Radio Diaries

The Longest Game

The Last Man on the Mountain

Jimmy Weekley, a lifelong resident of Pigeonroost Hollow, West Virginia, stood as the final holdout against the encroaching mountaintop removal mining operations of the Arch Coal Company. Despite the departure of his neighbors and the systematic destruction of the surrounding landscape, Weekley refused to sell his ance...

Signal Hill: What's Inside the Moon

Kenneth Koch’s unconventional poetry workshops at Manhattan’s PS 61 in the late 1960s fundamentally altered how children engaged with language and their own imaginations. By encouraging students to embrace surrealism, "lies," and personal desires, Koch transformed poetry from a rigid academic exercise into a tool for l...

Guest Spotlight: Phonograph

My Iron Lung: Remembering Martha Lillard

Martha Lillard, the last person in America to rely on an iron lung, spent 66 years utilizing the device after contracting polio during the 1950s epidemic. Far from a refusal to modernize, her dependence on the iron lung stemmed from its superior efficiency and comfort compared to contemporary positive-pressure ventilat...

Soweto 1976

30 Years of Teenage Diaries

Thirty years after documenting his initial arrival in the United States, Juan reflects on his journey from an undocumented teenager living in a trailer near the Rio Grande to a settled plumbing business owner in Denver. His early audio diaries reveal the harsh realities of his youth, marked by extreme poverty, the stru...

The Almost Astronaut

Ed Dwight, the first Black astronaut candidate in the United States, navigated a complex path through the 1960s space race. Recruited by the Kennedy administration to counter Soviet criticism of American racial inequality, Dwight faced severe institutional resistance and isolation at Edwards Air Force Base, particularl...

Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair

Sealab: A Home on the Ocean Floor

Guest Spotlight: William Parker's War on Slave Catchers

Detained: A Homecoming

The Real Refugees of Casablanca

The 1942 cinematic classic Casablanca served as a profound intersection between Hollywood fiction and the lived realities of European refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. While the film is celebrated as a romantic masterpiece, its supporting cast was comprised almost entirely of real-world exiles, such as Helmut Dantine, ...

Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier 3: The Trial

The podcast explores Orson Welles's 1946 radio commentaries on the Isaac Woodard case, where a Black WWII veteran was blinded by a police officer. Welles's broadcasts, which called for the officer's arrest, sparked both support and backlash, with some stations canceling their ABC affiliation. Despite a Justice Departme...

Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier 2: Officer X

The podcast episode delves into the story of Isaac Woodard, a black soldier blinded by a white police officer in 1946, and the efforts to bring the perpetrator to justice. It highlights the NAACP's benefit concert featuring prominent artists like Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday to raise awareness about Woodard's case....

Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier 1: The Bus Ride

In 1946, Orson Welles, already famous as the director of Citizen Kane, used his national radio show to investigate the brutal beating of Isaac Woodard, a Black soldier, by a white police officer in South Carolina. Woodard was attacked on the day of his discharge, and the assault resulted in permanent blindness. Welles'...

TRAILER: Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier

The 1946 blinding of Isaac Woodard, Jr., a Black veteran attacked by a white police officer hours after his honorable discharge, serves as the catalyst for a high-stakes investigation into racial violence in the Jim Crow South. Initially shrouded in mystery with no known location or suspect, the case gained national mo...

Remembering Claudette Colvin

The First Computer Dating Service: Operation Match

This Short Life