Upgrading The Energy Grid; Stopping The Next Extremist Attack; Songs Of Remembrance

Plus, why young professionals are struggling to maintain friendships during the pandemic.

by Jill Hudson Stories You May Have Missed Thomas Shea/AFP via Getty Images The power is back on in Texas. Now comes the recovery — and it won't be cheap. The Texas blackout is another reminder that the entire energy grid needs an upgrade for extreme weather. We asked family and friends who lost loved ones to COVID-19 to share their favorite songs. Here are some of the songs they loved — and why. Just because the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is done, it doesn't mean the story of what happened on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol is over. Listen to the story. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a website to help Americans find locations of COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to increase the pace of vaccinations. At a time when transgender men and women are becoming far more visible in many professions, one trans woman describes coming out while working as a forest ranger in rural upstate New York. Hear the story.    Matthew Mead/AP Good butter should spread easily at room temperature, right? Well, Canadians have been complaining about strangely "hard" butter for weeks. Are there fewer deaths from COVID-19 in “tight” cultures compared to “loose” cultures? Researchers compared the U.S., a “loose” culture with relaxed social norms, to “tight” cultures like Singapore and Taiwan, which have stricter rules and citizens who are more willing to follow the law.  Young professionals are struggling to maintain friendships during the pandemic. Transitioning from college to the working world amid a tough economy and shrinking of social interactions is taking an emotional toll.   Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images President Biden has revoked a controversial classical architecture executive order signed in December by former President Trump.  Known for indelible hits like "One More Time" and "Around the World," the legendary French duo Daft Punk called it quits last week after years of silence. Newsletter continues after sponsor message The Picture Show Kahran and Regis Bethencourt Atlanta photographers Regis and Kahran Bethencourt are making a name for themselves by working with an exclusive and imaginative clientele. Their new book, Glory: Magical Visions of Black Beauty, is a collection of more than 100 portraits of kids who are portrayed as real life versions of their own wildest dreams.  More than four million homes around the country face substantial risk of expensive flood damage, a research organization says. Communities where flood insurance is already unaffordable face potentially catastrophic damage.  Podcasts Of The Week Kristen Uroda for NPR Advocates for diversity in STEM have a saying: You can't be what you can't see. Here are just a few of the many incredible black scientists that have been featured on the Short Wave podcast. Read about them.  The new film Minari follows a Korean-American family who moves to Arkansas in the 1980s to follow their father's dream of becoming a farmer. The grind of trying to make the farm a success strains the parents' marriage and often confounds the kids, but it's a story about the choices families make and the ways they stay together. (Pop Culture Happy Hour) The government used to be afraid to borrow too much money. Today, it borrows hand over fist. And it's ... fine? (Planet Money) Civil rights activist and organizer Bayard Rustin is often overlooked as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. But he was instrumental in the movement and the architect of one of the most influential protests in American history. (Throughline) Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Daily News, Politics, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Best of NPR emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

APOD - The Aurora Tree

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2021 February 28

The Aurora Tree
Image Credit & Copyright: Alyn Wallace

Explanation: Yes, but can your tree do this? Pictured is a visual coincidence between the dark branches of a nearby tree and bright glow of a distant aurora. The beauty of the aurora -- combined with how it seemed to mimic a tree right nearby -- mesmerized the photographer to such a degree that he momentarily forgot to take pictures. When viewed at the right angle, it seemed that this tree had aurora for leaves. Fortunately, before the aurora morphed into a different overall shape, he came to his senses and capture the awe-inspiring momentary coincidence. Typically triggered by solar explosions, aurora are caused by high energy electrons impacting the Earth's atmosphere around 150 kilometers up. The unusual Earth-sky collaboration was witnessed in March of 2017 in Iceland.

Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator
Tomorrow's picture: interstellar fowl

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You Need More Pleasure

Help With Finding The Vaccine Where You Live

Shots Avid Reader Press 'Hunt, Gather, Parent': Lessons From Moms Around The World Parenting is fraught with social and emotional challenges in the best of times. Add a year of forced togetherness and lack of regular school and work routines due to the pandemic, and it can feel downright depressing if your kids are out of control.  Enter the new book by NPR science desk correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff, in which she gathers the parenting wisdom of ancient cultures to help her raise her young daughter, Rosy. Doucleff, a chemist-turned-journalist, was disappointed by the parenting books she’d read, and set out to find better ways of handling her spirited daughter. She details her journey through the Yucatan, the Arctic, and Tanzania in Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. One thing she learned in the Arctic about dealing with kids' temper tantrums is to treat kids calmly, not as a person trying to push your buttons but as an unformed human who has not yet learned how to behave. Read more advice from moms from the Arctic to the Yucatan on how raise resilient, thriving kids. BONUS: Playful ways to help kids control their anger Newsletter continues after sponsor message Becky Harlan/NPR Pleasure Is Essential. Here’s How To Bring More Of It Into Your Life A big thing missing from this pandemic year for many of us is the touch of another person -- the kiss of a lover, the hug of a friend, or even a casual pat on the arm from an acquaintance.  Our friends at NPR's LifeKit report that self-touch is actually quite healing -- it reduces stress, calms nerves, and releases oxytocin -- and it doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. To get started by yourself, experts say to slow down and get curious about what feels good to you -- Maybe it's a long walk, maybe it's a bubble bath. Read on for more tips about how to treat yourself with care. BONUS: How to do relaxing self-massage with a foam roller   Michele Abercrombie/NPR CDC Launches Web Tool To Help Americans Track Down COVID-19 Vaccines Frustrated trying to find out where and when you can get your shot? No wonder. It’s different in nearly every state and county, as we reported last week when we released our guide to getting started. Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a web tool that promises to show potential patients where the providers are and how to make an appointment. It also shows how much vaccine is available.  While other private services have sprung up to try to help connect patients with shots, the government’s site, called VaccineFinder, doesn’t rely on manual input from volunteers - it requires health providers to report inventories every 24 hours. (Also, psst - VaccineFinder isn’t new -- it’s an expansion of a program that’s been available to help find flu shots and other vaccines for years.) Read on to find out more about how VaccineFinder is expected to expand as more vaccines are released. BONUS: Reflecting on our losses as the U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpassed 500,000   More of this week's health stories from NPR ‘Buttergate’: Canadians Spread Reports Of Hard Butter Can You Catch Coronavirus From Frozen Food? You’re More Likely To Win The Lottery ​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​Is Tattoo Ink Toxic? The Fight Over Banned Pigments​​​​​​​ Scientists Talked To People And They Answered We hope you enjoyed these stories. Find more of NPR's health journalism on Shots and follow us on Twitter at @NPRHealth. Your Shots editors   Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: shots@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Goats & Soda, Daily News, Best of NPR and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Health emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

FDA Authorizes Johnson & Johnson's One-Shot COVID-19 Vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration gave Johnson & Johnson's vaccine the green light for emergency use Saturday, a day after a panel of advisers to the agency endorsed it in a unanimous vote.

FDA Authorizes Johnson & Johnson's One-Shot COVID-19 Vaccine The Food and Drug Administration gave Johnson & Johnson's vaccine the green light for emergency use Saturday, a day after a panel of advisers to the agency endorsed it in a unanimous vote. Read More You received this message because you're subscribed to Breaking News Alerts emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy

APOD - Perseverance Landing Site from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2021 February 27

Perseverance Landing Site from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Explanation: Seen from orbit a day after a dramatic arrival on the martian surface, the Perseverance landing site is identified in this high-resolution view from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter's camera image also reveals the location of the Mars 2020 mission descent stage, heat shield, and parachute and back shell that delivered Perseverance to the surface of Mars. Each annotated inset box spans 200 meters (650 feet) across the floor of Jezero Crater. Perseverance is located at the center of the pattern created by rocket exhaust as the descent stage hovered and lowered the rover to the surface. Following the sky crane maneuver, the descent stage itself flew away to crash at a safe distance from the rover, its final resting place indicated by a dark V-shaped debris pattern. Falling to the surface nearby after their separation in the landing sequence, heat shield, parachute and back shell locations are marked in the high-resolution image from Mars orbit.

