Much ado was made about a cancelled auction of an ultra-rare set of Shakespeare’s folios, which could have fetched millions of dollars.
This headline – along with Shakespeare being one of the world’s most well-known playwrights – inspired the Unexpected Elements team to delve into the science of stories.
First up, we find out why your brain loves a tale. We then discover that some people can’t see images in their mind when they read, and reveal the impact this could have.
Shakespeare’s folios are almost 400 years old, but how have they survived that long? We get on the line with Kathryn Kenney, a book and paper conservator, to find out how she keeps precious books safe.
We also find out about a disappearing island, whether climate change needs a new narrative and if you could eat books to survive.
All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Tristan Ahtone
Producer: Margaret Sessa Hawkins, with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Imaan Moin and Minnie Harrop
Studio Manager: Rhys Morris
Thanks for making The Daily Signal Podcast your trusted source for the day’s top news. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode.
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.
When you think about this bill, you should think about risk. It would increase our risk of a fiscal crisis by adding a hefty sum to our nation’s debt, at a time when we’re alienating the countries that typically buy our debt. It would slash food stamps and strip health insurance from millions of people, increasing the risk that the safety net won’t be able to catch any of us, at a time when President Trump’s tariffs have increased the risk of a recession.
It’s what I’m calling the Big Budget Bomb. And if it passes, we’ll all be in the blast radius.
My guest today is Catherine Rampell. She’s an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and an anchor on MSNBC. She’s been covering this closely, so I asked her to come on the show to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings.
Editor’s note: This episode was recorded before the House passed Trump’s domestic policy package.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Tyson Brody.
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.
The Romans were familiar with Africa. At one point, they controlled everything on the north coast of Africa from Morocco to Egypt.
However, below their African territories was the vast Sahara Desert, which was extremely difficult to cross. For all practical purposes, it served as a permeable barrier between the people above and below the desert.
As such, historians have wondered just how much the people above and below the Sahara knew about each other.
Learn more about Rome and Sub-Saharan Africa, and what contact they had with each other on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
As we get ready for summer 2025, we thought we'd give canned summer cocktails another go! Join us as we responsibly taste-test our way through a variety of delicious (and not-so-delicious) beverages. We also discuss some news. Cheers!
Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953(Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema.
Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results.
Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.
Conservation Is Not Enough: Rethinking Relationships with Water in the Arid Southwest (University of Wyoming Press, 2025) by Dr. Janine Schipper reconsiders the most basic assumptions about water issues in the Southwest, revealing why conservation alone will not lead to a sustainable water future. The book undertakes a thorough examination of the prevailing “conservation ethos” deeply ingrained in the culture, critically analyzing its historical roots and shedding light on its problems and inherent limitations. Additionally, it explores deep ecology and an Indigenous water ethos, offering radically different ways of understanding and experiencing water.
Using an exploratory and qualitative approach, Dr. Schipper draws on more than ninety-five interviews conducted over three years, revealing the complex relationships people have with water in the Southwest, and prominently features the voices of participants, effectively illustrating multiple perspectives and diverse ways of thinking about and relating to water. Schipper highlights various perspectives—including a water manager making conservation decisions, a Hopi elder emphasizing our connection to the water cycle, and a ski instructor reflecting on human-made snow—and interweaves personal experiences and reflections on her own relationship with water and conservation efforts.
Conservation Is Not Enough encourages readers to reflect on their personal connections to water and consider new possibilities, and it also urges readers to think beyond conventional conservation approaches. This book helps to transform the collective approach to water and cultivate fresh ways of engaging with and relating to water and is of great interest to scholars, students, and residents concerned with water issues in the Colorado River Basin.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
In one of the most anticipated rulings of the term, the Supreme Court justices deadlocked Thursday in a case over the creation of a religious charter school in Oklahoma. The 4-4 split sets no precedent, meaning the justices could take up a similar case — and the underlying thornier questions around the separation of church and state — in the future. Later in the day, the justices also handed President Donald Trump a major temporary win, allowing him to fire the leaders of two independent federal agencies while the cases play out in the lower courts. Leah Litman, co-host of Crooked’s legal podcast ‘Strict Scrutiny’ and author of the new book “Lawless,” talks about Thursday’s decisions and gives us a preview of SCOTUS opinion season.
And in headlines: The Justice Department filed murder charges against a man suspected of killing two staffers of the Israeli embassy in D.C., the Palestinian health minister said more than two dozen children and elderly people had died of starvation-related causes in Gaza over the last two days, and the U.S. Treasury gets ready to bid adieu to the penny.
