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Trump is back in court for his hush money trial hearing, and his immunity case was argued at the Supreme Court. On this week’s On the Media, hear what gets lost in the blow-by-blow coverage of Trump’s legal woes. Plus, an essay from a former NPR editor has lawmakers calling to cut funding to the public radio network.

[01:10] Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the courts for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus, about her frustration with pundits' obsession with solving political problems involving Trump with the law.

[15:14] Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Kelly McBride, NPR’s public editor, about the push to ‘defund NPR’ sparked by a former NPR editor’s essay and whether his points have any salience.

[32:59] Brooke continues the conversation about NPR with Alicia Montgomery, vice president of audio at Slate and former editor at NPR. They explore the real problems brewing at the public radio network.

Further reading / listening:

The Law Alone Cannot Curb Donald Trump’s Lawlessness

The relentless focus on Gaza

The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems

We received the following statement from a spokesperson at NPR:

NPR is proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our journalists, desks, and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories. We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of our country and our world, and to meet our public service mission. Journalism is a collaborative process, and rigorous debate and self-examination are necessary parts of our pursuit of the facts. We adhere to the highest editorial standards and have built in processes to ensure accuracy and balance, including a standards and practices editor as well as a public editor to stand-in for the audience.

On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

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Former President Donald Trump returns from a break from his trial at Manhattan criminal court in New York, Thursday, April 25, 2024.

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Former President Donald Trump returns from a break from his trial at Manhattan criminal court in New York, Thursday, April 25, 2024.

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WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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Why the law won't fix the Trump's lawlessness; and a former NPR editor's essay puts a spotlight on the public radio network.

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How Not to Cover the Trump Trials. Plus, the Latest Push To Defund NPR

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News clip: You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcade.

News clip:  It's about a 20-minute drive between Trump Tower and the court building.

Brooke Gladstone: A historic week of Trump trials has inspired more breathless coverage. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. All the trial drama is entertaining.

Dahlia Lithwick: Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsy moments. My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, one former NPR editor's grievances continue to reverberate. He implies wokeness is ruining the place.

Alicia Montgomery: There is a version of what wokeness is that marginalized people are storming the barricades and dictating that this story happens and this story gets killed and we're going to use this language and not use that language. That's not what I saw.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooklyn Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. This has been a historic week in Trumpian jurisprudence. The US Supreme Court heard arguments over whether Trump should be immune from prosecution for attempting to reverse his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. His former lawyers and others were indicted in a 2020 election-related scheme in Arizona. A New York judge denied Trump's request for a new trial in the E Jean Carroll defamation case that cost him $83 million in damages. Then there's what some call his hush money trial, others call his election interference trial, and a few others call the Biden trial. Two of those monikers are accurate, the last isn't.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, as Jon Stewart noted this week, the media that vowed to never again waste precious air time on Trump-related minutiae forgot.

News clip:  Trump leaving Trump Tower on 5th Avenue.

News clip:  They're now making their way across town.

News clip:  He's heading down the FDR.

News clip:  Two of the Manhattan courthouse on Chamber Street.

News clip:  Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance.

Jon Stewart: Arriving at the intersection of American history. The brilliant juxtaposing of the gravitas of the moment with simple traffic terms. [laughter] He arrived at the intersection of American history, where he put a quarter in the parking meter of destiny. [laughter] Leaving the car, looking to avoid stepping in the urine puddle of jurisprudence.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: There's also the chance that he could be held in contempt for endlessly defying a gag order that bans him from intimidating and potentially endangering witnesses, jury members, and court employees, you know, doing stuff like this.

News clip:  April 17th on Truth Social, Donald Trump quotes Jesse Watters from Fox News. They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge in order to get on the Trump jury. The prosecutors are pointing to that and saying, "This is really bad." Jurors are intimidated after this post went up. Jury 2 was no longer comfortable to serve on jury.

News clip:  When the juror was walking out, Trump made a remark that was audible enough to be heard in the overflow rumors and Judge Merchan really went apoplectic. Basically making the case that he's not going to tolerate any sort of juror intimidation in his courtroom.

Dahlia Lithwick: If a judge says to him, "You cannot use my courtroom to intimidate the court staff. You cannot use my courtroom to threaten the prosecutor," he just does it on Truth Social. All of these questions are, in my view, different versions of the same question, which is, "Why can't law be better?"

Brooke Gladstone: Some months back, Slate's legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, laid out in her column why "The law alone cannot curb Donald Trump's lawlessness." We spoke back in January about her frustrations with mainstream media's preoccupation with horse race questions in much of the coverage of Trump's various trials.

Dahlia Lithwick: Overwhelmingly, what I was hearing the big brains in the legal academy fighting about was tactical questions. Is it just going to foment the next insurrection to disenfranchise a bunch of Trump supporters, whether constitutional democracy can withstand the Supreme Court signing off on that? Then I think the sense that the trials are taking too long. The question then becomes, how do we make this happen in time to have meaningful accountability before the election? Those questions are not legal questions. They're political questions that are coming in the garb of legal questions.

Brooke Gladstone: You write that Americans have "been convinced that the justice system alone can somehow be deployed, or in the parlance of the insurrectionists, weaponized into becoming the shiny entity that could preserve democracy."

Dahlia Lithwick: The law is not a toolkit that you can pull out to make fascism end, but I think that there is a uniquely American fascination with the morality play of, "We'll all sit back and it's going to be just like Law and Order, and at the end, the right thing will happen and the guy will go to jail. "That is a part of what accountability for Donald Trump must include. I think, principally, the judicial system is something that we use to determine what happened. By definition, that is a slow exacting process. It's really built to do something quite different from stop Donald Trump from being the next president.

Brooke Gladstone: Because Trump, you observed, has always managed to evade legal accountability because he doesn't allow the legal system to look back at facts. He disputes them even after they've been adjudicated. Look at the case of E Jean Carroll. He has an entirely different goal for the mechanisms of the legal process, you say.

Dahlia Lithwick: He loses the first E Jean Carroll trial. The jury finds that he defamed her, and what does he do? He says he won and continues to defame her in real time. He uses law as a tactic, not as a search for truth.

Brooke Gladstone: His goal then isn't to win the case?

Dahlia Lithwick: If he eventually actually pays fines, that will be a material loss, but right now, none of this matters to him. It's just free air time. He is very good at winning for losing.

Brooke Gladstone: You argue that the narrow focus on Trump's various trials actually plays in his hands because his numbers seem to go up, at least he says, with every indictment. I'm not sure what the alternative is.

Dahlia Lithwick: This goes back to the old J Rosen quote, not the horse race, but the stakes. I think when we get really, really in the weeds of covering these trials as a series of really dramatic horse races, it gets of a piece with the much bigger indictment of how the press is covering elections.

Brooke Gladstone: Competitions.

Dahlia Lithwick: Competition, contests, good guys, bad guys, oopsy moments, all that stuff is incredibly interesting. My question is whether it really surfaces what the stakes are of no legal accountability for Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Case in point, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump was ineligible to run for president because of his involvement in the January 6th effort to stop the certification of Biden's win last time. The 14th Amendment bars those who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government positions. The Colorado ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court.

News clip:  The justice's ruling in Donald Trump's favor saying Colorado has no right to keep his name off the ballot this November.

Brooke Gladstone: When we spoke, Dahlia predicted that outcome.

Dahlia Lithwick: I think it's for exactly the reason that we started at, Brooke, which is this is fundamentally a political question that comes to the court dressed as a legal question.

Brooke Gladstone: Is that what the founders were thinking when they wrote the 14th Amendment?

Dahlia Lithwick: No, I think it's fairly clear that removing Donald Trump, an insurrectionist, from the ballot so that he cannot get office again was exactly what the framers were thinking about, and I don't think that's very much in dispute. The question is whether the Supreme Court, which is at the lowest public approval in your and my lifetimes since they've started Gallup polling, their numbers have never been this low.

Does the Supreme Court want to be the entity that yanks Donald Trump off the ballot? By the way, if Colorado was allowed to take Donald Trump off the ballot, Texas and Florida will take Joe Biden off the ballot and say he's an insurrectionist. There are very, very real and, I would say, urgent political questions that are undergirding this. I think, in a sense, we're hoping that law is going to solve our politics problem.

Brooke Gladstone: This week's argument over immunity for the President possesses an even more urgent political problem. Whether our commander in chief is immune from the consequences of any or all actions he takes in office, or is it just official acts and not private ones? How can you tell the difference, especially when Trump's lawyers argue, not for the first time, that no crime is too criminal to overcome immunity.

Justice Jackson: If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?

John Sauer: It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act.

Justice Jackson: It could and why? He's not doing it like President Obama is alleged to have done it, to protect the country from a terrorist, he's doing it for personal gain. Isn't that the nature of the allegations here, that he's not doing these acts in furtherance of an official responsibility?

Brooke Gladstone: As you said, the law can't be boiled down and reconstituted as a vitamin, and then chugged down with a Gatorade to save us from an authoritarian strong man. Back in 2016, the journalist Masha Gessen, who was raised in Russia, warned us that our institutions won't save us, but clearly, it's not a lesson we've learned.

Dahlia Lithwick: 100%. I think the point is all of these things absolutely should be pursued and absolutely this is not a call to say we should pump the brakes on what Fani Willis is doing or Jack Smith is doing or Alvin Bragg is doing. No, no, no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the idea that we can sit around and think that it's going to be, in and of itself, the basis for him not winning the election just strikes me as deeply dangerous. Americans at this present moment have a very thin relationship with the work of democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you mean a thin relationship to the work of democracy?

Dahlia Lithwick: For most of us, most of the time, Brooke, I think the notion is that the system works and we're going to go out and vote and the system doesn't work. The system barely held in the 2020 election. By the skin of our teeth we got out of a meaningful effort to set aside the election results. The Electoral Count Act, which is the reason that Donald Trump was almost able, with the help of John Eastman and some of his flying monkeys, to set aside the 2020 election. That's been reformed, that there was a loophole in there that has been fixed by a lot of democracy projects working very hard.

