Audiofiles!

For centuries, the Newfoundland fishery was hailed as the greatest in the world. Then, in 1992, the cod disappeared and island culture was poised to go the way of the cod.

Aspiring young DJs without much money, post-blackout looting, and abundant hi-fi stores. Delaney Hall explores how the New York riots of 1977 sparked hip-hop music.

Andy Kaufman lives in this epic WTF with Kaufman’s former comedy partner and Comic Relief co-founder Bob Zmuda, who goes back to his first meetings with Kaufman and the many mind-bending productions they put on through the years.

It’s fitting that Dick Clark seemed to defy the ravages of time since he hosted the long-running “American Bandstand,” which helped bring rock’n’roll into the mainstream.

The drummer backed Bob Dylan and sang with Van Morrison. Three decades after The Band split and ten years after a diagnosis of throat cancer, he put out a solo album.

Jad Abumrad goes looking for the devil, in search of the truth behind the legend of one of the most haunting, shadowy figures in music — American blues singer Robert Johnson.

Nneka’s music is a mixture of Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, and folk. As a teenager, she moved from Nigeria to Germany, her mother’s home country. “I was a foreigner, and I was treated like a foreigner. Despite the fact that I had both passports.”

Published in 1967, Guy Debord’s “La Société du Spectacle” is a radical attack on modern society, in which, in Debord’s words, “being” had declined into a state of “having” and “having” merely meant “appearing”. But what exactly was the spectacle?

“Q: Did you hear about the new corduroy pillows? A: They’re making headlines!” An all-icebreaker episode of the Dinner Party Download. Very short, very stupid jokes from Patton Oswalt, Miranda July, Spike Jonze, Shepard Fairey, and many more. Part 1.

“One of the greatest gifts I’ve gotten from SNL is getting out of my comfort zone,” Wiig says. “The first handful of years that I was there, most of my characters were ladies in their 40s with short hair and weird sweaters that no one wanted at their dinner party.”

Tod Machover is recognized as one of the most innovative composers of his generation. He has astounded the world with his avant-garde musical explorations, including an opera staged with robots. He’s also an inventor, changing the way people make music.

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, the renowned folksinger and bluesman, performed with pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax on WNYC in 1944.

In 1946, legendary radio dramatist Norman Corwin was named the first recipient of the “One World Flight” Award. His prize was a four month trip around the world. Corwin used his global journey to produce a series of thirteen radio documentaries for CBS.

A look back at the late, great Earl Scruggs. The bluegrass pioneer took the humble five-string banjo out of the rhythm section and made it a solo star at the front of the band.

The tragic inspiration behind the invention of Morse code.

“I love the simplicity of Sesame Street characters,” says Kevin Clash, Elmo’s creator. “I love that Elmo is just an orange nose and two eyes and no tongue — just a black mouth — and you just find that by just the tilt of the head or looking up, it says something.”

The Sporkful tackles the world of gum, including thoughts on the liquid center, ideal shapes and sizes, and the best gum jingles of the 80′s. Featuring NPR’s Mike Pesca.

Etgar Keret has been called the Kafka of Israel. His stories — short, weird, and wonderful — make you stop and think: Could your lover have a zipper under his tongue and another man entirely inside? Will our lies come back to greet us in another life?

In 1971, something new hit the TV screens of America. Don Cornelius stepped in front of live cameras and introduced “Soul Train,” putting at front and center a world Americans had never seen before on a national mainstream show.

The singer-songwriter still remembers when she first hit the music scene in Nashville and LA and was told she was “too rock for country” and “too country for rock.”

Starlee Kine plays matchmaker to form a band that’s made entirely out of the classifieds.

Fashion Week emerged almost accidentally in New York during World War II.

John Coltrane recorded the album in 1964 and released it the following year. In many ways, it mirrors Coltrane’s spiritual quest that grew out of his personal troubles.

Bill Ferris is one of the country’s leading folklorists. As a boy, Bill began going to church with his family’s housekeeper, and fell in love with the music and the drama. A few years later, he hit the road with recording equipment, and discovered the blues.

