Comedian, TV writer and podcast host Chelsea Devantez moved around a lot as a kid. She jokes in today's episode that her mom "loved to get divorced" — but that also led to what she describes as a pretty great co-parenting situation between her mom and godmother for a while. It's one of the many stories in Devantez's new memoir, I Shouldn't Be Telling You This (But I'm Going to Anyway). She spoke to NPR's Elizabeth Blair about the book, her journey as a domestic violence survivor and the experience of being the product, in part, of a sperm donor
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You Like It Darker is a new collection of short stories by Stephen King — and as the author tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, one of those stories spent decades tucked away in a desk drawer before he gave it an ending. In today's episode,the two discuss the bigger questions of destiny and morality in that story and in much of King's work, and why the writer thought several of his best-selling novels would never see the light of day.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
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This episode was originally released in 2016 in the days after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It is re-released every year on the anniversary of the incident.
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.
Notes and Reading: * Most of the specific history of the White Horse was learned from "Sanctuary: the Inside Story of the Nation's Second Oldest Gay Bar" by David Olson, reprinted in its entirety on the White Horse's website. * "Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco's Gay Bars, 1950-1968," by Christopher Agee. * June Thomas' series on the past, present, and future of the gay bar from Slate a few years back. * Various articles written on the occasion of the White Horse's 80th anniversary, including this one from SFGATE.Com * Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States. * Radically Gay, a collection of Harry Hay's writing. * Incidentally, I watched this interview with Harry Hay from 1996 about gay life in SF in the 30's multiple times because it's amazing.
Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered something else: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the long-lost autobiography of Jacobs' brother, John Swanson Jacobs. In today's episode, Schroeder speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about the life of the author, his escape to freedom and the blistering critique of the United States that he wrote in 1855 while living in Australia.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
Books are one of the foundational tools of civilization. They allow us to pass knowledge and information between people who don’t know each other, and their compact form allows knowledge to be transported across vast distances.
Their permanence allows information to be sent across time such that centuries might separate a writer from a reader.
But how did books develop, and in the modern world, is a book still a book if it's purely digital?
Learn more about books, where they came from, and how they’ve changed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Mango Tree kicks off with a phone call: Journalist Annabelle Tometich is informed her mom has been arrested for shooting a man, with a BB gun, who was trying to take mangoes from her yard. What follows is a memoir about a rich but turbulent upbringing in a half-white, half-Filipino family in Fort Myers, Florida. In today's episode, NPR's Scott Simon asks Tometich about the moment she realized the violence in her household wasn't normal, and what that mango tree represented for her immigrant mother. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
In the 19th century, several American universities began to compete with each other in several sporting events in friendly intercollegiate competitions.
Fast forward over a hundred years, and college sports in the United States is a multibillion-dollar business.
How did institutes of higher education become some of the biggest sports organizations in the world? And how did this situation come to be, and why does it only exist in the United States?
Learn more about college sports and how it became to be such a big business on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.