“Of Kith and Kids” on PRX About “Of Kith and Kids” It started with a pledge to my local public radio station… yes! As a sustaining member of WNYC I receive a New Yorker subscription and read the piece: State Of Play: How Tot Lots Became Places to Build Children’s Brains by Rebecca Mead. The article covers the 2010 opening of a high profile playspace in Manhattan called the Imagination Playground. The writer likened it to something much grittier, darker and, well, European: something called...

“Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent’s Dilemma” on PRX About Diary of a Bad Year: A War Correspondent’s Dilemma This project was born in the place where so many good ideas come to life — Woods Hole. I was visiting Jay and the Transom Story Workshop to talk about making radio. Like good reporters, Jay and Melissa Allison, Viki Merrick, Samantha Broun, Sydney Lewis, and Rob Rosenthal asked me a lot of tough questions. As I answered, I realized the tables had been turned on me, that by...

“Walking Across America: Advice for a Young Man” on PRX People in the Piece (in order of appearance) “I don’t know why he’s doing it. He’s just crazy, I think.” Bill Guy, Shady Grove, Alabama. “Like it or not, it is about breaking this hold that death has on us.” Therese Jornlin, Andrew’s mom, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “You’ll know who you are. Because that’s what you’re looking for anyway.” Woody Curry, Baltimore, Maryland. “You’ve got a lot to learn. You’ve got an education and a...

About A Code To Live By In Appalachia “Mysterious” is probably the first word most people associate with the Melungeons. They were a mixed race group that settled in southern Appalachia in the late 1700s. They lived in their own communities, separate from their white neighbors. Some stayed in those communities as late as the mid-20th century. Jack Goins The oldest generations of Melungeons had a striking look: dark skin, straight black hair, blue eyes. Nobody knew where they had come from...

“Forgiveness” on PRX About Forgiveness I stumbled upon this story on a long distance bike trip, while I was doing a radio project on veterans’ experiences at war. As you can see, this story has nothing to do with veterans or war. It just goes to show that sometimes you just need an excuse to be out there looking for stories and something wonderful will eventually pop up. We were staying the night at a gay and queer commune in rural Tennessee when someone pointed out Hector to me. They...

About An Open Letter to a Fussy Woman at a Toll Booth Toll collection is the second oldest profession. In Greek mythology, Charon the ferryman (one of the oldest service workers) required that a toll be paid to carry souls across the rivers between here and Hades. Souls unable to pay were left to wander around for eternity searching for the damn place. This is the story of a nightmarish customer who felt entitled to a free ride across the river Styx. What it is like to work in a...

“Blind Parenting” on PRX About Blind Parenting In my previous, and now current podcast, I spend a lot of time satirizing this and that aspect of other people’s lives. So I found the task of doing an actual story about my own life daunting. But only once I tried to do it. When we started, I figured Maura and I would just crap out something in a few days, and then I’d get back to my other less interesting projects. I was so excited at the chance to do something for Transom, and felt lucky to...

“Portrait of the Bully as a Young Man” on PRX About Portrait of the Bully as a Young Man Sometime in the fall of 2010, after I had seen or heard or read another bullying story about terrible things happening to young people, I realized that the coverage of these terrible things was totally devoid of young people’s voices. I started thinking that Generation PRX – the youth radio project I direct for PRX – could do something to change this. The 60 or so youth radio groups in the network...

“Bucky’s Dome” on PRX About “Bucky’s Dome” One of the biggest challenges I faced was condensing all of the information I had into a manageable story that makes sense. Buckminster Fuller was a philosopher, architect, inventor, author, dreamer – he was multi-faceted in a way that is rare these days. I needed to convey that without giving a long lecture. Jay Baldwin’s pithy quotes were immensely helpful for that section. Also, pardon the gory radio term, but I had to shoot some puppies.* The...

“The D-Word” on PRX About The D-Word What is the D-Word? – It’s a 30-minute documentary that attempts to explore our rather neurotic relationship with that five-letter word: death. It was produced as part of my thesis project for an MSc in Science Media Production at Imperial College London and so is my first try at producing a feature length documentary piece. It explores the subject through the voices of those who deal with death on a regular basis and is my attempt at making sense of a...

“Splash” on PRX Who did What to WHOM!? My memory’s not what it once was. But hearing a certain name made an instant connection with the past. A prominent Tampa lawyer was murdered by his ex-wife. She snapped, drove to his new home and shot him six times. I got a cold chill when the victim was ID’d. I’d known him as a neighborhood kid decades ago when we played kid games. But the part of the story I couldn’t shake was what his ex did after emptying her revolver. She drove to the nearby...

“The Memory Palace” on PRX A Favorite Episode of Nate DiMeo’s: Nee Weinberg I recently asked my, um, my Facebook group, to suggest which episode I should post for this thing. I guessed that opinion would coalesce around a few of the crowd pleasing-est. I was wrong. The suggestions were all over the place (even citing a couple that I can’t really even listen to anymore). It was nice. People like what they like. So, here’s one I like. One of the toughest things about doing a biography piece...

