In the first 100 days of his presidency, FDR passed a staggering seventy six pieces of legislation. Barack Obama, passed just 11. On today’s show we’ll look into partisan politics and the changing presidential mandate, and why the first 100 days is a metric worth looking at.
And, while most ski mountains in New England are facing the effects of a warming climate, another problem is slowly developing: aging chairlifts.
Plus we’ll check in with chamber pop band San Fermin before they play House of Blues in Boston this Saturday.
Listen to the full show:
The First 100 Days
Within the first one hundred days of becoming president in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed seventy-six pieces of legislation - now compare that to John F. Kennedy's twenty-six, or George W. Bush's seven. Barack Obama did slightly better than his predecessor with eleven, but nothing compared to those numbers from the first half of the twentieth century, begging the question, is this honeymoon period a worthwhile metric? There's been a lot of talk about the first one hundred days of the new administration - but for a country that feels like it's been in a deadlock for years, how much can really be achieved in just over three months? And does it make sense to laser focus in on this period?
Julia Azariis an Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University and author of Delivering The People's Message: The Changing Politics of The Presidential Mandate. She wrote about why a president's first 100 days really do matter for Five Thirty Eight
Related: "A President's First 100 Days Do Matter"
The Danger of Aging Chairlifts
For most of the last decade, the prevailing story for ski resorts here in the northeast has been snow—or lack thereof. Plus questions of how resorts will cope with a warming climate in the decades to come. As time passes, many mountains will face another problem: aging ski-lifts. Brendan Borrell is a correspondent for Outside magazine, where he reported that some two-thirds of chairlifts around the country are more than twenty years old, and nearly 100 of those were installed more than half a century ago.
Related: "Is Your Local Chairlift a Death Trap?"
San Fermin
Ellis Ludwig-Leone was deep into studying composition at Yale when he started playing around, integrating pop tunes with orchestral arrangements. He finished school and retreated to the proverbial woodshed to compose what would become San Fermin, a sleeper indie hit in 2013. NPR named it, "one of the most surprising, ambitious, evocative and moving records" of the year. Loads of critics and fans joined in, and after lots of touring, another album, and a few personnel changes, San Fermin's new album, Belong is due out in April.
Chamber pop band San Fermin is among a number of bands including Bombino and Salif Keita, at Crash-Fest at the House of Blues in Boston this Saturday - Jan 28. We caught up with bandleader, pianist and composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eERWM_7_-XI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K9gjhbT7xs
Music and Noise
We rarely think about sound, and especially music, as a form of trauma or violence. But that's all the more reason why we need to open our ears to the full—and sometimes painful—range of effects that music and other sounds can have on our bodies. This piece, about sound and noise, was produced by Joshua Hudelson as part of NYU's graduate seminar, grappling with violence in the sonorous world.
You can listen to this story again at PRX.org.
