Audiofiles!

One minute and twenty seconds of uncomfortable silences, edited by Michael Sippey from This American Life’s “Retraction” show. Somehow it’s as painful without context.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Melody Kramer is an associate producer for Fresh Air in Philadelphia. Before that, she worked on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! So yeah, no fair. She is also one of the most web-savvy, digitally connected radio producers working in the NPR system.

If you don’t know, Fresh Air has a Twitter feed — a real, active, personal, engaged one, not the usual promotional, tweet out links to the day’s stories kind; a great Tumblr; really nice text build-outs of their interviews; Pinterest boards; they are even trying their mightiest to give Google + its fair shot. All of that is Mel. And she produces radio, too.

1. Maurice Sendak, on Fresh Air

We typically do all of the interviews on Fresh Air in a studio via ISDN, but Sendak’s was conducted via phone, so he could stay in his home. As I was listening to the unedited conversation between Sendak and Terry, I remember putting my head down on my desk, so I wouldn’t have to be distracted by anything else and could just focus on what he was saying. Sendak’s appearance on Fresh Air drew in more responses than we’ve ever seen since we started keeping track of email. People were moved to tears by his reflections on life, on death, on art. The interview itself was edited by producer Sam Briger, who did a masterful job of turning a phone conversation into a work of radio art.

2. Dede Allen, on Fresh Air

I often have to write obituaries for people who were interviewed on Fresh Air before I got here. One of the first obits I worked on was for a film editor named Dede Allen, who transformed the way Hollywood filmmakers paced scenes — and broke down gender barriers in Hollywood. I had never heard of Dede Allen before the interview, and then decided to watch the films she edited over her 60-year career. The interview gave me an appreciation for her work — and film in general — that I would have missed otherwise.

3. Patrick Fitzgerald, on Wait Wait

Every summer, Wait Wait does a live show in front of an audience of about 10,000 in a park in Chicago. It’s hard to find a guest for this particular show because the person has to live in Chicago and want to be interviewed in front of 10,000 people. One of my friends happened to be working in Fitzgerald’s office and, after a few phone calls, he was booked — and we had the first major interview with the U.S. attorney after the Scooter Libby trial. Of course, Peter presented him with an actual Razor scooter on stage.

Radio appearances

1. On the Arab Spring

“I think there’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty of where we’re headed,” Shadid told Terry Gross on Fresh Air in December 2011. “I guess after being a pessimist in Baghdad for so long, I remain an optimist. I think that optimism comes from this idea that these societies — that have been moribund for so long — have been revived or rejuvenated. … And that very dynamism of those societies leaves hope for the future.”

2. On the death of Gadhafi

Shadid was a guest on The Takeaway in October 2011 to discuss how the developments in Libya might affect the entire region, particularly upcoming elections.

3. On bin Laden’s death

Shadid said the resulting uprisings showed that, for today’s Arab youths, bin Laden is a historical footnote and his death serves as the epitaph for an era long past. He spoke to Here & Now’s Robin Young in May 2011, shortly after bin Laden was killed.

4. On his captivity in Libya

Shortly after being released, in April 2011, Shadid sits down with Tom Ashbrook of On Point. He and three colleagues were taken captive by forces loyal to Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi. They were bound, blindfolded, and beaten for days.

5. On the state of Iraq

Shadid, an Arab-American, has an intimate, empathetic perspective on the Iraqi view of the war and the world. A conversation with Tom Ashbrook from September 2005, when Shadid was a correspondent for the Washington Post.

Remembrances

1. Quil Lawrence

NPR’s correspondent in Kabul: “I met Anthony Shadid on a ruined airstrip in western Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-’02. He was sporting a beard and longer hair in those days that made him look a little like a crusading Arab warrior … As I recall his face now, I realize Anthony’s secret: His sincerity was piercing, disarming and infectious.”

2. Bill Keller

In addition to being an outstanding journalist with deep compassion for the people he covered, his editor at The New York Times said there’s one more thing about Shadid that everyone may have taken for granted. “He was just so damn nice,” Keller said. “It’s not always the case that you find successful correspondents so free of obvious ego.”

3. JJ Sutherland

NPR’s correspondent at the Pentagon: “I would read his long pieces about places I had been in Iraq and come away knowing that I had fundamentally misunderstood what I had seen … to me, Anthony’s most powerful legacy is his generosity of spirit, his optimism about a world whose dark side he knew well, and his penetrating insight.”

4. Marty Baron

Shadid worked for several years as a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe. The newspaper’s editor, Marty Baron, remembered him on WBUR’s Morning Edition.

A Valentine’s Day playlist, with love in all its torturous incarnations.

1. Love hurts …

“Benny takes a jet” :  When Benny was 23, he couldn’t admit to himself that he had feelings for other men. He actively campaigned to keep gay alliance clubs out of schools. But then he fell horribly in love with another Mormon.

2. Love scars …

“Obsession” : Catalina Puente finds herself obsessing over a girl she hardly knows. The 16-year-old is tortured by her love, and the object of her obsession takes over her life.

3. Love wounds …

“Dr. Phil” : In the wake of a devastating break-up, Starlee Kine finds so much comfort in Phil Collins break-up songs that she decides to try to write one herself.

4. And mars.

“Eat cake” : A radio drama in which two people used to being alone in the winter connect over the telephone.

5. Any heart, not tough …

“Ring of fire” : The story of Johnny Cash and June Carter, told Sarah-Vowell style.

6. Or strong, enough …

“Finding Emilie” :  Alan Lundgard falls hopelessly in love with a fellow art student, Emilie Gossiaux. Then a devastating turn leaves Emilie lost in a netherworld.

7. To take a lot of pain …

“When worlds collide” :  In 1993, John Perry Barlow was at a convention for the NeXT computer. Feet away, the American Psychiatric Association was holding a convention of its own. At the border of the two, Barlow’s life changed forever.

8. Take a lot of pain …

“Clive forgets” : A man who’s lost everything, Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls the most severe case of amnesia ever documented. But, amidst so much forgetting, he remembers music and love.

9. Love is like a cloud …

“Best laid plans” : Kurt Braunohler and his girlfriend had been together for 13 years. So, they decided to sleep with other people before they could get married. Naturally.

10. Holds a lot of rain

“Lonely hearts club band” : Musician David Berkeley has gotten a lot of requests in his life, but none quite like this one. A fan asked him to come to his house and help save his relationship by serenading the troubled couple with a personal concert.

11. Love hurts …

“Yes means yes?” : Elna Baker on being a 24-year-old virgin in New York City.

12. Ooh ooh love hurts.

“He stopped loving her today” :  A song so sad that George Jones was initially reluctant to record it. Yet it became one of the most popular songs in country music.

Fresh Air turns 25 this year. Its birthday isn’t until May, but Terry already celebrated last week with an appearance on The Colbert Report. She followed the toughest act we can possibly imagine, in which Maurice Sendak huffs Sharpies with Stephen Colbert. Of course, Terry had her own, very touching interview with Sendak recently. She has also — on multiple occasions — been on the other end of an interview with Colbert, who has an adorable crush on her, very similar to the one Louis CK seems to harbor.

All of this is to say Terry has some incredible guests on her show, apparently starting on Day One. Producer Mel Kramer sent us the first program schedule, from 1985, when the show was weekly. The line-up would be just as killer, if not more so, today.

If Audiofiles were to be represented visually, we would like to look just like this:

Image used with permission of the artist, Grady McFerrin, and discovered thanks to the always delightful Twitter feed of @wnycradiolab.

1. On religion

A 2007 interview with Tom Ashbrook of On Point. It’s a call-in show, so Hitchens goes head to head with several outraged listeners, and hears from others who say he’s given them the strength to admit they aren’t believers. An excerpt, on followers of God:

They know him well enough to issue commandments in his name, saying one may not, for example, masturbate. Or, go to bed with a person of the same sex. Or of the opposite sex unless under strictly regulated conditions. How they know this, I don’t know. They’ve never been able to furnish the relevant information, but it does mean that religion is innately coercive.