A Favorite Episode of Roman’s: 99% Symbolic Although I have a hard time pulling out one episode to represent all of 99% Invisible, I chose this one about the design of city flags because I had the most fun making it. During production, I found I couldn’t say “vexillology” very well (that’s the proper name for the study of flags), and rather than practice it until I got it right, I incorporated that into the show. I even set up my wife (who provides the voice of the NAVA guidebook) to say...

“Scene of the Crime” on PRX About Scene of the Crime This summer I traveled to Colombia on a 10-day fact finding mission organized by Witness for Peace, a Washington-based social justice organization. Witness for Peace had scheduled ten long days of interviews with human rights activists, union leaders, displaced farmers, and witnesses and victims of paramilitary violence. I’m a private investigator and working on a graduate degree in Legal Studies focusing on human rights investigations,...

“Inside the Adoption Circle” on PRX About Inside the Adoption Circle Adoption reveals some profound but basic aspects of the human story. It’s an act of caring, love and bravery. An emphatic and ancient statement about human nature, it is also rife with questions about identity. We wanted to get to the stories that live inside those questions. In the fall of 2007 Sam had been having long conversations with her friend Kira who had recently gone through the process of adopting a child. That...

“Finding Miles” on PRX About Finding Miles from Sarah Reynolds I first knew Miles as Megan back in college. When he decided to transition from female to male, he gave me a call. He was slowly coming out to his friends as transgender — testing them, really — to see who he could still count on. The radio producer in me kicked in and I thought, this is quite a story about to unravel. I pitched him the idea and he agreed to do it: we would document his transition for radio. We began in...

“Working With Studs – A Transom Radio Special” on PRX Bonus tracks from “Working With Studs” About Working With Studs Back in the 1980s, long before coming to work at Transom, I’d been working with Studs Terkel at WFMT Radio. Despite exiting ’FMT in ‘91, and leaving Chicago in 2001, I continued working as Studs’ transcriptionist and editorial helper for the rest of his life. Last year, during a planning meeting for a Transom radio special series, Jay Allison said, “OK, Syd, you have to...

“Matthew” on PRX About Matthew I first met Matthew in the spring of 2008 when I was a visiting artist teaching printmaking workshops at Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH) in San Francisco. LHH is the city’s long term care facility. Many of the residents are elderly and suffering from some form of dementia. Matthew stood out both because of his youth and clarity of mind. He wore a face-mask, got around in in a wheelchair and was obviously in recovery from some kind of procedure. I never knew much...

About Kidnap Radio I was 19 when my father was kidnapped in Colombia. It was 1999. My mother came to my college campus to deliver the news and I flew to Bogota to be with my family for a few weeks. (My mother is American, my father’s Colombian and they divorced when I was 5.) After that, except for brief trips for a wedding and a funeral, I didn’t go back to the country where I was born until I traveled there to report this piece in the spring of 2009. I was able to make the trip thanks to...

“Cat Lady” on PRX About Cat Lady I had struggled for a year, trying to write a piece about my mother, about myself, about what I observed to be an awkward, even incompatible relationship between the roles of artist and mother, about a child’s inheritance of his parents’ pain and desire. I had a long and unfocused essay, which I put aside. A few months later Holly Hughes invited me to participate in a night of readings that would all be pet-themed. Did I have anything that would fit? I,...

This week we’re featuring the co-winner of our Self Portrait competition. It comes from the comedy collective “Mortified” who encourage people to read out loud the most embarrassing things they wrote as children. “I Hate Drake” is an hysterical and heartfelt entry from Will Nolan’s childhood diary about an archetypal bullying episode. Like most of the multi-media pieces on Transom, it’s story-driven and works fine without the images, but the animation deepens the story and makes it even...

Last year, Transom and the FLIK International Film festival put out a call for multi-media self portraits. We have our two winners. Soon, we’ll be featuring “I Hate Drake” from Mortified, but right now Transom is hosting James Barany’s poignant and powerful piece about his own obesity called, “My Most Important Self Portrait.” The animated images of James’s body and the sounds of his voice work together in a dark and elegant duet.

Jesse Hardman and Maura O'Connor recently drove around the southwestern United States visiting some of the 33 Native American reservations that have their own radio stations. They said it became clear that "radio, often dismissed as outdated for the Web 2.0 era, was the most essential medium of communication in Indian country." Airchecks from these stations sound alive and connected, peopled by a real range of characters. On Transom, Jesse and Maura put together a report, full of photos and...

“Jennie’s Secret” on PRX About Jennie’s Secret I don’t remember how I first encountered the story of Civil War veteran Jennie Hodgers (aka Albert Cashier), but I was smitten from the start. I was amazed that hundreds of women had posed as men during the Civil War. I couldn’t imagine how she (or they) pulled it off. And I was positively gob-smacked when I found out that Hodgers went on to spend most of her adult life – as a man – in the tiny town of Saunemin, Illinois. That’s just 12 miles...

“Prostate Diaries” on PRX About The Prostate Diaries: From Jeff Metcalf A man walks into a doctor’s office for a physical and the doctor says, “You look good. Your heart sounds strong, lungs are clear, urine sample is clean but this next part will be a bit uncomfortable. You want to drop your pants and bend over the table so I can do a digital exam of your prostate? You might feel a slight discomfort.” And, honest to God, I start to laugh because I’m thinking why the hell would anybody...