Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday for many Americans, but what is it like for those who are from other countries and celebrate it too? This piece gives you a glimpse of how special American Thanksgiving is to foreigners.

Imagine that you're walking down the street and hear someone speaking with a British accent. What assumptions might you make about that person based on his or her voice? Would you come to the same conclusion if that person had a heavy southern drawl or sounded like he or she spoke Spanish as a first language? John Baugh , the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, continues his discussion of linguistic profiling and describes how he hopes his research will lead to policies that increase Americans' acceptance of linguistic diversity.

To hear Baugh's personal story about how first became interested in this line of research, be sure to listen to Linguistic Insights , the first episode in our ongoing series about language.

I hope you're sitting down. I'm going to say something heretical. Ready?

I'm kinda tired of StoryCorps.

Let me explain. On so many levels, StoryCorps is genius. It's the nation's largest oral history project -- ever. And, it's peer to peer (mostly) with people interviewing one another. The stories are heartfelt and honest. What could be better on the radio, right?

Problem is, I think the stories are predictable. Not all the time, to be sure, but often.

On this Saltcast, we listen to a story produced at Salt several years ago that, in-house, we called "StoryCorps Plus." Take a listen and let us know if you think the approach to recording and producing this story might be a way for StoryCorps to take their productions to the next level.

Alicia Beltrán-Castañeda grew up in Salinas, California, in the late 1960s. Her mother, Beatriz Béltran, was an immigrant from Mexico, and her father, Manuel, worked both as a foreman at a food packing plant and as an overseer of migrant farm workers.

Their family of seven lived in a small trailer, but by working multiple jobs, Manuel was able to save enough money to buy a plot of land on which he built a house. Alicia vividly recalls sitting on a 1950s metal stool in their living room, watching her father paint some of the walls goldenrod, and others Pepto-Bismol pink.

Manuel died when Alicia was 13, leaving their mother to raise the children alone.

Beatriz began working for the Salinas City Elementary School District as a bilingual liaison for Spanish-speaking families and the administration, and later became a coordinator for migrant worker families. Through her job, she saw the poverty many migrant families lived in.

Alicia was not as familiar with the lives of migrant farmworkers until she came home one day to find that her bed was missing--she was furious. With all of her older siblings away at college, Alicia had finally gotten her own room, and she loved her bed, which had a pink cover and lace dust ruffle. When she confronted her mother, Beatriz explained that she had given the bed to a family that had recently arrived in California from Mexico, and Alicia remembers telling her mother that she did not understanding why that was her problem. Without explanation, Beatriz told her to fill shopping bags with canned food from their pantry.

Together they drove to a house where Alicia’s bed now was, a one-room shack with a dirt floor like the ones occupied by so many other migrant worker families. There they met a woman who was laying on Alicia’s bed with her newborn baby surrounded by her four other children.

At StoryCorps, Alicia told her own daughter, Serena, 13, how meaningful that experience was for her.

Originally aired November 18, 2016, on NPR’s Morning Edition.

We're closer than ever before to discovering if we're not alone in the universe. The host for this episode of Transistor, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, visits the NASA lab that discovered that comets contain some of the very same chemical elements that we contain. Then, Michelle talks to a Vatican planetary scientist about how science and religion can meet on the topic of life beyond Earth.

This is the story of a love that spans continents. Jon Dunham set out on the longest, toughest walk of his life. But along the way, he met someone who helped carry the weight.

Women are earning more degrees in higher education than men. So why are there so few women in tenure track or leadership positions in academia?

Rock chameleon David Bowie has died at the age of 69. Throughout his long career, one of Bowie's most important collaborators was producer Tony Visconti. Sound Opinions hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot spoke with Visconti in 2008 about his work with the music icon. He described meeting the 22-year-old David Bowie for the first time in 1969 as well as the 1977 recording of "Heroes."

