NPR's Book of the Day - From silence to cacophony, here’s how your brain makes sense of the world

It can be hard enough to answer the question, "what kind of music do you like?" But how about "why do you like it?" That's one of the many questions about the human brain and sound that neuroscientist Nina Kraus set out to answer in her book Of Sound Mind. In this interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, she breaks down the science behind what our brains do when they process sound, and how it differs for each of us.

Everything Everywhere Daily - The Four Great Inventions of Ancient China

As I have mentioned in many episodes of this podcast, there are a great many things that were originally invented in Ancient China. There are literally hundreds of inventions that were developed in China before they were introduced anywhere else. However, there are four inventions in particular which stand out as having revolutionized not just Chinese civilization, but the entire world.

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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Korean Demilitarized Zone

In the early 1950s, war ravaged the Korean peninsula. However, the fighting ceased on July 27, 1953. Both sides of the conflict pulled back from the front and created a buffer zone 4 kilometers or 2.5 miles wide. That buffer zone still exists today. Learn more about the Korean Demilitarized Zone, its past and present, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Encore)

You probably heard the expression that something is “the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Well did you ever wonder what the greatest thing was before sliced bread? Or why we measure greatness in terms of sliced bread? Well, there’s an answer to these questions. Learn more about why sliced bread is so freaking amazing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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NPR's Book of the Day - What A Detective Novel And A Memoir Both Have To Say About Black American Life

At first glance, journalist Dawn Turner's book Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood and detective novelist Walter Mosley's Down The River Unto The Sea don't have a ton in common. The former takes place in Chicago and focuses on the tough childhoods of Turner, her sister and her best friend; the latter takes readers to the streets of New York, where a cop-turned-private eye investigates police corruption. But in today's episode, each author talks to Michel Martin about how both their stories illustrate systems that treat Black Americans unfairly, and what that says about justice in the U.S.