Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says the U.S. would negotiate with North Korea without demanding that the country first agree to nuclear disarmament. This marks a significant change in a approach for Tillerson, who has spent much of this year working on the pressure campaign to cut off financial resources for the North Korean nuclear program.

Kam Franklin (left) is lead singer of The Suffers, a band from Houston that started touring three years ago. Amber Daniel is lead singer and bassist of Blame the Youth from North Carolina. They’re preparing for their first tour.
Courtesy of Jay Bee Zay and Allison Slade
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Courtesy of Jay Bee Zay and Allison Slade
When you’re facing a major life change, it helps to talk to someone who has already been through it. All Things Consideredis connecting people on either side of a shared experience, and they’re letting us eavesdrop on their conversations in our series Been There.
North Carolina band Blame the Youth has been playing together in and around Charlotte for three years.
Now, they’re at a point where they’re trying to decide just how serious they are.
Are you about to undergo a major life change, like start your own business or deploy overseas in the military? Or have you gone through one already? All Things Considered invites you to share your experience, either to ask questions or pass on your own lessons learned. Email us at nprcrowdsource@npr.org, with “Been There” in the subject line.
Amber Daniel and her bandmates still have their day jobs. Amber is an elementary school music teacher who teaches private lessons on the side, and being on tour full-time would be a big change.
“We’re getting to the point where it’s like, so you gonna do it? You ready, you ready?” she says. “Speaking for myself, yeah.”
But Amber still has some concerns about hitting the road.
Three years ago, the Houston band The Suffers were in the same place — wondering if they should go on the road, and how to do it.
Kam Franklin, the band’s lead singer, says The Suffers’ decision started with a big discussion among the bandmates about quitting their jobs and taking a chance, which everyone decided to follow through on.
“There will always be something to come back to,” says Kam. “But you can’t go back to these opportunities when they’re right in front of you. “
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity
Advice from Kam Franklin
On deciding to tour full-time
We had a conversation and we were like, alright, we know we’re doing this, but we don’t know what’s gonna happen after. And like where was gonna be the stopping point for us to know that, OK, this is when we need to go back to our old lives. And you know, is everybody down to quit their jobs.
On dealing with your bandmates on the road
Over-communicate your needs and your frustrations to your band and to your team early on. Passive aggression will ruin your band. It will ruin your business. And I know it seems really silly but saying things like, you know, I need to stop for tampons, or I need to go to a bra store because my back is hurting because this bra is old and I’ve played too many shows in it. At a certain point you guys are gonna be it to each other. It’ll be beyond family, beyond a romantic relationship and you have to learn how to not only respect one another’s space but how to respect yourself by over-communicating when it’s necessary.
On playing to an empty room
We have never, thankfully, played to zero people. But we have definitely played to a room that probably had a dozen people in it, including the people who were working there. But at the end of the day you have to take on this mentality of, “Who cares?” Because at the end of the day, is this what you want to do with your life? So look at that show as a practice for the major stage.

An illustration comparing the giant penguin to an average person. Kumimanu biceae weighed about 220 pounds and was a bit shorter than 6 feet in height. It swam around off the coast of New Zealand between 55 and 60 million years ago.
Gerald Mayr
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Gerald Mayr
An international team of scientists have announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of prehistoric penguin.
The bird waddled around off the east coast of New Zealand between 55 and 60 million years ago. And it was a giant as far as penguins go. The researchers estimate that it probably weighed about 220 pounds and was around 5 feet 10 inches tall.
“That’s about as tall as a medium-sized man,” says Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Franfurt, Germany, and the lead author of the new study published today in Nature Communications. “This particular specimen is one of the largest known fossil penguins.”
The largest living penguin, on the other hand, the Emperor penguin, is a good bit shorter — around 4 feet.
The scientists have named the new species Kumimanu biceae, which means ‘monster bird’ in the Maori language. (Kumi is the name of a monster in Maori mythology and manu means bird.)
The new finding is really cool, says Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas, Austin, who wasn’t involved in the study. “I mean, what’s not cool about a human-sized penguin?” she says.
While giant penguins may seem odd to us, they were pretty common millions of years ago. “We have had evidence of giant penguins, but they’ve all been younger than the new discovery,” says Clarke.
Take for example, Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, which was similar in size to the newly discovered species. It lived in Antarctica between 33 to 45 million years ago. Then there wasIcadyptes salasi, which was almost 5 feet tall and lived in what is now Peru about 36 million years ago.
What this new species shows is that penguins evolved to be big very early in their evolution, says Ewan Fordyce, a paleontologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
“It’s a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs,” says Fordyce. With the giant reptiles gone, it may have opened “new ecological opportunities” to birds like penguins, allowing them to break through “a glass ceiling of evolutionary size,” he says.
The oceans may also have allowed penguins to get so big.
“Giant penguins were occupying the seas about 20 million years before whales entered the oceans,” she says. No whales, no seals, no marine mammals.
And scientists think that large marine mammals — whales, walruses, seals — are why giant penguins eventually became extinct, leaving us with the smaller, cuter birds we all adore.

