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Up First from NPR - Ukraine’s New Year’s Agony, Puerto Rico Power Outages, Dry January Tips

Ukraine's leader vows to end the fighting in 2025, just before Russian drones attack Kyiv again. A grid failure leaves more than half of Puerto Rico without power. Why resolve to have a "dry January?"

For more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.

Today's episode of Up First was edited by Jan Johnson, and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Kaity Kline, Ben Abrams and Julie Depenbrock. We get engineering support from Arthur Laurent. And our technical director is Stacey Abbott.

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NPR's Book of the Day - Salman Rushdie’s memoir ‘Knife’ recounts his attack and recovery

In 2022, the author Salman Rushdie was onstage at a public event when a man ran up and stabbed him. His new memoir, Knife, delves into that moment when Rushdie thought he was going to die — and everything that's come after, as he's healed from the attack. In today's episode, he speaks at length with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about how the miracles found in his fiction might've manifested themselves in his real life, how his wife – poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths – has helped him move forward, and how writing about that experience became a way for him to fight back.

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Short Wave - The Trouble With Zero

Happy New Year, Short Wavers! What better time to contemplate the conundrum that is zero than this, the reset of the year? Zero is a fairly new concept in human history and even more recent as a number. It wasn't until around the 7th century that zero was being used as a number. That's when it showed up in the records of Indian mathematicians. Since then, zero has, at times, been met with some fear — at one point, the city of Florence, Italy banned the number.

Today, scientists seek to understand how much humans truly comprehend zero — and why it seems to be different from other numbers. That's how we ended up talking to science writer Yasemin Saplakoglu about the neuroscience of this number that means nothing.

Read more of Yasemin's reporting on zero for Quanta Magazine. Plus, check out our episode on why big numbers break our brains.

Thirst for more math episodes? Let us know what kind of stories you want to hear from us in 2025 by emailing shortwave@npr.org!

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1A - Ask A Mystery Novelist

Writing a book can be hard. Add in the twists and turns of a mystery... Where to even start?!

Three authors join us today to help us cozy up to confusing capers. In the latest edition of our "Ask A" series, we're asking mystery novelists about how they mystify and confound amateur sleuths and gumshoes the world over.

From the red herrings to the smoking guns, how do they craft their whodunits?

Want to support 1A? Give to your local public radio station and subscribe to this podcast. Have questions? Connect with us. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.

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