Two years ago, a massive protest movement swept through Iraq. People were angry about corruption and a lack of basic services like electricity and health care in a country that brings in billions of dollars in oil revenue each year. That protest movement culminated in a parliamentary election, held earlier this month. NPR international correspondent Ruth Sherlock reported on the election closely from inside Iraq. Through her reporting, and in conversation with host Ari Shapiro , Ruth explains wh...
Oct 28, 2021•15 min
Last summer, when former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen sat down to tape their podcast, the country was facing a pandemic, joblessness and a contentious election. And their conversations, they say, were an effort to offer some perspective and an attempt to try and find a unifying story for the country. The two talked about their dads, race, and the future of the country. Those conversations have now become a book, titled Renegades: Born in the U.S.A. — and they spoke to Audie Corni...
Oct 27, 2021•15 min
The CDC has now released booster guidance for all three vaccines available in the U.S. — making tens of millions of people eligible for another shot. And on Tuesday, an FDA panel met to review data from Pfizer on their vaccine for children ages 5 - 11. NPR's Alison Aubrey explains what those data say about the vaccine — and how it might be rolled out. Pediatrician Dr. Reah Boyd tells NPR how she's talking to parents about vaccinating their young children. Additional reporting in this episode fro...
Oct 26, 2021•13 min
School board members across the country are being intimidated and threatened. Now the National School Boards Association wants the federal government to step in. The group said in a recent letter to President Biden that acts of school board harassment and confrontations seem to be coordinated. The online newsletter Popular Information has written about national groups targeting school boards . NPR Ed correspondent Anya Kamenetz travelled to Gwinnett County, Georgia, where school board members ha...
Oct 25, 2021•13 min
This episode is from our friends at Wisdom From The Top . From the creator of How I Built This, host Guy Raz invites you to listen in as he talks to leadership experts and the visionary leaders of some of the world's biggest brands. Along the way, you'll hear accounts of crisis, failure, turnaround, and triumph, as the leaders reveal their secrets on their way to the top. These are stories that didn't make it into their company bios, and valuable lessons for anyone trying to make it in business....
Oct 24, 2021•59 min
A record 4.3 million workers in America quit their jobs in August. Anthony Klotz coined this ongoing phenomenon "The Great Resignation." Klotz is an organizational psychologist at Texas A&M University. In part, he says, the pandemic has made workers reevaluate what they are actually getting out of their jobs. "During the pandemic, because there was a lot of death and illness and lockdowns, we really had the time and the motivation to sit back and say, do I like the trajectory of my life? Am ...
Oct 22, 2021•13 min
Last week the White House announced a plan to help move the port of Los Angeles into 24/7 operating status. But that will only "open the gates" of the clogged global supply chain, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told NPR on the NPR Politics Podcast. Another crucial supply chain link is the trucking industry, which is short tens of thousands of drivers. Bruce Basada, President of the Diesel Driving Academy in Shreveport, Louisiana, explains why. The clogged supply chain is leading to dela...
Oct 21, 2021•13 min
Since 2016, a number of U.S. diplomats and federal employees have reported symptoms of a mysterious illness, the so-called Havana Syndrome. The list of symptoms include hearing loud sounds, nausea fatigue, and dizzying migraines, among others. The cause of this mystery illness is a source of curiosity, but it remains unknown. Last year the State Department commissioned a study by the National Academies of Sciences for researchers to investigate Havana Syndrome. NPR's Sarah McCammon spoke to Dr. ...
Oct 20, 2021•13 min
Colin Powell's life was marked by public service, first as a soldier in Vietnam and then eventually as President George W. Bush's secretary of state. By that time he had already held many prominent positions in government, including national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the first African American to hold each of these roles. But Powell's story will always be entwined with the Iraq War. Although he argued against the invasion in private White House meetings, ...