An artist’s illustration of ‘Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped interstellar object discovered in October. Now, astronomers want to know if this interloper might harbor life.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
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It’s time to find out what, if anything, our “mysterious interloper” has to say.
That, at any rate, is the guiding idea for a team of astronomers, who announced Monday they plan to check out an interstellar object for signs of life. Beginning Wednesday, the group Breakthrough Listen will closely scan the asteroid ‘Oumuamua, a recently spotted space rock that hails from outside our solar system.
The skinny object is the first of its kind that scientists have observed. And since it has already whipped around our sun and embarked on its long return to parts unknown, researchers working with the international organization want to seize their limited opportunity to find out if it really is just a naturally occurring phenomenon — and not something more.
“Researchers working on long-distance space transportation have previously suggested that a cigar or needle shape is the most likely architecture for an interstellar spacecraft, since this would minimize friction and damage from interstellar gas and dust,” the group said in its announcement.
“While a natural origin is more likely, there is currently no consensus on what that origin might have been, and Breakthrough Listen is well positioned to explore the possibility that ‘Oumuamua could be an artifact.”

An illustration of our interstellar visitor’s path through the solar system, provided by the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy.
Brooks Bays/SOEST Publication Services/UH Institute for Astronomy
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Brooks Bays/SOEST Publication Services/UH Institute for Astronomy
“The possibility that this object is, in fact, an artificial object — that it is a spaceship, essentially — is a remote possibility,” Andrew Siemion, a member of the initiative and director of Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.
“We don’t want to be sensational in any way, and we are very realistic about the chances this is artificial,” Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire financing the project, told the Scientific American, “but because this is a unique situation we think mankind can afford 10 hours of observing time using the best equipment on the planet to check a low-probability hypothesis.”
And they’ll be checking on that hypothesis by scanning the object for possible artificial transmitters through a radio telescope at West Virginia’s Green Bank Observatory.
Time will be of the essence, however.
“We might have, for moderately large telescopes, another handful of days, maybe a couple of weeks,” Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, which discovered the object, told NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce in October. “So we don’t have much time to study it.”
Meech acknowledged to the Post that ‘Oumuamua’s characteristics are “entirely consistent with being a natural object” — but, she added, “this is the sort of opportunity that one would hate to miss, even if the chances are extremely low for success.”
‘Oumuamua, whose name means “scout” or “messenger” in Hawaiian, might yet have a revelatory message for us — and if so, Breakthrough Listen hopes to be there to hear it.
Credit: NPR
Margo Price sings classic country songs that manage to enchant, even as they disillusion. Her steadfast voice and songwriting conjure a powerful sense of nostalgia — she emerged in 2016 with Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, an album that didn’t so much callback to ’70s country as it did flawlessly reanimate it. But if her musical signifiers are comfortably familiar, her lyrics stand in stark opposition to that feeling. They don’t live in a soft-focus past, but are eyes-wide-open to modern America — from songs like “Pay Gap” to “All American Made,” Margo Price brings a fresh urgency to a well-worn form.
Standing on the 9:30 Club balcony with a scratched old acoustic guitar, she appeared as a kind of troubadour. She paraphrased Sam Cooke — “A voice should not be judged on whether it’s beautiful or not, it should be judged on [whether it] can convince you that [it is] telling the truth.” Price’s project could easily settle for nostalgia. But her voice and the songs she sings carry the good of tradition, along with a clear, contemporary ring of truth.
SET LIST
- “Tennessee Song”
- “Pay Gap”
- “All American Made”
CREDITS
Director: Colin Marshall; Producers: Colin Marshall, Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey; Technical Director: Josh Rogosin; Live Mix Engineer: Shawn “Gus” Vitale; Supervising Producer: Mito Habe-Evans; Managing Producers: Bob Boilen, Jacob Ganz, Jessica Goldstein, Abby O’Neill; Creative Director and Producer: Peter Glantz; Concert Videographers: Bronson Arcuri, Kara Frame, Nickolai Hammar, Morgan Noelle Smith, Maia Stern, Niki Walker; Production Assistant: CJ Riculan; Editor: Annabel Edwards; Special Thanks: The 9:30 Club; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has been trying to push back against reports that he’s gutting the State Department, addressed his employees in a rare town hall on Tuesday. Tillerson spoke about foreign policy changes and department reform plans, including a promise to streamline security clearances.
Reckless decorating is a thing, and a serious one at that. At least 240 people a day go to the emergency room after falling off ladders, getting cut, or getting burned when trying to put up holiday cheer. Two years ago, super decorator Kurt Farmer of Alexandria, Va., was one of them.