2. On dying

Melissa Block, of NPR’s All Things Considered, visited Hitchens’ apartment in October 2010, to talk about his cancer and his thoughts on dying. He hadn’t lost his edge:

When I meet people who say — which they do all of the time — “I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,” and so forth, I switch off quite early. If this story is not about metastasized esophageal cancer, I’m not that interested … [I'm] an esophageal cancer snob.

3. On religion + dying

Hitchens was outraged that people hoped he would convert to Christianity when faced with his own mortality. “If anything, my contempt for the false consolation of religion has increased since I became aware that I probably don’t have very long to live,” he said. He debates with his brother, who argues that civilization needs God.

4. On The Moth

In 1999, a rambling, seemingly drunk Hitchens takes the stage, spends about seven minutes telling the audience about the story he was planning to tell them, before changing his mind, then finally delivers a gripping, hilarious and moving story that illustrates his kindness, courage and detestation of all religious flummery.

5. On his memoir

A 2010 conversation with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate on “Hitch-22,” his memoir:

I did discover when I was a little boy, because I was quite little, I was small for my age, and I was in danger of getting picked on in boys boarding schools, if you could turn a phrase back on someone, if you could be quick, verbally, it could make up for being pickable-upon, and you could get larger guys to back off. So that was my first discovery that words could be weapons.

Bonus: video of Hitchens on why Margaret Thatcher is sexier than Sarah Palin.

6. On women not being funny

A 2006 appearance on The Brian Lehrer show to discuss his article for Vanity Fair, arguing for a gender humor gap. “It’s not a question, I think, of are women less funny or not?, because I think that’s been decided,” he said. “My article is about why that is.”

7. On the war in Iraq

Hitchens, a vocal supporter of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, participates in a debate on pre-war intelligence. Other guests include former US Sen. Bob Graham.

8. A lecture

Hitchens gives a talk in Seattle in 2007. He explains he is an anti-atheist, not an atheist — that some atheists wish there was a God, but he does not.

9. A remembrance

“I once woke him up at around 11 in the morning for a prearranged interview,” the reporter remembers of Hitchens. ‘How are you doing?’ I asked after he staggered to his front door. ‘It’s a little too early to tell,’ came the bedraggled, hair-of-the-dog reply.”

Writing country music songs to explain fluctuating OPEC prices, exposing sweet ladies who cut coupons as grocery store terrorists, nerding out with Dr. Oliver Sacks over mind-bending neuroscience cases — sounds like Robert Krulwich, co-host of Radiolab, right? Except these stories are from the ’80s.

Transom collected some of his early stories for NPR, from 1981 and 1984, and it’s ridiculous how little has changed.

Nobody hears more public radio than the team at PRX, so it’s guaranteed great listening when they put together a list of year-end favorites. You’ll need to set up a PRX account to access most of these, but it’s free, super easy and then you’re in for life.

1. I Don’t Know

A child’s Christmas thoughts spring into song. You might recognize the producer, Andy Mills, and his distinctive style from another great story, Kohn, which ran on Radiolab.



2. Be Whatever You Want

On a summer afternoon, three kids push around a soccer-ball-style sorbet maker and concoct stories to make their task more interesting. From Sara Curtis.

3. Singing Salvation Army Bell Ringer

A crack addict finds Jesus, gets off drugs and rings bells at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Oh, and he sings while doing it. Todd Melby produced.

4. Cul-de-sac

If suburbia had a flag, it would have a picture of a cul-de-sac on it. A Roman Mars production for the podcast 99% Invisible, and featuring Katie Mingle.

5. ‘Invitation’

“In the 1970s, a guy at NPR loaned me a tape recorder, and I just made myself at home,” Jay Allison begins in his benediction at the 2011 PRPD Conference. “I was a citizen of this country and they let me in. It was a favor — an act I still hope is embedded in the DNA of public radio — and I have devoted my life to repaying that favor.”

Thanks to Jake Shapiro and John Barth for letting us post their list!