Were there any suspicious claims in the election debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer?
Do the claims in Reform UK?s policy documents on excess deaths and climate change make sense?
Can the Conservatives and Labour raise ?6bn a year by cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion?
And do all the humans on earth weigh more than all of the ants?
Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporters: Kate Lamble and Nathan Gower
Producer: Beth Ashmead-Latham
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production coordinator: Brenda Brown
Editor: Richard Vadon
Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States(U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
When President John F. Kennedy set the objective of landing on the moon before the end of the 1960s, no one really knew what it entailed.
The Apollo program involved many incredible feats of engineering, but perhaps the most impressive was the development of the Apollo Lunar Module.
The Lunar Module was unlike any spacecraft before or since. It was the first spacecraft designed to fly only in the vacuum of space and the first to land on another celestial body.
Learn more about the Apollo Lunar Module and the incredible design challenges it had to overcome on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order that will severely limit the number of migrants who can claim asylum at the border. Flanked by high-profile Democrats at a press conference Tuesday, Biden said he was forced to act to address “a worldwide migrant crisis” amid Republican stonewalling on a bipartisan border bill. “Doing nothing is not an option. We have to act,” Biden said. But the president also came under significant criticism from others in the party, including California Sen. Alex Padilla. He explains why he thinks limiting asylum won’t work.
And in headlines: The New York Times reports that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian military facility using American-made military weapons, three Trump associates have been charged with forgery in Wisconsin for their connection in trying to overturn the 2020 election, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a third term in the country’s elections.
We're talking about a broad asylum ban that's now in effect, and why there's pushback from both sides of the aisle.
Also, we'll explain the first evidence presented in Hunter Biden's criminal trial, and what happened in another heated hearing on Capitol Hill.
Plus, a setback in the push to use psychedelic drugs as medical treatment, how $99 in gambling cost one MLB player hundreds of thousands of dollars, and who just became the most popular creator on YouTube...
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
About Us: From the creators of Robinhood Snacks Daily, The Best One Yet (TBOY) is the daily pop-biz news show making today’s top stories your business. 20 minutes on the 3 business, economics, and finance stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual. Hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell.
June 6, 1944 the Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy and took the Nazis by surprise in the largest sea-to-land invasion in history. This would be remembered as D-Day and would ultimately lead to the end of World War II in Europe. However, this planned attack wouldn't have been possible without deep knowledge of ocean tides! We get into the whole story, including why tides sit at the intersection of astronomy and marine ecology — and why understanding tides are key to a greener future.
Want to hear us cover more science history? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
Instagram’s parent company, Meta, knew the harm the platform was inflicting on minors and did nothing to mitigate it, according to a lawsuit filed against the social media giant.
In 2023, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc., calling on the company to prioritize the protection of minors.
“Over about the last 15 years, the mental health of American teenagers has plummeted in anxiety, suicidality, depression, sleep deprivation—all these metrics that show something is not right,” Skrmetti told "The Daily Signal Podcast."
“Not only do we have experts who say it was social media, there have been a variety of leaks from within the social media companies that indicate they knew that it was having this negative effect,” he says.
While Skrmetti says that “social media [are] not inherently bad,” and the lawsuit is not intended to micromanage platforms such as Instagram, it’s Meta’s responsibility to make its products "safe for kids.”
Skrmetti joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss where the lawsuit against Meta stands. He also discusses his state’s fight to protect women’s sports against males who identify as women entering female athletics.
They’re gorgeous. They’re picky moms, and tremendous flirts. They are sparkly. And they drink blood. We hopped on the line with mosquito researcher, medical entomologist, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, and Culicidologist, Dr. Fhallon Ware-Gilmore to chat about mozzies. Why do skeeters bite you, specifically? Which ones should we watch out for? Why do they make high-pitched sounds? WHAT DO THEIR HELL MOUTHS LOOK LIKE? And how can I learn to love them? But also, how can I keep them away from me? Scream in your date's face and drink blood, if you’re a mosquito, because things are about to heat up. Next week: we’ll cover diseases and repellents, just for you.
Each week, we’ve explored wellness from different perspectives, but we haven’t talked about what it means to live a full life while grappling with the real possibility of death.
Most of us hope for a full, long life with “good” health. But a serious, possibly fatal diagnosis changes everything: Our relationships with work, loved ones, and even the way we see ourselves.
On this week’s episode of Well, Now we speak with author, journalist, and artist Suleika Jaouad. Many learned about her work in the Oscar-nominated documentary American Symphony – which chronicled her marriage to musician Jon Baptiste as his career soared and her leukemia re-emerged.
But Suleika began documenting illness and identity long before starring in an award-winning film.
