Happy 2025! We have a slate of new stories coming soon, but we want to start the year by shouting out fellow podcaster (and friend of the show) Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace. He just put out his first book, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past. So to celebrate, we're featuring one of our favorite episodes from The Memory Palace, "These Words, Forever." Joe also sat down with Nate to chat about his book, storytelling and the dream of having a device that could allow you to hear anything.

Find Nate's book The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past NOW online or at your local bookstore. Check out The Memory Palace wherever you get your podcasts, or on radiotopia.fm.

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If you follow boxing, you've heard of Claressa Shields. At the 2012 Olympics, she became the first American woman to win gold in boxing. She repeated the feat 4 years later, becoming the first American boxer — woman or otherwise — to win consecutive medals. Now, she's the subject of a new movie called The Fire Inside, tracing her journey to Olympic stardom.

Claressa Shields' story was one of our earliest at Radio Diaries. We gave her a tape recorder and asked her to document her journey leading up to the 2012 Olympics. She was sixteen at the time. Today, we revisit the story of Claressa Shields — before the world knew who she was.

The Fire Insidecomes out exclusively in theaters on Christmas Day.

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Former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris died recently, at 94 years old. In 1967, Fred Harris and 10 senators came together and released the Kerner Report, a 1400-page explanation of the causes of the protests that filled American cities that summer. It was an instant — and unlikely — bestseller, selling over half a million copies in just three weeks, getting shoutouts by celebrities like Marlon Brando, and sparking debates on news programs throughout the country. The book talked about white racism at a time when that phrase was mostly used by Black activists, not white politicians. Fred Harris was the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission.

You can read the full Kerner Report here.

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