packaged and sold in cans, while expensive wishes belong in bottles. In today's episode, Mohamed explains to NPR's Ayesha Rascoe how this system is meant to illustrate the ways wealth already works in our society, and how difficult it can be to decide what wishes are worth hoping for.
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Short Wave - The Ancient Night Sky And The Earliest Astronomers

Moiya McTier says the night sky has been fueling humans' stories about the universe for a very long time, and informing how they explain the natural world. In fact, Moiya sees astronomy and folklore as two sides of the same coin.

"To me, science is any rigorous attempt at understanding and explaining the world around you," she explained to Short Wave's Aaron Scott. "You can see that they knew enough about the world around them to predict eclipses, to predict annual floods in Egypt, for example. I think that you can use folklore and mythology to understand the early scientific attempts of humanity."

Moiya McTier is the author of The Milky Way: An Autobiography of our Galaxy. She joins us to draw out the connections between astronomy and folklore, why the night sky is more dynamic than it might look, and what it feels like to live on an astronomical timescale.

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