"Bless Me, Ultima" is about a boy much like Anaya, coming-of-age in the open llano of New Mexico. This Literary Moment is part of the NEA's Big Reads Moments. The Big Read is an NEA program designed to restore reading to the center of American culture by providing citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities. In 2007, nearly 200 communities nationwide participated in the Big Read, reading one of twelve classic American novels such as "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston.

The names of many of Reverend Martin Luther King Junior’s associates are well known: Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young. But one of his most important confidants, a Jewish business man from New York named Stanley Levison, has remained largely hidden from public view. From what we know about him, Levison probably would have wanted it that way.

The late Julian Bond conducted 51 extensive interviews with prominent black leaders in America. Phyllis Leffler who led the project with Bond, has written a book on the series that offers insights into the intractable disparities of race in America.    Also: In the 1940’s Fatima Massaquoi penned one of the earliest known autobiographies by an African woman. Arthur Abraham is one of three editors of The Autobiography of an African Princess , which traces Fatima’s life from her youth in Africa to her later years in America.

Later in the show:  In his book, The Truth About Cultural Bias , Allen Lewis looks at race in light of the Obama presidency and the George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn court cases as well as his own life. And:  Twitter is speeding up communication about racial incidents.  Bridgett Robertson says three-fourths of all African-Americans use Twitter to discuss political and social issues of importance to the black community.

Also: The Geography of Slavery is a website that catalogues more than 4,000 advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves (including one written by Thomas Jefferson) placed in newspapers in the later part of the 18^th century. Tom Costa says these advertisements humanize the stories of the runaway men and women and will also be used in the classroom to teach American history.

In August of 2009 I was 29 years old, single, and living in Iowa City.  I wasn’t going to be 29 much longer, and I decided I didn’t want to be single much longer, either.  So I went looking online, not for love, but something a little more mundane, something between U-Hauls and one night stands.  So far I’ve found a Latin lover, a cougar-seeking piece of “hot chocolate,” and a Satanist named Dan.  And you know?  He just might be the one.

An engaging and informative look at farmers in a desert landscape, and at how their individual farming styles reflect their personal values. Explores modern industrial farming, centuries-old collective water-distribution organizations, ancient Navajo corn customs and semi-urban organic farming.

"Haven't you ever just wanted to chuck it all in, and escape a daily routine that you felt was wearing you down? Just sell the house, the car, give up the electronic gadgetry, the monthly bills, the commute...

We all have. But few of us have the courage to just do it.

Top environmental consultant Don Gamble did find the courage to do just that back in the early 1990s.

Feeling disillusioned with the international environmental impact assessments he was working on, he bailed out, gave it all up, rediscovered yoga and meditation and found... peace."

Nauru is a teeny speck of an island in the middle of the Southpacific. Once a bountiful habitat for 1,000 residents, in the past 150 years Nauru has been reduced to a lunar landscape of rubble. Novelist David Kendall tells the whipsaw tale of greed and shortsightedness, how phosphates made these islanders among the richest people in the world and how its subsquent depletion -- by their own hands -- has left them bankrupt and hopeless.

NAPT Project Coordinator Brendan McCauley speaks with Gary Farmer, Cayuga, from Canada. Farmer has been a television and film actor since the 80s. He plays the father of the main character in Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals and is also one of the co-stars of Dead Man. He helped create Aboriginal Voices Radio in Canada.

A vox that works for National Teacher Day, Valentine's Day, or maybe a day close to graduation.  This is a light hearted collection of student voices waxing poetic about teacher crushes. 

Debbie Salamone was an environmental journalist who was passionate about the ocean—and ballroom dancing. One day at the beach, all that changed.

A “brig” is a two-masted ship, a big ship. And “brig” is the word used for a prison on a ship. And the Brig Creole is an 1800s ship that was meant to deliver 135 enslaved people to New Orleans. "Meant" being the key word here…

The ship left Virginia on October 30, 1841, with plans to take the same route that dozens of ships took to the port of New Orleans.

Walter Johnson, History Professor at Harvard University, says as of 1841, nothing could have been more ordinary than this journey. This was the height of the domestic slave trade in the United States.