Tomorrow's picture: northern lights

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‘Liner Notes For The Revolution’: An Interview With Daphne A. Brooks

Plus, check out all our Black History Month Tiny Desk concerts.

by Marissa Lorusso and Lyndsey McKenna Courtesy of Harvard University Press “How is it possible for Black women popular musicians (an Aretha, a Whitney, a Beyoncé) — some of the most widely imitated artists in the world — to exist simultaneously at the fringe and yet at the center of the culture industry?” That’s the question at the heart of Liner Notes For The Revolution: The Intellectual Life Of Black Feminist Sound, the exceptional new book by Daphne A. Brooks, writer and professor at Yale University. It’s a fascinating read that centers Black women as artists, archivists and critics in the making of American culture. In this interview, we asked her a few questions about how the project came to be and what music fueled her writing sessions. NPR Music: Let’s start with the title. You talk in the introduction about how liner notes help develop canonical perspectives on popular music, using the exquisite phrase “a discursive dialectical jam session” to describe the book itself. How did the project come to be?  Daphne A. Brooks: In many ways, this is a project that’s been living inside of me since I was 12 years old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and spending all of my time at Tower Records hunting for records and reading Rolling Stone magazine. I was obsessed with rock music criticism, in part because as an African American tween interested in a broad swath of popular music culture, I was hungry for critical conversations about the music that I was hearing outside of my family’s home (the place where I was surrounded by a dreamy elixir of my parents’ beloved big-band records and my older siblings’ passion for soul and disco). No one was listening to The Clash at my house. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t find myself in that criticism, nor could I find any extensive, sustained, rigorous and passionate interest in Black women’s groundbreaking musicianship. The book I ended up writing was an attempt to explore not only the astonishing work of Black women artists across the centuries but to also account for the feminist critics who cared for their work. I also knew that I would have to address some of those lingering blindspots in popular music criticism that I’d first encountered all those years ago. We’re curious: What music soundtracked your trips to the archives and long writing sessions? I’ve been working on this book for so long that I’ve ultimately cycled through many playlists. But one album that I lived inside of for a very long time was (and still is) Don’t Fight the Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live at the Fillmore West, the multi-disc recordings of Aretha Franklin’s historic concerts at that legendary venue. I went back to it again and again — not only because of its wide and majestic sweep, the palpable energy and improvisatory abandon of Aretha Franklin working in the round with saxophonist Curtis Ousley (King Curtis, who would die tragically later that same year), Ray Charles and Billy Preston but because it conveys this warm, communal energy. It reminded me of the worldmaking powers of the women in my book. Nina Simone’s 1959’s Little Girl Blue was and is another favorite because it’s just such a dazzling statement about the nature of virtuosity.  Much of Liner Notes is about Black women creators who were – and weren’t – in dialogue with each other, within their own historical moments and also across time. Whom do you picture your book being in conversation with? Artists as well as fans. I suspect my fellow critics will likely be conversing with me about this book, and I welcome that! But what I’ve loved watching across the years as I’ve been writing this book is the number of Black women musicians who’ve asserted their love for reading about the history of Black women in popular music culture: the late jazz genius Geri Allen read the work of and collaborated with scholar Farah Griffin (author of books on Billie Holiday and Mary Lou Williams); the brilliant folk and roots music wonder Valerie June has talked about reading Gayle Wald’s pioneering work on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; and I watched Toshi Reagon swoon over Maureen Mahon’s new book on African American women and rock and roll. I wrote this book with a belief that a whole range of Black women musicians are some of our most prodigious grassroots intellectuals and public historians. I hope that it might speak to them. I also hope that it will speak to the next generation of feminist music fans — women of color and their white allies — who might draw inspiration to write about the sounds that they care about, the records they collect, the archives that they are building for themselves and for others. Also, of course, there are key interlocutors who figure prominently in this book: critics like Greil Marcus, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Griffin, Gayle Wald, Sonnet Retman, Kara Keeling, Jacqueline Stewart, John Jeremiah Sullivan. Black studies heavyweights like Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison are huge influences on my work as well.  