Short Wave Folgen

James West has been a curious tinkerer since he was a child, always wondering how things worked. Throughout his long career in STEM, he's also been an advocate for diversity and inclusion — from co-founding the Association for Black Laboratory Employees in 1970 to his work today with The Ingenuity Project, a non-profit that cultivates math and science skills in middle and high school students in Baltimore public schools. Host Maddie Sofia talks to him about his life, career, and about how a device he helped invent in the 60's made their interview possible.Email us at shortwave@npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Can people who are vaccinated still carry and transmit the coronavirus to other people? How effective are the vaccines against coronavirus variants? And what's the deal with side effects? In this episode, an excerpt of Maddie's appearance on another NPR podcast, It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, where she answered those questions and more. Listen to 'It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders' on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Email us at shortwave@npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

To round out our celebration of Black History Month, we're bringing you a special episode featuring acclaimed science fiction writer Octavia Butler from our friends at NPR's history podcast Throughline.Octavia Butler's alternate realities and 'speculative fiction' reveal striking, and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today. She was a deep observer of the human condition, perplexed and inspired by our propensity towards self-destruction. Butler was also fascinated by the cyclical nature of history, and often looked to the past when writing about the future. Along with her warnings is her message of hope — a hope conjured by centuries of survival and persistence. For every society that perished in her books, came a story of rebuilding, of repair. Read Throughline's article about Octavia Butler.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy