The Federal Reserve introduced a visual tool called the "dot plot" in 2012 to communicate where officials think interest rates should be in the coming years. The dot plot is eagerly dissected by Fed watchers looking for insight on future policy, but others think that the dot plot has become a visual example of just how little the Fed can predict where the economy is going.
Today on the show, we decode the dot plot and hear why some think that the Federal Reserve's artistic exercise should be scrapped altogether.
You Like It Darker is a new collection of short stories by Stephen King — and as the author tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, one of those stories spent decades tucked away in a desk drawer before he gave it an ending. In today's episode,the two discuss the bigger questions of destiny and morality in that story and in much of King's work, and why the writer thought several of his best-selling novels would never see the light of day.
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This episode was originally released in 2016 in the days after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It is re-released every year on the anniversary of the incident.
A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first.
Notes and Reading: * Most of the specific history of the White Horse was learned from "Sanctuary: the Inside Story of the Nation's Second Oldest Gay Bar" by David Olson, reprinted in its entirety on the White Horse's website. * "Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco's Gay Bars, 1950-1968," by Christopher Agee. * June Thomas' series on the past, present, and future of the gay bar from Slate a few years back. * Various articles written on the occasion of the White Horse's 80th anniversary, including this one from SFGATE.Com * Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States. * Radically Gay, a collection of Harry Hay's writing. * Incidentally, I watched this interview with Harry Hay from 1996 about gay life in SF in the 30's multiple times because it's amazing.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle call the surge at the US Southern Border a "border crisis."
One camp says we need to focus on addressing the conditions in other countries that cause people to leave. The other says we have to focus on deterrence and enforcement.
But...what if both camps are actually ignoring a major piece of the picture? Today on the show, an overlooked cause and potential solution to the situation at our southern border that has nothing to do with the border at all.
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Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered something else: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the long-lost autobiography of Jacobs' brother, John Swanson Jacobs. In today's episode, Schroeder speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about the life of the author, his escape to freedom and the blistering critique of the United States that he wrote in 1855 while living in Australia.
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We are back to answer your questions that you, our listeners, have been sending. On today's show, is chicken actually getting cheaper? Why doesn't the Federal Reserve use different interest rates around the country? And: is election spending an indicator of economic health?
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Books are one of the foundational tools of civilization. They allow us to pass knowledge and information between people who don’t know each other, and their compact form allows knowledge to be transported across vast distances.
Their permanence allows information to be sent across time such that centuries might separate a writer from a reader.
But how did books develop, and in the modern world, is a book still a book if it's purely digital?
Learn more about books, where they came from, and how they’ve changed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.