Author: Michelle Korhonen
A brother and sister enjoy an imaginative game in a domestic garden on a sunny day. Siblings can have a powerful effect on one another. Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images A brother and sister enjoy an imaginative game in a domestic garden on a sunny day. Siblings can have a powerful effect on one another. Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images Here at NPR, we’re willing to bet that those of you who have a sibling probably have something to say about your relationship with them. About 80% of children in the U.S. live with…
In the summer of 2020, the playwright Michael R. Jackson received an unusual message from a fan of A Strange Loop, his musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness through the process of writing a musical about a gay Black man’s path to creative self-awareness. “Can I buy you a bulletproof vest?” the fan inquired over Instagram.Jackson, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for A Strange Loop and lived on a perfectly safe street in Upper Manhattan, had no more conceivable use for body armor or handouts than the next man. He told me about the…
The Supreme Court will hear the case against the abortion pill mifepristone on March 26. It’s part of a two-drug regimen with misoprostol for abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images The Supreme Court will hear the case against the abortion pill mifepristone on March 26. It’s part of a two-drug regimen with misoprostol for abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images A scientific paper that raised concerns about the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone was retracted by its publisher this week. The study…
You’d have to go back to the peak years of Bob Dylan’s cultural relevance, when one critic cum stalker started searching the songwriter’s garbage for clues about his lyrics, to find a musician who attracts as many amateur code breakers as Taylor Swift does. Swift has fed the frenzy by declaring that her songs, her liner notes, her social-media posts—basically everything around her—might have hidden meanings embedded in them. As she told The Washington Post in 2022, she and her fans have “descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.”That scavenger-hunt mentality can lead would-be decoders…
Salt Lake City sits in a bowl of a mountain valley where dirty air can get trapped for days during winter inversions. Kirk Siegler/NPR hide caption toggle caption Kirk Siegler/NPR Salt Lake City sits in a bowl of a mountain valley where dirty air can get trapped for days during winter inversions. Kirk Siegler/NPR SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — When it comes to its chronically poor winter air, Salt Lake City already has topography working against it. Steep mountain ranges on either side of the city create a giant bowl, where dreaded winter temperature inversions trap cold air that stagnates…
In 1815, the head of a boarding school in Maine wrote to Thomas Jefferson asking for some wisdom to pass along to his students. Jefferson responded by sending a passage from a Stoic self-help manual, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, that he had copied down as a teenager to console himself after his father’s death. “If the Wise, be the happy man, as these sages say,” Jefferson paraphrased, “he must be virtuous too; for, without virtue, happiness cannot be.”Who were these other sages? And what was the connection Jefferson saw between virtue and happiness?A reading list that Jefferson first drafted in 1771,…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.The first walk I took by myself after my baby died was just to my neighborhood coffee shop a block away, but it felt like a mile. I had a heavy pad in my underwear because I was still actively bleeding, a belly band velcroed tightly above my C-section scar, and nipple covers tucked into my nursing bra to soak up the last of my milk.Many new mothers have done this walk. But they generally have a baby in their Ergo carrier or nestled…
Listen to this articleProduced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.Football is a complicated sport. Offensive players can move around before the quarterback calls hike, but only certain ones at certain times in certain directions. A defender can rough up a receiver within five yards of the line of scrimmage, but only if he remains in front of the receiver and the contact is continuous; after that, the defender can still make some contact, but only as long as it does not “significantly hinder” the receiver from catching the ball—whatever you interpret that to mean. And that’s…
Scenes from the World Aquatics Championships in Qatar, new lava flows in southwestern Iceland, a freestyle skiing competition in Utah, the one-year-anniversary of a deadly earthquake in Turkey, a Carnival gala on Tenerife, preparations for the Chinese New Year in Beijing, and much more
If winter feels a bit wrong to you these days, you’re right. For the past few months, across the United States, people have been dealing with record-breaking cold temperatures, unusually low snowfall, or dramatic precipitation—phenomena that have become more common recently, as the traditional rhythms of the season have been in flux. Even as some places deal with unexpected cold, winter is shrinking across the globe as a result of human-driven climate change, according to a study published last month in Nature. The planet is rapidly losing its snowpack, and the declines are the most significant in the southwestern and…