A photographer looks at the night sky to see the annual Geminid meteor shower in northern Italy in December 2015. This year’s shower coincides with a close-range visit by its parent asteroid.
Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images
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Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images
This week, the skywatchers will experience a flashy double feature: The Gemenid meteor shower — one of the year’s best — will coincide with an unusually close encounter by an asteroid.
That asteroid? It’s called 3200 Phaethon, discovered by a NASA satellite in 1983. With a diameter of about three miles, it’s the third-largest near-Earth asteroid classified by the space agency as “Potentially Hazardous.”
On Saturday, Phaethon will come within 0.069 astronomical units — about 6.4 million miles — of Earth. That’s when NASA plans to take detailed radar images of the asteroid at its Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert and at the Areceibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
NASA says this encounter with Phaethon is the Earth’s closest since 1974, and the closest it will be until 2093.
And that flyby means good gazing for amateur astronomers, too.
“Hold onto your eyepiece!” says Sky and Telescope, noting that Phaethon will be so bright that asteroid buffs can track it through a 3-inch telescope. “This thing will be scooting along at up 15 [degrees] per day or 38″ a minute … fast enough to cross the field of view like a slow-moving satellite.”
Meanwhile on the meteor shower front, the Gemenids are known for the brightness of the individual meteors and their frequency: as many as 120 per hour, according to Space.com.
Most meteor showers occur as Earth passes through the debris trail and orbit of a comet. But December’s Gemenids are different, because Earth is passing through the debris of an asteroid: Phaethon.
The first recorded observation of the Gemenid shower was on a riverboat in the Mississippi River in 1933, Sapce.com says. And the show has only gotten better since then, as Jupiter’s gravity has pulled the particles closer to Earth.
While wee hours of the morning are generally the best time to watch for meteors, Sky and Telescope‘s Bob King says the Gemenids offer “an evening matinee”:
“You can spot a modest number of meteors visible starting as early as 9 p.m. because the radiant already stands some 30 high in the eastern sky. True, a fair number of shower members are cut off by the horizon at that time, but more of us are likely to go out and share it with our children in the evening as opposed to waking before dawn. Since Geminids travel at moderate to slow speeds and approach us from a low angle at that hour, they can produce brilliant and long-lasting fireballs.”
King adds an important note about that 120-meteors-per-hour rate:
“That’s the zenithal hourly rate, or ZHR, an idealized number based on observing under a pristine, moonless sky with the radiant at the zenith. Depending on the time you observe and local light pollution, counts will vary. At my observing site, which is handicapped by minor to moderate skyglow, I cut the rate in half to keep expectations realistic. A meteor a minute is certainly nothing to complain about.”
This year’s arrival of the Gemenids and Phaethon is especially welcome because last year a “supermoon” washed out the meteor shower.
How to best observe the historic show?
Grab a blanket, find a dark place, and let your eyes adjust. Then join your fellow Earthlings in taking it all in.
Was a chilly -4C last night on St Annes beach looking for the Gemenid meteor shower pic.twitter.com/opD5mXfwwE
— Daniel Martino (@DanJMartino) December 12, 2017
@Tim_O_Brien we saw 2 shooting stars this morning after the sun had started to rise, they took us by surprise! I presume they were from the Gemenid meteor shower. They were bright white and looked amazing against the blue sky.
— Helen (@N0ZOMI) December 12, 2017
Just stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and saw two meteors. Reminded me of when I asked my mother to stay with me at my old house. I’d come in from work and she’d have coffee made and we’d sit outside and watch the meteor showers. I miss those times. #Gemenid
— Steven Busby (@stevieb39la) December 12, 2017