Category: DailyShorts

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NPR's Book of the Day - Zakiya Dalila Harris and Oliver Jeffers talk about different kinds of hauntings

It's almost Halloween, which means that we're in peak spooky season. So for today's episode, we bring you two books with two very different kinds of frights: a haunted house and...office politics. That's right: In The Other Black Girl, writer Zakiya Dalila Harris captures the all-too-real horror of being the only Black woman in her office. When another Black woman is hired, the tension gets dialed up even higher. And in There's A Ghost In This House, the author-illustrator Oliver Jeffers uses old photographs to create creepy illustrations that will give both children and adults goosebumps.
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Bay Curious - Listen If You Dare! Three Bay Area Ghost Stories

We recommend you listen to this episode on headphones.

Join us around the campfire to hear three ghost stories, some of them decades old, and all of from right here in the Bay Area. Featuring Wes Leslie of The Haunt Ghost Tours, Tommy Netzband of Haunted Haight Walking Tour and the San Francisco Ghost Society and storyteller JP Frary. 

Additional Reading


Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Erika Aguilar, Jessica Placzek, Kyana Moghadam, Paul Lancour, Carly Severn, Lina Blanco, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, Vinnee Tong, Don Clyde and Jenny Pritchett.

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Everything Everywhere Daily - Ambergris: The World’s Most Valuable Smelly Substance

One of the rarest and most expensive substances in the world is actually pretty disgusting. The way it is created is pretty gross, it looks pretty gross, and smells even worse. Despite how disgusting it is, there are people who will pay as much for it on a per gram basis as gold, yet when you get right down to it, no one really needs it. Learn more about ambergris, the treasure of the sea, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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NPR's Book of the Day - How Drew Magary rediscovered himself after ‘The Night the Lights Went Out’

The humor writer Drew Magary was at a karaoke bar when his life changed in a flash: He collapsed and cracked his skull. By most accounts, the resulting traumatic brain injury should have been fatal, but he survived. As he recounts in his book The Night the Lights Went Out, recovering from that injury has been tough. Among other things, he permanently lost some of his senses. As Magary tells NPR's Lulu Garcia Navarro, recovery has required him to figure out who he is now, post injury — a challenge that makes for a good story, he says.
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Curious City - The Halloween Episode: Munger Road

On this week’s episode Curious City investigates the origins of the Munger Road haunting. Like any good ghost story, there are several versions of the Munger Road tale, but the ghost story goes something like this: A school bus full of kids was crossing over the train tracks and it stalled. Before the driver could get the bus off the tracks, a train came along and hit the bus. No one bus survived the accident. The legend says the ghosts of the children are still there, and claims that if you drive your car onto the tracks and put it in neutral and sprinkle some baby powder on your car bumper, allegedly, the children are going to push your car off the tracks to safety. And small handprints will appear in the baby powder.
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Curious City - The Halloween Episode: Munger Road

On this week’s episode Curious City investigates the origins of the Munger Road haunting. Like any good ghost story, there are several versions of the Munger Road tale, but the ghost story goes something like this: A school bus full of kids was crossing over the train tracks and it stalled. Before the driver could get the bus off the tracks, a train came along and hit the bus. No one bus survived the accident. The legend says the ghosts of the children are still there, and claims that if you drive your car onto the tracks and put it in neutral and sprinkle some baby powder on your car bumper, allegedly, the children are going to push your car off the tracks to safety. And small handprints will appear in the baby powder.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - Monarchies vs Republics

I’ve had many episodes where I talked about a country being a “republic”. In fact, we often use the word but many people have a mistaken idea about what exactly a republic is. So what exactly is a republic, and how does it differ from a monarchy or other forms of government? What many people think a republic is isn’t necessarily wrong, but it also isn’t exactly right. Learn more about monarchies and republics and the differences between them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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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.