Artists often wonder if the distractions of the modern world compromise their creativity. Andrew Bird put the theory to the test. “Let’s see what happens when I stop listening to records, move out in the middle of nowhere, and have the space to experiment.”

The comedy couple bring some love to the garage. They talk about their start in theater, their co-star courtship, and their classic characters, Ron Swanson and Karen Walker.

The American novelist Richard Ford reads a favorite John Cheever short story, and discusses it with The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

Delivering a sort of pocket history of rock music, Bruce Springsteen talked about how doo-wop taught him about sex, country music helped him understand despair, and Woody Guthrie revealed the political roots of the fatalism he’d heard in Hank Williams.

In his ongoing wrestling match with the Cantonese language, Benjamin Law charts his attempts to master his family’s mother tongue.

“I felt like I was looking at kind of a new form of comedy,” Steve Martin says of Twitter. “In a strange way, that was talking and response and talking and response.”

“I think that’s one of the beautiful things about Gram Parsons,” says Polly Parsons. “He’s one of the rare artists you can hear his spirit and his sadness in his music.”

In the US, it’s called a line. In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up. Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue. Benjamen Walker’s preoccupation with the subject led him to find a man known as “Dr. Queue,” a queue theorist at MIT.

Some have called the song an alternative national anthem. Others say it’s a Marxist response to “God Bless America.” Written and first sung by Woody Guthrie, it probably borrowed heavily from a 1930 gospel recording by the Carter Family. From

When an author writes something that’s supposed to be true and readers discover it’s not, things can get ugly fast. But author John D’Agata and his former fact-checker Jim Fingal take the controversial position of defending an author’s right to embellish.

On The Media, the show that specializes in pulling back the curtain on other media, pulls the curtain back on itself. Not everybody speaks as cleanly as it might seem.

The photographer Michele Iversen documents strangers in their own homes, without permission. At night she sits in her car, looking in and waiting for the perfect shot.

Without Charlie Parker, bebop as we know it might never have existed. While other musicians — Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk among them — created the building blocks, Parker’s innovative phrasing brought it all together as a new jazz revolution.

Talking Marilyn with Michelle Williams, a science lesson from Wu-Tang’s GZA, juicy gossip about Fidel Castro, and inhalation of America’s best vodka.

The conductor has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping people to realize their untapped love for it — and by extension, their untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, and new connections.

Children’s storyteller Roald Dahl was as dark and fabulous as they come. As every parent — and child — knows, these are not cute little stories. Horrible, peculiar, nasty things happen all the time. They happened to Roald Dahl, too.

The Maltese Falcon is a detective novel, but it’s also a brilliant literary work, a thriller, a love story, and a dark, dry comedy. This radio documentary on the novel is part of The Big Read series, from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A closer look at Yoko Ono’s role in the Beatles break up, the complicated relationship with Paul McCartney, and surprising stories behind his most recognizable songs.

“It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves — whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it,” says Tina Fey. “We’re all kind of figuring it out as we go.”

For twenty years, Robert Shields has kept a written record of absolutely everything that has happened to him. For no less than four hours each day, Shields holes himself up in a small office in his home and types – 35 million words and counting.

In 2012, for the first time ever, women will step into the ring to compete at the Summer Olympics in London. One of the contenders fighting for one of the three spots is 16-year-old Claressa Shields, a high-school junior in Flint, Michigan.

Interviews with Spike Lee, Carrie Brownstein, and Randy Newman, disco godfather Nile Rodgers’ tale of the birth of “Le Freak,” and more.

“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked,” says Andrea Seabrook, NPR’s congressional correspondent. “You start poking around, you find the coolest things.” That’s how she found the marble bathtubs in the Capitol basement.

Director Richard Shepard had been dwelling in cinema obscurity for years before he got his break: a big budget and a chance to direct big stars in his film The Matador. When he took the film to Sundance in 2005, his entire future was flashing before his eyes.

It’s a dark night in Greenwich Village. A couple, a solitary customer, and a bartender seem adrift in the darkness. Adam Gopnik, of the New Yorker, walks the streets in search of the location and mood of Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks.

