A Little Structure

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013 | shows | No Comments

The latest HowSound takes a look at the basic story structure for some of our favorite radio shows and maps them out on cocktail napkins. Very fun.

The densest city of all time

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 | shows, stories | No Comments

99% Invisible and Love + Radio team up to tell the story of Kowloon Walled City. It started as a fort and as people moved in and built inside its strict boundaries, the buildings began to grow together into one massive organism.

Best of the Best!

Friday, November 16th, 2012 | shows, stories | No Comments

Each year the judges at The Third Coast International Audio Festival select the best new documentaries produced worldwide as part of the TC / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition. The winners are the best of the best in radio. This 2-hour special, hosted by Gwen Macsai, collects the winning documentaries, interviews with the makers, and moments from the award ceremony held at the TCIAF conference in October.

If you only listen to two hours of radio this year, these two hours should be it!

BeyondtheBlackLetter

Thursday, May 31st, 2012 | shows | No Comments

Law students spend countless hours reading cases and distilling them down to the “black letter law” – the rules they’re tested on at the end of each semester. But what gets lost during that process? A friend series creator Zach Miller once said that “law is history stripped of context”. BeyondtheBlackLetter brings back the context. The history. The politics. The people. Connections with other disciplines, like economics and sociology. The goal is to make the law accessible and engaging, and seek out those “Aha!” moments when you realize that something you’ve taken for granted is far more interesting than you once thought.

BeyondtheBlackLetter is latest in a new crop of “short shows” that focus a single subject over the life of the series, like The Longest Shortest Time (early motherhood), the memory palace (surprising history), Blank on Blank (lost print interviews), and 99% Invisible (design and architecture). It’s a fantastic development in public radio and podcasting.

The Hidden World of Girls with Tina Fey

Saturday, December 10th, 2011 | shows, stories | No Comments

Now in heavy rotation: The Hidden World of Girls from The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva). Do I even need to tell you how great this is? If you hear one minute of it, you might as well give up on doing anything else until it’s over.

How To Do Everything

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 | cool, shows | No Comments

Please welcome How To Do Everything to the mix! It’s half advice show, half survival guide. If you need to know how to find a date, or how to find water in the desert, this is the show for you. No question is too big or too small.

Here’s how it works: you send HTDE your questions—from “how do I break up with my hairstylist of 20 years” to “how do I not sound stupid when ordering wine” to “how do I escape a charging rhino”—and Mike and Ian answer them. Usually, given how little they actually know how to do, they find experts who can help you out.

How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag and produced by Blythe Haaga. You may know Ian and Mike as two of the names Peter Sagal says really fast at the end of NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

We’ve added 15 episodes of HTDE to the mix and will add a new one into heavy rotation every week.

Sound Opinions Reviews on Remix

Saturday, July 16th, 2011 | cool, music, shows | 1 Comment

We’re excited to offer new album reviews selected from the world’s only rock n’ roll talk show, Sound Opinions. Produced at WBEZ Chicago, Sound Opinions is hosted by Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, two of the finest and best-recognized pop music writers in the nation. Jim and Greg save you the time of that pesky listening process, by boiling down their reviews to three easy to use phrases: Buy It!, Burn It! or Trash It!

Dinner Party Download turns 100!

Sunday, June 12th, 2011 | shows | No Comments

Though they’ve been helping us win dinner parties for the past few weeks, we haven’t officially introduced our latest Remix addition, The Dinner Party Download. The show is a fast and funny “booster shot” of news and culture designed to help you dazzle your friends and family at this weekend’s dinner party. In every 15 minute episode you’ll learn a joke…get the week’s major headlines…bone up on some history…drink in a cocktail recipe…meet an artist of note…savor an emerging food trend…and hear your new favorite song. Plus, unconventional wisdom from hosts Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam. Maybe “wisdom” should be in quotes there.

It just so happens that this week is DPD’s 100th episode, so in honor of the occasion Rico and Brendan have filled the dinner party with a few “dream guests”, Rico samples a 100 year old egg, and the guys finally ask permission to use to the theme song they’ve already been using for 100 episodes. It’ll be a party for the ages.

Episode #100 is playing on Public Radio Remix all week, but if you just can’t possibly wait, here you go:

The Guardian’s Science Weekly will make you love science (again and again)

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 | shows | 1 Comment

Please welcome the first (but not the last) podcast from The Guardian to REMIX Radio: Science Weekly. The program is an accessible and entertaining weekly look at what’s going on the world of science. It’s smart and surprising and I think it’s the best topical science program out there, so I’m thrilled we get to present it to you on the US airwaves.

Here’s the thing I love most about the show: For the Christmas holiday, Science Weekly producer Andy Duckworth went to the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and covered the strange and charming day to day life of the researchers at the facility, using humor and sound in a 20+ minute feature that is a great joy to listen to. A proper doc, through and through. Don’t take my word for it, listen:

Christmas at the Large Hadron Collider:

So, I hear that episode, and I think, That was brilliant, they should let poor Andy get out of the production booth more often! More Andy! More roving reportage!

Then I hear the next episode, and it’s the always brilliant Alok Jha sitting in a studio in London and simply talking to smart people in Antarctica and the US over the phone and it’s awesome. A totally riveting half hour breezes by and I love every minute of it:

Monitoring Climate Change in the Antarctic:

THEN I think, Get back to the studio Andy; you’ve got a job to do! Those interviews don’t just edit themselves!

The next week, a panel of science writers will discuss if the latest “monumental discovery” is all it seems, or if it really deserves those quotes, for irony’s sake.

I figure, if each week I’m convinced that the latest episode is the episode all future episodes should be modeled, then they must be doing something right.

Don’t trust me, just stay tuned.

Two Wheels to Nowhere

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 | shows | No Comments

Aengus Anderson actually did it. That dream- the cross country trip on a motorcycle- writing, and in this case recording, all along the way: 13,843 miles, 89 days, 37 states, 166 interviews.

The result is a 7(!) part free range audio docudrama that explores how Americans are facing the unknown. He asked each person two questions: what is the most exciting thing in your life? What is the most concerning thing?

The result is a moody, winding tale that never feels slow or depressing, which I think may be harder and  even more impressive than a 14K motorcycle trip. Third Coast conducted an interview with Aengus about the series that you should check out. You can listen, rate and review the the whole series on PRX.org, or just wait for it to come on REMIX by chance, which I think may be the best way to encounter it.