The Daily Folgen

Air travel was a mess over the holidays — in the last 10 days of December, 30,000 flights were canceled. While every airline was affected, one stood out: Southwest, which over the past few decades has transformed how Americans fly, melted down. In the last 10 days of the year, it canceled as many flights as it had done in the previous 10 months. So what went wrong?Guest: Niraj Chokshi, a business reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Southwest’s crisis shows what can go wrong when a company relied on by millions of people moves too slowly to invest in unglamorous parts of its operation.The airline’s customers incurred thousands in expenses as they scrambled to get home. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker of the House turned into a rolling disaster last week, played out over five long days and 15 rounds of voting. Today, the inside story of how it went so wrong — and what he was forced to give up in order to finally win.Guest: Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. McCarthy’s slog to the speakership ended with a remarkably public show of intraparty strife during a history-making overnight session.The speaker’s concessions have given the rebels on the right flank of his party more tools to sow disarray.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

On Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima, Peru. She was headed for Panguana, a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon, where for three years she had lived, on and off, with her mother, Maria, and her father, Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke, both zoologists.About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, was struck by lightning and broke apart. Strapped to her seat, Juliane fell some 10,000 feet, nearly two miles. Her row of seats is thought to have landed in dense foliage, cushioning the impact. Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash.LANSA Flight 508 was the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history.In the 50 years since the crash, Juliane moved to Germany, earned a Ph.D. in biology, became an eminent zoologist, got married — and, after her father’s death, took over as director of Panguana and the primary organizer of expeditions to the refuge.To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.