In November, the U.S. stopped production of the humble penny after 232 years in circulation. On today’s show, Darian Woods and Wailin Wong from NPR's daily economics podcast The Indicator unpack the fiscal math that doomed the penny, and an artist pay tribute to this American icon.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate. I have recently launched a newsletter. You can subscribe to it at thememorypalacepodcast.substack.com.
Music
Sincerely Yours by LLLL
Across the Other Side by Infinite Scale
Sunset by Resavoir
Mammoth by Golden Brown
Unassigned by Vernon Spring
Swimming by Explosions in the Sky
Pure (Ride the World) by The Brendan Eder Ensemble
Le Tunnel by Sylvain Chauveau
Floating Away by Lullatone
Notes
There's a ton written about Emma Rowena Gatewood but so much of it, including this story, owes a huge debt to Ben Montgomery's book, Grandma Gatewood's Walk, which excavated the story of her life with her husband. Besides that, it is wonderfully written. Totally recommend it.
Want more business storytelling from us? Check our weekly deepdive show, The Best Idea Yet: The untold origin story of the products you're obsessed with. Listen for free to The Best Idea Yet: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/
About Us: The daily pop-biz news show making today’s top stories your business. Formerly known as Robinhood Snacks, The Best One Yet is hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell.
It’s not that antisemitism ever went away, but it’s still jarring to watch people spread its oldest and most vile tropes on social media in a way that would’ve been unthinkable ten years ago.
Guest: Isaac Saul, politics reporter in Bucks County, Penn., author of the Tangle newsletter
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
Have you ever thought about getting your small product into production, but are worried about the cost of the big cloud providers? Or maybe you think your current cloud service is over-architected and costing you too much? Well, in this episode, we interview Michael Kennedy, author of "Talk Python in Production," a new book that guides you through deploying web apps at scale with right-sized engineering.
After a firehose of economic news in 2025, we wanted to check back on some of the people we’ve heard from on our show. Today, we check in with a former federal employee caught in the Trump administration's wood chipper, a Louisiana shrimper on Trump’s tariffs and an update on a financial aid scam.
33 Place Brugmann opens with a list of the residents of a Brussels apartment building. The year is 1939 and Germany’s invasion of Belgium is on the horizon. Alice Austen’s debut novel winds together the fates of these residents under Nazi occupation. In today’s episode, Austen joins NPR’s Scott Simon for a conversation that touches on the backstory of the building’s address, how she balanced the novel’s many narrative voices, and the questions that consumed her as she wrote the book.
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
Paris Marx is joined by Cam Wilson to discuss the new social media age limit in Australia, including how successful the rollout has been so far and the missed opportunities of taking a more nuanced regulatory approach.
Cam Wilson is an associate editor at Crikey and writes The Sizzle newsletter. He’s a co-author of Conspiracy Nation: Exposing the Dangerous World of Australian Conspiracy Theories.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.
The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.
In the wake of the shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia's government has announced a number of measures to address antisemistism, including giving officials the power to reject the visas of anyone who engages in religious hate speech. 15 people were killed when two gunmen opened fire at an event celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
Also: in an end of year speech, President Trump has been telling the American people about his achievements since returning to office. YouTube has secured exclusive broadcasting rights for the Oscars awards ceremony from 2029. Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer orders the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich to donate more than three billion dollars in proceeds from the sale of Chelsea football club to Ukraine, or face having the money confiscated. Human rights groups say the Iranian champion boxer Mohammad Javad Vafaei-Sani is at imminent risk of execution. Officials in Japan warn people not to be fooled by AI-generated videos of bears cozying up to humans, as fatalities from bear attacks are at a record high in the country. And the merits of recording your relatives and getting to know the family history this holiday season.
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