“The bulk of the enslaved people who form the labor force in the emerging cotton kingdom are taken from the upper south, as one of the largest forced migrations in human history,” Johnson says.

Ships brought thousands of people into the New Orleans slave market. But those on board the Creole were determined to make moves and not land in the cotton kingdom.

Britain outlawed the international slave trade with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, and its ships take the lead in policing the high seas, searching ships of other nations. They sign bilateral treaties with Atlantic trading nations like Portugal, Sweden, France and others. But there’s one country that responds to this with "aw, hell no": America.

"So a British naval crew trying to interdict slave shipments is not allowed to stop a ship that has the American flag”, says Johnson. “What that means, in the words of the historian WEB DuBois, is that through the first half of the 19th century, Old Glory became the slave trader’s flag of choice.”

Other countries became hip to what the U.S. flag meant at sea, and started switching flags.

“So say you're a Spanish slave trader and you see a British naval ship on the horizon. The first thing the slave traders do is they run up the American flag, because that way they are protected by the mantle of American national sovereignty.”

So the U.S. was notoriously defiant, and we knew it. But back to 1841 and the Brig Creole, sailing the Atlantic under that flag, and everything it represented. A week into the journey, on the night of November 7, William Merritt, one of the slave traders aboard the Creole, goes down into the hold.

“He sees Madison Washington, who is one of the slave men” Johnson says. “He’s out of the hold where he's supposed to be. There's a confrontation, and the slave trader escapes from Washington's grasp and runs back on to the deck of the ship. He hears a shot fired and realizes that some of the slaves in the ship are in revolt, and within four or five hours the slaves have complete control of the ship.”

One slave trader is killed and thrown overboard, and captain Robert Ensor is wounded. Nineteen slaves are later identified as the rebels responsible for the revolt. They had heard of a ship that had departed from Virginia the year before, and shipwrecked in the Bahamas. That was British territory -- no slave trade allowed -- and those shipwrecked slaves were eventually emancipated by the local British government.

It was with that story in mind that the rebels took command of the Brig Creole, and re-routed it to Nassau, Bahamas.

The ship sails into the port in the Bahamas, and at that point, the 19 rebels kind of step down from power to mix in with the rest of the slaves. This is in hopes of not being targeted as criminals, but Johnson says what it also does is allow the white crew to reassert control and let Old Glory do the talking. “By raising the American flag is to say to the British ‘you have no interest in this. Just give us back the cargo and we'll push on to New Orleans.’”

Not so fast, say the British, who come on board to investigate what happened. They’re told by the Brig Creole crew that a group of slaves rebelled and briefly took control, which is why they’re docked in Nassau. But the Brits respond by saying, "Hey, USA, you can’t claim that a slave revolt has occurred. Not here, anyway."

“Because if there's no such thing as slavery in the British Empire,” says Johnson, “then there cannot be a slave revolt.”

The white crew just wants to keep the slaves on board, get back out to sea, and go make their profit in New Orleans. But Johnson points out that the community of Nassau at that time is mainly African. It’s full of emancipated slaves, and the West Indian regiment of Britain’s army. They realize what’s going on relates to them to the extent that many of them get into small boats with clubs and go out and position themselves around the Creole in order to protect it from any effort by the white crew to take it away and sail it back to New Orleans.

When the Americans realized need to regain control in the harbor, they tried to buy more weapons on shore, and no one in Nassau would sell them weapons. Johnson says there's this revolutionary Black Atlantic, there's the symbol of the American flag moving through the water saying "Don't mess with us, don't touch us," there's the British who have abandoned this ideology of slavery. And then all three of those forces just comes to a head at Nassau. “It’s pretty amazing what they did, right? So there's a story of the establishment of political solidarity under extreme conditions here.”

Political solidarity on many levels. As Johnson describes, the community in Nassau surrounds the docked Brig Creole in smaller boats to say "you guys aren’t going anywhere with those slaves -- they’re not yours anymore."’ The local government defends the community’s actions, and lends further support with their army! And the whole town boycotts American business by refusing to sell them weapons. Johnson says that it’s important to remember that before all this, was the plan to take over the ship in the first place.

