Secret Asian Woman

This intensely personal, engagingly produced piece dives into a crucial gap in perception that often separates people of color from white Americans. What constitutes racism? In the day-to-day of…
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A Stitch in Time: Sewing Behind Bars

A solidly done feature about a manufacturing business based in a women's prison. Without raising the policy question directly, the piece makes a case for giving inmates something productive to do with…
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Coast Guard - a look at homeland security in the San Francisco Bay Area

Maybe it's just me, but in a half-hour documentary on the Coast Guard, I expect to get at least one boat ride out of the deal. This piece is built entirely on interview tape from Coast Guard…
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Interview with legendary folk singer PEGGY SEEGER

A good interview with an important and fascinating figure. It's unfortunately done over the phone rather than by tape sync, but that's my only gripe. Seeger tells of growing up in her musical family,…
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MegaCities Series 4: Shanghai, China

This report covers interesting and important information, but it feels almost incidental that the piece is made for radio. Admittedly the subject is wonkish, a tough one to make lively through scenes…
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The Street of the Cauldron Makers

A superb piece ostensibly about a single street in Istanbul, but of course about much much more: cultural identity and government's attempts to control it; ethnic "cleansing"; historical memory and…
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Chicago's Memory

An interesting experiment that doesn't come off too well. We're taken on an audio walking tour of locations in Chicago where people died in historic disasters. There's music, traffic sound, and sound…
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New Orleans' Friendly Bar

It's a challenging task at this point to say something new about New Orleanians and their efforts to rebuild their city and their lives. The idea of focusing on one neighborhood bar seems like a…
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India Rising, program four: Can It All Hang Together?

This is excellent journalism and very good radio. In this segment of the BBC's series on the new India, George Arney explores some of the downsides of India's industrialization and booming wealth.…
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Interview with investigative journalist JEREMY SCAHILL, author of "BLACKWATER: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

Americans who pay attention to the news know that for four years, the U.S. has had a military force in Iraq ranging from 120,000 to 150,000 troops. That's half the truth, literally and figuratively.…
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Reimagining a New Orleans Icon: The Shotgun House

A good piece with a fresh angle (new to me, anyhow) on the rebuilding of New Orleans. This is a straightforward news feature--about a program to build stylish new homes based on the traditional…
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It is To Laugh - Business as Usual

You have to admire the hard work that went into this program. Highly produced, energetically acted mock radio ads--one after another. After another. The ads are deftly done and some are clever, but so…
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Victoria Secretes

"In a nutshell, Victoria is the genteel tourist town that poops in the ocean." I'm not sure which is the more satisfying aspect of this report -- the appearance by Mr. Floaty, the seven-foot turd…
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Homelands Regained

An excellent production from the catalog of Homelands Productions. In Columbia's Cauca region in the early 1990s, Paez Indian guerrillas were forcibly taking "back" land that had been controlled for…
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The Roots of Mother's Day: A MOMbo MOMent

This "MOMbo MOMent" reminds us that Mother's Day was not originally about brunch at IHOP and a chance for mom to put her feet up. Not that those aren't worthy (in)activities, but Julia Ward Howe's…
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