The American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant often uses fictional or mythological characters in her songs, to capture contemporary and political concerns. Her latest album, Keep Your Courage, is a song cycle composed entirely of love songs. She tells Kirsty Wark she wanted to explore the isolation of illness and the power of care, felt in the last few years.
In his new book, Musical Truth, the educator and broadcaster Jeffrey Boakye creates a soundtrack that encapsulates key historical moments of the 20th and 21st century – from the carving up of Africa to feminism and football. Using jazz, disco and hip hop he explores how music both feeds into and mirrors its time, as well as its political and cultural impact.
But the writer Michel Faber is more interested in how music affects the individual. In a collection of essays, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us, he explores what’s going on inside when we listen to a whole range of tunes. And he asks two questions: how do we listen to music and why?
The long-anticipated invasion is not the expected blitzkrieg; we ask how a longer, more cautious war will be fought. Kemal Ataturk is still wildly popular a century after he founded modern Turkey—so instead of undoing his legacy, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is simply claiming it (10:57). And an ode to Canada’s “long dash”, a time-marking tradition that has now gone silent (21:15).
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In 1893, the eyes of the world turned to the city of Chicago, which was hosting the World’s Fair. The fair was the largest public demonstration at that point of the new technology called electricity.
However, there was a dark side to what was happening in Chicago.
One man created a building that has been dubbed a murder castle. Many of the people who entered his macabre structure never left alive.
Learn more about HH Holmes, the man who is considered to be America’s first serial killer, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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We'll update you on the situation in the Middle East now that Israel has started its ground war in Gaza.
Also, there seems to be a string of red flags leading up to last week's mass shooting in Maine. We'll tell you what police are now saying about the gunman.
And which big-name Republican dropped out of the presidential race?
Plus, what's next for striking autoworkers, how a Friends star who died suddenly said he'd like to be remembered, and which movie saw unexpected success as moviegoers got into the Halloween spirit.
Those stories and even more news to know in just 10 minutes!
Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?
In this interview, Dr. Cohn discusses some common misconceptions about comics, the ability to read and make comics, and how drawings are at the core of so many creations.
Who Understands Comics? was Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work
Dr. Niel Cohn is currently an Associate Professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the overlap in cognition between graphic communication and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics? (2020), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics' structure.
Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says that over 8,000 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. Israel has since announced it has entered the “next stage” of its operations into Gaza, after sending in more ground troops to the enclave over the weekend.
Meanwhile, calls for an immediate ceasefire have grown, with protesters taking to the streets in cities around the world to demand an unconditional end to the fighting.
And in headlines: the suspected gunman behind last week’s deadly mass shootings in Maine has been found dead, Hollywood is mourning the sudden passing of “Friends” star Matthew Perry, and former Vice President Mike Pence dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
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One big reason rents are rising is AI Landlords — Two software companies are helping more and more landlords jack up rents.
One year ago, Glossier made a big pivot: Going from direct-to-consumer to selling in Sephora stores — It’s how Glossier went from awareness to action.
And Amazon won last week’s Big Tech earnings, but we have to talk about the real surprise: Amazon’s Droid Army — Amazon has 750K robots… and some of them now look like humans.
Antibiotics have changed the world. They've made it possible to treat diseases that used to mean anything from discomfort to death. But no new classes of antibiotics have made it to the market since the 1980s. What if humans' closest, ancient relatives held the answer to antibiotic resistance?
Some scientists want to discover new antibiotics using machine learning ... and some very, very old relatives of humans. Host Aaron Scott talks to César de la Fuente about using computers to discover the first therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms.
Since she began serving on her local school board in Arizona in January, Heather Rooks has made it a practice to begin her meeting comments by reading a Scripture verse she found encouraging.
Rooks says citing Scriptures such as Isaiah 41:10—“Do not fear for I am with you; Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God”—served as an inspiration to her.
“I continued to do it, because it really gave me a lot of strength and courage, and just really brought me peace while I'm up there making those big decisions when it comes to children,” she says.
But it did not take long before the mother of four was told she had to stop the practice.
Rooks' Scripture reading drew objection from inside and even outside the school district, and she received a “cease and desist” letter from a secular organization that told her she had to stop her practice because it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. After receiving the letter, Rooks contacted First Liberty Institute, a Texas-based conservative law firm specializing in religious freedom.
Rooks’ actions are “clearly within the framework of legislative acknowledgements of religion,” says Hiram Sasser, Rooks' attorney.
Of behalf of Rooks, First Liberty Institute has served the Peoria Unified School District in Glendale, Arizona, with a lawsuit holding that it's within the school board member's rights to read Scripture at the meetings.
Rooks and Sasser join “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the lawsuit and explain why citing Scripture at a school board meeting is not a violation of the establishment clause.
