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May 12 2024 — PROVINCETOWN, MA — (16:31 ) When fishing boats go down at sea, coastal communities seem to grieve with one heart. For fishermen and their loved ones, every day is a risk they take to be able to work at sea. In this short film, fishing families share their heartbreaking stories.

Popular science books invited families—especially children—to explore acoustics through hands-on experiments, transforming sound from an invisible mystery into something that could be observed, understood, and enjoyed.

In 1777, the German physicist Ernst Chladni, who would later be crowned the Father of Acoustics, designed an experiment that revolutionized our understanding of sound. After placing grains of sand on a thin metal plate and drawing a violin bow along one edge, Chladni watched in wonder as the sand danced and jiggled into surprising shapes—all perfectly even and symmetrical, but changing their formations depending on how the bow was used. In their beauty and complexity, these shapes (which the physicist himself cannily called “Chladni figures”) seemed to be arranged by invisible hands. In one simple and elegant experiment, sound had become visible.

Here at last was clear proof that sound was not produced by generating tiny particles of matter within air, as the dominant theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries had insisted, but was instead the result of vibrations from waves. While earlier claims about the wave-like properties of sound (which in fact date back to Aristotle’s Physics) had fallen mostly on deaf ears, Chladni’s experiment provided undeniable evidence that sound was caused by waves that could move through both air and matter.

How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.

The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.

For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.

Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.

Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.

Last week, the Justice Department deleted thousands of press releases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection and other matters. Here they are.

The Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov. 

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

This comprehensive report sheds new light on the ongoing capitulation of major media, tech and telecom companies to the dictates of a bigoted and corrupt administration.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, most of the nation’s largest media companies have retreated from prior commitments to promote diversity, equity and inclusion principles in their workplaces, policies and reporting. Their backsliding is another form of capitulation to a White House that’s determined to whitewash U.S. history by erasing the accomplishments of the civil rights movement and marginalizing communities of color.

Free Press has documented the media’s retreat in COMPLICIT: Corporate Media’s Capitulation to Trump’s Attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This comprehensive report sheds new light on the ongoing capitulation of major media, tech and telecom companies to the dictates of a bigoted and corrupt administration. 

Timing, talent, and purpose compelled Michael Doucet, the leader of BeauSoleil for fifty-two years, to “Cajunize” the United States. Performing in every US state and 19 other countries, BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet spread Cajun music vast distances beyond southwest Louisiana’s bayous and dancehalls. During the band’s half-century of travel, Doucet accumulated two-and-a-half-million miles on merely one of the airlines he flies. 

Doucet has recorded twenty-six albums with BeauSoleil, five with the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, and a handful of solo releases. With BeauSoleil, he claimed two Grammy Awards from the band’s eleven nominations.  

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities has named Doucet the 2026 Humanist of the Year. The honor recognizes Doucet’s revitalization and preservation of Cajun music and the globe-circling exposure he brought to southwest Louisiana’s Cajun-French culture.  

Washington, DC — Today, Congressman Bill Foster (D-IL) introduced the Closing the Digital Divide for Students Act to expand broadband access for low-income families in HUD-assisted housing. This bill would allow families living in HUD-assisted housing, whose children qualify for free or reduced lunch, to use federal assistance on broadband internet access.

Reveal's serial podcast investigates a story that is a reckoning of justice in America.

Billey Joe Johnson Jr. dreamed of graduating high school, going to college and one day playing pro football. On a cold December morning in 2008, that future was shattered. His story is a reckoning of justice in America.

Chapter 1: The Promise

Billey Joe Johnson’s family has lived with suspicion and doubt since authorities first told them he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound during a traffic stop with a White sheriff’s deputy. They never believed law enforcement thoroughly investigated what happened. While on a reporting trip 10 years ago, Reveal host Al Letson made a promise: to investigate his death and pursue the Johnsons’ unanswered questions.

Researchers worry about the reproductive risks posed by the reduced gravity and the high radiation levels that space settlers would face.

From Gaza to Ukraine and beyond, students and teachers face escalating violence, as detailed in a new global report.

The report, titled “Education Under Attack 2026,” documents at least 8,566 attacks on education and cases of military forces using educational facilities from the beginning of 2024 to the end of last year, a more than 40% increase from the previous two-year period.

Early recordings were not simply inventions but cultural products shaped by musicians, entrepreneurs, audiences, and new technologies that transformed how people experienced and purchased sound.

Introduction

To the question “When were recordings invented?” we might be tempted to answer “1877”—the year when Thomas A. Edison was first able to record and playback sound with a phonograph. But what if we think of recordings not as mere carriers of sound, but as commodities that can be bought and sold, as artifacts capable of capturing and embodying values and emotions, of defining a generation, a country, or a social class?

The story then unfolds over three decades and is full of layers and ramifications. Without Edison’s technological innovations, recordings would have certainly never existed—but hammering out the concept of recording were also a myriad of other inventors, musicians, producers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world.

Most of them were enthusiastic about being part of a global revolution, but they worked in close connection with their milieu, too, shaping recording technologies and their uses to meet the needs, dreams, and desires of the audiences they knew.

Again and again, voters say their top concern is the cost of living. Affordability has taken center stage as the defining issue in our politics.

Exposing the campaign to erase Black progress. Explore Onyx Impact’s Blackout Report — data, stories, and action to defend our history.

Black history and Black futures are under coordinated attack. This is not just about deleting stories or banning books—it’s a deliberate nationwide strategy to erase, distort, and suppress Black excellence, truth, and opportunity. 

These tactics are sophisticated, the impacts are deep, and the stakes are generational.

This is a disinformation campaign designed to seize illegitimate power and control, using “DEI” as a smokescreen to justify harm. 

More To The Story: When Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, the city—one of America’s most prominent slave trading spaces before the Civil War—had dozens of Confederate monuments and memorials, but nothing commemorating slavery. Today, thanks to Stevenson’s efforts, the city looks much different.

Over the last decade, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative has transformed parts of Montgomery through markers acknowledging the legacy of slavery while also building the Legacy Sites, a series of museums and memorials that commemorate America’s dark history of lynching, slaveholding, and racial terror across the South. 

On this week’s More To The Story, Stevenson talks about the importance of memorializing America’s full history as the Trump administration attempts to erase slavery and lynching from the nation’s museums and why he sees today’s narrative struggle for racial justice as a generational battle.

The FCC announced in April it would be taking a fresh look at all aspects of the Universal Service Fund (USF). The agency recently kicked off this process for the E-Rate program by issuing a combined Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

E-Rate is the Universal Service Fund program that subsidizes broadband for schools that have the highest percentage of students who qualify for the federal school lunch program. E-Rate also brings broadband to libraries. The program has been in effect since 1997. In recent years, E-Rate has disbursed around $2.5 billion annually to subsidize broadband bills. There are over 101,500 schools and 11,600 libraries served by the program.

How was the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion discovered? 

Thonis-Heracleion is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world.

It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity. The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD.