Jessica Miller

The Brooklyn Folk Festival's Annual Banjo Toss Competition lets people find some catharsis from playing the banjo, by throwing one into the Gowanus Canal.

Listen to Leonard up his street cred, all while informing our listeners about jurisprudence. If you don't know, now you know.

Daniel Handler on who he reads, how he writes, where he writes, and a few extra things too.

Today's guests tell us what they like to cook up in a snowstorm!

The Emmy Award-winning actress filled in for Leonard, and lent her expertise to Please Explain about acting.

Last week, Lisa-ann Gershwin, Director of the Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services and author of Stung!, called us all the way from Tasmania to talk about jellyfish. She explained that the recent surge in the global jellyfish population is more than just a pain in the neck (or side, or leg...) for beach swimmers. As it turns out jellies also pose a serious threat to our global infrastructure.

"There have been some amazing things that jellyfish have been getting up to -- behaving very, very badly," she says.

So we weren't all that surprised to see that jellyfish are making headlines again. The New York Times reported today that, "in an episode that evokes B-grade sci-fi movie plots from the 1950s," a bloom of moon jellyfish in the Baltic Sea brought down a nuclear reactor in southeastern Sweden.

The cooling system intake pipes at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant became clogged by the otherwise innocuous animal, forcing a shut down. The plant's operator said a similar incident occurred in 2005.

The pipes have been unclogged... for now, but engineers are concerned a new jellyfish bloom could be lurking just around the corner. Cue Jaws music.

 

On Monday, Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard was on The Leonard Lopate Show to talk about how coastal communities along the East Coast – including New York City - are adapting to rising sea levels and the ongoing threat of repeated floods. In her article “Under Water,” Sheppard wrote that, although Hurricane Sandy might have been a “100-year flood,” city officials have been repeatedly warned that global warming and rising water levels leave New York increasingly susceptible to major amounts of flooding.

Dr. Brett Singer, Staff Scientist and Principal Investigator in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was recently on the Leonard Lopate Show to talk about indoor air pollution caused by cooking. According to the Berkeley Lab's study, the long term health effects of indoor pollutants is on par with that of car accidents and infectious disease, and the pollution we create in our kitchens can be a large part of that problem. Dr. Singer shared a few tips about cooking safely.

Since its inception, American Prairie Reserve has raised $60 million from well-known, ultra-rich donors in an effort to create a national park in Montana that would be about the size ...

In 1918 Irving Berlin composed a show tune called "God Bless America." But he never would have imagined that his work would eventually become a nationally known patriotic anthem. Sher...

Last Tuesday, Senator Wendy Davis filibustered her way to the national stage after spending nearly 11 hours speaking in order to block Senate Bill 5 from passing in the Texas legislat...

It may be hard to believe, but just one month ago, the United States was a very different place to live. There were historic Supreme Court decisions out on affirmative action, votin...

In his most recent New Yorker article, George Packer describes Silicon Valley's biggest blind spot: namely, that its wealth and its youthful demographics has given way to a distinct...

Mexico City is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with close to 20 million people living within its borders. For its residents, it is also an incredibly polluted...

Facebook issued a statement Tuesday saying it had failed to effectively remove misogynistic images and language from its pages. The announcement is in response to a campaign led by f...

There was no prom for the high school seniors of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The prom, along with other normal high school end-of-the-year activities in these schools were cancelled ...

Jennifer Tolbert, director of State Health Reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation, responds to listener questions and concerns about the Affordable Care Act.

The Intensive Care Unit of a hospital is a place most of us hope we’ll never get to know. But for some families, these places can suddenly become all too familiar. Other people, like ...