It's Fat Bear Week - but our fascination with bears is timeless

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every year, the Katmai National Park in Alaska puts on a March Madness-style bracket of all the fattest bears in their park. It's a celebration of fatness, because a fat bear ahead of hibernation means a healthy bear come spring. This competition is popular — there were over a million votes tallied last year — and it speaks to a larger cultural obsession with bears. In honor of Fat Bear Week, Host Brittany Luse journeys through time to unpack what bears mean to us — and why they're family, friend and foe all at once. And later, an exploration of how the queer community emulates bearness — and what the symbol of the animal can mean to them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From an Iraq war cover-up to towns ravaged by opioids to the roots of our modern immigration crisis,
0:06.4	Embedded explores what's been sealed off and undisclosed.
0:10.6	NPR's original investigative podcast reveals why these stories and the people behind them matter.
0:17.5	Listen to the Embedded podcast only from NPR.
0:24.0	Hey, hey, I'm Brittany Loose and you're listening to it's been a minute from NPR.
0:28.7	A show about what's going on in our culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:34.4	And warning for listeners, this episode contains some vulgar language and mentions of sex and sexuality.
0:40.9	There's something very special happening this week.
0:43.7	It's not on TV or in theaters, but in the animal kingdom.
0:47.7	And one of my producers, Liam McBain, has been obsessed with it.
0:52.0	Brittany, I've waited patiently all year just to witness this.
0:55.6	This week is my Super Bowl.
0:58.0	It's Fat Bear Week.
1:00.5	It's a yearly competition put on by the Catmine National Park in Alaska.
1:05.1	To celebrate the bears getting really, really fat ahead of hibernation.
1:09.7	And every year I watch the livestream cams from home.
1:13.1	It's literally just bears eating salmon and sitting in a bubbling river,
1:17.1	like it's their own personal jacuzzi, like it rules.
1:21.1	I will admit, when Liam first told me about this, I wasn't sold on it,
1:25.4	but once I started checking out the livestream and seeing what the bears get up to,
1:29.4	I kind of got into it.
1:31.1	And the more we started talking about it, we realized bears are kind of everywhere in human culture.
	...

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