Oct 19, 2021•12 min
One of the killings that sparked racial justice protests last year is again in the national spotlight, with a trial that begins this week in Brunswick, Ga. Three white men are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man shot and killed as he was jogging down a residential street. NPR correspondent Debbie Elliott reports on the defendants' expected arguments and the evidence stacked against them in a trial that serves as yet another test case for racial justice. In participating r...
Oct 18, 2021•11 min
After the protests last year, we heard the phrase "racial reckoning" a lot, as some groups of people struggled to catch up with what's just been reality for many others. On this episode of NPR's new Book of the Day podcast , we've got two books that might help you reckon with that reckoning, in two different ways: Traci Todd and illustrator Christian Robinson's bright and powerful picture book biography Nina: A Story of Nina Simone and poet Claudia Rankine's Just Us: An American Conversation , i...
Oct 17, 2021•19 min
Large parts of the West have been hot and dry for so long that reservoirs are running low and some communities are mandating conservation. California is talking about a statewide mandate, too. Meanwhile, farmers are preparing to flood their fields to replenish aquifers, while ranchers are selling off parts of their herds and worried about feeding the rest. NPR's Dan Charles reports from California and NPR's Kirk Siegler reports from North Dakota. Also in this episode: water rights lawyer Christi...
Oct 15, 2021•15 min
Patricia Maginnis, who was 93 when she died on August 30, may have been the first person to publicly call for abortion to be completely decriminalized in America. Despite her insistence on direct action on abortion-rights at a time when many were uncomfortable even saying the word "abortion," Maginnis is not a bold letter name of the movement. That may be because she didn't seek the limelight and she cared more for action then self-presentation. Guests include Lili Loofborow, who profiled Maginn...
Oct 14, 2021•15 min
Hate and division on Facebook are not just a problem in the U.S. That's one of the messages whistleblower Frances Haugen took to Congress last week, where she accused Facebook's algorithms of quote, "literally fanning ethnic violence in Ethiopia," a country that's endured nearly a year of civil war. Freelance reporter Zecharias Zelalem has been keeping track of how inflammatory posts on Facebook have led to attacks in the real world. And NPR's East Africa Correspondent Eyder Peralta describes wh...
Oct 13, 2021•12 min
In many parts of the U.S., China remains a huge business opportunity despite recent friction. That's the country where Apple makes its phones and Nike stitches its shoes. Yet inside the Washington Beltway, China is a security threat. Full stop. It's one of the few things Democrats, Republicans and most everyone else in the capital agree on. NPR correspondents Greg Myre and John Ruwitch report on this gap between how China is viewed in Washington policy circles and how many outside the proverbial...
Oct 12, 2021•11 min
After decades of Indigenous stories told by non-Natives, two shows from this past year signal a change. Reservation Dogs from FX on Hulu was created by and stars Native people. It follows four Indigenous teenagers growing up on a reservation in rural Oklahoma, with dreams of adventuring to California. Vincent Schilling , a Native journalist and critic for Rotten Tomatoes, calls Reservation Dogs 'a show about Native American resilience.' Rutherford Falls is a sitcom on NBC's streaming platform, P...
Oct 11, 2021•12 min
Thirty-five years ago, Janet Jackson released an album that changed the course of her career, and of pop music. Control took over radio, reinvented the playbook for Black artists crossing over into pop and ushered in a whole new sound for R&B. But after the wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, Janet's reputation took a hit, and she's yet to receive the flowers she deserves. In this episode of NPR's It's Been A Minute , host Sam Sanders wants to set the record straight. ...
Oct 10, 2021•43 min
Last month, R&B singer R. Kelly was found guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking. Days later, a judge suspended Jamie Spears as the conservator of his daughter Britney Spears' estate. While these cases are completely unrelated, they do have one crucial thing in common: a massive online following, and an ecosystem of think pieces and documentaries that fuel conversation online. NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans discusses the role documentary series have played in cases like R. Kelly's and Brit...
Oct 08, 2021•13 min
One day after a worldwide outage on multiple of its platforms, Facebook was accused by a whistleblower of hiding concerns about its products from the public and its shareholders. Both crises reveal the same thing: just how powerful Facebook is on a global scale. Ayman El Tarabishy of George Washington University explains what Monday's outage meant to small businesses around the world. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on...
Oct 07, 2021•14 min
Meth-related overdoses have tripled in recent years. In the west, 70 percent of police departments identify meth as their biggest problem. Now one state — California — is on the brink of implementing a major new treatment program that would pay drug users to stay clean. KQED 's April Dembosky reports. The meth surge has hit some Black and Native American communities the hardest. NPR's addiction correspondent Brian Mann has this look at what kind of help people in those communities say they need....
Oct 06, 2021•14 min
Children being born now will experience extreme climate events at a rate that is two to seven times higher than people born in 1960, according to a new study in the journal Science. The researchers compared a person born in 1960 with a child who was six years old in 2020. That six-year-old will experience twice as many cyclones and wildfires, three times as many river floods, four times as many crop failures and five times as many droughts. Read more about the study here. These extreme changes n...
Oct 05, 2021•15 min
Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all on the decline in the U.S. — with September marking a turning point in the delta surge. Vaccination rates continue to tick up and will be helped along by more workplace vaccine rules, including one from the Department of Labor. That rule, which has yet to be released, will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports on the small agency with a big task. Vaccine rules have been implemented successfully at bi...
Oct 04, 2021•13 min
People are likely to be confused by climate change terms like "mitigation" and "carbon neutral," according to a recent study . Yet, these terms are ubiquitous in climate research and reports that are meant to be accessible to a general audience. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy...
Oct 03, 2021•11 min
Michelle Zauner is best known as the frontwoman of indie rock band Japanese Breakfast and like most musicians, she's trying to tell a personal story through her music. But she's spent the last couple of years composing music that has nothing to do with her — for a video game soundtrack. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy...
Oct 01, 2021•11 min
Like lawmakers across the country, the Republican majority in Texas is getting ready to redraw the lines that define state and congressional voting districts. Those lines cement the shape of political power in the state for the next decade — and it's perfectly legal for the party in power to draw them to its own advantage. Texas Tribune reporter James Barragán and Michael Li of the Brennan Center discuss redistricting in Texas, and around the country. In participating regions, you'll also hear a...
Sep 30, 2021•13 min
Thousands of Haitian migrants who had gathered on the southern border were deported back to their home country last week, even though some of them haven't lived there for a decade. They'd been living in Chile. But increasingly, Haitians in that country are fleeing, in response to a pandemic-battered economy, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and new government policies. All those factors are not disappearing any time soon — and neither is the flow of migrants out of the country, says Chilean jour...
Sep 29, 2021•13 min
Retail experts are already warning of delays, shortages, and price hikes this holiday shopping season as the pandemic continues to disrupt global supply chains. NPR's Scott Horsley reports on the interconnected nature of those chains — and what happens when a single part delays manufacturing by months at a time. University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson explains why labor-related delays and shortages are not going away any time soon. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local new...
Sep 28, 2021•14 min
Some city and state workers around the country have already begun to resist workplace vaccination rules on religious grounds. Soon those rules will be the norm in the private sector too, with the Biden administration's announcement this month that businesses with 100 or more employees must require those employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. NPR correspondents Andrea Hsu and Shannon Bond explain what the law says about religious exemptions to vaccine rules in the workplace. In par...
Sep 27, 2021•11 min
It's one of the most common and perplexing friend mysteries out there - when friends ghost friends. In this episode of NPR's Invisibilia , they examine a contemporary real-life ghost story to see why we're so haunted. Also, a listener attempts to find the friend who got away. And finally, we offer a new way to think about friendship endings. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Pr...
Sep 26, 2021•48 min
Every generation has its musical "boogeyman." The Rolling Stones, N.W.A., Madonna. And the latest musician to be inducted into this notorious list is Lil Nas X. Not only has he broken Billboard records , he's breaking barriers. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy...
Sep 24, 2021•12 min
