The history of traveling queer parties in Chicago is rooted in exclusion and racism. This week, we spoke with Pat McCombs and Vera Washington — longtime organizers of Executive Sweet, a traveling party focused on Black lesbians that got its start in the 1980s. We also talked with Tori and Jae Rice of smallWORLD Collective, a group that organizes events today — and learned how queer Black organizers have been at the forefront of traveling parties in Chicago.
Patriarch Leo Chao is murdered at his restaurant at the beginning of Lan Samantha Chang's new novel The Family Chao. Eventually family secrets and bitterness reveal themselves — much like a Dostoyevsky novel, from whom Chao took a lot of inspiration. But NPR's Scott Simon points out that even though this novel is about a murder, it's quite funny. Chang told Simon that she just enjoyed writing it so much that humor became part of it.
In the year 330, the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that the capital of the entire Roman empire should be moved.
The location he selected was a small Greek town by the name of Byzantium located in the middle of the Bhosperous Straits approximately 500 miles or 800 kilometers from Rome.
From there it grew into one largest and wealthiest cities in the world today and was the seat of more than one major empire.
Learn more about Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Author of the wildly popular and, at times, controversial A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara, is out with a new novel. To Paradise is an epic – in three parts – sprawling over 700 pages and 200 years about a make-believe New York City. Yanagihara was mostly through writing her story, which features pandemics prominently, when COVID-19 first hit in early 2020. But Yanagihara told NPR's Scott Simon that she was able to keep her story and her fears about the pandemic in reality separate.
At the end of the second world war, the allies captured 21 top, surviving Nazi leaders, and put them on trial in Nuremberg, Germany.
With these high-ranking Nazi officials incarcerated, psychologists saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study the men responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in human history.
What made them tick and why did they do what they did?
Learn more about the Nuremberg Personality Tests and what they discovered about Nazi leaders, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Author Emma Straub has written a book about family dynamics and the mess and love that comes with them in All Adults Here. It's no secret that families are complicated. Straub argues a lot of our familial relationships are watching each other grow up and whether or not you allow those you love to grow and change. She told NPR's Scott Simon though that even the bits that aren't perfect are worth loving.
Wherever you happen to be listening to this show, at some level beneath your feet the rocks in the Earth reach a temperature hot enough to boil water and create steam.
With steam, you can turn a turbine and create electricity.
If everywhere on Earth is just a few kilometers away from tapping into this source of energy, why don’t we use this everywhere?
Learn more about geothermal energy, its uses, and its limits, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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.
