Year: 2021

Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai made an assault allegation in November, then disappeared from the public eye. She has since re-emerged, but in protest of her treatment, the Women’s Tennis Association’s has now suspended all tournaments in China.

That decision by the WTA could cost the organization and its players hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe more, in revenue. And it’s the threat of losing that kind of money that usually keeps most professional sports organizations — like the NBA — treading lightly in response to China.

NPR correspondent Tom Goldman has been following the story and looks at how the WTA’s unflinching support for Peng may inspire a wider outcry over China’s actions.

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Banning books from classrooms and school libraries is nothing new, but it’s recently become a topic of considerable political debate. How should parents react to this news, and to the books their children are reading?

In this episode of NPR’s It’s Been A Minute senior editor Barrie Hardymon and Traci Thomas, host of The Stacks podcast, joined guest host Ayesha Rascoe to talk about banned book lists.The three talk about why it’s important for kids to discover books freely, even if that means starting a hard conversation with them. They also discuss their favorite — and least favorite — books that often show up on banned book lists.

It was only a matter of time before cases of the COVID-19 omicron variant started popping up in the U.S., and now, it’s here. Although it’s too early to tell how this virus strain will spread, the threat it poses has already lit a fire under public health messaging.

President Biden announced a new strategy to avoid a winter surge of cases that involves free at-home testing, a vaccine booster messaging campaign and heightened international travel safeguards.

Meanwhile, the race is on to detect how omicron is already spreading in this country. NPR reporter Will Stone gives us a look into what’s happening in labs right now across the country.

And Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, discusses what we know about how effective travel bans are scenarios like this.

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Buying stuff is a part of this country’s DNA. It’s a tradition that really took off near the end of World War II, when the American economy was thriving and the market exploded with products Americans didn’t even know they wanted. And even in an economy rocked by a pandemic, buying is on track to exceed 2020 levels this holiday season.

The result of all that spending means consumption drives 70% of our country’s GDP, but it’s also the leading driver of nearly every environmental issue our planet faces.

Journalist J.B. MacKinnon, who also wrote “The Day the World Stops Shopping, How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves,” discusses how curbing consumption could positively affect a warming planet.

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Getting an abortion in Mississippi has never been easy, but it hasn’t been impossible. Now, a case before the Supreme Court that centers on a clinic in Mississippi could upend abortion rights for pregnant people across the country.

Today, the conservative-leaning court heard arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The clinic, which is the only abortion provider remaining in Mississippi, is challenging a 2018 state law that bans termination after 15 weeks of pregnancy. If the court upholds the law, it would reverse its own precedent by allowing states to interfere with the right to abortion at that stage of pregnancy.

NPR Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg, SCOTUS Blog’s Tom Goldstein, and Florida State University Law Professor Mary Ziegler parse the arguments and weigh in on the possibilities on how the justices could rule.

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After years of jokes about unsuccessful Infrastructure Weeks, months of deliberation, and bouts of gridlock on the political left, a $1.2 trillion package made its way through Congress at long last. The president signed it into law earlier this month. Now, the challenge of actually getting the money where it needs to be remains.

NPR’s White House Correspondent Franco Ordonez followed President Biden around the country earlier this month to report on the changes to come, now that the bill is law.

And NPR’s National Desk Correspondent Nathan Rott reports on the portions of the infrastructure package that address resilience and protecting communities historically hit hardest by climate change.

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The World Health Organization is warning that the omicron variant of the coronavirus, which was first detected in South Africa, has a “very high” global risk because of the possibility that it spreads more easily and might resist vaccines and immunity in people who were infected with previous strains.

On Monday, President Joe Biden said this this variant is a “cause for concern, not a cause for panic.” He urged Americans to get fully vaccinated and get a booster dose if they qualify.

WHO spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris explains what more there is to learn about the severity and transmission of this new variant.

And Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) discusses why vaccine hesitation on a global scale could make this next phase of the pandemic more dangerous.

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This Thanksgiving week, we’re sharing a segment from our special series Play It Forward, in which artists tell us about their own music and the musicians who inspire them.

This episode, opera singer and funk keyboardist Constance Hauman speaks to Ari Shapiro about her new album, Tropical Thunderstorm, her experiences as a multi-genre musician and an artist she’s grateful for: Daf player Asal Malekzadeh.

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For Thanksgiving Day, we’re sharing a segment from our special series Play It Forward, in which artists tell us about their own music and the musicians who inspire them.

In this episode, funk legend George Clinton speaks to Ari Shapiro about the longevity and enduring influence of his band, Parliament-Funkadelic, being a hype man for other musicians, and an artist he’s grateful for: opera singer and funk keyboardist Constance Hauman.

On tomorrow’s episode: Constance Hauman plays it forward.

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The commonly-told version of the first Thanksgiving story leaves out a lot: The indigenous Wampanoag people who lived in a complex society long before the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock; Squanto escaping bondage in Spain before becoming an emissary to the Pilgrims; and the long legacy of violent displacement that followed.

Paula Peters, a writer and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, still lives near where the Pilgrims made landfall on her ancestral homeland. She talks about how the 1621 feast fits into history.

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