Ten years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th,  as part of WNYC's "Decade: 9/11" coverage, this special explores New Yorkers' most visceral and immediate emotional reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center and how they are - and are not -- still with us today.

Fear and shock, grief and guilt, anger, gratitude and solidarity -- these emotions overwhelmed many New Yorkers along with the billowing cloud of smoke and debris after the Towers collapsed.

WNYC's award-winning news team spent days, months, and then years reporting on the attacks and their aftermath. Through a mix of their recordings at the time and interviews with people ten years later, WNYC reporter Marianne McCune guides us through the stories of people who were directly impacted by what happened and have been struggling for a decade to make sense of it.

For more on WNYC's "Decade Nine Eleven" project, please visit our website:
http://www.wnyc.org/series/911-tenth-anniversary/

What’s for dinner? Probably not cod. Cod was once so common in American homes it was simply called “fish.” Now you’ll find cod featured on menus in fancy restaurants. When the cod fishery collapsed in the 1990s, it devastated fishing communities around the world. The American towns still have not recovered; meanwhile, Norway is catching record amounts of cod. What’s so special about Norway? Latitude investigates.

Tens of thousands of inmates live in total isolation in America's jails and prisons today. And the number is rapidly growing. Often prisoners spend years – even decades – by themselves in a cell the size of a small bathroom. They don't see anyone. They don't talk to anyone. They don't touch anyone. They are completely alone.

In this half-hour radio documentary, "survivors" of solitary paint a picture of what solitary confinement looks, sounds and feels like. These are the voices of both men and women; Black, White and Latino; old and young.
   
The effects of sensory deprivation experienced in solitary confinement have been well documented. They include depression, panic attacks, insomnia, paranoia, hypersensitivity, hallucination and psychosis. These psychological effects can be permanent. And often prisoners are released directly from solitary back into society.
   
U.N. conventions and treaties define this sort of treatment as torture. If we, as a people, continue to brutalize others in this fashion, what does that do to us all as a society?

This essay/montage was produced for the Third Coast Audio Festival's 2008 Audio Challenge, Radio Ephemera.  The challenge was to produce a piece of no more than three minutes based on any two of five books selected from the Prelinger Library of San Francisco -- and to include the voice of a stranger.  "Scared" is based on the books, "Control of Mind and Body," and "The Stork Didn't Bring You!: The Facts of Life for Teenagers."  The stranger is the voicemail lady.  

A sound-rich profile of Ataiba, chief of one of the last bands of nomads in the Americas, as he leaves the Bolivian jungle to live with evangelical missionaries. The story is told by Ataiba and the missionaries from starkly different points of view. Part of the Vanishing Homelands series, chronicling the dramatic changes to land and culture across the Americas.

This piece is a commentary on what it was like growing up half french and how I resisted learning the language like saying "Mercy Buckets" instead of "Merci beaucoup." My mother called child specialists asking them why I refused to speak French. It explores how I eventually came around to love French and accept the culture and language.

My parents have been divorced for 11 years and it's been an ongoing struggle for me. I wanted to know what it was like for other kids, so I walked around Montpelier, Vermont and talked with kids about divorce. Here's what they said....

This is a fun, light-hearted, silly, heart-warming story about one of Baltimore's best-kept holiday secrets. Here's an intro for a host... "The coming holiday season brings with it different traditions for different people... And for a lot of longtime Baltimore families, it's synonymous with one thing: Rheb's candies. This year, the local family-owned chocolate business marks its 90th year in operation. Rheb's is a true hidden jewel of old Baltimore, and producer Aaron Henkin recently ventured out with a friend to discover what the Rheb's experience is all about...

In fulfillment of a year-long Fulbright Fellowship, this bilingual piece is a taste of the sound I've been recording in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. It's a collection of interviews with villagers from around the region, sound I've collected from the indigenous station in the region (XETLA) as well as snippets from blog entries over the last several months. This piece was made for presentation at a mid-term reunion of Fulbright Fellows.

A celebration of one of the most astonishing yet obscure musical genres of the 20th Century. Industrial musicals were written for company sales meetings or annual conventions, with a golden age spanning the 1950s into the '80s. They were lavish productions that incorporated original music and lyrics, full orchestras and expensive staging, Most were never recorded, though sometimes a record was made and a few hundred copies were distributed as souvenirs. Steve Young, a writer for David Letterman, is the self-appointed archivist and obsessive collector of these recordings, and he's the host each week of a show that shares these recordings with an audience they were never intended for. This is a one-time special. It is not really a weekly show. The special includes an original comedy piece featuring the great Moe Moscowitz, a veteran of NPR's Morning Edition.

