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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
OWLS. FINALLY. In no particular order: what’s up with their eyes, legs, hoots, feathers, silent flight, nests, folklore, necks, barfs, conservation status, and omens? Go take a walk or sit on a porch in the dusk and make friends with Rocky. Dr. R.J. “Rocky” Gutiérrez is a celebrated researcher, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, a legend in the owl world, and simply one of the loveliest ologists. He’ll take us on a trip next to a river, scrambling up some trees, over rocky terrain and through the forest to learn why owls are so magnetic. Yeah, I called owls the best bird. Not backing down.
Salman Rushdie lived for decades under a death sentence and survived a knife attack three years ago. His latest book The Eleventh Hour is his first work of fiction since that near-death experience. These short stories and novellas center around the end of life, what might come after, and the idea of personal legacy. In today’s episode, Rushdie joins Here & Now’s Scott Tong for a conversation that touches on mortality, changes to the author’s writing process, and his first ghost story.
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Russia’s been subject to more than 5,000 sanctions since its invasion of Ukraine. Yet many purported allies of Ukraine are still getting Russian oil — directly or indirectly. On today’s show, how governments are straddling the fence and skirting their own sanctions.
Zohran Mamdani has won New York’s mayoral election after defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, making history as the city’s first Muslim mayor and its youngest in more than a century. The 34 year old surged to victory with promises to tax millionaires to pay for expanded social programmes. Meanwhile, Democrats are projected to win governor races in Virginia and New Jersey. Also: a cargo plane has crashed at Louisville airport in Kentucky, sparking a huge fire and killing at least seven people; the UN says new restrictions by the Taliban have forced it to suspend operations at a crucial border crossing between Afghanistan and Iran; Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said his government will seek an independent investigation into a police raid in Rio de Janeiro that left more than 120 people dead; the American man who faked his own death and fled to Scotland after being accused of rape; and Paris residents are offered a chance to be buried alongside the rich and famous.
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With traffic down, gambling down, and hotel prices bottoming out, everyone’s asking: Is Las Vegas dead? Nate and Maria wade into the frenzy with some real data and hard-won experience. They talk about why casinos are struggling, what this indicates for the broader economy, and why high-end steak houses are, in fact, a recession indicator.
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We went live at 9PM as the polls closed in New York City and talked about Zohran, voting demographics, Graham Platner, and the “future of the Democratic party.” Enjoy!
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In the second episode of the lethal injection series, Steve Monacelli and Michael Phillips interview Dick Reavis, a journalist who witnessed the world’s first execution by lethal injection, that of Charlie Brooks in Texas in 1982. They report on how the lethal injection method was improvised after a Dallas reporter won a temporary court order allowing television stations to broadcast executions. Worried that a televised electrocution might turn the public against the death penalty, Texas politicians instead approved lethal injection. An Oklahoma coroner who admitted he had no expertise in chemistry and knew a lot about dead bodies but not “how to get them that way,” improvised the three-drug protocol eventually used by all death-penalty states, with horrifying results. Then, Monacelli and Phillips interview law professor Corinna Lain, who says that rather than a supposedly painless death, lethal injection is more like a slow drowning.
Sources:
Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press, 2025.)
Dick Reavis, “Charlie Brooks’ Last Words,” Texas Monthly (February 1983.)