An exploration of the Gershwin tune, and its many interpretations.

The tradition of siblings singing together is as old as song.

Junot Díaz reads his short story “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).” And Edwidge Danticat discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor.

“The only way you can manage creative people is with very loose reigns,” Michaels tells Alec Baldwin. He should know, having launched the careers of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Tina Fey …

Two cartoonists for the New Yorker, Matt Diffee and Alex Gregory, discuss the intricate and complex world of cartooning, to great hilarity.

A Hollywood sound designer demonstrates how it can enhance emotional impact.

In 2002, John Osborne won a competition on legendary BBC broadcaster John Peel’s radio show. His prize was a box of records from Peel’s shed that took eight years to listen to. When he finally finished, he made this ode to radio and those records.

“Q: How do you turn a duck into a popular soul singer? A: Put it in the microwave until its bill withers.” An all-icebreaker episode of the Dinner Party Download. Very short, very stupid jokes from David Carr, Girl Talk, Billy Bragg, and many more. Part 2.

Fifty years ago, in television’s simpler days, all three networks aired a tour of the White House led by the First Lady. A stunning number of Americans tuned in.

The pop star Robbie Williams is taking time out from his career and has been researching UFO sightings, abductees, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Jon Ronson accompanies him to a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada.

After years of ignoring the wailing and screeching of the escalators in the DC Metro, Washington Post music critic Chris Richards began to hear them in a new way.

There’s a famous William Carlos Williams poem. It’s only three lines long, you’ve probably read it, the one about eating the plums in the icebox. It’s possibly the most spoofed poem around. Some regular This American Life contributors get into the act.

“Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches,” says Ethel Kessler, art director of the United States Postal Service Stamp Services. “But you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make it work.”

In March of 1940, a young Woody Guthrie sat for a series of oral history interviews for the Library of Congress archives. The recordings offer a glimpse of Guthrie’s early music style and a frank account of his harrowing past.

The group Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they’re a smash hit. So they study the band’s music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans.

Ira Glass spends time in perhaps the toughest room on earth, the editorial meeting at The Onion, where there’s one laugh for every 100 jokes.

“When I turned 40, I was offered, within one year, three different witch roles,” the actress tells Terry Gross. “I think there was, for a long time in the movie business, a period of — when a woman was attractive and marriageable or f- – -able, that was it.”

“In the afterlife, you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order. All the moments that share a quality are grouped together.”

The astounding mad scientist life of Nikola Tesla. Who was this pioneer of radio, radar, and wireless communication, who claimed he saw machines swirling in his head?

Jack DeJohnette is a drum legend. But he started out on the piano. Inspired by Fats Domino, he’d begun a promising career when he heard Ahmad Jamal’s 1958 album. He was entranced by the drummer, who had a particular way of handling brushes.

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The 33 high-rise towers were supposed to solve an impending population crisis, but when conditions started to decline, everything got very bad, very fast.

One morning, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow. Peter is the hero of the classic children’s book, The Snowy Day, from 1962. And, though this is never mentioned in the text, he’s African-American.

The comedian returns to the garage for a very different conversation than last time. It’s an honest, open discussion unlike any other heard on WTF.

Musician David Berkeley has gotten a lot of requests in his life, but none quite like this one. A fan wanted Berkeley to come to his house and help save his relationship by serenading the troubled couple with a personal concert.

As an information designer, Nick Felton has tabulated thousands of tiny measurements in his life and depicted them in graphs that detail the activities of a particular year. In 2010, his father died and Felton turned his annual report into a full biography.

419s are the scam emails sent by Nigerians that clog up inboxes all over the world, and it’s also the nickname given to any form of corruption in Nigeria. In this oil-rich country, corruption is rife, causing a profound debauching of the government and the people.

At 16, Judd Apatow was already doing his own radio show, not so unlike WTF. Listen back to rare clips of Apatow in 1983 talking to Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Garry Shandling, well before the breaks that launched them all to superfame.

