Today we are discussing Mitch McConnell's leadership resignation, Trump's presidential immunity case, Biden family drama, Dr. Phil and Wendy's surge pricing. Tune in!
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020.
Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (Columbia UP, 2024) explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.
Some of the most important battles in history, the ones that changed the course of civilizations, are often very small battles.
In 1532, a battle, really just a skirmish, took place, which completely changed the future paths of Peru, Spain, and the entire continent of South America.
Despite the importance of this battle, few people have ever even heard of it.
Learn more about the Battle of Cajamarca and how it changed the shape of the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We're talking about dueling trips to the southern border: what President Biden and former President Trump had to say about what many voters consider the most important issue in our country today.
Also, a deal was reached to avoid a government shutdown (for now.)
And a winter storm could bring 12 feet of snow to parts of California.
Plus, lawmakers moved to protect fertility treatment in Alabama.
Video doorbells meant to keep your home safe from strangers could actually be letting strangers In.
And it's time to celebrate Women's History Month. We'll share some ideas.
More than 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more injured Thursday near Gaza City as people gathered around trucks to receive much needed food and aid. Hamas said in a statement that the Gaza Health Ministry had presented “undeniable” evidence of the Israeli Defense Force directly firing at civilians. Israel, for their part, denied that soldiers shot into the large crowd.
Alabama’s legislature voted to protect in vitro fertilization, or IVF, following the ruling by the state’s Supreme Court earlier this month that categorized frozen embryos as “children” and said that anyone who destroys them can be held liable for “wrongful death.” The bills aimed to protect IVF providers from lawsuits and criminal prosecution in hopes that they would resume offering treatments in the state again.
And in headlines: the government shutdown will be delayed for another week, Texas battles the largest wildfire in its history, and Wendy’s sets the record straight on “surge pricing.”
An Indiana pastor has launched an effort to connect Christian leaders across the country and root out the influence of a "woke" Christianity that undermines the biblical and traditional doctrines of the faith.
"We've got 500 pastors that have signed this statement across all sorts of denominational lines, committing themselves to really sound biblical teaching as a primary doctrine and to help eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit," Lucas Miles, pastor of the Nfluence Church in Granger, Indiana, and leader of the Nfluence network, tells "The Daily Signal Podcast."
Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI all just invested in FigureAI, whose humanoid robots can do manual labor — The key isn’t the human-like bodies, it’s the AI brains.
Following its worst year ever, Budweiser managed to avoid a worker strike — And it reveals one of our favorite lessons on negotiation.
And Oiishi has invented the perfect strawberry… that’s also the world’s most expensive strawberry — The “Veblen Effect” explains how this berry defies economics.
Is it censorship for social media platforms to moderate their content, or is censorship when the state tells social media platforms how to moderate their content?
Guest: Mark Joseph Stern, Slate writer on courts and the law.
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The sci-fi film Dune: Part Two is out in theaters now. The movie takes place on the harsh desert planet, Arrakis, where water is scarce and giant, killer sandworms lurk just beneath the surface. But what do planetary scientists and biologists think about the science of these worms, Arrakis and our other favorite sci-fi planets?
Today on the show, Regina G. Barber talks to biologist (and Star Trek consultant!) Mohamed Noor and planetary scientist Michael Wong about Dune, habitable planets and how to make fantasy seem more realistic.
Want more of the science behind your favorite fictional worlds? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.