A recent episode of Underground History highlighted one archaeologist’s effort to share the wonders of our National Park System in a new way: not through words, but with LEGO vignettes.

By now, you have probably heard that I will be retiring as the host of First Concert at the end of June. It has been an amazing experience for me to discover and share with you so much beautiful music that I was unfamiliar with and enlarge the catalog of classical music here at JPR.

In early February an email arrived from NPR announcing Linda Wertheimer’s retirement. Wertheimer has been an NPR icon for over five decades and, along with Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, and the late Cokie Roberts, was crowned one of NPR’s “founding mothers” in the 2021 bestseller Susan, Linda, Nina & Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR by Lisa Napoli.

I/O is the tenth studio album by English singer-songwriter and musician Peter Gabriel, released December 2023 through Real World Records.

It’s another presidential election year and a reminder that our country still doesn’t have a secure, nationwide e-voting system even following all the turmoil of the 2020 election. We have developed all the technologies we need in order to achieve this―data encryption, two-factor and biometric authentication, smartphones, smart cards, cloud computing, high-speed fiber optic connectivity―and yet here we are, four years later, with the same system.

This past September, a coalition of 22 donors announced a national initiative to strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information with an infusion of more than a half-billion dollars over the next five years.

The following are headlines from a few local news sites on a recent Sunday. In Ashland: “City Council to vote on camping ordinance, consider funding to extend emergency shelter operation.” In Medford: “Medford council worries about draining last federal dollars to help homeless people.” In Grants Pass: “Parents, superintendent want fence between school and homeless campers.” Besides all being about homelessness, there’s another similarity in these stories. None talked about the lack of housing in the Rogue Valley.

Arsenic in green dresses? Lead in make-up? Mercury in feather hats? Oh my. The Underground History podcast has recently been chatting with experts on the many ways toxins and dangerous—and sometimes just gross—things can make their way into museums or even our homes.

Once upon a time, a blue planet orbited a white sun at 67,000 mph in a small solar system located at the edge of a large galaxy hurtling through the vastness of the universe’s mostly empty space at 1.3 million mph. The blue planet was billions of years old and had become home to millions of species of plants and animals that had originated and evolved out of the cosmic chaos of a long-ago exploded star. One of the animals on the blue planet eventually evolved to become a hyper-intelligent being that invented language and began naming things. This animal named itself Homo sapiens (“wise man”) and called the blue planet “Earth” and the galaxy it was in “The Milky Way”.

There is a lot to take in on Sufjan Stevens' Javelin. It’s a beautifully produced, profoundly sad, deep dive into the psyche of a singer/songwriter not afraid to bare his soul if not just for his audience, for his own understanding of life.