Sethu Ramaswamy read all of the novels of Charles Dickens before she turned ten. That was also the age she was forced to leave school to get married. And for most of her adult life, she was in the shadows. Then, at age 80, her memoir, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian Woman, was published to great acclaim all over India.

“What I was doing was trying to be a glamour girl,” the singer told Terry Gross. “I had been a tomboy most of the time. And I wanted to look grown, you know, I want to wear tall high-heeled shoes, and fishtail gowns, and big long rhinestone earrings.”

The composer and radio host are second cousins, but they didn’t know each other well when the Field Museum in Chicago asked Ira to interview Philip on stage.

Mount Kailash in Tibet is one of the world’s most venerated, and least visited, holy sites. Walking its circuit alongside pilgrims, yaks, and yogis, Scott Carrier circles the center of creation. From the six-part series Stories from the Heart of the Land.

A conversation with the photographer, ranging from the peaks of celebrity life to the stark valley of death — the loss of her longtime soulmate Susan Sontag.

A strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human.

It set the model for the hit family sitcom. Lucy was a bad girl trapped in the life of a ‘50s housewife; her slapstick quest for fame and fortune ended in abject failure weekly.

Mike Daisey was a “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes my crap? He traveled to China to see. Note: This American Life has retracted this story.

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.

Pondering the mysteries of the popular song.

Jack London’s The Call of the Wild is a singular classic. It’s a great novel, and a philosophical one, but packed with adventure. Oddest of all, it is experimental — half of the characters are canine, including the hero. This radio documentary on the novel is part of The Big Read series, from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The interview begins with Terry Gross mispronouncing Simmons’ original Hebrew last name; he tells her it’s because she has a Gentile mouth. It’s only downhill from there. Simmons refused to allow the interview to be posted online by NPR.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?”

The London Philharmonic Orchestra version of the game’s theme song.

Working in an art museum, quietly observing for hours at a time, security guards begin to feel trapped inside their own thoughts, or even inside a painting.

Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. Electronic things are made to feel mechanical. The sound of an iPhone turning on? Sounds a lot like a vise.

The Great Salt Lake’s West Desert is a land of polygymists and bombing ranges. There’s chlorine gas in the air, anthrax underground, and people who call the place home.

Edwin Booth was a very famous actor. Then his brother shot Abraham Lincoln.

From a phone conversation the comedian had with Jane Borden of Time Out magazine. The tape begins with Gervais explaining why religious views aren’t central to his routine. Blank on Blank is an audio archive of unexpected, forgotten bits of interviews.

A dream of a super radio that would allow one to hear every sound ever made.

When people critique cul-de-sacs, often, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. Cul-de-sacs by definition aren’t well connected to other streets and they are far away from town centers. People argue whether these are pros or cons.

Christopher Hitchens was never a friend to religion. The British-born critic called Mother Theresa “the Ghoul of Calcutta.” He called organized faith “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry.” And that’s just for starters.

Walking in San Francisco, journalist Delfin Vigil noticed the name “Nikko” etched into the sidewalk. Then he saw the name again. And again. And again.

As host of 99% Invisible, Roman Mars spotlights the seams and joints that make up the world around us. Roman joins Radiolab to play some favorites from his podcast, and chat about the hidden language of design that shapes our lives.

A profile of Ataiba, the chief of one of the last bands of nomads in the Americas, as he leaves the Bolivian jungle to live with evangelical missionaries.

Why is it that karaoke machines only have songs on them? Why aren’t there other options, like the “you talkin to me?” scene from Taxi Driver?

It might seem hyperbole to claim, as many Wagnerites do, that The Ring Cycle is the greatest work of art ever. But the grandeur and power of this monumental work have permeated our culture from Star Wars to Bugs Bunny to J.R.R. Tolkien.

“It’s marvelous when we’re surprised by coincidences,” the composer said. “That’s one of the beautiful things about hunting mushrooms — is that they grow up and are fresh at just a particular moment, and our lives are actually characterized by moments.”

Notes and stories about the Canadians among us. Are they different from red-blooded Americans? They claim they’re not. Skeptical Americans put their position to the test. Plus, Ira Glass un-ironically refers to the Internet as the World Wide Web.