“I mean these are 19 people who are from different areas of Virginia who have not known one another before they met in the slave pen and then on the slave ship in Virginia. At the end of October. And within a week, they come to trust one another and off to risk their lives on this venture. That's incredible.”

This is not something the white crew was expecting. Otherwise the ship’s captain, Robert Ensor, would have never brought his family along. In an article Johnson wrote about the incident, he writes:

For what else to call the oblivious confidence with which a man like Ensor brought a fifteen month old child aboard a slave ship. And an aspect of the property he held in his own slaves produced whiteness. A certainty born of history that events would break in his favor. That all would be well.

“And yet he's willing to lie to himself and say this is going to go all right,” says Johnson.  “Just like it always has been before. And it doesn't. It doesn't go all right.”

For the slave traders, at least. After months of depositions, insurance claims, and detention in jail, all the slaves, including the 19 rebels, were offered freedom. According to Johnson, ignorance and denial on behalf of the whites on board is what made something like this possible. They chose not to see that this "cargo" was capable not only of organization, but heroism. He says it all goes back to when the slave trader, William Merritt, first discovered one of his previously obedient slaves out of the hold.

“That moment seems be an extraordinary moment. This man Merritt, who thought that he was in one kind of history, is forced to confront the idea of the fact that something doesn't make sense. Something's happening that he doesn't understand. He says "but you're the last person I would expect to be out of order on the ship." And then it gradually dawned on him, and he starts to run. And that seems to me to be a moment, and a sense of possibility and danger that it's really worth us trying to imagine and capture.”

This boatwide emancipation was celebrated by abolitionists, and used in efforts to close the U.S. domestic slave trade. New Orleans was the main engine of that trade, and continued to profit from the trade for another 20 years. And although the story of the Brig Creole does not end in New Orleans, it was meant to, and shows the city’s prominent role within an Atlantic world full of slavery and revolution. Talk about rocking the boat…

"I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown.

I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil,

to see if it could grow differently,

if it could drink of new and cool rains,

bend in strange winds,

respond to the warmth of other suns,

and, perhaps, to bloom."

That evocative description of leaving one's home in the North for another life in the South was in a footnote in Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. Wright was one of six million African Americans who made that journey in the period following World War I through the 1960s. This mass movement of people became known as The Great Migration, and it's the subject of Isabel Wilkerson's acclaimed new book; which she titled The Warmth of Other Suns.

Tennis great Arthur Ashe first emerged as a world-class athlete with his win over Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, but his contributions as an activist, author, and humanitarian eventually transcended his sporting success.  Whit Sheppard is working on a biography of Arthur Ashe, who died at age 49 of AIDS related pneumonia.  And: Philanthropist Doris Buffett, sister of Warren Buffett, has funded a new program that helps first generation college students earn associate’s degrees in high school. Ann Woolford and Antwan Perry say the initiative is especially helpful for young African American males, who have the lowest national graduation rate.

When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson’s more famous poems. They’ve stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh about one poem in particular that’s haunted her all this time.  It’s called I cannot live with You-
According to Vendler, whose authoritative Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries has recently been published, it’s a heartbreaking poem of an unresolvable dilemma, and ensuing despair.

This interview is the first in a new ThoughtCast series which examines a specific piece of writing — be it a poem, play, novel, short story, work of non-fiction or scrap of papyrus — that’s had a significant influence on the interviewee, that’s shaped and moved them.

Up next – esteemed novelist and short story writer Tom Perrotta discusses Good Country People,  a short story by Flannery O’Connor that’s particularly meaningful to him.

The batman of Mexico has his own bat-cave. He just shares it with 4,000 Mexican long-nosed bats. In this episode, join researcher Rodrigo Medellin as he descends into the Devil’s Cave just north of Mexico City. It’s a journey that started decades ago when Medellin was on a game show as a boy. He lost the game show, but won a prize far more valuable—for himself, his students, and Mexico’s bats. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports from Tepoztlán.

