Audiofiles!

Playing around with audio samples taken from pornography films, producer Ed Prosser was struck by how much the moans and groans came to resemble the calls of whales.

For the veterans of the Civil War, memories and remembrances were different than for veterans of later wars. Without images or sounds, shared experience was the only evidence that what the veterans remember actually took place.

A story about being a crybaby, from David Sedaris’ book of animal fables.

Even during construction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the breeze. In the months the bridge was open, people came just to ride the waves as they crossed above Puget Sound. The thrill ride didn’t last long.

At the countdown to the New Year, Joe Frank is feeling the weight of time.

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.

As a boy in religious school, Shalom Auslander is informed that his name is one of the names of God, so he must be very careful not to take his own name in vain.

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

“Night in London is a brief period of infinite possibility,” wrote the journalist HV Morton in the 1920s. Nowhere is this truer than in Hackney, which becomes an asphalt jungle for revellers, criminals, artists, lovers, all night eateries, and taxi drivers.

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.

Two stories about heart-stopping falls: David Eagleman gets to the bottom of what goes on in our brains during those life or death moments when time seems to slow way down. Plus, the story of Sarita and Simon, who fell in, and then out, of love.

Forest Park is the last stop on Chicago’s blue line. Famous for its graveyards, one in particular catches your attention: Showmen’s Rest, a burial place for circus performers.

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.

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.”

A retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, in which we finally hear Cain’s side of things.

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.

At this moment, a quiet war is raging in our oceans. The opponents are microscopic, but the scope is so vast it rivals Lord of the Rings. And it’s vital to our own survival.

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.

The sounds of the city, through the music, noise, and voices of some of its eight million people. In this chapter of The London Chronicles, an audio journey through “fear.”

A soundscape of weather, walks, and slugs in North Wales.

An exploration of our rather neurotic relationship with death.

In 1993, John Perry Barlow was at a convention for the NeXT computer, the machine Steve Jobs created. Feet away, the American Psychiatric Association was holding a convention of its own. At the border of the two, Barlow’s life changed forever.

Off the coast of Baja, California, scientists have found gray whales are uncharacteristically social with humans, even allowing their faces, mouths and tongues to be massaged as they bump up beside boats.

A man tries to calculate what love costs.

The true story of Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria, 1826-1875, who was observed awkwardly walking sideways down the palace corridors. When questioned by her worried royal parents, she announced that she had swallowed a grand glass piano.

A teacher’s classroom of restless, indifferent students becomes suddenly reliant on his seemingly worthless field study on drowning.

Meditations on insanity and unsanity.

The sounds from Dublin Zoo at night. Howling wolves and snuffling elephants.

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.

She rose at dusk, sang, rehearsed, performed, ate and drank and sang until dawn. Then she slept all day and began to create and unravel again as the sun went down.

The dizzying rise and fall of Lincoln Beachey, a pilot whose aeronautic feats changed aviation forever and turned chancy stunts into acrobatic mastery.

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.

The history of the modern shopping mall, told by people living in a real, yet unnamed, city. Scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or worse.

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

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.

On a summer afternoon, three 10-year-old kids push around a soccer-ball-style sorbet maker and concoct stories to make their task more interesting.

“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.”

Whether or not you believe it, about one in 10 people report having an “out of body” experience. And turns out it happens pretty frequently among fighter pilots.

What happens at the moment we slip from life to the other side? When exactly does it happen? What happens afterward? Eleven meditations on how, and even if, we die.

Two sisters, now in their seventies, have preserved the same relationship they had as girls — down to the matching outfits and shared favorites.

When he was 16, Myron Jones was allowed to go out any night of the week, but his mother barely let his sister out of the house. So the siblings invented an imaginary family that required her to babysit late into the night and sometimes for entire weekends.

There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But you can feel it. As a musician, Sxip Shirey decided that living in New York was a necessary evil. Then, one night on a roof, he had an epiphany that completely changed the way he saw the city.

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.”

What thoughts do bridge jumpers have a second after their feet leave the wall? How does it feel to hit water at 120 miles per hour? How do they stay afloat until rescued?

A solo project from Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor.

The people of Lubec, Maine, are met with an unpleasant surprise when an enormous whale washes onto the beachfront of their tiny coastal town. As the 60-ton creature begins to decompose, the town is forced to come up with a plan to get rid of it.