With her rich, throaty voice, the singer has reinvented her sound in the decades since her start in 1950 — working with the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Prince, and Bob Dylan.

For more than 60 years, people in northwest Tennessee have tuned each weekday at noon to a radio program called The Swap Shop. For 20 minutes, listeners call or write offering to buy, sell or trade in a broadcast version of the classified ads.

Milton Reid works as a muralist in one of the largest housing projects in America. Starting at about 50 dollars, he’ll paint a resident’s wall. When he first started, all clients wanted were black and gold panthers, but their tastes have gotten more varied.

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is a native of Ghana, the son of a king. Instead of tribal politics, Ali chose to leave Ghana for the United States and became a musician and writer. But he hasn’t left behind the memories of a song from his childhood.

What began as a promotion for his new album turned into two hours of rare Beatle stories and playing DJ — introducing the music, commercials and weather.

Pornography rates up there with Hollywood as one of Southern California’s biggest industries, yet stories about it are often completely off the mark. Pornographer Sam Stern offers an unsettling answer to the question: just how far have we come in perceptions of feminine sexuality? Note: This story deals with mature themes.

An account of life in one of the Bowery’s last flophouses, from the men who live in its rows of wooden cubicles. “So it’s not the Waldorf,” says Nathan Smith, the manager, “but where else can you find a room in New York for $10 a night?”

Walking down the street in Seattle, it might be easy to ignore the throngs of homeless kids asking for spare change. But it’s harder to ignore their dogs.

One of the last songs Johnny Cash recorded was “There Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down).” It was written in 1934 by a 12-year-old boy named Claude Ely, who went on to become a Pentecostal preacher known to followers as Brother Claude.

For more than 25 years, Frank Pease was the primary portrait photographer in a town of about 20,000 just south of Lake Michigan. Jason Bitner, co-founder of Found Magazine, happened across thousands of those photos and tracked down some of the subjects.

The Canadian singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, Metals, is a bit more chaotic and liberating. It’s “about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for,” Feist says. She performs four songs from the album.

The frontman for Antony and the Johnsons says everything changed for him when he discovered the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. “I decided he was my art parent. Someone who’s footsteps I would follow in. I would trust him.”

Bob Hill, 86, meets Katie Burningham, 28, at an East London market one day and an unlikely friendship blossoms. Katie begins to visit Bob, who turns out to be a wonderful dancer. Three years later, Katie is still having dance lessons with Bob.

By day he was a file clerk, by night he created one of America’s favorite cult comics. A conversation with Cleveland’s favorite dark, dysfunctional and curmudgeonly son.

The phone rings at the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce and 86-year-old Matt Kennedy answers a common question about the Brooklyn amusement park. “Yes, of course Coney Island still exists. Yes, it’s bigger and better than ever. Thank you.”

Burnt orange and harvest gold — looking at the century through changing palettes.

Fried rabbit, barbecued rabbit, rice with rabbit gravy — all standard fare at the Rabbit Hutch Restaurant in Logan, Alabama. But food was only part of the experience.

What do you talk about with a comedy superstar? How about alcoholism, cocaine, divorce, joke stealing, heart surgery, Richard Pryor, jealousy, and Twitter. This episode is repurposed for public radio, so it’s shorter and filled with bleeps.

Witness the tearful end of a perfect online world.

Orson Welles and H.G. Wells’ are linked in the public imagination thanks to The War of The Worlds, Wells’ sci-fi novel adapted by Welles in 1938 for radio, causing panic across the US. Two years after the broadcast, the men met for a short conversation.

“I seem to be one of these curious cases of a person whose memory is continuous,” the author says. “The capacity to forget is what preserves your life, in some instances. On the other hand, there is no continuity of human life without memory.”

“I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor,” Eno says.

In 1988, Deborah Luster’s mother was murdered by a contract killer. To cope, Luster turned to photography — in prisons. “The perspective was that everyone is a whole person, that they’re not just the sum of their worst acts or even their best acts.”

Rumor has it that two things made Robbins become a writer: taking LSD and moving to Seattle. With that in mind, he plays a game called “Unleash the power within!”

