In this episode, we share two interviews on novels that explore how horror can be found within – and beyond – the laws of nature. First, Megan Miranda takes NPR's Elissa Nadworny into the North Carolina woods to set the scene for her book, The Last to Vanish, about disappearing hikers. Then, Stephen King and his son Owen tell Mary Louise Kelly about the supernatural rage that overcomes the women in their novel, Sleeping Beauties.
A house on Rainbow Road in Barrington, Illinois is shrouded in mystery. Former residents say they’ll never return. Some locals say memories of the property still chill their blood. So, what really happened at 92 Rainbow Road?
Can spirits really speak to us from beyond death? That's what science editor and skeptic Jon Brooks has been wondering for 27 years, since he and a friend had an experience with a Ouija board that they just can't explain. After losing his mother, Jon decides to dust off the same board he used in 1995 and try to recreate the original experience with as much scientific rigor as one can manage while attempting to contact the dead.
This story was reported by Jon Brooks. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Amanda Font and Brendan Willard. Our Social Video Intern is Darren Tu.
Early in the second world war, the Germans found themselves with a metaphorical pebble in their shoe. The pebble was actually a rather large rock that happened to guard the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea.
Unfortunately for them, it happened to be controlled by the British.
If they could remove the British, they could solve their problem and maybe do something for Hitler’s friend, Francisco Franco.
Learn more about Operation Felix, the planned German invasion of Gibraltar via Spain, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Pulitzer Prize winning-author Annie Proulx tells Leila Fadel that she learns by writing. So when she wanted to better understand the wetlands – and how they're being affected by the climate crisis – she dove into nonfiction. Her new book, Fen, Bog & Swamp, does not concern itself with how the natural world serves humans, but rather how it serves itself.
Poet and filmmaker Fatimah Asghar lost their parents at a young age. But they tell Scott Simon that they didn't grow up with a lot of stories that accurately captured the experience of being an orphan. In their debut novel, When We Were Sisters, Asghar describes life on the margins for three Muslim-American siblings left to raise one another.
The American Civil War wasn’t just a military conflict. There was also a major political and legal conflict struggle that took place alongside the military campaigns.
In the last months of the war, President Abraham Lincoln knew that if the war was to truly be the end of the conflict, it was necessary to ban slavery once and for all.
That would require changing the constitution.
Learn more about the 13th Amendment and the battle for its ratification on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Geena Davis is no stranger to the spotlight. But in her new memoir, Dying of Politeness, the Academy Award-winning actor remembers growing up full of insecurities and self-criticisms. She tells Rachel Martin that acting gave her the "ability to be somebody else" – and over time, she gained her confidence by watching none other than her Thelma and Louise co-star, Susan Sarandon, walk through the world with her head held high.
In the 1990s, Harvard’s student body was said to be nearly a quarter Jewish. According to the Harvard Crimson’s2020 survey of the freshman class, 6.7 percent of respondents identified as Jewish. On the final episode of this series, we explore the declining numbers of Jewish students across the Ivy League, and try to understand why, at places like Harvard, there may be fewer Jewish students today than when discriminatory policies kept them out a century ago.
We also look at how the same playbook that was developed to keep Jews out of elite universities–from the application, to the interview, to legacy preferences, to the hunt for geographical diversity–is now being used against a different minority group: Asian Americans.