A mystery involving a box of old letters and a chase through clues and suspects — a Manhattan middle school teacher, homesick WWII soldiers, Rte 101, an estranged wife and mother — that all revolve around, yes, a goat standing on a cow.

Steve McGreevy goes to Canada for the Northern Lights. Not to see them, but to hear them. You can do that, with the right equipment. And Steve’s got a van full. He records Natural Radio, the sound of earth’s magnetic field.

The story of Elizabeth Van Lew, known as Crazy Bet. Her odd behavior — freeing her slaves, visiting Yankee POWs in prison — made tongues wag in the Confederate capital. But Richmond society couldn’t begin to guess what was really going on.

Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You’d probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even put your mouth on it.

Julia Easterlin describes her performing style as “musical sudoku.” When the 22-year-old walks into a room, she is equipped with just a backpack. She unpacks her rectangular looping machine, which essentially creates a one-woman chorus.

Bernard, 86, has been alone since the death of his partner. He charts his life story and inner struggle in South London during a time when sex between men was illegal.

An hour under the influence of the radio maestro and radical raconteur.

A series of convergences, but none of them are harmonic. The story of Pythagoras and the fifth hammer, using Nazi cameras in art, what happens when the mind goes pop!, and more. In other words, another hour with Benjamen Walker.

In a five-part series, Scott Carrier profiles the people of Ciudad Juarez — a city on the border with few rules, rampant poverty and a police force that can’t be trusted.

A Guatemalan teenager’s trip with a coyote through Mexico to southwest Florida. The story is a composite of several women’s experiences. All of the women were raped, starved and drugged during the trip and then sold when they arrived in the US.

William Safire prepared a speech for President Nixon to read on television if the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the Moon. This radio drama imagines what it might have sounded like if things had gone differently for Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

A famous boy prodigy, William James Sidis taught himself Latin at 3, graduated Harvard at 16, but collected streetcar transfer tickets at 28.

In the 1960s, a young professor of psychology at Yale set out to test our capacity for obedience and cruelty. Millions of words have been written about the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiment. Less is known about the effect it had on those involved.

The Frankenstein Family Crypt in 1952, paranormal observations of an 8 year old, the haunting of a kitty, thoughts on the ghost story structure, and a scary pantry door.

A 12-year quest to chase down and catch an antelope.

This is a story that’s hard to describe. A slow, sonic, poetic roadtrip. The story itself starts at 05:05, before that is a conversation with the reporter.

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.

In 1906, a rich family vacationing in Oyster Bay, New York, started to get sick. Very sick. It turns out they’d come down with typhoid, a disease forever associated with one woman: Typhoid Mary. You may think you know this story — you don’t.

At the heart of San Francisco, there’s a plaza called United Nations Plaza — less formally known as Urination Plaza. For most of the past three decades, it’s been the city’s most public theater of squalor. So how does this happen? Why does a public space fail?

Kohn Ashmore’s voice is arrestingly slow. When he was eight years old, he was in a coma for five months, and when he finally woke up, everything about him was slowed down, except for his mind. His friend Andy tells his story.

In December of 1967, miner Melvin Earl Dummar was driving down a desert road in Nevada when he saw a man lying in the road. Melvin rescued the man who turned out, he says, to be billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes. His life changed forever.

NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we send astronauts to Mars, they might not make it back.

If you’ve read any 19th century literature, England seems to be an island made up entirely of people with submerged, often misplaced passions for other people. This particular affair, even years after it ended, wasn’t much discussed.

The reporter took a job working for a network correspondent he refers to as “The Friendly Man.” Every story was supposed to be upbeat, a tale of people coming together. And every story they sent him out on turned out to be a sham.

Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up.

A restaurant in Switzerland offers up a different dining experience: Guests eat in complete darkness and are served by blind or visually handicapped waitstaff.

Dr. Oliver Sacks called her “Mrs. O’C.” She was Irish. She was old. And she had a problem: One night, while sleeping in her room at a Catholic old people’s home in the Bronx, she was awakened by a voice, a female voice singing Irish ballads.

The radio producer quit his job at a low moment in his life. His wife left him and took the kids. And he got a job interviewing schizophrenics for research. After doing it a while, he began to wonder if he was a schizophrenic himself.