Brooke Gladstone: That was that maneuver that was going to try to get Pence to set things aside, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: Yes, they were going to capitalize on vague language, and that's been fixed. Things are fixable. Voting rights are fixable, mail-in voting is fixable, gerrymandering is fixable. The reason people are losing confidence in voting is because we are not performing what it is to be confident about voting. Almost more than anything, we have to believe that our vote matters, finding out about the candidates matters, that our state elections matter, that races like State Supreme Court races matter. We have learned this over and over again since Dobbs.

We have the scaffolding for a really cool democracy and we are so unwilling to throw ourselves into the machinery of that democracy, or we want to think about it in October before the election. I think the pragmatic answer I'm giving you, which is so boring, is structural democracy reform. That's the answer. Remember, in the hours and days after Donald Trump enacted the travel ban after the 2016 election-

Brooke Gladstone: The Muslim ban.

Dahlia Lithwick: -the first one, every lawyer [laughs] that I knew showed up at an airport and went to baggage claim and held up a sign that said, "Dude, I'll be your lawyer." Some of them were real estate lawyers, some of them were family lawyers, and they just realized that this is not a spectator sport, I guess I can teach myself immigration law. Remember all those people who showed up at JFK-

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, yes.

Dahlia Lithwick: -and who weren't lawyers; the taxi drivers and the Uber drivers. I think we can very quickly tilt into what I'm describing as a very thick relationship with democracy preservation, but it's a muscle, Brooke, and we have to use it and we have to use it much sooner than October of 2024.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much, Dahlia.

Dahlia Lithwick: Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts for Slate.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up. What's the matter with NPR?

Brooke Gladstone: Because this is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Now we pay some much-requested attention to the latest controversy at NPR. We'll start with--

Reporter 11: A guy named Uri Berliner who came out, he said, "I've been at NPR for 25 years. Here's how we lost America's trust."

Micah Loewinger: On April 9th, the Free Press, a substack run by former New York Times writer, Barry Weiss published an essay by Berliner, then a senior business editor for NPR, claiming that NPR's reflexive liberal takes had lost conservative listeners.

Uri Berliner: A much narrower niche thinking, a group think that's really clustered around a very selective progressive views.

Micah Loewinger: That's Berliner on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation Show.

Uri Berliner: They don't allow enough air, enough spaciousness to consider all kinds of perspectives.

Micah Loewinger: He declined to speak with us, but he argues that at the network's Washington headquarters, the focus was on ethnic and racial diversity on the staff while ignoring political diversity. He accused his colleagues of left-wing advocacy that distorted coverage of the Mueller report, the origins of COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, and more. Concerns he said he tried to raise internally since 2021.

Steve Doocy: What he said is, whatever NPR could do to hurt Donald Trump's presidency, they did.

Micah Loewinger: Steve Doocy on Fox & Friends, part of a now weeks-long conservative media-feeding frenzy.

Steve Doocy: In the name of diversity, they've eliminated diversity of thought.

News clip:  It's gotten so partisan that I no longer trust their facts. I used to understand spin.

News clip:  Donald Trump now calling for the defunding of NPR.

News clip:  Indiana congressman, Jim Banks, among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on "low-grade propaganda".

Micah Loewinger: A quick note, NPR has never produced On the Media, although it did distribute the show until 2015. A defund NPR bill would squeeze the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gives roughly $3 million to NPR directly and over $100 million to stations around the country, including $2.5 million to WNYC, OTMs producing station.

Brooke Gladstone: What has the NPR's response been? If you can sum it up.

Micah Loewinger: Last Wednesday, all things considered, host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with NPR Media correspondent David Folkenflik, who dutifully covered the flare up from within, including NPRs response to Berliner's claim that a focus on building up staff and listenership had skewed its journalism.

David Folkenflik: Edith Chapin, our chief news executive, wrote a memo last week essentially rejecting the argument. She praised the works that our colleagues had done on various continents, the world, various communities around the country, various issues that we focused on. NPR also suspended Berliner and it cited two things.

Micah Loewinger: One, he had written the Free Press op-ed without permission from the company, and two, in that essay, he had shared proprietary numbers about listener demographics. The suspension gave the conservative media outrage cycle a second wind and ignited activist Christopher Rufo, who unearthed old tweets from NPR's new CEO and president Katherine Maher.

Christopher Rufo: In 2018, she declared that Trump's a racist, and she did it again in 2020, and then kept the year off showing how excited she was to vote for Biden.

Micah Loewinger: After about 50 NPR employees signed a letter urging Maher to rebut the quote, factual inaccuracies in Uri's op-ed, she wrote an internal response. He didn't like it.

Jesse Watters: Berliner says, "I cannot work in a newsroom where I'm disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems that NPR has cited in my Free Press essay."

Micah Loewinger: Lost in much of the coverage was a close look at Berliner's proof. The NPR coverage he cited as evidence of left-wing bias.

Kelly McBride: I actually get where he's coming from. I actually thought as an editor, I could have made his argument better for him.

Micah Loewinger: Kelly McBride is senior vice president of the Poynter Institute and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership. She's also NPR's public editor, meaning she's paid by NPR to critique NPR, to investigate and respond to listener complaints about its coverage.

Kelly McBride: I basically have the least desirable job in journalism.

Micah Loewinger: She says the more she dug into the claims in Uri's piece--

Kelly McBride: The more it felt like he had cherry-picked examples to prove a point that I thought was disingenuous.

Uri Berliner: We started covering Trump in a way that we were trying to damage his presidency to find anything we could to harm him.

Micah Loewinger: Uri on Bari Weiss's podcast.

Uri Berliner: I think what we latched onto was Russia collusion.

Micah Loewinger: He wrote, "When the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, Russiagate quietly faded from our programming," but Kelly McBride says NPR was right to keep the spotlight on two of the main questions of the Mueller investigation.

Kelly McBride: To what extent did Russia have a role in the US election and try and disrupt it, and to what extent was Trump in his campaign a part of that? It is ridiculous to think that any national news agency wouldn't cover the hell out of that story.

Micah Loewinger: Writing in the Washington Post, Erik Wemple pointed out a technical problem with Uri's focus on collusion. Robert Mueller did not apply the concept of collusion to his investigation. As Wemple put it, "Trump will have you believe that the absence of criminality signifies the absence of wrongdoing, a logical atrocity abetted by Berliner's essay."

Kelly McBride: Even when the Mueller report came out, it was initially just a summary characterized in one specific way, and then when journalists got ahold of the whole report, they were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, this says something completely different."

Micah Loewinger: Trump had basically attempted to spin the report as exonerating him. Robert Mueller declined to recommend charges against Trump, at least, in part due to a Justice Department legal opinion that said a current US president shouldn't be indicted. The report said, "The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or seed his requests."

Kelly McBride: Headline, it's complicated

Micah Loewinger: Now, onto the Hunter Biden laptop story, which the New York Post broke in October of 2020. Uri alleges that NPR didn't cover the story ahead of the election because it would've hurt President Biden. On Bari Weiss's podcast, he refers to a couple of quotes from NPR staff, one he witnessed firsthand.

Uri Berliner: I remember a conversation with a group of us, and one of the great journalists at NPR, someone who is very fair-minded said, "Look, I'm glad we're not covering this because it could help Trump."

Micah Loewinger: Kelly McBride says she doesn't know who said this or whether it's an accurate quote, but she did recognize the second one.

Uri Berliner: One of our top news manager, when the post published this explosive story, said, "We're not going to cover stories that aren't stories and we're not going to let our audience be distracted by this."

Kelly McBride: The quote that he attributes to the managing editor was actually a quote from my newsletter. The week that the New York Post came out with its stories, I was responding to questions from the audience who were asking, "Is NPR going to cover this story?" I reached out to a senior editor and he gave me that quote along with a lot of other context.

Micah Loewinger: The Post was the only outlet that accepted data allegedly from the laptop from Rudy Giuliani. McBride says NPR editors passed on the story because they didn't have access to the laptop. No outlet did. As media professor Dan Kennedy pointed out in a recent essay, even Fox News waited until after the election because it couldn't verify basic facts about the laptop.

Kelly McBride: Exactly. Once the provenance of the laptop was actually confirmed, journalists began to cover the contents of it.

Micah Loewinger: That said, you believe NPR could have covered later iterations of the laptop story sooner than it did?

Kelly McBride: Yes, I think they were a little slow to get back to it.

Micah Loewinger: Let's move on to the theory that COVID came from a lab leak in Wuhan China. Uri claims that this story was not reported at NPR for political reasons, that it was dismissed "as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory."

Kelly McBride: The stories that I've read and heard on NPR recently implied that the origin of the beginnings of COVID are still unknown, and the lab leak is a viable theory if you look at the last 30 stories that NPR did. Now, did NPR and most of American journalism repeat the government line that it couldn't have possibly been a lab leak without a lot of independent investigation? Yes. It was a mistake, but it wasn't unique to NPR.

Micah Loewinger: He was alleging that because it could be construed as lending credence to a "racist or right-wing conspiracy theory," journalists at NPR were not sufficiently curious about the scientists who, early on, did argue that there might be something to the lab leak theory.

Kelly McBride: Were they not curious because of all of the narratives around race and ethnicity and geographic origin, or were they not curious because we were in the middle of what's arguably the story of a century? There were thousands of storylines to pursue that seemed more accessible.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about NPR's coverage of recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. In his column, Uri portrays the editorial process as a frictionless conveyor belt of stories about how "Israel is doing something bad," and then largely categorizes NPR's coverage as "oppressor versus oppressed" where Israelis are the oppressors.

Kelly McBride: I get a lot of similar critiques in the public editor inbox and those critiques are more precise. They critique NPR for not labeling Hamas as a terrorist organization, for not acknowledging that the health authority that reports the number of dead, which is now around 37,000, not labeling that as Hamas and casting doubt on that figure for disproportionately covering the suffering of Palestinians and minimizing the suffering of Israelis, for not saying often enough that the reason that so many people have died in Gaza is because Hamas hides among civilians and for accusing either implicitly or explicitly Israel of war crimes, but not giving Israel a chance to respond.

Those critiques are much more precise than Uri's suggestion that every time Israel does something bad, NPR want to report it.

Micah Loewinger: She says, "NPR should explain on-air why it makes these decisions."

Kelly McBride: Many critics do see bias, and it's not bias. It's a deliberate set of journalistic choices to focus on where there are more people dead and to try and tell that story because there's just more story to tell there.

Micah Loewinger: She does agree with Uri's criticism of NPR's coverage or lack of coverage of antisemitism.

Kelly McBride: It is smart to argue that this is a piece of journalism that is currently missing from NPR's body of work. I would have pointed to the statistics that show a rise in antisemitism, and I also would've looked at statistics of other forms of harassment like anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, racial crimes against Black people, against Latinos, and then looked for NPR's work on those areas. I don't know if it's disproportionate to other forms of hate crimes, but if I was his editor, I would've made him figure it out.

Micah Loewinger: In an effort to quantify NPR's liberal bias, Uri looked up the voter registration of DC NPR journalists

Uri Berliner: What I found was 87 registered Democrats on our editorial staff, zero Republicans. I presented this at all hands or a large news meeting. I said, "Hey, look, something's gone wrong here. If we're really thinking about diversity and our coverage, something is really off."

Micah Loewinger: Steve Inskeep, host of NPR's Morning Edition, took issue with these numbers and with Uri's methodology in a column for his own substack pointing out that he himself, Steve Inskeep, is not registered to a political party, that he's worked with people who are probably conservative at NPR and that hundreds of people work in content at NPR around the world. What are your thoughts on UJri's count and the larger point he's trying to make with it?

Kelly McBride: I wish that he had not used that figure because I think it's so easily torn apart. I'm assuming that that reflects the heavily democratic demographics of DC. He didn't report how many people are no-party affiliated. I bet that that number was bigger, but we know that journalism likely tilts more liberal or democratic.

Micah Loewinger: She says that for journalists at NPR, the methodology of rigorous journalism, the professional practice of scrutinizing a theory by speaking to a range of sources and reporting out the facts offers a defense against bias, which we all have.

Kelly McBride: Uri actually did what he is accusing NPR of doing. He had an assumption of bias and he set out to prove that bias and he reported out one figure that supported the proof of that bias, but he didn't seek out other data that was knowable that might have contradicted that.

Micah Loewinger: That said, Kelly McBride says NPR is too focused on news affecting people on the coasts, in big cities, and university hubs. That it could do more to highlight rural and small-town life.

Kelly McBride: I grew up in Toledo, Ohio and I don't hear my experience of being in a declining small industrial town on NPR much at all. That's real, that geographic bias and it probably has some overlap with conservative liberal, but I don't think it's as one-to-one as people think it is

Micah Loewinger: One of Uri's strongest pieces of evidence showing that right-wing audiences got fed up with NPR is internal data comparing 2011 to 2023 showing that the percentage of listeners identifying as Democrat rose from 23% to 67%, while the percentage of conservative listeners dropped from 26% to 11%.

Kelly McBride: Did NPR change or did the American populace change? Because it's pretty clear that the Republican Party has become much more conservative. When you ask people outside of studies like this how do they identify, those numbers have moved.

Micah Loewinger: Instead, Uri Berliner says, conservative listeners got turned off by biased coverage coinciding with former NPR CEO, John Lansing's North Star, his explicit effort beginning in 2021 to diversify its staff and audience to better reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the country. Since 2020, according to a New York Times story this week, NPR's listenership has shrunk by 20%, but during that same period, the pandemic scrambled work commutes and listening habits as NPR's podcast competition continued to multiply. From 2020 to 2023, the share of adults who get news on TikTok quadrupled from 2018 to 2022.

Pew found that the percentage of Americans who closely followed the news dropped from 51% to 38%. Conservative listeners may be tuning out NPR, but they're tuning out conservative media too at a remarkable clip. Data from the writing found that between February 2020 and February 2024, traffic to fox.com dropped by 24%, by 60% to the Blaze, and by 87% to Breitbart, whereas CNN and the New York Times saw 20% and 22% drops respectively. In other words, it's far too simplistic to blame NPRs woes on wokeness.

Uri Berliner: I think that NPR is still an incredibly valuable public institution. I think it needs serious fixing.

Micah Loewinger: Uri Berliner.

Uri Berliner: I think there are member stations in small towns and remote areas that rely on this money to provide a local news coverage. I think it's pretty critical, so I wouldn't support defunding NPR.

Kelly McBride: I believe him,-

Micah Loewinger: Kelly McBride.

Kelly McBride: -but he did the thing that's probably going to support that cause more than any other thing. NPR gets a drop in the bucket directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's the smaller markets that are mostly going to suffer if that money goes away.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, NPR has problems, but maybe not what you think they are.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, just because many of Uri Berliner's specific complaints weren't entirely supported by the evidence, it doesn't mean NPR is problem-free. Ask Alicia Montgomery, an NPR veteran of nearly 20 years, now it's late. She described in a recent column how when she first saw his essay, it "felt like hearing a loud, ugly family argument break out in the room next door. I wanted to pretend it wasn't happening. I wanted people to shut up, but if they were going to shout, I at least wanted them to tell the whole story, you know." Actually, as a 23-year NPR veteran myself, I get it.

Alicia Montgomery: Brooke, you and I know that a lot of public radio feels like a family in the best ways and the worst ones. [laughter] There is a problem with receiving even well-intended criticism with an open mind, at least as far back as I can remember. What Uri had to say, you know how it is when you have a family argument and somebody opens the door with a truth, and then it starts getting less and less true as the yelling continues. That's what it felt like.

Brooke Gladstone: He described it as straightforward coverage of a belligerent truth-impaired president that veered towards efforts to damage or topple his presidency. Now, you were there, was there none of that?

Alicia Montgomery: There was none of that. I'm just going to say that straightforward. I can't account for what people said in the cafeteria, but I was on Morning Edition from fall of 2017 until spring of 2020. From my seat and the meetings that I attended, there was a lot of effort to cover Trump as fairly as possible.

Brooke Gladstone: Which was usual. It was the bend over backwards stance of a liberal news organization.

Alicia Montgomery: It's the bend over backwards stance of an organization that has to stay in good standing with a broad swath of people from different constituencies in order to guarantee its survival.

Brooke Gladstone: Talk about some direction that you might have been given at an editorial meeting.

Alicia Montgomery: During the run-up to Trump's election, there were all sorts of meetings for team leaders whose desks or teams might be dealing with the election, and because I was in leadership at Code Switch, I was included on a lot of these meetings.

Brooke Gladstone: Because Code Switch was? For people who don't know.

Alicia Montgomery: Code Switch was the editorial vertical set up to talk about the intersection of race and culture, but because of shifts in newsroom priorities and resources, we became the team that dealt with race and often politics. I was in one such meeting where the suggestion was made that if we were covering a story about Donald Trump lying, we should match it with a story about Hillary Clinton lying. The question, well, what if one candidate just lies more than the other? Just hung out there as the hard questions on want to do sometimes.

Brooke Gladstone: You recalled an editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump's strong poll numbers wouldn't survive his being exposed as a racist.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes. [laughter] This is ludicrous.

Brooke Gladstone: When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of that racism,-

Alicia Montgomery: Crickets.

Brooke Gladstone: -crickets.

Alicia Montgomery: Silence. Again, even the suggestion that the facts might be more complicated, silence was often the response, and that was an improvement over what it could have been, which is being loudly shut down.

Brooke Gladstone: I recall that NPR was a big holdout on applying the word liar to Trump.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes. Oh, there were so many blowups about that.

Brooke Gladstone: We don't know what's going on in his mind. Maybe he thinks it's the truth.

Alicia Montgomery: There is a valid journalistic point there. As frustrating as it was, that lying is about somebody's motivation. If you can't tell whether the person knows the difference between the truth and the lie, are they a liar? I don't necessarily think it was always decided the right way.

Brooke Gladstone: NPR also didn't want to call waterboarding torture.

Alicia Montgomery: Wow. Yes, that's a deep cut and also true.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm just saying you talk about the ugly truth is that NPR's good journalism isn't always about the journalism.

Alicia Montgomery: NPR's good journalism a lot of the time is about maintaining a good relationship with the people in charge and maintaining access to powerful people. If you are calling waterboarding torture, maybe George W Bush's, people don't want to come on your show if you are saying Obama's policy during the Syrian civil war didn't work out very well.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean the red line?

Alicia Montgomery: What was that line in the sand? Did we ever find it? Trying to stay on good terms with people in power and cover them rigorously, always attention no matter who was president.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that it took a kind of courage for him to publicly criticize the organization, but it took the wrong kind of nerve.

Alicia Montgomery: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: That his argument was, and this is strong language, a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst. What did you mean?

Alicia Montgomery: There is a kind of journalism where what you do is find the stories that are going to support the worldview of your audience and ignore or downplay the facts that your audience would find challenging. What Uri did was, to call it cherry-picking is generous.

Brooke Gladstone: That's what he says NPR does because it has coalesced comfortably around the progressive worldview.

Alicia Montgomery: You know what? For the time that I was there, there was nothing comfortable about the discussions around Trump or around race or policing. It was really tense. The idea that these decisions are being made because of pressure from people in marginalized groups who don't want to hear X, Y, and Z, that's not real. This is something that really got me because for several years while I was at NPR, I worked on a program called Tell Me More with Michel Martin. Even though the program's explicit mission wasn't race, we did cover race a lot more than the other shows. We also covered gender issues, we covered faith issues in a way that the other shows didn't.

If you listen to media that is people of color or people in marginalized groups, the stuff that we produce for each other, it doesn't sound anything like what the NPR leadership thinks people in those groups want to hear. The idea that all cops are bad or that policing needs to be shut down. There was a lot of diversity within different communities about whether that was a good idea. A lot of the police force in Washington, DC and Philadelphia and New York and Chicago, Los Angeles, there's a lot of people of color in those police forces, and they've got families and they've got neighbors, and they've got people who think that they're doing good work in the community.

Brooke Gladstone: Race seems to be the point where you argue his version of a comfortable coalescence at National Public Radio broke down or wokeness.

Alicia Montgomery: There is a version of what wokeness is when conservative critics talk about it, that marginalized people storm the barricades at a news outlet and dictate that this story happens and this story gets killed, and we're going to use this language, and not use that language. It's not what I saw.

Brooke Gladstone: During the period that Uri was talking about, there was an exodus of on-air women of color to other places. Could have been a coincidence, I don't know.

Alicia Montgomery: [laughs] It wasn't just women. The network also lost Sam Sanders, who rose from, I think, an internship to being the host of It's Been a Minute. Maybe John Lansing changed everything after George Floyd's death, but in the time that I was at NPR, there were always these spasms where some terrible thing would happen around race. We would have a moment that would last somewhere between three and six months of higher level of attention to issues of diversity in reporting and staffing, and then it would just all fade away.

Brooke Gladstone: When it faded away, what was reasserted?

Alicia Montgomery: The comfortable space, comfortable for the leadership anyway, where problems of race were all about a small minority of really bad white people somewhere in the country that wasn't close to Washington DC doing a few terrible things to a few marginalized people and that's all we needed to cover.

Brooke Gladstone: NPR's core editorial problem is, and frankly has long been, you said, an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice.

Alicia Montgomery: Donald Trump made MS-13 a talking point and his anti-immigration rhetoric. He was always conflating this idea of immigrants and specifically undocumented immigrants with a rise in violent crime, and MS-13 was the poster child for that. I remember a lot of resistance to actually diving into that. MS-13 was killing people in the neighboring county to Washington DC, taking advantage of Central American immigrant communities, and really terrorizing those places. It blew my mind that we didn't follow up.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me another example.

Alicia Montgomery: If you think about why were the white voters so angry about whatever was happening in the world, one of the things that led to a lot of them supporting Donald Trump in defiance of what the conventional wisdom was, especially in elite media, this assumption that immigration doesn't threaten the livelihoods of most Americans. Immigrants are doing jobs that most Americans don't want. Immigrants may not be competing with NPR listeners for jobs, but that's a legitimate question worth asking.

Brooke Gladstone: There are statistics that suggest that it does suppress wages.

Alicia Montgomery: There are, and I felt at the time that there's a way to have that conversation without giving in to a bunch of anti-Latino, anti-immigrant rhetoric. Just ask the question, see if there is something happening there that might be undergirding some of this anti-immigrant feeling that's not just about racism.

Brooke Gladstone: You agree with Berliner when he says an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR?

Alicia Montgomery: Did it ever? [laughter] I guess that's where I disagree with Uri. I don't remember a long stretch of time at NPR where you could really accurately say that the editorial spirit was to be open-minded. It was to be smart, but it wasn't necessarily open to being challenged.

Brooke Gladstone: You guys were both there for-

Alicia Montgomery: At the same time.

Brooke Gladstone: -roughly the same length, right?

Alicia Montgomery: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: I've often felt that the need for diversity in representation in journalism is long overdue. I'd also like to see more diversity in areas of class and region and religion. I also though see a kind of orthodoxy and a chill rising from the side that has been silenced for too long. Backlash comes then the lash again, forces of reaction and overreaction. It doesn't mean death to journalism by any means, but I think it's worth acknowledging

Alicia Montgomery: I have a lot of problems with that argument because a lot of the lash and backlash and talk about wokeness taking over is something that is happening in social media and the consequences for the people who are lashed at now, what people call cancellation, is that people whose criticisms of them wouldn't have been heard and examined before are now getting a microphone

Brooke Gladstone: Again, I'm saying that all of this is long overdue. I'm not claiming a kind of equivalency either socially or morally or any other way. Just as in the Me Too Movement, I had a lot of boohoo on my tiny violin. Very rich people got canceled for a few minutes or even for longer.

Alicia Montgomery: When a woman said something or a person of color or another marginalized person said something that made life hard for their bosses, he just got fired. Nobody called it cancellation. They just called it life and tough breaks and too bad. A lot of people are going to call what happened to Uri cancellation

Brooke Gladstone: In this particular case, he didn't like what they called him and he quit, so he canceled himself.

Alicia Montgomery: He did. He broke the rules of the place where he worked and there were consequences that he didn't like, and so he left. That's not a tragedy that society needs to spend a lot of time trying to remedy.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you write this article now?

Alicia Montgomery: I was prepared to forever hold my peace because I love NPR and because I know on some level, any kind of criticism of this organization makes it harder for the good people in the organization to do their work, but I wasn't going to sit silently by while this false narrative, demeaning the good work of hundreds of thoughtful, dedicated, and yes, I'm going to use the word patriotic public radio journalists got trashed.

Brooke Gladstone: You ended by contesting Berliner's premise that NPR doesn't reflect America. You argue that it does.

Alicia Montgomery: It does. This was part of why I left. You can fall in love with the story about who you are and your role in the world that you were blameless, for me anyway, this is the part that's personal, blameless in whatever went wrong, and entirely responsible for what went right. Rather than listen to the criticism of people who are looking to you, people who are looking up to you, you just put up a wall, say, "I was always right. I'm on the right side of history and everybody needs to shut up." That is something that I saw at NPR and that's something that I've seen in our country, and that's something that I am fighting within myself.

Brooke Gladstone: Alicia, thank you very much.

Alicia Montgomery: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Alicia Montgomery is the vice president of Audio at Slate, and she's the author of the recent article, The Real Story Behind NPR's Current Problems.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callendar, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

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How Not to Cover the Trump Trials. Plus, the Latest Push To Defund NPR

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Ann Heppermann is a Brooklyn-based, independent radio/multimedia documentary producer and educator.  A Peabody Award-winning producer, she also has received awards from the Associated Press, Edward R. Murrow, and Third Coast International Audio Festival. From 2010-11, she was a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism fellow, reporting on perinatal depression.  In 2011, she was named a United States Artists (USA) Fellow with Kara Oehler. She is also a faculty member teaching radio writing and radio drama at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour: a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten.

The act of recalling in our minds something that happened in the past is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process--it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. Then, Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Investigating a strange world.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour: a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.transcript
LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif. I have now worked here so long that I sometimes forget about entire episodes. And it feels especially ironic that I forgot about this one, "Memory and Forgetting" from 2007. On relistening, it was so good that I'm kind of shocked that I did forget it. The reason it came up recently is that one of our producers is working on a story about something extraordinary and surprising she found out about her own brain and memory. I want to say more, but I can't. The episode will come out soon. It's super fascinating. I cannot wait to share it with you. Anyway, as she was reporting, she dug up this episode, which we're gonna play for you now. It is as classic Radiolab as it gets. It has cow brains, Oliver Sacks, a 1967 Chevy Nova, everything you could possibly want in a podcast episode, obviously. Okay, so listen to this, dig it, and when the new episode comes out, don't forget that you remembered it here first.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today, our program is about memory.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

JAD: Hey, we're the radio people.

SALES CLERK: Yes. Please, you want to see the furniture?

ROBERT: I think most people think about memory kind of like ...

ROBERT: So we're interested in this filing cabinet.

ROBERT: ... a file cabinet in your brain.

ROBERT: I'm looking for a fairly large capacity.

SALES CLERK: This is traditional style.

ROBERT: Something happens in your life.

ROBERT: This is real wood.

SALES CLERK: Yeah, this is real wooden filing.

ROBERT: You file it away.

ROBERT: Oh, this is pretty good.

ROBERT: And then later when you want to remember something, you flip back through the files, and there's the one.

SALES CLERK: This one?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ROBERT: You pick it up. "Oh, yes. I recall." And there it is, that's the memory.

ROBERT: Can you lock it?

SALES CLERK: Yes. We have the key.

ROBERT: Sure, sometimes you forget where you filed it.

ROBERT: Let me see if I can get ...

ROBERT: But it's there.

ROBERT: Oh, I can't ...

ROBERT: Somewhere. However, when we asked scientists about this analogy, they pretty much all said ...

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: The filing cabinet analogy is just completely wrong.

SCIENTIST: Period.

JAD: Well, maybe that's because your metaphor is a little outdated, frankly.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I think of memory as more like a—more like a hard drive.

JAD: Here we are, about to go into B&H.

JAD: That you might find at a tech store.

JAD: So much gear! Can you show me your hard drives?

SALES CLERK: Sure.

JAD: Like your brain is basically a biological disc drive.

SALES CLERK: This little one is 320 gigabytes.

JAD: How big is big these days for a hard drive?

JAD: And everything you do ...

SALES CLERK: Up to two terabytes.

JAD: ... everything you see ...

JAD: Could I put all the images I've ever seen in my life, could it go onto this hard drive?

SALES CLERK: Um ...

JAD: ... somehow all that experience gets stored in your head in some kind of neural code.

SALES CLERK: Digital information is stored in zeros and ones.

JAD: Then later when you wanna go back to it, you just find the right file, call it right up and there it is.

SALES CLERK: It's up on your computer screen.

JAD: Your memory. Just as you left it.

SALES CLERK: The way you put it in, the way you take it out, it's all the same.

JAD: Never changes.

SALES CLERK: Never changes. Zeros and ones.

JAD: But again, if you ask scientists about this analogy, they'll tell you ...

SCIENTIST: No.

SCIENTIST: Wrong.

SCIENTIST: Memory isn't like that. Memory is not an inert stack of zeros and ones.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, robotic voice: Malfunction. System is shutting down.]

ROBERT: Well, if neither of those metaphors are an apt description of memory, then what—how should we think about memory?

JAD: Well, maybe memory is more creative than that.

ROBERT: Creative?

SCIENTIST: Yes.

SCIENTIST: Yeah.

SCIENTIST: On a literal level it's an act of creation.

SCIENTIST: Yeah, exactly.

SCIENTIST: We're reconstructing those memories.

SCIENTIST: Construction.

JAD: Maybe it's more like painting or sculpture.

SCIENTIST: Everyone's constantly their own artist.

SCIENTIST: We take bits and pieces of experience.

SCIENTIST: Some things get sharpened, other things leveled.

SCIENTIST: And infused with imagination and ...

SCIENTIST: Out of that construct ...

SCIENTIST: Construct. Construct.

SCIENTIST: ... what feels like a recollection ...

SCIENTIST: It's a beautiful process.

SCIENTIST: It's—it's unbelievable.

JAD: Let's begin as simply as we can. What is a memory? Like, where do you find a memory? Where do you go to find it? There's a scientist we met, Joe LeDoux who works at NYU, who started looking when he was very young, in the most obvious place.

JOE LEDOUX: As a child I worked in my father's meat market, and the way the cows were slaughtered in those primitive days was with a .22 rifle.

JAD: They'd shoot them in the head?

JOE LEDOUX: They'd shoot them in the head, yeah. And my job was to clean out the—clean the brains.

JAD: This makes a convenient beginning to this story because perhaps ...

JOE LEDOUX: The texture of the brain is very fun to play with.

JAD: ... while the young LeDoux had his fingers in the cow's brain ...

JOE LEDOUX: You stick your fingers in there and have the sense that I was reaching into the cow's soul.

JAD: ... maybe he was also thinking, "Where in that mess are the cow's memories?"

JOE LEDOUX: It had these rough membranes over it and just stripped it.

JAD: "Can I touch a memory? Can I pinch it between my fingers?"

JOE LEDOUX: One bullet.

JAD: One bullet.

JOE LEDOUX: One tiny little bullet. And my job was to go in and find it and remove it, because if you were eating brains, you didn't want to chomp down on lead.

JAD: In any case, LeDoux developed a thing for brains. And many years later in college, he'd get another chance.

JOE LEDOUX: I was taking courses in psychology.

JAD: A professor of his asked him to come into this lab ...

JOE LEDOUX: Studying the brain mechanisms.

JAD: ... and work on rat brains. And no bullets involved. This time he really would be searching for memories.

JOE LEDOUX: And I got hooked on it.

JAD: You with me?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: All right. So it was the '60s, right? LeDoux was in school. And it was an interesting time for the field he was about to enter. Scientists had just discovered this drug. They found that if you give this particular drug to ...

JOE LEDOUX: I think it was probably done in goldfish first.

JAD: ... yeah, give it to a goldfish. Squirt a little in the tank.

JOE LEDOUX: Into the water.

JAD: Suddenly ...

JOE LEDOUX: The goldfish ...

JAD: ... can't make a memory.

JOE LEDOUX: After a goldfish has learned something ...

JAD: ... they'll swim around, have all kinds of experiences, but later remember nothing.

JOE LEDOUX: They won't form a long term memory for it.

ROBERT: What does a goldfish learn then? I mean ...

JAD: Uh, I actually have no idea. But apparently they do learn stuff, except when they have this drug in their system, in which case they'll learn stuff and forget it immediately. And the implications of this were huge.

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, yeah.

JAD: According to science writer Jonah Lehrer ...

JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely.

JAD: Because now for the first time, scientists could say that a memory, well it's a real thing.

JONAH LEHRER: This physical thing. It's not simply an idea, it's a physical trace left in your brain.

JAD: A trace made largely of ...

JONAH LEHRER: Proteins. You know, proteins are the building blocks of memory.

ROBERT: Well, how do they know that?

JAD: Because of that drug.

JOE LEDOUX: It's called anisomycin.

JAD: The amnesia-inducing one.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What it does is target proteins.

JONAH LEHRER: It prevents new proteins from being formed.

JAD: It busts them up.

ROBERT: And that means what, exactly?

JAD: Well, no proteins, no memory. Well, let me give you an example of how all this works. And this is something LeDoux ended up doing after college.

JAD: The methodology. Can we start there?

JOE LEDOUX: Sure.

JAD: He would take a rat, put it in a box, and then play it a tone.

JOE LEDOUX: Just a five kilohertz pure tone.

JAD: Sort of like, boooop!

JOE LEDOUX: Something like that, yeah.

JAD: Now imagine you're this rat.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Your entire world is in this box. And suddenly a sound as if from God. And then the sound stops, and you're like, "What? What is—ow! Hey, he shocked me on my feet!"

JOE LEDOUX: The shock is, you know, a mild electric shock.

DAVID BUSH: I mean, it's less than getting static electricity.

JAD: This guy who works in LeDoux's lab ...

DAVID BUSH: I'm David Bush.

JAD: He actually demonstrated it for me.

DAVID BUSH: All right, so what ...

JAD: Or on me.

DAVID BUSH: What I'm gonna do is have you put your fingers on there, okay?

JAD: He made me touch the bottom of the cage.

JAD: Right. I'm putting my fingers on the bottom of the cage. I'm a little scared. Yeah. Yeah. Ah!

JAD: It's really not that bad. It's like static electricity, really.

JAD: Ow!

ROBERT: If you're you, or if you're a rat it might be a whole 'nother thing.

JAD: Even for a rat.

ROBERT: But what's the point? Why are we doing this?

JAD: Oh, well they're trying to make the rat form a memory.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: And here's how we now know that that works. So from the rat's perspective, the moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock, inside its head a bunch of neurons start to build a connection.

DAVID BUSH: Whenever you create a memory, it's an act of cellular constructions.

JOE LEDOUX: What we're talking about now is associative memories. Associations between two things in the outside world.

JAD: Between boooop! And bzzzt!

JOE LEDOUX: Those two events have to somehow be connected.

DAVID BUSH: It's as if you're building a bridge over a chasm and that connection ...

JAD: Well, that's basically a memory. A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells. It's gonna know that after this: boooop! Comes this: bzzzt! And so instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze.

DAVID BUSH: The back is hunched, and they're just frozen solid.

JAD: Bracing itself for what is about to happen.

DAVID BUSH: Exactly.

JAD: When LeDoux and his team see the rat freeze like that, they know it is in the midst of remembering.

JOE LEDOUX: They'll do that the rest of their life.

JAD: However ...

DAVID BUSH: If you inject a chemical into the brain that prevents these neurons from building this new architecture that a new memory requires, the rat will never form a memory because its neurons are prevented from forming all these new proteins, which a new memory requires.

JAD: And so whatever the rat was doing during the injection, it'll never remember.

DAVID BUSH: Play it the noise and then shock it, and then play it the noise and then shock it, and then play it the noise and then shock it, and the rat never learns.

JAD: It'd be like boooop! "Hey, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow! Booop! "Ooh, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!" Booop! "Ooh, cool. What's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!"

DAVID BUSH: Perpetually surprised by the shock.

JAD: So the basic rule is that if you get to the memory while it's being made, you can bust it up by inserting this drug.

ROBERT: So the memory never is actually formed.

JAD: Right, never committed to memory.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: But if the memory gets made and the protein bridge is there in your mind, it's built and built for all time.

ROBERT: So if you have the memory in there then you cannot erase it then.

JAD: Yeah, so it's about timing. If you get there first you can erase it, but if you get there after, no.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: And that's what everyone thought. Until 2000. One day, LeDoux was in his office and a guy walks in the door.

JOE LEDOUX: The person who walked through the door that day is Karim Nader.

KARIM NADER: Karim Nader. I would often go in Joe's lab and just tell him ideas and stuff.

JAD: This is Karim.

JOE LEDOUX: He was a postdoc in the lab.

KARIM NADER: I went into Joe's office and said "Joe, like, what do you think would happen if ..."

JAD: "What do you think would happen if, instead of giving the drug while the rat was making the memory, what if way after the fact, we gave it the drug while it was remembering the memory?"

KARIM NADER: You remembered something.

JAD: "Could we mess with the memory then?"

KARIM NADER: I thought, wouldn't it be cool if that happened?

JOE LEDOUX: I said, "Well, that'll never work.

KARIM NADER: He said, "That's never gonna work."

JOE LEDOUX: "Don't waste our money."

ROBERT: It was just a very naïve question.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, because the memory's already there.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: You can't erase a memory that is already there. I mean have you ever seen that movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: No? Well, that's essentially what it was proposing

KARIM NADER: Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories.]

KARIM NADER: In this movie, Jim Carrey has all of these memories he wants to get rid of.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: I'm here to erase Clementine Kruczynski.]

KARIM NADER: And so he goes to this company that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Good morning, Lacuna.]

KARIM NADER: ... performs this service.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: How are you today, Mr. Baird?]

KARIM NADER: And so they have him in this room.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Comfortable? Please try to focus on the memories.]

KARIM NADER: And he's retrieving all these memories.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: This is the day we met. Hi there. Hi. I'm Clementine.]

KARIM NADER: And each time he retrieves one ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: I'm Joel.]

KARIM NADER: ... they zap his brain.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Got it. I love you. Got it.]

JAD: Could we zap a memory that was already there? Could we go in and erase old memories? That was Karim's question.

KARIM NADER: I was just looking to do something conceptually challenging, just kind of fun, right? And just out there.

JAD: Joe thought he was crazy.

JOE LEDOUX: I didn't think the experiment was gonna work. And he said, "Okay." And so he went away and he did the experiment without telling me. And ...

JAD: A couple months later, Nader walks back in the door.

JOE LEDOUX: ... walked in the door and he said ...

KARIM NADER: "Joe, like this is really crazy, but it actually worked."

JOE LEDOUX: "It worked."

JAD: Karim said he took a rat, played it the tone.

KARIM NADER: Gave them a tone and then give them a mild shock to the feet.

JAD: So it could form a memory. Tested it just to make sure, and sure enough when it heard the tone, it froze.

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: Which means it had the memory. Good. Then he waited. A long time.

KARIM NADER: 60 days.

JAD: 60 days?

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: Two months later, he played the rat the tone, and as it's frozen thinking "Oh no! Oh no, I know what's about to happen," right at that moment, while it was remembering, he gave it the drug.

KARIM NADER: And then the next day we just put them back into the box, and we just gave them some tones to see how afraid they were of the tones. And the ones that got the drug, they behaved as if the tone doesn't mean that they're gonna get zapped anymore.

JAD: All of a sudden the rat had been sent back to square one. Now it was like—boooop! "Ooh, what's that?" Bzzzt! "Ow!" Memory was gone.

KARIM NADER: There was no memory.

ROBERT: No memory at all?

JAD: No.

JONAH LEHRER: That was the shocking result of the LeDoux-Nader experiment.

JAD: That's Jonah again.

JONAH LEHRER: The rat is already terrified of the shock, but if you inject the chemical as the rat is remembering what the sound means, the memory disappears. It's as if the memory had never been there in the first place.

ROBERT: Really?

KARIM NADER: Yeah. Joe looked at me, and he just looked very surprised.

JAD: What exactly did you say to him?

JOE LEDOUX: You know, "Holy bleep. Take a look at this because it's so bleep crazy."

KARIM NADER: It took me a while to really kind of believe that it was all true.

JAD: Plus, Joe and others had a concern: maybe this drug isn't erasing a memory, maybe it's just giving the rat brain damage and erasing everything.

JOE LEDOUX: So we designed an experiment that would test the specificity of these effects.

JAD: He wondered, could he pinpoint and extract one single memory of many? So in his latest study, what he did was he taught the rat to be scared of two tones, not just one.

KARIM NADER: So one's like a voop! And the other one is a pip. Like, repeating sounds of a pure tone.

JAD: And he teaches the rat to be afraid of both of these tones, each one results in a—bzzzt! Only this time, when he plays the tones 45 days later, he picks just one of them. Maybe for instance this one [tone] to pair with the drug.

KARIM NADER: And then the next day you test both.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

KARIM NADER: And only the one that was paired with the drug is affected.

JAD: So you erased tone one but not tone two?

KARIM NADER: Exactly.

JAD: So do re mi—you can just erase re?

KARIM NADER: That would be the idea.

JAD: Wow. That really is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!

KARIM NADER: Well, that movie came out about two years after we published the study that really got all this going.

JAD: Do you think they stole from you?

KARIM NADER: I don't think they stole, but maybe they were thinking along these lines, and they were ...

JAD: They must've read it and been like, "Oh, my God!"

KARIM NADER: There was a write up in the Science Times, and they proposed this would be a treatment for PTSD.

JOE LEDOUX: Post traumatic stress disorder. People who go to war or have been through trauma.

JAD: People haunted by really bad memories.

JOE LEDOUX: They just can't escape the thoughts and memories that they keep reliving.

JAD: How would that work in a therapy situation though?

KARIM NADER: Suppose you have a holocaust victim who's lived for 50 years with these memories and, you know, you would say, "Well, let's talk about what went on in the camp, and the day you saw Mary in the line to go to the chambers."

JOE LEDOUX: You say close your eyes and just imagine.

KARIM NADER: Relive it.

JAD: And right as you're talking about it you swallow a pill?

JOE LEDOUX: Yeah.

KARIM NADER: More or less.

JOE LEDOUX: And so in fact, we've done that.

ROBERT: They've done that?

JAD: They have. Karim Nader now works at McGill University in Montreal, and he has teamed up with a clinical psychologist to try this on people. And it seems that when you give this drug as a person is remembering or reliving a traumatic event, the memory is eroded somewhat. The next time they think about it, it's not quite as painful.

KARIM NADER: One woman, she had been raped as a child by the doctor, and then when she told her mother, her mother said she was making up stories.

JAD: Wow.

KARIM NADER: Apparently she never spoke to anyone about this. And she used to get undressed in the dark in front of her husband.

JAD: Wow.

KARIM NADER: And so she came into the clinic.

JAD: He says she took the drug while thinking about the trauma.

KARIM NADER: And then a week later ...

JAD: She told the story again. And this time it wasn't nearly as hard.

KARIM NADER: She improved dramatically to the point where she was telling the story on TV.

JAD: On TV? Wow! So she went from telling no one about this—including herself—to being so open that she could tell thousands of people?

KARIM NADER: Yeah. She just felt that the emotional part was no longer overwhelming her.

JOE LEDOUX: Some ethicists say that it's wrong to mess with memory but, you know, that's what therapy is too. It's a process of changing your evaluation of situations, learning new things, storing new things.

KARIM NADER: At one point she said, you know, we've given her back herself.

ROBERT: Hmm. I—I know that she feels better, but there's something slightly creepy about this.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: That she feels better because something is now missing in her, something that troubled her. But she's been—in a way, a part of her has been deleted. I mean, look, I think of myself really, I'm Robert Krulwich and I'm a certain age, but really what I am is I'm a string of memories.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: I mean, that is as close to a way of describing the real me as I can find.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I own those memories, and they define me. But you're saying you can come to me when I'm already formed, when I'm already there, you can give me a shot and you can fundamentally change me.

JAD: There's an assumption in what you're saying which is actually kind of wrong. There really isn't anything like a "real" memory. I mean, think about it: if you can erase a memory while it's being created—that's how we started—and now we learn you can erase a memory while it's being remembered using the same drug?

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: What that really means is that every time you are remembering something, you're actually recreating it. That's the only reason the drug works. And so if you're recreating it each time, then each time you're remembering something it's a brand new memory.

ROBERT: Well, no. But I've always kind of assumed that underneath all this remembering, there's some kind of special absolutely original memory locked in a vault somewhere.

JAD: No. No. That is the crazy implication of this experiment.

JONAH LEHRER: That the act of remembering on a literal level, it's an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.

JAD: And not only is it an act of creation, as Jonah says, Karim would say it's an act of imagination.

KARIM NADER: Every time you remember something you're changing the memory a little bit. We're always changing the memory slightly.

JONAH LEHRER: You think you're remembering something that took place 30 years ago. Actually, what you're remembering is that memory reinterpreted in the light of today, in the light of now.

ROBERT: So does that mean that there's no such thing as a memory for all time that hides in a secret vault somewhere? That all you've got is the most recent recollection of the experience?

JONAH LEHRER: Yes.

ROBERT: Well then, how do I know that any memory is verifiably true?

JONAH LEHRER: You don't. You don't. And one of the ironies of this research is that the more you remember something, in a sense the less accurate it becomes.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JONAH LEHRER: The more it becomes about you and the less it becomes about what actually happened.

ROBERT: So let's just do something. Imagine a couple in love and it's their first kiss. He kisses her and she kisses him back. She remembers the kiss of course, and he remembers the kiss of course. As they go through the rest of their romance and the next 36 years together, the kiss will essentially become replaced by two independently re-embroidered and increasingly dishonest kisses?

JONAH LEHRER: Assuming they think about that kiss enough, that's kind of what the theory implies.

ROBERT: But certainly there's gotta be somewhere, between the man and the woman, there's gotta be some true kiss, or is that kiss just gone?

JONAH LEHRER: That true kiss vanished the minute their lips separated.

ROBERT: Huh.

JONAH LEHRER: As soon as reality happens, it begins diverging in all our different brains on a very synaptic level.

ROBERT: Here's where you cue the really sad music.

JONAH LEHRER: They just grow slowly farther and farther apart.

ROBERT: Well, let me do it a different way. Let's suppose that Joan and Bob kiss, and then they part. It's a great kiss.

JONAH LEHRER: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: And then they never think about it again. I mean, it was a great kiss in the moment but they never think about it again.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

ROBERT: 30 years later, Bob is in a railroad station. Joan comes out of a train, their eyes meet, Bob sees Joan, sees her eyes, and remembers suddenly that kiss.

JONAH LEHRER: That memory is more honest than if he'd been thinking about the kiss every day of his life since.

ROBERT: Oh. You know, that's even sadder.

JAD: You know, but it's true. That's what scientists say.

JOE LEDOUX: Absolutely. We had a conference last week, and Yadin Dudai was here, and he proposed that the safest memory, a memory that is uncontaminatable, is one that exists in a patient with amnesia.

YADIN DUDAI: What I meant is that there is a sort of a paradox.

ROBERT: This is Yadin?

JAD: This is Yadin.

YADIN DUDAI: And I'm a professor in Israel.

JAD: Reporter Ann Heppermann tracked him down for us.

YADIN DUDAI: Intuitively you think if you use a memory, you know, you know better because you remember it better, you recall it better, you know the details better, and so on and so on. But this is not what science shows. If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more you're likely to change it. So if you never use your memory, it's secured. So taking it a bit farther, the safest memories are the memories which are in the brain of people who cannot remember.

JAD: Okay. Well, I guess we should go to break now.

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And if you need more information, or you want to hear anything again, one word, Radiolab.org.

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today on Radiolab we're looking at memory and ...

ROBERT: Forgetting.

JAD: Right, forgetting. And we're looking at how these two processes, remembering and forgetting, are intertwined. And writer Andrei Codrescu has an idea about this.

ANDREI CODRESCU: The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer, and had to add 20 megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day. And then it became blindingly obvious: all the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing. Every time somebody adds memory to their machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew. Americans are singularly devoid of memory these days. We don't remember where we came from, who raised us, when our wars used to be, what happened last year or last month or even last week. Schoolchildren remember practically nothing. I take the Greyhound bus every week, and I swear half the people on there don't know where they got on or where they're supposed to get off.

ANDREI CODRESCU: The explanation is simple: computer companies are stealing human memory to stuff their hard drives. Greyhound, I believe, has some kind of contract with IBM to steal the memory of everyone riding the bus. They're probably connected by a cable or something. Every hundred miles—poof!—another 500 megabytes gets sucked out of the passengers' brains. The computer's thirst for memory is bottomless. The more they suck, the more they need. Eventually, we'll all be walking around with a glazed look in our eyes, trying to figure out who it is we live with. And then we will forget our names and addresses and we will just be milling around trying to remember them. The only thing visible about us will be these cables sticking out of our behinds, feeding the scraps of our memory to computer central somewhere in Oblivion, USA.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I think it's time for all these memory-sucking companies to start some kind of system to feed and shelter us when we forget how to eat, walk and sleep.

