That Big Black Guy's List: NPR / Public Radio / Podcasts

Word of Mouth airs at 2 pm Monday through Thursday, and noon on Saturday.

Word of Mouth is the sound of new ideas, hosted by Virginia Prescott, and produced by Taylor Quimby, Zach Nugent, and Logan Shannon. Our Senior Producer is Maureen McMurray. Check out a playlist of music used on the program on Spotify. You can leave us a message on the Word of Mouth Listener Line anytime. We reserve the right to use your message on the air: (603) 223-2448

We all know the story, or think we do.

Let me tell it the old way, then the new way. See which worries you most.

Once upon a time, you could crack open a radio, a telephone, a lawnmower, even a car, take it apart and figure out how it worked. No more. Pretty much everything we use these days comes with computer chips, which you can't really take apart. (I mean, you can, but all you'll find inside are a bunch of 1's and 0's with no obvious logic.) So car mechanics can snap a new chip into an engine, wait till it whirs and watch the gears come to life, but do they know what's going on in there? For most of us, chips are "black boxes." They work, but we don't know why.

Circuit boards can be just as puzzling. Here's one from Randall Munroe, the xkcd cartoonist who loves complexity. But notice that, while explaining its innards, Munroe sticks in an eel, a mouse and some holy water ... because he hasn't the foggiest idea how this thing works...

This is an alarming story, not because it ends badly. It's alarming because it ends well. It shouldn't have, but it did, and biologists (and especially conservationists) now have a puzzle to ponder.

Maybe you've seen this, (it's gotten around), but I'm still gobsmacked. Totally amazed. We're in northern Italy looking at the face of the Cingino Dam, and here and there on the vertical stone wall, you'll see a few dark specks.

Every holiday season, people splurge on gift items to make their loved ones smile - but does buying all that stuff really make people happy? Guest host Celeste Headlee speaks with NPR senior business editor Marilyn Geewax about buying happiness.

A Texas teen escaped a jail sentence after being involved in a drunk-driving accident that killed four people. Defense attorneys say he suffered from 'affluenza' because his privileged parents never set limits for him. The Barbershop guys weigh in on the controversial ruling.

When Andy Marra came out as a transgendered woman, she got lots of support from her adoptive American parents. She wanted to move forward with hormones or surgery, but not until she found her birth family in South Korea. She shared that journey in an essay titled 'The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition.'

Tell Me More goes behind closed doors to look at the increasingly open debate about how the sexuality of girls and women is being discussed on Twitter.

Parks and Recreation actress Rashida Jones recently got social media going with her Twitter takedown of a number of female pop stars for their hyper-sexual performances. She called on these stars to #stopactinglikewhores.

It set off a brouhaha over if and when it's okay to call out women or girls as promiscuous based on their dress or behavior. According to the stories shared on the Twitter hashtag #FastTailedGirls, even very young girls.

Tell Me More host Michel Martin talks about the controversy with Mikki Kendall, who helped start the #FastTailedGirls hashtag; Prachi Gupta of Salon.com, who wrote about Rashida Jones' comments and the feminist debate over so-called "slut-shaming;" and Keli Goff, correspondent for TheRoot.com and columnist for The Daily Beast.

Today leaders from around the world converged on South Africa to pay their final respects to the late South African President Nelson Mandela.

The ceremony began with a choir signing South Africa's national anthem as dozens of dignitaries along with thousands of South Africans gathered in FNB Stadium—home to the 2010 World Cup and the last time and place Nelson Mandela made a public appearance.

Four American presidents are in attendance—President Jimmy Carter, President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama along with First Lady Michelle Obama.

"After this great liberator is laid to rest, when we have returned to our cities and villages, and rejoined our daily routines, let us search then for his strength—for his largeness of spirit—somewhere inside ourselves,” President Obama said during the ceremony.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon  , had a heated exchange with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence for the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) 

"I wanted to see if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the N.S.A. collect any data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Senator Wyden asked.

"No sir," General Clapper replied.

Wyden: "It does not?" 

Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where it could collect but not wittingly.”

Less than three months later, Edward Snowden's leaks proved Clapper's statement completely false. In July, Clapper finally apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee for his "erroneous" statement.

Snowden's revelations have set of a fierce debate over national security and personal privacy, and the debate has become particularly intense for the Senate Intelligence Committee itself. Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, discusses the past, present and possible future of the N.S.A. in his piece that appears in the latest issue of the magazine.

The House and Senate have come to a compromise on a bill that would strengthen protections for victims of sexual assault in the military and keep Guantanamo Bay open.

The measure is the first change to laws governing sexual assault in the military in years and stems from the furor that has erupted in recent years over the rising number of sexual assaults in the military. There were 3,553 sexual assault complaints reported in the first three quarters of this fiscal year—a nearly 50 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

Todd Zwillich, Takeaway Washington Correspondent, walks us through the ins and outs of this deal.

Protests continued to escalate overnight in Ukraine where security forces have flooded the city center, raiding opposition headquarters and dismantling protest camps in front of government buildings.

The enhanced police presence is due in large part to protest activity that occurred on Sunday when activists toppled a statue of Vladimir Lenin.

It was a move seen by one member of Parliament as “the end of the Soviet occupation and the beginning of the final decolonization of Ukraine.”

Joining The Takeaway to explain the significance of this statue’s undoing is Sasha Senderovich, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Program for Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Here's a statistic that might surprise you: The United States has the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania. 

Nearly half of all New Yorkers live below or very close to the poverty line. Children make up a large part of this population-in total there are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York. Andrea Elliot, a reporter for our partner The New York Times, visualizes it this way: "If all of the city's homeless children were to file into Madison Square Garden for a hockey game, more than 4,800 would not have a seat."

In many ways, children are the invisible victims of homelessness. Unlike the homeless adult men and women New Yorkers encounter daily on the city's subway and streets, homeless kids largely are out of sight, shuffling from schools by day to temporary family shelters by night.

Elliot profiled one family caught in the shelter system. Her five-part series, which is called "Invisible Child," focuses particularly on a preteen named Dasani. Elliot joins The Takeaway today to discuss poverty through the eyes of Dasani and her family.

Race is embedded the fabric of American culture, and racial categories and their implications persist today—from the U.S. Census to the way we understand our politics and our president. 

In "A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America," Jacqueline Jones, professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, argues against our continued use of racial categories—at least in the ways Americans have used these categories since the country's founding. 

Race, Jones writes, is often used as a shorthand to distinguish between those whose ancestors were enslaved and those whose were not. The harm of this categorization, she continues, is that "problems labeled racial are in fact historical, and persistent use of the word keeps the fiction of race alive in all its adaptable destructiveness."

Racial categories as Americans use them today allow us to imagine that some of the "racial" problems in our society are inherent traits of a particular race, rather than as a problem stemming from historic, structural inequalities.

Today on The Takeaway, Jones describes her research into the fluid and changing nature of race in America, from colonial Maryland and Virginia, to postwar Detroit, and President Obama's Administration.

When Ricky Megee emerges from a shallow grave in the harsh Australian outback, fate forces him to redefine "food" as he struggles for survival.

Producer: Anna Sussman

'Tis the season to chronicle our good fortune. This week, Snap Judgment looks back on some of the stories we were especially thankful for. Snap Judgment from PRX and NPR... do not miss it.