Katherine May, like so many other people, found herself submerged in anxiety and restlessness during COVID-19 lockdowns. But as cities reopened, she looked for new ways to immerse herself in the awe of the natural world around her. That journey is at the center of her new book, Enchantment. And as she tells NPR's Rachel Martin, her relationship with her faith, prayer and her definition of God played a big role.
Ruthy Ramirez, the 13-year-old middle child of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island, vanished without a trace. But more than a decade later, as the family still feels the weight of her absence, one of her sisters spots a woman who she thinks might be her sister on a reality TV show. In her new novel, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, author Claire Jimenez explores the way loss, violence and spectacle impacts the women in the Ramirez family. And as she tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, there's a big divide in the way reality tv treats white women and women of color.
Margaret Atwood has been writing for a long time – and as she tells NPR's Leila Fadel, the world looks very different today than it did when she started. Her new collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, provides different approaches to the passing of time. There's a couple that's facing the realities of aging; there's a conversation with George Orwell, who Atwood says drastically changed her life; and there's even a parallel reality to the author's 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, where men are the ones being controlled.
Every since the lands of the New World were mapped, people dreamt of creating a canal through Central America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
For almost 500 years, that dream was just that. A dream. Creating such a canal would require one of the greatest engineering projects in human history.
It was finally achieved in the early 20th century with an enormous amount of machinery, money, human lives, and a whole lot of political arm-twisting.
Learn more about the Panama Canal and how it came to be on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Music
*Under the credits is Harlaamstrat 74 off of John Dankworth’s Modesty Blaise score.
*The piece opens with Rainfall, by David Darling and Michael Jones.
*Her brief love story is scored by Nathan Johnson’s Penelope’s Theme from his score to The Brothers Bloom.
*When she lands her first gig, we start Garde a Vue, and roll into Le Roi de coeur, from Chantal Martineau.
* The vibraphone piece is “Opening” by Nathaniel Bartlett.
* The recurring violin piece is called Geometria del Universo by the one-named Colleen.
* It ends on Romain’s First Love, again by Georges Delarue, from his fantastic score to Promise at Dawn.