JAD: Andrei Codrescu with an essay from the book 101 Damnations. Anyways, Robert?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Mon amour.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Andrei, he's trying to make a point about, you know, historical amnesia and America and whatever, but what if we were to take what he's saying literally?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And explore it? Like, we know you can subtract a memory. But what if you could add a memory? Like, actually add a memory in—back into a brain that wasn't there before?

ROBERT: What do you mean by add memory?

JAD: Well, implant a false memory.

ROBERT: Oh.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Count back. Okay. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. My name is Elizabeth Loftus. I'm on the faculty at the University of California-Irvine.

JAD: Depending on who you talk to, Elizabeth Loftus is either a hero or Dr. Evil.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Her research, which goes back more than two decades, has completely changed how we think about memory.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Well, for many ...

JAD: I spoke with her recently about it.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: For many years, I and other psychologists were doing experiments in which we distorted the memories of events that people had actually experienced. So we would take somebody who'd seen a simulated auto accident or a simulated crime, and we would alter the details in their memory report. We'd make people believe that they saw a car go through a stop sign instead of a yield sign. And we found it was not that hard to alter people's memories of these previously experienced events. But more recently, we've gone even further and shown that you can plant entirely false memories into the minds of people, memories for things that didn't happen.

JAD: Like what?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Well, we planted a memory that when you were about five or six years old, you were lost for an extended period of time in a shopping mall.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Mom? Mom?]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: You were frightened, you were crying. And ultimately, you were rescued ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Are you lost?]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: ... by an elderly person.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We'll find your mother.]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: And reunited with the family.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, child: Mommy!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: There you are!]

JAD: And how did you implant that memory?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: We told them that we had talked to their parents, and that we'd learned some things that happened to them when they were a child.

JAD: They'd basically interview the subjects about their past.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: They'd say, "Hey, do you remember that time when you were on the bike and you fell?"

ROBERT: Which they were making up.

JAD: No, no, no. They would start with a true story. They would start with a true story, and then they'd say, "Hey, do you remember that time"—which was true. "Remember that other time?" which was true. "And that other time?" which was true. And somewhere in the middle of all of those true stories?

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: They would slip in the lie.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: The false, made-up story about being lost and frightened and crying. And in that particular study, we found that about a quarter of our subjects fell sway to the suggestion and they adopted it as their own memory.

JAD: A quarter of her subjects, when she checked with them later, now had in their head a memory of being lost and then found in the mall that never happened.

ROBERT: I would have been the number one guy in that quarter. [laughs]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: What is happening in this situation is people take their image of an actual shopping center, actual family members, and they construct an experience ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, mother: There you are!]

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: ... out of these bits and pieces. Investigators in this field have made people believe that they had accidents at family weddings, or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack, or that they nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard. Even with these pretty traumatic ideas, you can make people believe that it happened to them.

ROBERT: Actually, we had this very same experience. When I was in law school, we had this professor. He was a professor of property, and he was doing a lecture. And in the middle of the lecture—and this was not, you know, in any way we were not prepared for this.

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: All of a sudden, a guy zips into the class, the very front of the class, grabs something from the professor and then runs out.

JAD: Just stole it?

ROBERT: Stole it. I don't even remember what it was, but it happened so suddenly.

JAD: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: And Professor Bergen said, "Oh, my God, did any of you see the curly-haired guy? He just went—" and he just sort of threw it in. "The curly-haired guy." But it turned out that what he called the curly-haired guy, when the man came back later to present himself, was not a curly-haired guy at all. He was a straight-haired guy.

JAD: So the whole thing was staged?

ROBERT: Yeah. We were all eyewitnesses, and we all had been coached inadvertently to see something that wasn't true. And we all saw it.

JAD: What I find interesting though, is why that kind of suggestion works so well on memory. And Karim Nader, the guy we heard from earlier, scientist?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: He puts it this way: suppose you witness a crime, and the police ask you some questions later and they say, "Did you see a red Camaro leave the scene?"

KARIM NADER: And you're thinking about it going, "Yeah. No—you know, no red Camaro."

JAD: No, didn't see one. But then maybe the policeman asks you again, "Are you sure you didn't see one?" And suddenly you're like, "Well ..."

KARIM NADER: "I think—well, maybe there was. Maybe I forgot."

JAD: ... you start to question it, because as he puts it, when you are remembering something, the memory is unstable.

KARIM NADER: The memory comes back up to this unstable state.

JAD: It's being rebuilt, recreated. And in that moment, someone, without even meaning to, can slide something new in.

KARIM NADER: And so as the memory gets restored with the image of the red Camaro, the next day when the judge asks you, "Was there somebody with a—was there a red Camaro there?" from your perspective it's a real memory.

JAD: Yeah, but what's so fascinating to me about that phenomenon, assuming it's true ...

KARIM NADER: Yeah?

JAD: ... is that the red Camaro that is now in your head ...

KARIM NADER: Yeah.

JAD: ... is a vivid, technicolor, red Camaro. You can see the light bounce off the hood. It just feels real. You can taste the air.

KARIM NADER: It's amazing how detailed these things can be.

JAD: Which is why when someone contradicts your memory and says, "It didn't happen that way," you're like, "Yeah, it did. Screw you!"

ROBERT: Well, it feels like a robbery.

JAD: Right. Right.

ROBERT: They're taking it from you.

JAD: And in fact, this got Elizabeth Loftus in a lot of trouble. Back in the mid '80s there were a lot of people—I don't know if you remember this—coming forward with repressed memories. Like, "I was abused by a satanistic cult, and performed rituals and whatever." All that stuff.

ROBERT: Oh, right. I remember that.

JAD: We now know that a lot of those memories were imagined. And she says at the time, she was one of the only people to raise her hand and say, "Excuse me." And it got her in a lot of trouble.

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: I've never really seen anything like the wrath of hostility when I began to write articles and publish on this subject. It was pretty amazing, the vitriol.

JAD: What kind of things would they do or say?

ELIZABETH LOFTUS: Oh, they—you know, my life was threatened, armed guards would have to be hired at universities where I was being asked to speak. I had the bomb squad at my house on one occasion. One day, I was taking an airplane flight, and when the woman sitting in the seat next to me learned who I was, she started to swat me with her newspaper. And it was kind of hard to extract myself from her because, you know, airplanes are crowded places. You know, the fact of the matter is memory is malleable, and we might as well face the truth.

ROBERT: Well now, this isn't to say that you could have a repressed memory and it might—it might just be true. I mean, not all repressed memories are false.

JAD: Sure, sure.

ROBERT: And in that regard, this next story you're gonna hear—I don't want to tell you much about it. I'll just tell you it's about a painter.

JAD: And it's produced by Neda Pourang.

NEDA POURANG: The first thing you notice in Joe Andoe's studio is horses. A big milky one straight ahead, sepia ones to the left and right, staring at you like they don't care about you, but they don't mind you either. They're really like dreams of horses.

JOE ANDOE: I never paint horses that are being manipulated with a bridle or anything. They're mostly just hanging out. It comforts me to have paintings of horses around.

NEDA: Over the past 10 years, the horses have multiplied. And Joe doesn't even know why he keeps painting them.

JOE ANDOE: I guess it's kind of like I just kind of tune it in or something, or, like, you're tuning your guitar, you know? Ding, ding, ding, until, you know, two strings resonate, you know, and you know it's in tune.

NEDA: In a Manhattan studio, surrounded by stacks of these animals, you start forgetting you're in Chelsea. Maybe you're in a stable instead. Sometimes even the jessa starts to smell like mulch and hay. When Joe got here in the mid-'80s, no galleries were offering solo or group shows, and like all the other hundreds of artists in New York, he was struggling.

JOE ANDOE: I'd been in New York for about six years, and nothing was happening. And I was beginning to think nothing was gonna happen. And I was—you know, had a kid and I was married. And so I stopped painting for a few months, which is a long time for me. And I missed it, so I started painting again for myself. You know, after the dishes were done and all my domestic chores were fulfilled, I'd sit down at the dining table and paint.

NEDA: And what showed up on these canvases were pastures, lush and open. The kind of pastures you'd see on a postcard from somewhere in Wyoming, or in this case, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Joe grew up.

JOE ANDOE: Well, I can show you some of my paintings. Me and my buddies, we'd park out here and we'd get high in the evening, like this is a summer evening, you know?

NEDA: Joe runs his hand through the air in front of a massive painting leaning against the wall. It's of a field at dusk.

NEDA: Beautiful.

NEDA: It's like he's showing me property.

JOE ANDOE: And we would trip and we would contemplate the universe, you know? Like, what do you think are those stars? What's behind them?

NEDA: It's one of those fields with thick grass that's matted where people might have laid down. There's some trees to lean against, separating the grass and the road.

JOE ANDOE: Our high school sat on Route 66, right on the edge of Tulsa. And, you know, you pull out of school at lunchtime, and you take a left and you could drive right down Route 66 into the heart of Tulsa. And you could take a right and you could go out to the—there's farmland. You know, this was in the early-'70s, and we would of course take a right.

NEDA: So when Joe stopped trying to paint for anyone else, he drifted backwards into his adolescence, all those breezy right turns out of the school parking lot.

JOE ANDOE: And ultimately, this is what people lined up for.

NEDA: Joe had one show, and then another one. Studio visits from private collectors. Then calls from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney—even sitcom art directors. All the while, he kept on painting his deserted landscapes. Then, as he describes it ...

JOE ANDOE: About 10 years ago, horses started showing up in my repertoire, so to speak.

NEDA: The pastures weren't empty anymore. They started to draw mares and foals to themselves. Some in the far distance, some so close that they're out of focus.

JOE ANDOE: And then about a year ago, I was—I started painting girls.

NEDA: Joe's first attempt at the human form. The girls are all on their own canvases. They're undressed, stepping out of a darkened space. Some of them look like they're about to say something.

