The first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer prize winner for penning Beloved and a mentor to millions, among many other things, Toni Morrison lived unapologetically but with unmatched empathy, intelligence and insightfulness. She famously told Terry Gross (of NPR’s Fresh Air) that she “regret[s] everything” about her life. She explained in a 2015 interview, “Now that I’m 84, I remember everything …
NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series works to flip the script of various industries’ histories. One edition celebrates the women that invented the genre of American popular music: Bessie, Maybelle, Billie, Marian, Ella, Mary Lou, Celia and Rosetta. “The goal is to free the music of women and others who don’t fit the dominant straight-white-male paradigm from special categories, and put it at the center, where …
Fungi’s Many Life-Changing Uses While there are 144,000 discovered species of fungi on the planet, there could be many more—millions more, in fact. But finding fungi and sorting out whether or not they contain any useful chemical compounds comes down to chance. The serendipity, scientists argue, is what led to great discoveries like penicillin—so hope for similar-level finds persists. Recent tests may have uncovered compounds …
