Berlin Wall, Fog Harvesting, Overlooked

Legacy of the Berlin Wall’s Collapse (0:32) Guest: Peter Fritzsche, PhD, Professor of History, University of Illinois, author of “Hitler’s First Hundred Days” This week marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall between communist East Germany and capitalist West Germany. Less than a month later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George HW Bush sat side by side and declared the Cold War was ending. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself would collapse. So let’s take a look at the legacy of November 9, 1989 –the day the wall came down. In Arid Regions, the Fog Harp Gets Water from Thin Air (18:17) Guest: Brook Kennedy, Industrial Designer and Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture + Design More than one billion people around the world live where water is scarce. Another billion face water shortage because their country doesn’t have the proper infrastructure for water gathering. And the United Nations predicts it’s only going to get much worse in the coming years. That means we have to find new sources of H2O. So how about using fog? A couple researchers figured out how to more effectively harvest that eerie mist for drinkable water. Remembering the Overlooked Figures in History Through Obituaries (35:12) Guest: Amy Padnani is an Editor on the Obituaries Desk at the New York Time and the Creator of Overlooked They say history is written by the winners. But Amy Padnani believes it’s up to us to decide who should be remembered. After becoming an editor of obituaries at the New York Times, Amy Padnani asked herself “Where are all the dead women?” Very few people get the privilege of an obituary in the Times, but surely not all of the people of note dying are white men. So Padnani hatched a project called “Overlooked.” For the last year and a half, they’ve been publishing obituaries the New York Times missed. Computer programmer Ada Lovelace. Journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells. Poet Sylvia Plath. “Jane Eyre” author Charlotte Bronte. Plus, lots o