The 1994 slaughter of hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis completely reshaped the country. It also produced Africa’s most polarising leader, whose outsized power and regional influence is proving ever more divisive. How a shadow economy of gangs and clans is running Gaza (11:45). And a total solar eclipse is coming to America (20:01).
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Today, millions of Americans will have the opportunity to see a rare total solar eclipse.
Fred Espenak, a retired astrophysicist known as Mr. Eclipse, was so blown away by an eclipse he saw as a teenager that he dedicated his life to traveling the world and seeing as many as he could.
Mr. Espenak discusses the eclipses that have punctuated and defined the most important moments in his life, and explains why these celestial phenomena are such a wonder to experience.
Guest: Fred Espenak, a.k.a. “Mr. Eclipse,” a former NASA astrophysicist and lifelong eclipse chaser.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Humankind’s relationship with music can be traced back millions of years and across continents. In Sound Tracks the archaeologist Graeme Lawson unearths some of the oldest instruments, from water-filled pots in Peru from AD700 that chirp like a bird, to bells from a tomb in 5th century China. He argues that music is part of what makes us human.
An ancient horn, played from a watchtower on Hadrian's Wall, is a far cry from the modern version the award-winning trumpeter Alison Balsom plays. She is giving the UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ Trumpet Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra (Barbican on the 11th April; Bristol Beacon on the 12th). This is a contemporary piece that showcases the huge versatility of the trumpet, from the opening pre-historic-sounding wild elephant call to ceremonial fanfare and New Orleans jazz.
The celebrated poet John Burnside’s new collection, Ruin, Blossom explores what it is to be human as we contemplate our mortality. But even amidst the ruin and death and decay, his words reveal the beauty and hope in the everyday natural world: ‘first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song’.
(Extract from Wynton Marsalis’ Trumpet Concerto, played by Alison Balsom with the Swedish Radio Orchestra in a concert from 17th February 2024, with permission from the Swedish Radio Orchestra )
On March 26, 2024 a container ship the size of the Eiffel Tower named for the world's most famous surrealist destroyed a bridge named after the author of the U.S. national anthem yards from one of the most notable sites of our country's least popular war. Who was Francis Scott Key anyway, and why has the man who gave the world the phrase "land of the free and the home of the brave" gotten a total pass for writing the world's worst national anthem while owning people and prosecuting abolitionists?
We then honor the memories of the six Latino immigrants who lost their lives in this disaster by taking a closer look at the contributions of both undocumented and "lightly documented" workers to the U.S. economy, including the massive boost of more than $7 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office has predicted the so-called "border crisis" will bring in the coming years. But what about the most recent Republican "solution" to give the world's whitest and wealthiest a chance at the American Dream? Would Thomas be able to immigrate to the U.S. under Sen. Tom Cotton's RAISE Act? We end with a short cruise through maritime law and examine why the owners of the Dali are seeking protection under the same 209-year-old maritime law which was used to severely limit the liability of everyone responsible for the Titanic.
Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deployed by enslavers. The letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly enslaved reveal the complex ways in which enslaved people analyzed and fought these comparisons. Dr. Chris Blakely focuses on human-animal relationships to unpack “how, where, and when did such decisions regarding the chattel nature of human captives take place?”
In Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World(LSU Press, 2023), they argue that slaving and slavery relied on and generated complex human-animal networks and relations. Exploring these groupings leads to a deeper understanding of how enslavers worked out the process of turning people into chattel and laid the foundations of slavery by mingling enslaved people with nonhuman animals.
Efforts to remake people into property akin to animals involved exchange and trade, scientific fieldwork that exploited curiosity, and forms of labor. Using the correspondence of the Royal African Company, specimen catalogs and scientific papers of the Royal Society, plantation inventories and manuals, and diaries kept by slaveholders, Dr. Blakley describes human-animal networks spanning from Britain's slave castles and outposts throughout western Africa to plantations in the Caribbean and the American Southeast. They combine approaches from environmental history, history of science, and philosophy to examine slavery from the ground up and from the perspectives of the enslaved.
Dr. Chris Blakley is a visiting assistant professor in the Core Program at Occidental College and a historian interested in more-than-human relationships with a focus on racialization and empire-building. Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World is their first book and they are just beginning a second project on science, race, and the senses in the nineteenth century.
Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.
During World War II, one of the biggest concerns of the Allies was the development of a German atomic bomb.
As such, the allies and various partisan groups in occupied countries made the destruction of anything related to the Nazi atomic program a high priority.
One place, in particular, was subject to allied bombing, commando missions, and partisan sabotage throughout the war.
Learn more about the Telemark Raids and how Norway became an important front in the Second World War on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We're talking about a rare and historic moment in North America: a total solar eclipse happening across thousands of miles today.
Also, we'll tell you how former President Trump broke a big record over the weekend and what's changed in the last six months of war in Gaza.
Plus, another major issue on a Boeing jet, the end to a perfect season in NCAA women's basketball, and a preview of the men's championship happening today.
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
The Fits Everybody collection is available now at SKIMS.com. Plus, get free shipping on orders over $75. Be sure to let them know we sent you in the survey!
Israel said on Sunday that it was reducing its military presence in Gaza but rejected any suggestion that it was a sign the war was winding down. Sunday also marked six months since Hamas attacked Israel, killed 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Ceasefire negotiations resumed over the weekend in Cairo amid the ongoing international fallout over an Israeli strike that killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen.
A rare total solar eclipse will cross a large swath of North America on Monday, and more than a dozen states from Texas to Maine are within the “path of totality.” It’s only the second total solar eclipse to be visible in the U.S. in the 21st century. Scientists have a simple message for viewers: Don’t look directly at it!
And in headlines: Former President Donald Trump’s campaign claimed it raised $50 million at a weekend fundraiser, a man was arrested and charged on Sunday for starting a fire outside Sen. Bernie Sanders’ congressional office in Vermont, and the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks bested Iowa and star guard Caitlin Clark in Sunday’s NCAA women’s championship game.
Show Notes:
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Doctors across the country have seemingly thrown caution to the wind, prescribing experimental drugs to block puberty and to chemically alter young people's bodies in the name of a nebulous gender identity, but rising rates for medical malpractice insurance may cause them to think twice.
"If the Hippocratic oath, if basic high school ninth grade biology, if the moral natural law theory of human beings being image-bearers of God, if none of that will convince doctors that this is a bad idea, and it takes their own economic self-interest, that might be a sad commentary on the practice of medicine, but I'll take it, right?” Latham Watts, vice president of public affairs at the nonprofit law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
