When you think of an epic, what comes to mind? The Iliad, the Odyssey, maybe Beowulf? Well, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers points out that epics are almost always about white men. She told former Morning Edition host Noel King that she didn't want to tell that story because that story has already been told...many times. So, Jeffers set out to write a different kind of epic about heroic Black women in The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois.
Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle. Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people.
Yet, the birds which exist today are often very different birds from the ones which were domesticated over ten millennia ago. Much of that change has occurred in just the last 70 years.
Learn more about the chicken, and how they became one of the most common birds in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
It's already pretty hard to tell what's really real when it comes to social media. But Jennifer Egan takes it one step further in her latest novel The Candy House where people can upload their actual memories, and let other people live in theirs. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad talked with NPR's Leila Fadel on Morning Edition about what it means to be "authentic."
Statistically speaking, about 90% of you listening to my words right now are right-handed. Of the rest of you, almost all of you will be left-handed.
The question of why so many more people are right-handed as opposed to left-handed is one that people have asked for centuries. It is an imbalance that has existed throughout history and across every culture.
Learn more about righties and lefties and why the imbalance between them exists, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
One of the most successful enterprises of the Middle Ages was a collection of free cities located in Northern Germany and along the North and Baltic Seas.
These cities created one of the greatest trade networks that the world had ever seen and for several centuries dominated trade and economics in Northern Europe.
It was the early prototype for successful trade organizations in the future.
Learn more about the Hanseatic League, also known as the Hansa, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Both interviews today are with author Douglas Stuart. The first about his Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain; a story based on his own life growing up a queer son of a single mother struggling with addiction. He told NPR's Scott Simon that he hoped people could find comfort in this story. Next, Stuart spoke to NPR's Ari Shapiro about his new book, Young Mungo. It's a story about two boys separated by faith who end up falling in love with each other. Stuart told Shapiro that when he "write[s] about heartbreak or sadness, I'm really only doing that to make the tenderness and the love shine more."
Ever since people have had secrets, people have taken measures to protect those secrets.
The first methods to hide secrets were simple and mechanical. Over time they became more elaborate and used machines. Today, they are mathematical and would require an enormous amount of computing power to decipher.
Learn more about cryptography and how communications are kept secret, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Geographically, Chicago is smack in the middle of the Midwest. But not everyone seems to think that’s enough to make us “real” Midwesterners. Is being a Midwesterner about where you are on a map, or about state of mind? We found that people’s answer to this question says a lot about how they view Midwestern identity and the growing urban-rural divide.