While I traveled around Ghana in January, 2008, certain sounds jumped into my recorder, like: kiddo handclaps, the pounding of fufu in Circle Market, Empress Olivia and her kpash kposh, screaming insects, screaming birds, screaming bats, one very hungry goat, fishermen singing while hauling in an enormous net from the Gulf of Guinea, the unmistakable cacophony of a tro-tro station, an unexpected pop song blaring from streetside speakers, the deep rhythms of a wedding celebration and glorious live music from a front porch.

Recorded during a visit to the Fouta Toro region of Senegal in April of 2008 with a Peace Corps volunteer from Indiana, this piece offers a glimpse into life in rural, northern Senegal. In a region where temperatures regularly top 120 degrees and many of the men have left for the exterior to support their families, we visit a village 8 km off of the nearest paved road. We visit households, a baby weighing, and a goodbye party for a departing husband. Emma Jacobs and Peace Corps volunteer Ashley Goodson narrate this story.

This is a segment of a longer piece about T-shirts.

The mission to ensure America's safety has led authorities to seek new tools and expanded powers in the war on terror. Interrogation practices have been among the most controversial issues of national security. The prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and stories of harsh interrogations conducted by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have sparked a debate on when interrogation becomes torture. And this debate seems far from over as Congress conducts hearings into interrogation practices. I myself am a former Army interrogator and when this debate began to unfold I found myself asking troubling questions. In this story I speak with Staff Sergeant Terry Karney, a US Army interrogator who served as an interrogation team leader in Iraq in 2003. His position is clear: torture is illegal, ineffective and counter-productive. And he's opposed to the policy of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

In September 2005 a group of American cowboys traveled to Mongolia for a horse trek across the steppe. This was a grassroots visit to local herdsmen and it also completed a cultural exchange that started a few years back when Mongolian herders came to the Western Folklife Center's National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada to sing songs and play music. Hal Cannon went along with the singing cowboys to document just how the music of these two horseback cultures would jibe.

In the show's pilot episode, host Al Letson, familiarizes the listener with a side of the Capitol City that most visitors never get to see; a thriving metropolis removed from the politics that govern this nation. The District is filled with arts and culture unique to the area, individuals striving to make the city a better place, and neighborhoods struggling to return to their former glory. So joins us for the next sixty minutes as we explore the undiscovered country right in our own backyard.

Billboard (:59)
Incude: "That is Go-Go"
Outcue: "...first this news"

News Hole: 1:00-6:00

SEGMENT A (15:30)
Incue:" The way to diffuse"
Outcue: "State of the Re:Union"

A-. Welcome to the Re:Union
Al starts the show explaining the goal of the series and the focus of its first episode, Washington DC.

A-2. Taxation without representation.
Summer Mathis, editor of the local news site, the DCist.com, gives listeners a feel for the city beyond government buildings and discusses the District of Columbia's unusual position in national politics.

A-3. Poetic Interlude - Spoken-word/Hip-Hop artists, the Poem-Cees set the stage for the next story and the area that surrounds it.

A-4. Busboys and Poets - A DC landmark with a mission.

SEGMENT B (17:59)
Incue: "I was once told"
Outcue: "State of the Re:Union"

B-1. The History of the Shaw
We hear the incredible history of DC's Shaw district. From it's beginnings as an all-black neighborhood, the growth of Black Broadway and the violent riots that destroyed the area to its modern day struggles with gentrification.

B-2. Poetic Interlude

B-3. Dischord House - Al speaks with punk and independent music pioneer, Ian MacKaye about the DC-based record label Dischord and its history with the city it calls home.

SEGMENT C (16:59)
Incue: "The Verizon Center..."
Outcue: "Welcome to DC"

C-1. The Wooly Mammoth
An avant grade theatre that pushes limits in the Nation's Capital and in doing so uniquely represents the city itself.

C-2. Go-Go - An infectious uptempo groove rarely heard outside of DC has been making people dance in the capital city for over two decades. Listeners learn about the genres history, it's draws, and why it packs clubs across town most nights a week.

C-3 Wrap-up / Montage - Residents of the city describe DC in their own words

PROGRAM OUT @ 59:00

This episode made possible by CPB and PRX. Produced by Al Letson and Taki Telonidis

Handbell ringers have an unusual approach to musicmaking -- as one choir director put it, "It's like synchronized swimming." In anticipation of the third annual Boston Handbell Festival, which takes place on May 19 at Old South Church on Copley Square in Boston, independent producer Jackson Braider delves in how these people make those incredible sounds.

Historian and author David McCullough spoke about his new book, “The Greater Journey:  Americans in Paris.” The book follows famous artists, writers, scholars, and some figures lost to history, who defied the American movement west, by heading east, to Paris.  It’s a fascinating, informative and enlightening conversation.

In his new radio series, Here’s The Thing, award-winning actor Alec Baldwin gives the listener unique entrée into the lives of some of today’s most exciting performers.

For information, please contact Deb Blakeley, Blakeley & Company, LLC, 612-377-1207 or blakeley.deb@gmail.com