Space scientists are acutely aware of what can happen when climates change in other parts of our solar system. Take Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid and is 900°F on the surface, but it wasn’t always that way. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller talks with a NASA expert on Venus about how the planet became a hellscape. And she talks with the Library of Congress’ inaugural chair of astrobiology about how to grasp this new geologic era where humans cause rapid change.

Something unusual happens about a half mile under the sea. Ocean physics create a special zone where sound travels for hundreds, even thousands of miles. Whales use it, and cold warriors plumbed its secrets. Listen in.

t used to be that a high school education was enough to support a comfortably middle class lifestyle. But these days, it takes a lot more to get a well-paying job. So, community colleges in Virginia are offering a program that helps students save time and money on their way to university degrees. Lilia Fuquen has the story.

Between a changing climate and an invasion of parasites, it’s a tough time for the little honeybee. A Norfolk woman’s quest to give bees a home may yield valuable research on their plight. She’s putting “bee backpacks” in the hands of local kids. John Last has that story.

On the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, birds across the North American continent greet the dawn — from the Florida Keys and the marshes of Chesapeake Bay, from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the great plains of North Dakota, to the mountains of New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, and all the way up to the Arctic. Wherever you live, step outside and listen to the magnificent chorus. Click on “Full Transcript” to see a list of the birds in this story.

In 1974, Latin music in the US was about to get a kick in the pants. The audience for the big bands was graying; younger, US-born Latinos thought of the classic Cuban forms — the mambos and sones andguarachas and guaguancós — as their parents’ and grandparents’ music. But Johnny Pacheco, a bandleader and star percussionist, had formed a new record label with a new approach. Fania Records, based in New York, put those forms together with influences from Puerto Rico, Colombia and other countries, and called it salsa.

Pacheco wasn’t the first to use the term salsa to describe music, but Fania Records made it nationally popular, and Celia & Johnny was its first breakout hit. It set Celia Cruz, a singularly talented and popular singer who had worked with Tito Puente and his orchestra, in front of a much smaller band that left a lot of room for vocal improvisation. 

The story of Celia & Johnny is told by Latin music scholar Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Celiz Cruz biographer Ana Cristina Reymundo, and Johnny Pacheco himself. 

Harvard graduate, Stanford PhD student:
https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/nisrin-elamin-abdelrahman

See Transcript

Produced by staff and students at the Stanford Storytelling Project
https://storytelling.stanford.edu/

Music used from Freesound and original 

Tyler Dunning went into the wild to distract himself from his grief…but ended up coming face to face with it instead.

Development efforts in American cities often push out long-term residents and communities of color. Zeroing in on Baltimore, Professor Brandi Blessett breaks down the intentional and unintentional impacts of urban policy decisions.

For More on this Topic:

• Read more of her work on the impact of public administration on communities of color in her two-page brief.

• Check out Arnold Hirsch’s book on race and housing in Chicago, Making the Second Ghetto.

Further Reading:

• The Health Consequences of Moving From Place to Place, Antwan Jones, George Washington University

• The Real Baltimore Crisis, Eva Rosen, Johns Hopkins University

• Episode 19: Changing Neighborhoods for Better or Worse, Jackelyn Hwang

An exploration of "forensic optography" - the theory advanced by some 19th and early 20th c. detectives that you could obtain an image of a murderer by photographing the retina of a murder victim. The belief was that the last thing you saw before you died was fixed on your retina. The idea has its origin in some bizarre experiments...with rabbits. Featuring Simon Ings, author of A Natural History of Seeing, and Arthur Conan Doyle scholar Michael Homer.

