It's been 10 years since the Supreme Court started to dismantle the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, joins Leah and Kate to track the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the challenges against it over the decades, and the fallout from Shelby County and other voting rights cases.
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Lara, the protagonist of Ann Patchett's Tom Lake, finds a silver lining during the frightening first few months of the COVID pandemic: her three adult daughters return home to the family orchard in Northern Michigan. In today's episode, Patchett tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly how they bond while Lara tells them of a romance from her youth, and how looking back to the past brings up all kinds of questions about love and relationships for all the women in the family.
There's the birds and the bees. And then there's what happens after. The process that leads to the beginning of pregnancy has a lot more twists and turns than a happenstance meeting. Today on Short Wave, NPR health reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin talks about the science of the very first week of pregnancy.
Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free.
Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America(Oxford UP, 2023) explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America?
Nicholas Tochka writes about the politics of postwar music-making in Eastern Europe and the Americas. In 2016, Oxford University Press published his first book, Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Socialist Albania. He is currently completing one project on citizenship in postsocialist Europe, and another about the invention of the Sixties in the United States. He works at the Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne in Australia, and plays both bass and guitar.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.
The most popular song of the 20th century — and a key part of a ubiquitous American ritual — was also the subject of a years-long legal battle. Zachary Crockett blows out the candles.
For the past few months, President Biden's top foreign policy advisors have been working as intermediaries between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Eventually they want to get the two countries to agree on a deal to finally establish formal diplomatic relations.
It would be a breakthrough for Israel to get that recognition, after decades of Arab hostility stemming from the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam's holiest sites, and it's an oil giant in the region.
But it seems like an almost impossible three-way agreement. So, what's standing in the way?
NPR's Daniel Estrin, who covers Israel, speaks with Felicia Schwartz from the Financial Times, Bader Al Saif, an assistant professor of history at the University of Kuwait, and fellow NPR correspondent Aya Batrawy, who covers Saudi Arabia, to understand what challenges remain for the two countries to normalize relations.
For the past few months, President Biden's top foreign policy advisors have been working as intermediaries between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Eventually they want to get the two countries to agree on a deal to finally establish formal diplomatic relations.
It would be a breakthrough for Israel to get that recognition, after decades of Arab hostility stemming from the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam's holiest sites, and it's an oil giant in the region.
But it seems like an almost impossible three-way agreement. So, what's standing in the way?
NPR's Daniel Estrin, who covers Israel, speaks with Felicia Schwartz from the Financial Times, Bader Al Saif, an assistant professor of history at the University of Kuwait, and fellow NPR correspondent Aya Batrawy, who covers Saudi Arabia, to understand what challenges remain for the two countries to normalize relations.
For the past few months, President Biden's top foreign policy advisors have been working as intermediaries between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Eventually they want to get the two countries to agree on a deal to finally establish formal diplomatic relations.
It would be a breakthrough for Israel to get that recognition, after decades of Arab hostility stemming from the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam's holiest sites, and it's an oil giant in the region.
But it seems like an almost impossible three-way agreement. So, what's standing in the way?
NPR's Daniel Estrin, who covers Israel, speaks with Felicia Schwartz from the Financial Times, Bader Al Saif, an assistant professor of history at the University of Kuwait, and fellow NPR correspondent Aya Batrawy, who covers Saudi Arabia, to understand what challenges remain for the two countries to normalize relations.
Liz and Andrew welcome back friend of the show Mitchell Epner for an episode dedicated to understanding the right wing's latest distractions, including their bizarre and wrong argument that the DOJ corruptly agreed to funnel a sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden.
Find out the truth - including why Hunter Biden's lawyers rejected the plea deal! - in this episode. You won't want to miss it!
