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So far this cold season, Earth's sister planet has heated up the evening sky like a UFO. You've surely seen that dazzling "star" soon after sunset: This has been its best showing since 2017. That eight-year interval is no accident. So happens, 13 of Venus’ years around the Sun have the same number of days as eight Earth years. They both work out to 2,922 days. Tune in to hear when you can see expect these special evenings.

Adam Ross is the author of the novel, “Mr. Peanut,” which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. It came out in 2010. 2025 brings his next novel, “Playworld,” a big and big-hearted book examining one transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan.

“Alphabetical Diaries” by Sheila Heti contains a decade’s worth of thoughts, arranged in alphabetical order. The book is a chronicle of the self, of the fundamentals and idiosyncrasies of human experience, that plays out thrillingly in the space that Heti has staked out between life and art, reality and fiction.

The Northeast U.S. is now in its single season that’s cloudy and windy, which might remind us of worlds where no breeze has ever stirred, where dust lies flat for billions of years. That’s what the Apollo astronauts saw. Tune in to hear about the characteristics of the planets: Mercury, Earth, Venus and of course we’ll talk about the Moon.

A team of researchers uses lasers to unveil tattoos on ancient Peruvian mummies.And modern 3D imaging technology is being used to uncover dinosaurs’ diets and how they changed hundreds of millions of years ago.

(Airs 02/14/25 @ 10 p.m.) The Legislative Gazette is a weekly program about New York State Government and politics. On this week’s Gazette: Top officials travel the state to promote Governor Hochul’s budget priorities, the father of a man who was killed in a Utica area prison comes to Albany to call for prison reform, and a new bill introduced in the New York State Legislature this week would make it easier for municipalities to opt into rent control.

(Airs 02/20/25 @ 3 p.m.) WAMC’s David Guistina in conversation with New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli about his concern that actions by the Trump administration to cut spending will hurt the state, his thoughts on Governor Hochul’s affordability agenda, and much more.

On this week’s 51%, we speak with Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin, author of Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum. As President Trump effectively shuts down processing at the southern border and ramps up deportations, asylum seekers in the U.S. are left in a precarious position, especially women fleeing domestic and gender-based violence. Through interviews and eyewitness accounts of closed court proceedings, Cleaveland and Waslin demonstrate how difficult it is for these women to seek shelter in the U.S., and why “gender-based violence” is still not considered grounds for asylum — even before the second Trump Administration.

(Airs 02/14/25 & 02/16/25 @ 6 p.m.) The Media Project is an inside look at media coverage of current events with former Times Union Editor, current Upstate American, Substack columnist Rex Smith, Judy Patrick, former Editor of the Daily Gazette and Vice President for Editorial Development for the New York Press Association, Daily Gazette Editor Miles Reed, and WAMC News Director Ian Pickus. On this week’s Media Project, Rex, Judy, Miles, and Ian talk about how the media might respond to the flood of information from the White House, how the media should be handling falsehoods, whether Saturday Night Live engages in truth-telling, and much more.

Playlist as aired on Saturday, February 15th, 2025: