Author Azar Nafisi has written a love letter to literature and reading in Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. She does this in a series of letters to her late father who passed on in 2004. Nafisi says that reading can help us really live and also help us, and has helped her, survive challenging times. Nafisi told NPR's Scott Simon that literature's purpose is to let us experience new worlds: "to come out of yourself, and join the other."
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Great War, the war to end all wars, came to an end. In the preceding four years and four months, the world saw the greatest bloodletting history up until that point.
Even after the announcement of the armistice, the war continued for several hours.
During that brief window, thousands of soldiers died. One, in particular, died at the very last minute of the war.
Learn more about Sgt. Henry Gunther, the last soldier to die in World War I, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Almost every single person listening to this podcast right now is doing so on some sort of personal computing device.
Many of the things that we consider part of a modern personal computer, windows, hyperlinks, a mouse, and a text editor, all were released upon the world in a single 90-minute demo in 1968.
The ideas were so advanced it would take over two decades before most of them found themselves in everyone’s homes.
Learn more about the Mother of All Demos and the birth of personal computing, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
This episode was originally released in December of 2016
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.
Warren Ellis rounds it out with his Lale’s Theme from his terrific score to Mustang (which you should totally see).
The Hazel Scott pieces can be found here and here.
Notes
I first heard about Hazel Scott while reading Rad American Women from A to Z to my daughter. It’s a wonderful book. You should buy it for any kid in your life.
On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a US Navy intelligence-gathering ship was on a routine surveillance mission in international waters off of the coast of North Korea.
While on surveillance duty, it was intercepted by North Korean patrol boats.
Shots were fired, the crew was captured, and it set off one of the biggest international incidents of the Cold War.
Learn more about the Pueblo incident, how and why it happened, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Our books today give the reader a peek into showbiz. Sarah Polley was a child actor but that led to her being put into many dangerous situations, which she details in her new memoir, Run Toward The Danger. She told NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer that she's not sure kids should be acting in a professional environment at all. Next, Isaac Butler deep dives into method acting in his new book The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. Butler told NPR's Scott Simon that method acting can create some beautiful performances but it's not an excuse to be terrible.
In 1788, the son of the leader of the Confederation of Futa Jallon in West Africa was commanding his 2,000 troops against a neighboring military force and was captured.
He was sold into slavery and spent the next 40 years of his living as a slave in Mississippi. That was until a chance meeting discovered his true identity, which eventually lead to his freedom and the involvement of the President of the United States.
Learn more about Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, the prince who became a slave, who became an issue in a presidential election, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
A Curious City fan asked us about an odd detail on an old Chicago map. Was it really a Native American burial mound? Producer Jesse Dukes went on a quest to find the answer.
At the center of author Naima Coster's novel What's Mine & Yours are two struggling mothers. Jade is a Black single mother who is trying to provide a better life for her son, and Lacey May is a white mother who is trying to give her daughters the life she never had. Their stories will intertwine over decades, starting with when Lacey May opposes the integration of her daughters' school – the same school Jade is trying to get her son into. Coster told NPR's Audie Cornish that fiction gives us a window into other people's lives but that does not mean we have to condone their actions.
History is full of battles and conflicts. Most of them are forgotten over time as they don’t really impact history. Whether one king or another wins a battle usually doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things.
However, there are moments that truly change world history. When civilizations clash and the outcome can affect the world for centuries.
Such a moment occurred on May 29, 1453.
Learn more about the Fall of Constantinople and what it meant to history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
