Garrard Conley's memoir Boy Erased chronicled his upbringing as a Baptist preacher's son and his experience being sent to conversion therapy. His new novel, All The World Beside, explores similar themes of faith, love and queer identity — but through the lens of a relationship between two men in Puritan New England. In today's episode, Conley speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about how fiction allowed him to actually provide even more autobiographical details than a memoir, and how writing this book grounded him in his relationship to Christianity.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
Europe wants clean energy, but it's struggling to compete with the low cost of China's green technology. The E.U. just announced it's investigating the subsidies received by Chinese wind turbine suppliers, which play a part in those low costs.
On today's episode, we speak with Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, about how the E.U. is trying to build and maintain a competitive green tech industry in the face of low-price Chinese imports. And we ask how the U.S.'s climate industrial policy fits into all this action.
Related Episodes: The surprising leader in EVs (Apple / Spotify) Industrial policy, the debate! (Apple / Spotify) Why offshore wind is facing headwinds (Apple / Spotify)
For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
Rae Wynn-Grant grew up in the Bay Area of California. But even if she was in the city, she was still fascinated by nature, eventually becoming one of those on-screen nature adventurers she spent her youth watching on TV. She speaks with NPR's Ayesha Roscoe about her new memoir Wild Life, and what she learned from other Black experts in the outdoors.
The encrypted messaging app Telegram is haunted by a single question - if it really is as secure as it claims to be, why does Vladimir Putin allow it to be used in Russia?
And should Russian dissidents, independent journalists and Ukrainian soldiers use this Wild West of an app, where you can find everything from porn to drugs to faked propaganda videos?
Answering those questions takes Helen on a journey that begins with a young Russian entrepreneur throwing 5,000 rouble notes off a balcony, folded like paper aeroplanes, and finishes with him in exile in Dubai, rich beyond his wildest dreams. But what does Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, really believe?
Producer: Tom Pooley
Assistant Producer: Orla O'Brien
Sound Design: Louis Blatherwick
Editor: Craig Templeton Smith
Original Music: Coach Conrad
When investigative journalist Aric Toler saw a handful of supposedly fake classified documents online, he had a hunch - what if they were real? The only way to find out was to hunt for the original source.
It was a journey that took him through the deep internet, beyond the reach of search engines. He scoured through chat forums about SpongeBob SquarePants, infiltrated servers named after edgy memes, and found a vital clue in screenshots of a video game about zombies. Eventually, Toler got his man - and his identity was not at all what you might expect.
At the heart of this story is the chat service Discord - a casual, conversational space without which, Toler thinks, his unlikely leaker would never have posted classified documents online.
After years of bad dates and toxic relationships, Chris finally found love - with a chatbot called Emma. Is this the future of digital love, or is Chris caught in an illusion?
In this episode focusing on how instant messages have changed our love lives, Helen also uncovers the heart warming story of the first couple to marry after reconnecting on Friends Reunited, and the strange tale of a woman who was literally ghosted.
You've heard of the British royal family, but what about the "working royals?" Today on the show, an expert on the royals explains what the job is like — how they measure productivity, how they get paid, and how this tiny, specialized workforce of 11 people might cope with the health crises of King Charles III and Kate Middleton.