Category: DailyShorts

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.

In 1939, the last naturally occurring element on Earth, francium, was discovered. However, the periodic table of elements still wasn’t full. The next year, a non-natural element was discovered: Plutonium. This new unnatural element had fascinating properties which made it incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous. Learn more about plutonium, how it is made, and what it can do, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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There are some subjects that are perceived to be mind-numbingly dull and boring. One such subject is accounting. Yet, believe it or not, accounting and bookkeeping have not only have been around since the dawn of human civilization, but they also had a hand in shaping it. Without it, the world would be a very different place today. Learn more about accounting and bookkeeping, and how they really aren’t as boring as they seem, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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From creating vertical gardens to breeding pigeons, the people living in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan manage to "carve out a life worth living." Artist and architectural historian Azra Aksamija co-edited a book that looks at the ingenuity found within that camp called, Design To Live: Everyday Inventions From A Refugee Camp. Aksamija told NPR's Scott Simon that even though camps are supposed to be a temporary solution, lots of families end up staying for years at a time, so they find ways to make themselves at home in a place that's not meant to be hospitable.

Most people are probably aware of the events which took place on December 7, 1941. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “it was a day that would live in infamy.” However, the events of December 7 weren’t limited to Hawaii, and they weren’t even limited to December 7. It was part of a much larger operation, the other elements of which are often overlooked today. Learn more about the events of December 8, 1941, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Author Darcie Little Badger has her protagonists, Nina and a cottonmouth snake named Oli, tackle big, real world problems in her new Young Adult novel, A Snake Falls To Earth. She told NPR's Leila Fadel that young people are feeling climate anxiety acutely, so it was important to her to make it a part of this story, even though it takes place in a fantastical world. She does have a PhD in oceanography and a bachelors in geo-science, so understands the stakes really well. But, she doesn't want her readers to walk away feeling hopeless.