Nailing the balance between humor and heavy, dark topics is a difficult feat. Night of the Living Rez by author Morgan Talty meets the mark. His collection of interconnected short stories tell the story of a Native American woman and her son who return to their reservation island in Maine. The two start living with a volatile alcoholic and the stories chronicle what that life looks like as the son grows up. Debut author Talty sat down with Melissa Block on Weekend Edition Saturday to talk about his work.
It can be consumed in blocks or wheels, strings or curds, slices or cubes.
It can be soft or hard, fresh or old, and it can even be consumed if it smells bad and has mold on it.
Pizza, hamburgers, and crackers depend on it, yet it can also be eaten by itself.
I am of course talking about cheese. Learn more about cheese, how it was discovered, and how it is made, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In the mid-19th century, the various games called football separated and evolved into their own games.
While association football and rugby became dominant on one side of the Atlantic, a totally different version of football evolved on the other side of the Atlantic.
That version of the game over the course of 150 years has grown into the move valuable professional sports league in the world.
Learn more about American Football and how it grew into the game it is today, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Memory Palace is a member of Radiotopia from PRX.
This episode was originally released in July of 2016. It’s being re-released today because Nate’s on book leave for the summer and because it’s a total banger.
Notes and Reading:
* I came to this story the old fashioned way (for me): I saw Su Lin at the Field Museum and needed to know more. That led me inevitably to Vicki Croke's The Lady and the Panda from 2006. It's a terrific read. If you have any interest at all in learning more about Ruth Harkness, that's the place to go. I've got a few quibbles here and there, but, for real, it's delightful.
* Quentin Young's (slightly strange and contested) version of events is told in Chasing the Panda by Michael Kiefer.
* If you've got a few hundred bucks (or a library with more liberal lending policies with old books than mine), why not read Ruth's own book, The Baby Giant Panda?
* If you're interested in zoos writ large, I'm a fan of Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos by Elizabeth Hansen.
In 1792, the people of France overthrew their monarchy and established the French Republic.
The leaders of the French Revolution didn’t just want to change the French political system, they wanted to radically overhaul French culture and society as well.
That extended all the way to the very calendar which was used to keep track of time.
Learn more about the French Republican Calendar, how it worked and why no one uses it today, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Today we have two nonfiction books that touch on a bygone era of Hollywood some refer to as its "Golden Age." First, George Stevens, Jr., talks to Scott Simon about his book My Place in the Sun, a memoir about growing up as the son of a movie director, learning the family's craft, and striving for his dad's respect. Then, author Mark Rozzo speaks to Ailsa Chang about the untold story of Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper's relationship, the focus of his new book: Everyone Thought We Were Crazy.
Sometime around 3,200 years ago, a new civilization became ascendent on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
This group wasn’t like the Empires that surrounded them. They weren’t focused so much on land acquisition and conquest so much as they were focused on commerce and trade.
For centuries they ruled over trade and commerce in the Mediterranean until they finally succumbed to their more powerful neighbors.
Learn more about the Phoenician Civilization and what set them apart from other ancient civilizations, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Curious City takes a deep dive into how Chicago’s powerful white institutions – from the police and the politicians to the banks and the realtors – used the 1919 race riots to cement a more segregated city.
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese intelligence officer during World War II, stationed on a small island in the Philippines. When the Japanese army evacuated, Onoda stayed and fought for 29 more years, living in the jungle and resisting all attempts to convince him the war was over. Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog tells a fictionalized account of this story in his first novel, The Twilight World. In an interview on All Things Considered, Herzog told Ari Shapiro that he's always been a writer and that this book is finally putting into words a story he had in him for two decades.
