The former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, has been analyzing the rise of autocracies and the threats they pose to democracy for decades. Amna Nawaz sat down with McFaul to discuss his new book, “Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder.” PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma: black holes. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can occur when a star approaches the end of its life. Unable to generate enough heat to maintain its outer layers, it shrinks catastrophically down to an infinitely dense point. When this phenomenon was first proposed in 1916, it defied scientific understanding so much that Albert Einstein dismissed it as too ridiculous to be true. But scientists have since proven otherwise. In 1971, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster discovered the first black hole: Cygnus X-1. Later, in the 1990s, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that not only do black holes exist, supermassive black holes lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. It would take another three decades to confirm this phenomenon. On 10 April 2019, a team of astronomers made history by producing the first image of a black hole. A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage (Apollo, 2025)is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging page-turner that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.
Today’s episode features two new crime thrillers written by big names. First, Harlan Coben says he stopped in his tracks when Reese Witherspoon asked to collaborate on a novel. In today’s episode, the co-authors speak with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly about their collaboration on Gone Before Goodbye. Then, I Love Dick author Chris Kraus took an autofiction approach to her crime novel The Four Spent the Day Together. In an interview with NPR’s Elissa Nadworny, Kraus describes the protagonist as “me at the moment of the story.”
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
This week’s top-streaming film on Netflix tackles a long-running Hollywood theme. The threat of a nuclear attack and the discourse around "A House of Dynamite" has struck a nerve with audiences and with military defense experts. Geoff Bennett spoke with the film's writer, Noah Oppenheim, for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. A warning: this segment includes spoilers. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
In Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule (U Washington Press, 2024), female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia.
Fang Yu Hu is assistant professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in modern East Asian history, with a focus on Taiwan, gender, colonialism, and cross-border flows. She has published in the journals ERAS of Monash University and Twentieth-Century China. Her current research focuses on Taiwanese migrants to mainland China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century.
Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
After Harper Lee’s death in 2016, previously unpublished writing was discovered in her New York City apartment. The Land of Sweet Forever includes eight new short stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Lee wrote them a decade prior to To Kill a Mockingbird and some of the stories include early versions of Atticus and Scout, the characters who made her famous. In today’s episode, Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd interviews The New Yorker’s Casey Cep, who edited the collection.
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
Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices--living and dead, visible and immaterial--that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a "not yet" that has always remained just beyond reach.
Salman Rushdie lived for decades under a death sentence and survived a knife attack three years ago. His latest book The Eleventh Hour is his first work of fiction since that near-death experience. These short stories and novellas center around the end of life, what might come after, and the idea of personal legacy. In today’s episode, Rushdie joins Here & Now’s Scott Tong for a conversation that touches on mortality, changes to the author’s writing process, and his first ghost story.
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
In their new book, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis offer an investigation into the unraveling of the U.S. Justice Department. They reveal how, under Donald Trump, the nation’s top law enforcement agency was transformed from an institution built to protect the rule of law into one pressured to protect the president. They joined Geoff Bennett to discuss "Injustice." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and transferred injustice through political and financial architectures.
In Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment (Bristol University Press/Policy Press, 2024) Dr. Joshua Castellino presents a five-point plan aimed at system redress through reparations that addresses the colonially induced climate crisis through equitable and sustainable means.
In highlighting the structural legacy of colonial crimes, Dr. Castellino provides insights into the complexities of contemporary societies, showing how legal frameworks could foster a fairer, more just world.
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.