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them,” the author told Terry Gross. “What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

The odd power of the cover band. One day in Afghanistan, the reporter started playing “Those Were the Days My Friend” on his accordion. His translator, shocked, asks, “How do you know Afghan music?” And so we learn the tale of Afghan Elvis.

In 2005, the singer, then 24, didn’t have a piano in her apartment, so she went to the Baldwin Piano showroom in Midtown Manhattan to play some new compositions.

Filmmaking is an art that, he says, “distracts me from the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death and death of loved ones; mass killings and starvation, from holocausts — not just man-made carnage, but the existential position you’re in.”

The true nature of the dark side, its power over 32-year-old men living with mom — and why being known as “The Master-Vader” may not command the respect you seek.

Merrill Garbus’ second album, w h o k i l l, explores themes of sexuality, femininity, class and violence, with Garbus’ witty lyrics alternately delivered in animalistic bursts, tender coos and yodels. She performs four songs from the album.

Bill Withers is the singer-songwriter behind classics like Ain’t No Sunshine, Lean on Me, Use Me and Lovely Day. Withers retired in the mid 1980s and, with the exception of a few songs penned for other artists, has stayed out of the public eye.

The idea is simple: if we all shared a second, neutral language, people of all different cultures could communicate freely and easily, and it would foster international understanding and peace. This is the idea behind the invention of Esperanto.

Why does a country music star and all-American guy — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story.

You pretend you don’t want to listen, but you totally do. The mom/manager of the Kardashian clan says the reality show was a no-brainer. “If someone says, we could shine a camera on your shop every day, hello, I’m signing up.”

Early in his career, musician Dan Deacon embarked on an eight-week tour. Totally broke, when the car died, he had no choice but to finish the trip by Greyhound bus.

The comedian talks about getting his start in comedy thanks to Eddie Murphy and explains why he went from Saturday Night Live to In Living Color.

Ever wonder how earthworms do it? Isabella Rossellini has always been famous for her independence of mind. In “Green Porno,” her series of film shorts for Sundance, she applied that iconoclasm to the sex lives of the animal kingdom.

To make foie gras, geese must be strapped down and force-fed huge amounts of food. So when Dan Barber heard about a Spaniard who had supposedly found a way to make the delicacy without mistreating the animals, he went to Spain to investigate.

For the celebrity chef, the song “96 Tears” was a gateway drug to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, not to mention a narcotic-fueled roadtrip and a dead stripper.

In this Peabody Award-winning show, the host sets sail in search of the white whale.

Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens is introduced to the Arkansas town of Brinkley, a farming town not far from where the ivory-billed woodpecker was recently rediscovered. That the bird is not extinct has brought a ray of hope to the residents.

From 1977, a home recording of 5-year-old Sofia Coppola, interviewed by her father, Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola.

The exchange between guest and host is priceless.

Wow. Once left out of a 1965 concert recording, this version of Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” is slowed to a breathtaking crawl.

In 1929, George Orwell stepped from a life of privilege into a battle against dirt and hunger. In France, the novelist was starving and broke. In Britain, he lived the life of those who’d fallen even lower — becoming a tramp on London’s streets.

In his memoir “God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F——-,” the Saturday Night Live impressionist details the systematic brutality he suffered at the hands of his mother, who beat him, stabbed him and tortured him with a hammer and electrical outlet.

Music philosopher Greil Marcus listens back and hears Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Lady Gaga, The Manson Family — the existential dread of a generation.

On finishing an album: “By the time you’re done, you don’t even want to hear it for a year. The songs have kind of grown up around you like vines, and you just want to distance yourself from it. And then when you hear it, it’s like an old buddy.”

“I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor.
Be honest. What do you make?

You want to know what I make?”

Mike swaps mics with Marc and interviews the host himself. Armed with questions from past WTF guests, Mike takes Marc on a trip through the inner recesses of his soul and arrives at a destination more than 200 hours in the making.

The story of a man obsessed with reruns. A director makes an entire movie that’s a rerun, based on a personal rerun that he found himself caught in. But why?