World-renowned naturalist Joe Hutto , subject of the Emmy winning BBC documentary "My Life As a Turkey", discusses how he became a wild turkey mother in the hammocks of Florida. Plus: Fourth-generation pilot Eric Walden gives a play-by-play of the ninja-like moves of the wild turkey—mid-air.  And: The once-scorned bronze-feathered turkey is making a comeback, with the help of organic, free-range farmers like Paul Kelly.   Also: Jay Sullivan sends his students off to Thanksgiving Break with a poem about a young engineer’s ingenuity and of course, a turkey.

A team of young producers explores water in Arizona: How people feel about it, how it is used, how it gets from one place to another, and how it could be conserved. They follow the path of a droplet of water, from the Rocky Mountains, through dams, rivers and diversions, and then hundreds of miles across the desert. They talk to ordinary people, as well as to the Federal and state officials who set water policy. And they visit a Native American community that has had to learn to survive for nearly a century without its beloved river but is now beginning to see its water return.

Zach Hirsch’s recent story on NPR is proof you can find national stories right in your neighborhood. Zach recorded a fairly simple chat in a backyard and turned it into one of the most important stories he says he’s ever produced.

Of course, no radio story is ever “simple.” For starters, the conversation he recorded with neighbors was about the Confederate flag. Zach said it was a bold move on his part to reach out and talk to someone displaying that flag.

n the end, the bravery, the communication system he set up with his partner, and thinking of his mic as a shield may have been a case of overpreparing. The people who spoke turned out to be, as Zach puts it, sweet.

But then, after the interview, Zach spent a great deal of time fact-checking the people he talked to. He included what he learned in his narration. And, that caught my ear when I heard the story. So, I reached out to Zach with a handful of my own questions: What obligation do reporters have with interviewees post-interview fact checking? What if the bulk of a story consists of correcting interviewees? Can’t people simply say what’s true to them? Zach tackles these questions and more on this episode of HowSound.

When you have an emergency, you call 911. A dispatcher answers and calmly sends help. But dispatchers are real people too, trying to make sense of what's happening and keep everyone safe. KUER's Erik Neumann walks us through one phone call that changed the life of an emergency dispatcher forever.

One came from Australia. Another from D.C. Another from Aspen. Still another from San Antonio. All were part of a class of ten people from all over who recently attended a Transom Traveling Workshop in Marfa, Texas hosted by Marfa Public Radio .

Some students were full time reporters. Others had dabbled at producing their own podcasts or stories for stations. A couple had not made anything before. They all produced a profile of someone living in the area.

Let’s just say it was a blast. I mean, think about it. Ten students, ten stories, one week. Marfa, Texas. Hello? What’s not to like??!

On this episode of HowSound, I’m highlighting a couple of pieces produced at the workshop because of their great use of sound and on-scene reporting. They’re really satisfying to listen to. The producers are Andrea Gibbs , a host on a weekly Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio program who has never reported in the field or produced her own story before and Margot Wohl who makes a podcast for KPBS in San Diego.

Andreas Weber is a Berlin-based philosopher, biologist, and writer. He holds degrees in marine biology and cultural studies. He proposes the development of a “poetic ecology” which intimately attaches our species to every being and underpins the entire range of human experience. He argues that feelings and emotions, far from being superfluous to the study of organisms, are the very foundation of life. 

His books in English include: Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (2013); The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016); and Biopoetics: Towards an Existential Ecology (2016). Weber regularly contributes to major newspapers and magazines, such as National Geographic and has won a number of awards for his writing.

His latest book and our subject today is Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology.  

The Blues were created by African Americans in the Deep South around the end of the 19th century. With its roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, and spirituals, the blues form is characterized by call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. While the blues is the cornerstone of American music and at the heart of much jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, it was originally the music of African American working people in the rural south. Musicologist  Robert Palmer noted the blues was both “a continuation of deep and tenacious African traditions and a creative response to a brutal and desperate situation.” 

