I recorded these interviews with my family two weeks ago, before George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. Now they seem unimportant, like from another era. Except that in my family it’s the younger folk who have been mostly f****d by the virus pandemic, and it’s been young people, mostly, who’ve been out on the streets protesting. I hope their efforts lead to real change in our society. Donate

Following the news is like watching a competition for the worst case scenario and I’ve grown weary of all the blaming and shaming. Now we can’t trust anyone, not even ourselves. But at some point we’re going to have to come together in order to survive. I’m working on a story where I interview people in my family about how they’re coping with the pandemic. Not everyone is doing well, and it’s pretty emotional for me, so I need to take some more time putting it together. In the meantime,...

It seems more of us are paying attention to our neighborhoods lately, so perhaps this is a good time to replay this story, produced in 1991. I still live in the same neighborhood, but it feels different now. It’s like there was a tall tree in my front yard but now the tree is gone and only a stump remains. I am stumped. I used to depend on trust—standing or sitting close to strangers and holding a microphone less than a foot from their faces. Now that’s not going to happen again for a while....

My friend Trent Harris has a problem caused by the coronavirus. It’s not a big problem compared to a lot of other things that have come up recently, like the possible collapse of the economy and thousands of people dying. Trent’s problem is more like a temporary embarrassment. Basically, his reputation is on the line. Donate ...

Shana from Achterarder, Scotland. My friend Erica Heilman has a podcast called Rumblestrip. She drives around Vermont and talks to people about their lives. Last week she was sitting at home, like everybody, trying to figure out what to do, and she decided to ask her listeners to send her audio recordings of what and how they’re doing under self isolation. A lot of people responded, quickly, and within a couple days Erica...

This story was originally broadcast on All Things Considered in 1993. The ground was shifting under my feet back then and I had to figure out what to do. Now it’s shifting again, this time everybody’s in it together. There are things we can do, stories to tell, that can make us feel better. Thanks for listening and supporting this show. Donate

Adrienne Kinne just after basic training in 1994. Adrienne Kinne, 2020 I should confess that I have a personal interest in listening to veterans talk about how they recover from war. I was never in the military, but I spent some time overseas...

Elliott Woods as a soldier in Iraq, 2004 Today I have a conversation with Elliott Woods, a veteran who is also a very fine writer. He served a year as a combat engineer in northern Iraq. Then he came home and went to school at the University of Virginia, graduating with a degree in English literature. He thought about staying in school and becoming a professor, but he decided he wanted to go back to war, this time as a...

Garett Reppenhagen in Iraq, 2004 I believe that sometime in the future, sooner or later, people in the United States will admit and accept that we have lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and demand that our troops be brought back home. Now we are in denial, which is dangerous because when you’re in denial you keep making the same mistake over and over again. I believe we need to talk about what we’ve done, the mistakes we’ve...

Last spring I was invited to speak at the Oorzaken Audio Festival in Amsterdam. I remember seeing leaves come out on the trees along the canals and tulips blooming on the bridges. The first night I was there i was interviewed on stage at the Torpedo Theater by the hosts of the Podcastclub, a Dutch podcast hosted by Lieven Heeremans and Misha Melita. This time I’m the one answering the questions. Donate

His real name is Alissandru Francesco Caldiero, born into the old world on the island of Sicily, he came to the U.S. on a boat when he was nine years old, sailing past the Statue of Liberty. When I first met him, nearly 30 years later, he was screaming a Dada poem at a sandstone wall in southern Utah—repeating the same line, “This is not it,” over and over, faster and faster in a near epileptic seizure. In that moment our lives became intertwined.I think of this story as a song, a lament for...

I’ve been in Armenia teaching a podcasting workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department. I think it went well, overall, and the students were exceptional. Perhaps I will write about it someday, but not now. I’ve come back to impeachment week before Christmas, a double whammy to go with my jet lag. So I’m going to re-play The Rebel Yell, a story about the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City, first podcast on this program in April of 2015. Music by the Icelandic group Mum (We Have a...

In the last episode I became upset when a woman wearing a gun told me Donald Trump had been born again as a baby Christian, and I considered giving up my pursuit of the other as there seemed to be no hope of crossing the divide and finding common ground. I felt like Donald Trump had grabbed me by the pussy.But then I got over it, and I went back out to Trump Country, this time to the west, the basin and range. Donate

I was driving around rural western Colorado, near the border with Utah, near where Jack Kerouac saw a vision of God in the clouds that looked like Pooh Bear. I was looking for people I was a little afraid of—Republicans, Trump supporters—and there on the side of the highway were three signs that made me think I was in the right place.Music: Main Theme, Soundtrack for To Kill A Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein Donate

It’s not easy for me to walk up to people and ask if they want to be interviewed for my podcast. I’m afraid they will think I’m a fool, or an idiot, or be suspicious of the whole thing—fake news, etc. But on this trip, more often than not, it was other people who came up to me. Pretty much everybody wanted to talk about the cultural divide. Donate

Yellowstone Lake, August 2019 This show is a request for funding, a responsibility for which I am ill-suited. I’m not interested in marketing and promotion. I’m opposed to advertising. I’m against monetizing my product. I don’t want my stories to go viral, I want them to go fungal like the underground network of mycorrhizal fibers that connect the roots of trees and plants in a forest, sharing food and information, a natural...

Solidod in Bozeman, Montana, 2012. Photo by Jake Warga. Larry met Solidod by chance, or happenstance. He happened to be in Florida on vacation and he happened to be walking through an apartment complex in Vero Beach looking for another guy and he ended up meeting Solidod. She invited him into her apartment and then she told him her life story and they became friends. Shortly after that, Larry and Solidod went into a recording...

I wanted to see the place where a war between the United States and Iran may begin. It turned out people over there couldn’t talk to me on tape because they live in countries without a tradition of free speech and they all feel they are being watched, and I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble. So this is a travelogue, a story about what it’s like to be there. The psychedelic Persian Gulf surf music is by Hayvanlar Alemi (he’s actually from Turkey). Here’s the link to his website. ...

Alan Chin talks about his experience covering wars since 9/11.

For the solstice, the sun tunnels in the West Desert of Utah. Stories about going to war come from the top down, from media corporations that manufacture consent for war among the people. Stories about not going to war move from the bottom up, starting in conversations between family and friends, people speaking out for no money but just because they feel obligated to speak. In this approach there’s a shift in context where fear is...

Maybe like the Phoenix rising from the ashes following a drawing by M.S. Escher.

Interviews with taxi and ride share drivers from New Orleans to Jacksonville.

I just got back from speaking at two radio conferences in Europe. I saw the leaves come out on the trees along the canals in Amsterdam. I woke up in Ireland next to a pasture with four wooly alpacas, one just a baby. I spent days talking about how podcasting works from the bottom up, forming a lattice of connections that reach around the skin of the earth. This is better than the top-down fear-mongering of the corporate media. I said these things with confidence, because of you. I get letters...

This is a story I produced last summer for The New Yorker Radio Hour. It’s about a controversy over one of the newest long-distance hiking trails in the United States. It was a difficult story to cover and explain, but I had excellent help from the NYRH producers and editors. I’d like to work for them again. Donate Ron Strickland, father of the Pacific...

A day inside the gang-ridden community of Chamelecon, Honduras. Donate The ceiba tree in the park where the rap battle took place. Chamelecon, Honduras. The playing field...