The book focuses both on Black women performers and Black women critics, highlighting what you call “the urgent need for rock lit and Black studies to ‘speak’ to each other.” Why does this feel so critical for you? The history of popular music culture in America is inextricably linked to the matter of Black life. From the blackface minstrelsy sounds that informed the 19th-century folk Americana songbook and the world of early musical theatre to the blues forms that constitute the DNA of our sonic world today, this country’s racial catastrophe, its brutal subjugation of Black peoples from the time of captivity through the long era of Jim Crow segregation and the fraught battles waged by a people to achieve social and political equality are the reasons why we have these musical forms. African Americans miraculously made music in spite of and oftentimes because of the gross insult of systemic racism. Rock and roll (as well as our other signature popular sounds — from jazz to hip hop) is soaked in this history, emerged out of this history. The stories that rock lit likes to tell about this music could be enlivened, sharpened, deepened, widened, in my opinion, by having to account for all of this. Black studies enables rock lit to go deep. Overall, what do you hope readers will take away from Liner Notes for the Revolution? The history of taste-making and cultural criticism in this country is an undemocratic one. In spite of this, however, Black women musicians as well as the feminist critics who showed serious interest in them and the fans who adored them — all matter. Newsletter continues after sponsor message New Music This week, All Songs Considered features a brilliant collaboration between Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Matt Sweeney and Tuareg musician Mdou Moctar and a stream-of-consciousness guitar tune from Francis of Delirium, and closes out with a couple tracks of tonal calm. On New Music Friday from All Songs Considered: the beautiful and heartbreaking new album from Julien Baker, a stirring collection of modern protest songs from Chris Pierce, contorted pop from Jimmy Edgar and more great new albums out Feb. 26. Featuring On Monday, Daft Punk officially called it quits in a cryptic video message. Only time can tell what the French dance duo’s legacy will be, but as an early postmortem, we asked NPR Music staff and contributors to assess the band’s origins and impact.  Rising rapper Bobby Shmurda’s story – from viral fame to incarceration – was the focus of a three-episode arc of NPR Music’s Louder Than A Riot podcast; on Tuesday, he was granted a conditional release from New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility. Hosts Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden explained what’s next for Bobby Shmurda and what questions remain on All Things Considered.  Another update on a story featured on Louder Than A Riot: New Orleans rapper Mac Phipps has been in prison since being convicted on charges of manslaughter in 2001, though he has maintained that he is innocent of the crime. This week, Phipps was recommended for clemency, putting him one step closer to freedom. From NPR Live Sessions: Watch Grammy nominees Black Pumas perform from Austin, Texas, for WXPN’s Virtual Free at Noon series.  Tiny Desk NPR This week, we asked Lauren Onkey, NPR Music's senior director, to recap the Tiny Desk's Black History Month spotlight. All month long, Tiny Desk celebrated Black History Month by featuring Tiny Desk (home) concerts and playlists by Black artists spanning genres and generations. We published the grand finale this week, a spirit-filled, joyous performance by gospel legend Kirk Franklin. Bobby Carter, who produced the month of shows, described it this way: "Franklin and his powerhouse choir pace through a decades-long, 16 Grammy award winning discography of faith, praise and encouragement while cracking plenty of jokes. I cannot recall a more moving Tiny Desk home performance."    Bobby put together a roster of artists that speaks “to the diversity and complexity of Black music—where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going.” Jazz, R&B, hip-hop, gospel, Afrobeat and indie rock were all represented. Concerts were filmed in Zambia, Brooklyn, Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center, even in a nail salon in Atlanta—and many points in between.   Artists were asked to name some of their inspirations, and they shared powerful stories of family members, especially elders and Black creatives working in many different fields: writers James Baldwin, Jayne Cortez, Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange; musicians from James Cleveland to Puffy to Sun Ra and lots more.   We also dug into the archives to highlight shows with similar themes. Guest curators assembled playlists featuring performances from 2009 to the present.   Thirteen vibrant new shows, and 20 blasts from the past – there’s your weekend plans, right there. Incoming If you feel like you could use a laugh, we’ve got just the thing. On Tuesday, March 2, check out a live, virtual evening of comedy from Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! One More Thing 👠 If the shoe fits... Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music! You received this message because you're subscribed to NPR Music emails. 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