Category: DailyShorts

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most recent public institution to announce that they are taking the Sackler name off of seven of their spaces due to their involvement with the opioid crisis. Author Patrick Radden Keefe wrote a book profiling the Sackler family called Empire of Pain: The Secret History Of The Sackler Dynasty that was one of the biggest of the year. It profiles the family that founded Purdue Pharma and their promotion of the drug Oxycontin.

From 1969 through 1972 six Apollo missions landed on the moon and returned a total of 840 pounds of moon rocks to the Earth. Geologists were able to study them and learned an enormous amount about the composition and formation of the moon. However, those same rocks have been the center of several controversies and mysteries ever since they came back to Earth. Learn more about moon rocks and where they are now on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Have you ever wanted to get stranded on a beautiful island? Maybe at the end of a vacation when you think you never want to leave. Well, that's what happens to the protagonist in Jodi Picoult's new novel, Wish You Were Here. It's a little less glamorous than what you might be picturing. It's March of 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic traps Diana O'Toole in the Galapagos Islands with very little wifi or cell service. Picoult told NPR's Scott Simon that this extreme isolation forced her main character to reevaluate how she really wanted to live her life.

A world’s fair used to be a very big deal. They would draw tens of millions of visitors and they would showcase some of the most cutting edge advancements in science and technology. They were also responsible for the creation of some of the most iconic structures in the world. Nowadays…..eh….not so much. Learn more about world fairs and how they shaped history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Legendary rapper and integral member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Raekwon, is out with a new memoir called From Staircase to Stage. Born Corey Woods in Staten Island, Raekwon takes a look back at hating school, watching his neighborhood decline during the crack-cocaine epidemic, and then finding success with the Wu-Tang Clan. Raekwon told NPR's Steve Inskeep that success came with both big highs and deep lows.

Henry, King of England, Ireland, and Wales, Eighth of his name and head of the House of Tudor, was one of the most significant monarchs in British history. One of the things which made his reign so significant was the controversy surrounding his wives. His marriages completely changed the course of England and of Christianity in Europe. Learn more about the wives of Henry VIII, all six of them, and how they met their fates, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Author Dave Eggars has written a new book, The Every, satirizing technology and it's ever-expanding hold on us. While publishing and distributing the book, which also happens to be about a tech giant overextending its reach, he tried to keep it out of the hands of one of today's tech giants. It proved to be a difficult task, Eggars told NPR's Audie Cornish, "...[it's] like taking not just the back roads but taking the dirt roads off the back roads off the highway."

In 1815, one of the most catastrophic and deadly events in recorded human history occurred in Indonesia. A volcanic explosion took place which was larger than anything, any human had ever witnessed in over 10,000 years. The total global death toll from the event might have been as high as the tens of millions. Learn more about the Mount Tambora explosion on this Episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Humans have been aware of ice for as long as there have been humans and ice. However, using ice outside of winter has always been a huge challenge, but that didn’t stop people from trying to harness and use ice even when it was well out of season. It wasn’t until relatively recently, historically speaking, that ice became something that most people could just take for granted. Learn more about ice and how humans managed to make and store it before they had electricity.

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The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

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.

Music

• How to be Invisible, by Thruppence.

• Motion by Peter Sandberg.

• Art Blakey’s magical, Come out and See Me Tonight

• And, of course, So What, from Kind of Blue

Notes

• I relied a lot on this extensive oral history interview from The Smithsonian.