Today, we'll discuss the upcoming end to unemployment benefits for millions of Americans. Then, our Friday Flashback year-end review and Alan Alda challenges scientists to explain color to kids. Plus, your discarded Christmas lights travel to China and come back as other goods, we explain how to have the difficult end-of-life discussion with your aging relatives, LA band The Internet joins the show and much more.
Listen
• 7:25
Congress left for the holiday recess without approving a federal extension of jobless benefits for those who have been out of work for six months or longer. There are several proposals to extend unemployment floating around Congress but the two parties have clashed over how to pay for it.
Listen
• 4:28
The fields around Watsonville produce more than half a billion dollars in berries every year. After the raspberry vines have been cut back for winter and the strawberry fields plowed under, some farmworkers from Mexico still go back there for the holidays.
Listen
• 15:37
We look back at the biggest stories of 2013 with James Rainey of the LA Times and Alex Seitz-Wald of National Journal.
Listen
• 7:58
You know what color is, but explaining the idea of it and how it works might be a little harder. But do it creatively to an audience of 11-year-olds and you could win the "Flame Challenge" contest hosted by Alan Alda.
Listen
• 7:02
Author Adam Minter found himself in China staring at thousand of pounds of broken strands of Christmas lights sitting in a giant pile. He was in a recycling facility where more than two million pounds of lights per year were broken down and turned into a number of other products.
Listen
• 15:03
Maybe you have ideas of what you'd choose for your end-of-life care, but how do those "what if" decisions hold up when pressed against reality?
Listen
• 6:36
2013 was a big year for education. New policies changed classrooms, from what kids are taught in the classroom to the kinds of devices that they are using. KPCC's Education Editor Evelyn Larrubia joins the show to educate us on the year that was.
Listen
• 5:26
The city of Pasadena is home to 139,000 residents, but next week about a quarter of a million tourists are expected to descend on the Crown City.
Listen
• 9:23
The Internet isn't just a technological invention that has revolutionized the way we live our lives. It's also the name of an LA-based neo-soul group who are part of the Odd Future collective, a group of 20-somethings who've taken over the L.A. music scene.