In this installment of Best Of The Gist, with the 2024 Summer Olympic Games underway in France, we listen back to a 2016 Spiel, in which, Mike tries to get to the bottom of an Olympian canard about the happiness of bronze medalists. Then we listen back to our Tuesday Spiel, when Mike ponders Kamala Harris’ past as a prosecutor and whether or not that will mean anything as she faces a convicted felon in the race for President.
What's the Word: Calculus; News Items: Water Harvesting, Chimp Communication, Dark Oxygen, Nuclear Clocks, Creationism Survey; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Your Questions and E-mails: The Logic of God; Science or Fiction
Paris pulls off its opening ceremonies despite security risks. The U.S. government responds to TikTok's efforts to stay operating under its current owner. Consumer companies notice shoppers shying away from high prices.
With the Paris Olympics underway, we hear about Beacon -- the therapy dog that's helped the USA Gymnastics team cope with the pressure and stress of competitive sport. His handler and owner, Tracey, tells us his friendly face and intuitive nature make him perfect for the job -- and that some of the gymnasts even talk to him.
Also: the first horse rider from the Arab world to qualify for Olympic equestrian eventing tells us it's a huge honour to represent the region's history.
How a new type of IVF is helping protect the future of threatened southern white Rhinos.
A woman who travelled solo across Africa on a motorcycle says the three month journey made her feel alive.
We're in Denmark to learn about a project that helps people with mental health issues - by prescribing a course of museum visits, concerts and other cultural activities.
And we find out about the Olympic couples competing in the city of love.
Our weekly collection of happy stories and positive news from around the world.
Presenter: Jannat Jalil. Music composed by Iona Hampson.
Megan Hammond came to Chicago in 2018 to study music at Columbia College. Since then, she’s released her own songs that highlight her powerful vocals, artful lyricism and genre-bending range.
Now, she’ll be taking the stage at Lollapalooza as a part of the Chicago Made Music Showcase on Sunday, Aug. 4.
Reset sits down with the singer to hear how she became the artist and musician she is today. For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left (Akashic Books, 2024) explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive-compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen--just as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes.
When he arrives in January 1966, Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family's loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967, he's mutated into a 6'2? tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really high and fly to Nashville.
In between--as the hippie revolution blossoms in the world outside--Hitchcock adjusts to the hierarchical, homoerotic world of Winchester, threading a path through teachers with arrested development, some oafish peers, and a sullen old maid--a very English freak show. On the way he befriends a cadre of bat-winged teenage prodigies and meets their local guru, the young Brian Eno.
At the end of 1967, all the ingredients are in place that will make Robyn Hitchcock a songwriter for life. But then again, does 1967 ever really end?
Robyn Hitchcock is a rock 'n' roll surrealist. Born in London in 1953, he describes his songs as "pictures you can listen to." Hitchcock has floated at a tangent to the mainstream for nearly five decades, and his songs have been performed by R.E.M., the Replacements, Neko Case, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Lou Barlow, Grant-Lee Phillips, Sparklehorse, and Suzanne Vega with the Grateful Dead, among others. Hitchcock lives in London with his wife Emma Swift and two cats, Ringo and Tubby.
Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).
During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and history with those of the United States. By actively participating in U.S. public schools, Hawaiians resisted the suppression of their language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, and denial of their cultural heritage and history, which was critical for Hawai‘i’s political evolution within the manifest destiny of the United States.
In Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941(U Nebraska Press, 2024), Derek Taira reveals that many Native Hawaiians in the first forty years of the territorial period neither subscribed nor succumbed to public schools’ aggressive efforts to assimilate and Americanize them but instead engaged with American education to envision and support an alternate future, one in which they could exclude themselves from settler society to maintain their cultural distinctiveness and protect their Indigenous identity. Taira thus places great emphasis on how they would have understood their actions—as flexible and productive steps for securing their cultural sovereignty and safeguarding their future as Native Hawaiians—and reshapes historical understanding of this era as one solely focused on settler colonial domination, oppression, and elimination to a more balanced and optimistic narrative that identifies and highlights Indigenous endurance, resistance, and hopefulness.
