Bonnie Garmus' new novel Lessons In Chemistry has been getting a lot of buzz. Elizabeth Zott is a talented chemist but because it's the 1960s she faces sexism in her quest to work as a scientist. So instead she has a cooking show that is wildly popular. Garmus told NPR's Scott Simon that the character of Elizabeth lived in her head for many years before she started writing this novel.
The election of 1860 was unquestionably the most important election in American history.
The presidential election after that was still important, but it has the distinction of being the oddest presidential election in history, if for no other reason than it was conducted in the middle of a civil war.
Learn more about the election of 1864 and all the ways we’ve never seen anything like it before or since, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Former Homeland Security official and author Juliette Kayyem has a new book out that encourages preparedness. The Devil Never Sleeps makes the case that disasters are going to happen, and gives advice on how to manage them. Kayyem told NPR's Steve Inskeep that we need to redefine our definition of success after disasters occur.
In 1946 after the conclusion of the Second World War, a Dutch man was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and plundering the Netherlands of some of its greatest artistic works.
During the trial, he came up with a defense that seemed to everyone to be preposterous, yet wound up being true.
Learn more about Han van Meegeren, the painter who duped the Nazis, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Author Jenny Tinghui Zhang is out with a new historical fiction novel, Four Treasures In The Sky. Set in the 1800s during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, a young girl named Daiyu is kidnapped and brought to the U.S. Zhang told NPR's Ayesha Rascoe that she has seen a lot of reviews that refer to this book as 'timely' – and that she does not think that is a good thing when a book is about racism.
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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
Dance PM from Horishi Yoshimura
Amor - C.B. Rework by Clark
Here’s What You’re Missin by Bing and Ruth
Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island as played by Bruce Brubaker
Alto Paraiso by Aukai
Opening from Nathaniel Bartlett
Rivers That you Cannot See by North Americans
First of the Tide by Erland Cooper featuring Benge
Notes
The episode old episode I mention in the credits as a companion to this one is here.
Most of the biographical details in this were found in the official biography written for the National Academy of Sciences by his Uranium-hunting colleague, George Tilton, and a terrific, entertaining oral history interview.
Also, if you’ve left episode in the mode where you’d just like to know some more, I came across this old Mental Floss article by Lucas Reilly that I thought did a particularly good job of weaving a lot of the back story (some of which I’d covered before in the Midgely episode linked above) into Patterson’s story. Just wanted to shine a light on it.
April is National Poetry Month, so to celebrate we are bringing you a conversation with poet Ocean Vuong. His new collection, Time Is A Mother, is about his grief after losing family members. Vuong told Morning Edition's Rachel Martin that time is different now that he has lost his mother: "when I look at my life since she died in 2019, I only see two days: Today when she's not here, and the big, big yesterday when I had her."