Charles Gaulperin is a Santeria priest and the owner of Botanica El Congo Manuel, a religious shop in a strip mall in Hollywood. The reporter goes to witness a sacred ceremony that involves the sacrifice of a hen and a sick man in New York.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” captured something core about a rising generation’s sense of time. She writes “time is a goon” — as in an irresistible force. Her inspirations were Proust and The Sopranos.

From a little workshop in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Wayne Henderson makes what may be the most beautiful and beautifully-voiced guitars in the world.

In the 1930s, Ina Ray Hutton was strutting her stuff as a sexy blonde jazz singer. Decades later, a news reporter looked at one of her albums and felt something was odd: the blonde bombshell, she thought, might have been black.

The steel drum was first created in Trinidad, hammered from biscuit boxes, brake drums and oil barrels. One of the biggest “steel pan” bands of the 1960s gained worldwide fame when an unlikely patron heard their act and took them on tour.

Welch and Rawlings perform an in-studio concert featuring songs from the long-awaited The Harrow and the Harvest. “There’s a lot of stuff on this album dealing with unfulfilled expectations and when things don’t exactly go as you had thought or wished they would — and the true adult nature of dealing with that,” Welch says.

Starting in 1931, C. Israel Lutsky took to the air daily for more than 30 years with listeners seeking advice. He replied with a mixture of folk wisdom and abuse. Charlatan or sage, Lutsky was one of the most beloved figures in the golden age of Yiddish radio.

A conversation with the art great. Stella’s work has gone in reverse of the arc of American art. Painters began with lush, majestic landscapes and slowly moved abstract. Stella began with the most severe, minimalist paintings and has slowly moved lush.

In her last book, Joan Didion contemplated how her life was fundamentally altered after her husband’s sudden death. The book was published just months after Didion’s only child, her daughter Quintana Roo, died at age 39. Didion says she was unable to start mourning her daughter’s death until she started writing again.

Lisa Bufano is a dancer. She is also a double amputee. Her legs and fingers were amputated when she was 21, after a staph bacteria infection raged through her body.

Together, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger created some of the most iconic rock ‘n’ roll songs of the 20th century. But the opening line of one of The Rolling Stones’ most famous hits wasn’t a collaboration. The riff came to Richards in a dream.

For Alec Baldwin’s inaugural show, the actor invites him into his apartment to discuss what makes a great director, a smart producer, and why playing a villain is wonderful.

The iconic villain Darth Vader has it all: heavy breathing, theme music, brute power, and that impenetrable mask. In Vader’s case, the mask shields his humanity.

Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide, Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The rapper and record mogul discusses his childhood and the stories behind his most famous songs.

TV shows have been bleeping profanity for years when people speak extemporaneously. In recent years, however, scripted shows have been writing profanity in — and then bleeping it out for comedic effect.

A deeply sensuous character who speaks to our most basic appetites. He’s always been blue, always been furry, always been voracious. But he didn’t always eat cookies.

A 1965 Syd Barrett song recorded as a demo with Pink Floyd before they had formed.

When country music legend Willie Nelson was a child, he heard a heavenly tune coming through his front door that’s been under his skin ever since.

Roger Ebert is famous for arguing on TV with Gene Siskel. Now that cancer surgeries have left him without the ability to speak, Ebert has found a new voice online.

At the time of the interview, Stephen Colbert was still the fake senior correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He talks about his reports, from “Rathergate” to “This Week in God.”

You’d be forgiven for confusing Tracy Morgan with his 30 Rock character Tracy Jordan. Jordan runs down the street in his underwear, wielding a plastic light saber; Morgan appeared on TV reclining on top of a desk with his shirt up over his belly.

Cellist Zoe Keating discusses the physics (if not metaphysics) of looping sound and how to use a 17th century instrument to make avant-garde electronic music.

A man who’s lost everything, Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” With Clive’s wife, Sacks tries to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers music and love.

In the wake of a break-up, the reporter finds so much comfort in break-up songs that she decides to try and write one herself—even though she has no musical ability whatsoever. For some help, she goes to a rather surprising expert.