The Mississippi Delta is known as ”the land where the blues began.” And at its heart is Clarksdale, located at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 (“the crossroads”),    Times have changed in the Delta, but the area  still remains a hotbed for the blues, with nightly music, great music festivals throughout the year, and  the world’s first museum devoted exclusively to the blues: the Delta Blues Museum. The Delta Blues Museum is one of the few museums in a rural farming area in the South. and it's become a cultural center, welcoming visitors from abroad and providing area residents with music and programming.  With some help from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delta Blues Museum created an award-winning arts and education program that serves the young people in the community.  And like the blues itself, it happened organically by filling a need.

Last fall, I heard a story on NPR about flood insurance and I thought “Oh dear. This is going to be humdrum.”

Noel King produced the story for Planet Money . She’s a reporter there. And even she agrees. National Flood Insurance Policy is not a riveting topic. But, despite that, Noel nailed it. Her three and a half minute piece was a great listen.

Why? Her writing. Only she says it’s not writing, it’s telling. Noel says if you sit down at a computer and start writing a radio story, there’s a good chance it’ll sound just like that, writing. Instead, for radio, a narrator should sound like they’re telling a story. In fact, she goes so far to say that the narrator should even feel what they’re saying. Not too much, of course! But some.

On this episode of HowSound, Noel dissects the story she wrote — told, rather — and how she came to approach her writing for radio as telling.

Hear stories about women in the early days of Greenpeace: heroines such as Ann Marie Horn and Bobbi Hunter, as well as the difficulties still present in sharing the stories of women in our movements.

On this episode of Culture Clique, we talk with agricultural specialist Dale Hadler about modern farming practices. Dale discusses farming as a holistic system versus the farm as a production factory.

Glenn Hastedt and Bernd Kaussler are the authors of a new book that offers a realist critique of US foreign policy toward the Middle East in the past decade. And: Far right populist parties have been on the rise in Europe, from France’s National Front to Bulgaria’s Attack Party. Tatiana Rizova explores how these parties are gaining ground and discusses whether power will continue to swing in their direction.

Writer Carol Dunbar has more than one power issue as she shares her essay "Generator" with us on Wordish.

Mary Tamaki Murakami was still swooning over pop stars and worrying about her homework when her life suddenly took a very real turn. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, she experienced a crackdown in her own San Francisco neighborhood. She was forced into an internment camp with her family, and experienced the type of descrimination that was enforced by the Supreme Court. Today, she shares her experience with schools and organizations because she fears history is already repeating. As more parallels emerge between her own experience and new policies affecting Muslim-Americans, Mary hopes her story can serve as a warning.

Humorous piece about setting off fireworks on the 4th. It's good to know going in that this is about Fireworks. Probably should mention that in the intro if you use this piece. One piece is dry (no music bed) the other had some music. Take your pick.

Joshua Geartz joined the Army after high school. It was 1999, he had some uncles who served, and he thought, "college wasn't for me," Geartz said.

Fast-forward a few years to Geartz driving a truck on his last night of deployment in Iraq.

"My vehicle was hit with a roadside bomb which left me with a brain injury and some spinal cord damage," he said. "Now I typically rely on a wheelchair. I'm not wheelchair-bound. But it makes things difficult."

The change was fast and jarring, and Geartz isolated himself, trying to deal with the new challenges on his own. "Going from being a leader in the military to a point where it was hard to even care for yourself is really hard to deal with," he said.

It was those psychological wounds that nearly killed him. At one point, after returning home to his wife Lisa and two sons in New York, he attempted suicide. "I felt like I was a burden," he remembered. "It was almost like I wanted my family to be able to laugh again."

Lisa was looking for help when she came across a news article about a non-profit group that pairs professional songwriters with veterans.

"Knowing my love for music, she thought it would be something I would maybe go to," Geartz said. "Especially because she was able to attend with me."

Using music to find 'what the soul is trying to say'

Geartz had never written a song before, but he entered the SongwritingWith:Soldiers program and met Nashville singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier. She's been volunteering as a mentor for about five years, facilitating artistic collaboration between the military and civilian worlds.

"Soldiers are trained not to be vulnerable, but when they come home, they've got to learn it," Gauthier said during a recent tour stop at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Cal. "Part of telling the story is being uncomfortably vulnerable. But that's what songs do."

