Category: DailyShorts

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NPR's Book of the Day - Why Hillary Clinton wanted to write a political thriller about her greatest nightmare

The bestselling author Louise Penny is a prolific writer of mysteries and thrillers — but for her latest book, she decided to bring a partner into the fold, a novice to the world of mystery-writing: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their book, State of Terror, brings readers into a world in which a president picks a former rival to be his secretary of state (sound familiar?) — and she must then contend with what Clinton calls one of her greatest fears: nuclear-armed terrorists. In this interview, Penny and Clinton discuss the messages they hope readers take away from the book.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - The Louvre: The World’s Greatest Museum

Located in the heart of Paris, along the banks of the River Seine, lies the Louvre. It has over 750,000 square feet of gallery space, it has over 615,000 items in its collection, and in a non-pandemic year, gets over 10 million annual visitors. Yet, it wasn’t always a museum, and the way it acquired its collection wasn’t always above board. Learn more about the Louvre, the world’s greatest museum, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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NPR's Book of the Day - In ‘The Matter of Black Lives,’ generations of Black thinkers probe American racism

Back in June 2020, during a summer of protests for racial justice, the New Yorker republished 'Letter from a Region in my Mind," a seminal James Baldwin essay calling out the ignorance of liberal white Americans. In the following months, writer Jelani Cobb put together a collection of essays from the magazine that fit a similar theme: Black writers, including Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote pieces for the New Yorker about race and racism that still ring true today. In this interview, Cobb reflects on the essays and what it took for those Black writers to break into the magazine.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - Wedding Traditions

Weddings are full of traditions. Almost every aspect of a traditional western wedding involves customs that may date back hundreds or thousands of years. However, most people have no idea where these customs or traditions come from. They simply do them because that’s what you do when you have a wedding. Learn more about wedding traditions and learn where they came from, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Hunting Down the Polluters

Tom Heap discovers fresh ways to quantify greenhouse gas emissions with help from satellites, artificial intelligence and former US Vice President Al Gore.

Emissions data from companies and countries can be inaccurate, incomplete or sometimes just plain deceitful. The team at Climate TRACE, led by Al Gore, have devised innovative ways to calculate accurate emissions data from power stations, factories, ships and even planes. That data can be used to reveal unexpected sources of carbon dioxide and methane and to provide independent figures for international negotiations on climate change.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Professor Raphael Heffron from the University of Dundee and Professor Paul Palmer from the University of Edinburgh. Image courtesy of Transition Zero.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Low Carbon Crisps

Ever thought about the carbon cost of a packet of crisps? At CCM Technologies they think of little else. Their revolutionary fertiliser offers a big step to carbon-free snacking.

Waste from crisp factories or from sewage treatment works can be routed and treated to form the basic building blocks of new fertilisers that can be spread on the ground to grow a new harvest of potatoes- or any other crop we need. The system avoids waste and takes a big cut out of the carbon emissions of traditional fertiliser production. Tom Heap tours the CCM fertiliser plant on the outskirts of Birmingham and discusses the carbon benefits with Dr Tamsin Edwards of King's College London.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Dr Kate Schofield from the University of Plymouth and Dr Abigail González Díaz from the National Institute of Electricity and Clean Energy.

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39 Ways to Save the Planet - Windcatchers

Wind energy is vital in the battle against climate change, but can we make improvements to harness more from them? Tom Heap visits Kelburn windfarm in North Ayrshire to discuss whether 'wakesteering' - reorientating the turbines could see them harness more power collectively. Meanwhile some potential sites are refused or restricted due to the damage caused to wildlife. Hubert Lagrange talks about his childhood obsession with bats which are often killed by the pressure around turbine blades. He's worked to develop a system to sense bat and bird activity and allow the turbines to operate longer through a refined system. Dr Tamsin Edwards discusses how much more potential there is and how much carbon this could save.

Producer: Anne-Marie Bullock Researcher Sarah Goodman

Produced in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Special thanks for this episode to Asst Professor Michael Howland from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Nick Jenkins from Cardiff University.

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NPR's Book of the Day - The zoo that history nearly forgot in ‘When Two Feathers Fell From The Sky’

If you visited South Nashville today, you might not suspect that, over a century ago, it was home to a zoo and amusement park called the Glendale Zoo. Among other attractions, the zoo had a popular attraction called "horse diving," in which a performer rode a horse off a tall platform into a body of water. In her book, When Two Feathers Fell From The Sky, Verble imagines the life of a young Cherokee girl named Two Feathers, who horse dives for a living at the zoo in the year 1926 — set against the background of the Jim Crow South and widespread mistreatment of Native Americans.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - The United States Minor Outlying Islands

Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country and you noticed that one of the country options was the “United States Minor Outlying Islands”? If you have you might have wondered, what are these island? Who lives there? And why are these islands considered minor? Learn more about the United States Minor Outlying Islands and how they ended up on almost every drop down list of countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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the memory palace - Episode 187: The Woods

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show and independent media, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate.

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

  • By the Ash Tree and Semolina by Slow Meadow

  • Opals by Catching Flies

  • Mechanical Fair by Ola Kvernberg and the Trondheim Singers

  • La Copla by the great Atahualpa Yupanqui

  • Holm Sound by Erland Cooper

Notes

  • You can find the original recordings, photos, and film clips taken on the 1935 expedition and after in the remarkable online library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

  • Of the many books on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the one I enjoyed and relied upon most here is Phillip Hoose’s The Race to Save the Good Lord Bird.