Category: DailyShorts

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

In lieu of my usual re-runs filling out August, I’m doing something different: a full-reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, presented in three parts.

Music for Gatsby was composed and performed by Mary Lattimore. Find and buy her music at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com

The cover art is from Jen Corace. See more of Jen’s work at jencorace.com.

Back with part two on August 12th. 

The American constitution was written in 1788, but there was a mechanism built in to adapt and change the document. Since 1788 the Constitution has been amended 27 times, most recently in 1992. The most recent amendment, however, had a path to ratification which was far different than any other of the 26 before it. Learn more about the 27th amendment and the very circuitous route it took to ratification, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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American politics has been called a two-party system. While there are two major parties today, and those two parties have been around a long time, they weren’t always the only two parties. In fact, there was a political party in the US that, took its name from a British political party, had four US presidents, and even held control of Congress for several years. Today, they are all but unknown to most people.

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Somewhere over your head, right the moment is an artificial satellite. Many of them actually. They beam television and radio signals down to Earth. They can tell us our exact time and location, and they can also help us predict the weather and they are now even providing broadband internet. But how do they work? How do you get something to wiz around in space without crashing down?

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On the morning of November 1, 1755, the citizens of Lisbon, Portugal set out to go to church for the feast of All Saints Day. Little did they know that moments later, their lives and the lives of everyone in Lisbon were about to be turned upside down and that the city of Lisbon would almost cease to exist. Learn more about the Great Lisbon Earthquake, one of the most devastating earthquakes in history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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You’ve seen it in your science classrooms, and there was probably a copy of it on the inside cover of your chemistry book. Maybe if you are a real nerd, you might even have your own personal copy. Yet its very creation was a revolutionary breakthrough that helped scientists and generations of students understand the very things which make up our world. Learn more about the Periodic Table of the Elements and how it helped explain the natural world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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The modern Olympics have been celebrated for over 100 years. Since their beginning in 1896, there have been over 100,000 athletes who have competed at the Olympics and thousands of medals have been awarded. At every Olympics, just like clockwork, the same debate is initiated: who is the greatest Olympian of all time? Join me as I try to answer this unanswerable question, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Robert Smalls was born a slave in 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina. From that humble beginning, he went on to become a war hero, a ship captain, a presidential advisor, and a member of the US House of Representatives. However, he is best known for one of the most daring exploits of the entire Civil War. Learn more about Robert Smalls on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Ever since the cease-fire which ended the Korean war, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea has been a tense stand-off. Standing only a few meters from each other, soldiers from North Korea stand on one side with soldiers from South Korea and the United States on the other. On August 18, 1976, the two sides came as close as they ever have to igniting another war. Learn more about the Korean Axe Murder Incident on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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