The organization holds several retreats a year, and they're free to veterans and their partners. At the retreats, a handful of professional songwriters play a show so the veterans can get to know their work.

"They pick who they want to write with. Whose music resonates," Gauthier said. "We have to get each of them their own song. That's our commitment to them."

Each of the pro songwriters has been at the craft for decades, "and we can tell quickly what the soul is trying to say," she said.

Gauthier starts the writing process by asking her veteran collaborator to recount stories from the service as if he or she were describing a movie scene. She plays a melody on guitar that correlates with the emotion of the story.

"Music is so core to our experience that if the songwriter can find the melody that correlates with the trauma that the veteran is trapped in, it helps to move that story into language," she said.

Before getting involved in the program, Gauthier recalled being guilty of stereotyping members of the military. She chalked it up to the growing military-civilian divide. Since the end of the draft, fewer and fewer Americans know a member of the military.

"I had the stereotype of the conservative straight white guy who likes to shoot weapons. That's not who I'm meeting," she said. "And that's not even nice to think that. But I didn't know until I experienced it firsthand."

A soundtrack of the veteran experience

Gauthier's tenth album, Rifles and Rosary Beads, is entirely co-written with veterans and families from the program.
The eleven tracks dig deep into the veteran experience, including stories you may not typically associate with military service.

The song "Brothers" takes listeners to the emotional deployment of a new mom, with lyrics like, "War ripped my baby from my breast / Now my name and rank cover my chest / 23 hours I flew and wept / 23 hours I never slept."

And later, "I learned to cry without a sound / because I'm afraid you'd put me down."

Army veterans Meghan Couninghan and Britney Pfad helped craft the song. "Megan was nursing her baby and she got deployed. Basically - no special treatment. Hand the baby off and get to Iraq," Gauthier said.

Another track, "The War After the War," was co-written with half-a-dozen military wives and songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman, who also wrote the monster hit "This Kiss" for Faith Hill.

"They have to serve in silence a lot of the time, and our veterans have told me over and over again, look, the hero here is my wife," Gauthier said.

Gauthier has a history of trauma and substance abuse in her own life, experiences she's delved into in previous albums. But she said the SongwritingWith:Soldiers process is not about trying to match the veterans' experiences with her own rocky past.

"Like, yeah, no, I wasn't in Fallujah. I don't have the experience of being in a war," she said.

Complex emotions; uncomfortable lyrics

On the first night at the Songwriting retreat, Josh Geartz arrived skeptical. But Gauthier's performance convinced him she would be a reliable songwriting partner.

"It was just something about her words, in the song," Geartz said. "Being able to express so many complex feelings with such a simple way of saying it." So they started talking - Gauthier looking for a way to unearth his song.

She asked, "What's the one thing weighing you down?" and Geartz replied, "I don't know, who the hell knows?'"

That became the first line of "Still on the Ride." Instead of his own life-changing injuries, Geartz chose to focus on lyrics that memorialized a fallen friend.

The song begins, "looking back now / who the hell knows / Where the soul of a dead soldier goes."

"I was just blown away that it could be that simple," he said. "Then when I started opening up and being truly honest with her, I think Mary saw where my true hurt, my true pain was coming from."

The song continues, "I shouldn't be here / You shouldn't be gone / But it's not up to me who dies and who carries on."

"Why him and not me? I think from that stemmed the idea that maybe he went first to be my guardian angel and make sure I made it through those things," Geartz said.

Geartz said he still works every day to maintain his mental health. He has joined Gauthier on stage to play harmonica during her Rifles and Rosary Beads tour.

Gauthier knows that the music on Rifles and Rosary Beads will make some members of the civilian audience uncomfortable.

"Leonard Cohen said it best: The crack is how the light gets in," she said. "We don't connect at our strengths, we connect at our vulnerabilities.

"I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way and war doesn't ever work that way."

This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans. Funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Bob Woodruff Foundation.

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