JOE ANDOE: And I'm just following my gut. I'm painting these pictures, and I don't really know why. You know, and after a few months I was sitting back and I was sort of reflecting. I was looking at all these things, and I noticed that they all looked the same. They all looked like the same girl.

NEDA: Looking over all the paintings in the studio, they clearly are the same girl, but in a dozen different angles. She has the look of a 16 year old in 1972.

JOE ANDOE: Like my first love kind of thing.

NEDA: Her name was Kay.

JOE ANDOE: It was like my first soulmate. The first—you know how the first time you feel like you're not alone?

NEDA: She's beautiful. Oval face, almond eyes that look right into you.

JOE ANDOE: And then I remembered this moment with her and me and the horse in the car.

NEDA: Joe realized he'd been painting a memory—the fragments of one afternoon 30 years earlier, each ingredient emerging slowly.

JOE ANDOE: We were parked in the back seat of my Nova, '67 Nova in this pasture. And we were in the back seat, and a horse looked in the window. This is like this moment where it was like—boom!—you know, this horse is there, she's there. And—and I was in love. I had a beautiful naked girl there with me in the back seat of my car, you know? It just didn't get any better. I was skipping out of school so I wouldn't happen to be in class. You know, I was on easy street. I probably had $5 in my pocket, you know? Enough gas to get home. I had some cigarettes. I don't know.

NEDA: Why did you break up?

JOE ANDOE: [laughs] I think I cheated on her. I think that's why.

NEDA: Joe!

JOE ANDOE: I think that's what happened. I went to the lake and I did something I shouldn't have. Right, you know, in front of somebody she knew. She moved away to Minnesota for some reason. And she called me one day, and we—we went to—went out dancing, and we drank beer and danced. And I took her home to the place she was staying. She was staying with some friends in this old house behind an appliance store. And I dropped her off, and she looked at me like this and says, "Aren't you coming in?" And I says, "No, I have to go see somebody else." I forget her name.

NEDA: You had a new girlfriend?

JOE ANDOE: New girlfriend. And she lit a cigarette, slammed the door and she died in a fire that night. I got a call the next morning.

NEDA: A car door slams, a girl turns and looks over her shoulder at a guy she won't be seducing that night. A fragment of a moment frozen in time.

JOE ANDOE: I mean, the funny thing is she was so spirited, if anybody was gonna come back and haunt me, she would.

NEDA: How old were you?

JOE ANDOE: Probably 21.

NEDA: How old was she?

JOE ANDOE: She was probably 19.

NEDA: That day in the car, with his girl and the horse looking in, Joe thinks the memory of that one afternoon in Tulsa might be some sort of post traumatic pleasure syndrome—an echo that bounced off Jupiter and caught up with him again.

JOE ANDOE: And then again, they're just paintings, too. They're just color. And these are just excuses for me to make another painting.

NEDA: There's something alluring about Joe Andoe's paintings. They draw you in. Maybe that's why people pay big money for them. But the only thing that anyone who wasn't there in the field with Joe, Kay and the horse can do is look from the outside into an impenetrable past that's finished. That memory, that story, is self sustaining and whole, looping endlessly in an alternate universe.

JOE ANDOE: That's the reason I don't title these. I don't put—you know, there's no—there's no ending, there's no beginning. It's just every day I stir it up again.

ROBERT: Joe Andoe has a new memoir. It's called Jubilee City, and it is published by William Morrow.

JAD: We will continue in a moment.

JAD: Ready?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: This is Radiolab, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And on this show, we've been talking about ...

JAD: Memory.

ROBERT: Remembering and forgetting, yeah.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: And this next story is about the most drastic version of this particular back and forth that I can think of. It just can't get any worse than this. This is a story of a man named Clive Wearing. It was told to me by the famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks.

ROBERT: Okay, first of all, who was Clive Wearing when he was well?

OLIVER SACKS: He was a gifted musician and musicologist, who was really a pioneer in Renaissance music, especially the music of Orlandus Lassus.

DEBORAH WEARING: And he had a group called the London Lassus Ensemble.

ROBERT: This is Deborah, Clive's wife.

DEBORAH WEARING: And in every concert, his signature tune was "Musica Dei donum," Music, the gift of God.

ROBERT: Boy, music, the gift of God. That's sort of interesting.

DEBORAH WEARING: Exactly.

ROBERT: And then what happened?

OLIVER SACKS: Then rather suddenly in March of '85, he became ill.

ROBERT: It began, she says, with just a headache.

DEBORAH WEARING: And he often had headaches because he often overworked, so it was nothing out of the ordinary.

ROBERT: But it didn't go away.

DEBORAH WEARING: We called the doctor, and the local doctors pronounced that it was a very bad flu bug.

OLIVER SACKS: The nature of the illness was not clear, nor its gravity.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yes. On the—phew—fifth day of the headache, he was suddenly out of it.

ROBERT: Suddenly, he couldn't remember things.

DEBORAH WEARING: He didn't know my name, didn't know his home address.

OLIVER SACKS: When the diagnosis was made of a herpes encephalitis, the damage had been done.

ROBERT: He was left, says Oliver, with the most severe amnesia ever documented.

OLIVER SACKS: This is a man who, at least when things were very severe, would forget something in the blink of an eyelid.

ROBERT: It's very hard to imagine what this must have been like. His wife Deborah wrote about it though, in a book of her own. And she says, "His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired, but he didn't seem able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. The view before the blink, utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back brought him an entirely new view."

DEBORAH WEARING: Well, every moment is his first waking moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's a long time since I've seen anything. My eyes are open today for the first time.]

DEBORAH WEARING: There is no other moment for Clive except this one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: If I can't remember now what was going on this morning or why I was here. I've never seen anything.]

ROBERT: This is Clive from a documentary filmed a year after he got sick.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: There is no memory for me at all, anything at all. I don't know what the hell is going on.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: What's wrong with you?]

ROBERT: You can hear his wife Deborah trying for the umpteenth time to explain to him what happened.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen anyone at all.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: This is one of the things that's wrong with you.]

ROBERT: All he can feel is that he's not there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen anything.]

ROBERT: That he's been nowhere.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've been blind the whole time, I've been deaf the whole time. No sense of touch.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: You've been conscious, but the brain hasn't been able to ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Not as far as I'm concerned. 'Conscious' actually means that the person who's involved is actually connected with it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This hasn't happened.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: You're not being able to store—well, everything that you experience has been lost. It's fading away.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's not registering.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: It's not registering. That's right. It's not making any impact. It's not leaving a trace or an imprint on the brain. So it happens and then it fades.]

OLIVER SACKS: Proust has a wonderful description of waking up from deep sleep in a hotel or a strange room, and perhaps feeling confused or not knowing where you are or what's around you, or not even knowing who you are. He says that memory comes like a rope let down from heaven to draw one out of the abyss of unbeing. No such rope is available for Clive.

ROBERT: But the staff at the hospital tried to help.

DEBORAH WEARING: We put a diary by his bed, and we initially wrote in it, "You are in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. It is—" et cetera, et cetera. And then we encouraged Clive to write things down.

OLIVER SACKS: So he starts to keep a journal. He is extremely intent on trying to document his state. He is very, very precise.

DEBORAH WEARING: He would look at his watch to see what time was this momentous event occuring of first consciousness. And so he would write down, "10:06. Awake first time." And then have the same sensation and put "10:07. Awake first time. Truly awake first time. Ignore the last entry. Now I'm awake. This is the first real awakeness." And so the diaries are line by line a succession of astonished awakenings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: "People's interest in the diary are rubbish." What does that mean?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I have no idea.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Did you write that?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I have no consciousness of it at all, no. You're showing me now for the first time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But it's—is it your handwriting?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Yes it is, but I know nothing about it at all.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: So how do you think it got there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I did it. I presume the doctors didn't know.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But you must be ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: No, I haven't. I haven't seen the book at all until now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: No, all I'm saying is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: No that's mean. That means I haven't seen it. I have no knowledge of it at all. That's all. There's no knowledge of that book. It's entirely new to me.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: But you've put—who would put that ...?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I don't know. But no, no—for heaven's sake. I haven't seen the bloody thing.]

ROBERT: It seems about as horrible as anything I could imagine.

OLIVER SACKS: Yes. Clive gets a sense of deep horror many many times a day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Same as death. No difference between day and night, no thoughts at all.]

OLIVER SACKS: No one quite knows what to do with someone with amnesia.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I've never seen any human being since I've been ill. I don't remember sitting down on this chair for example.]

OLIVER SACKS: They're not mad, they're not retarded.

ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: It's precisely like death.]

ROBERT: Clive has now suffered with this total amnesia for more than 20 years.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Can you imagine having one night 20 years long with no dream? That's what it's been like. Just like death. In that sense, it's been totally painless.]

ROBERT: And yet somehow, some things have sustained. The love he has for his wife Deborah remained part of him. But even though he doesn't remember, for example, his children's names, he doesn't remember anything about his immediate past or even his relatively distant past, when Deborah walks into the hospital room ...

ROBERT: ... and he sees her, what's happening?

OLIVER SACKS: He gasps ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Darling!]

OLIVER SACKS: ... with relief and excitement. And they hug, and he kisses her with enormous passion. He is suddenly being rescued from the abyss. There's suddenly something and someone familiar.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Have I not seen you at all until now? Haven't seen anyone at all until now.]

ROBERT: She goes home and the phone is ringing. She's just visited him.

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah. And she may find—she might find 20 calls on the message machine.

ROBERT: From a man who doesn't know she's been there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: Hi darling, Clive here. It's 10 to 7. I don't know anybody in this place. I know nothing about this case at all. I want to speak to you please. Can you come and see me please as soon as you possibly can? I don't care about anybody else in the world but you. Please, please come. Love you.]

ROBERT: 14 minutes later ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is Clive here. I don't want to speak to anybody else. I only want to speak to you, darling. Can you come and see me please? I haven't seen you yet and I want to. Please come, darling. Bye bye.]

ROBERT: 11 minutes later ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is Clive here. I have no idea what's been going on. Is there any way you can get to me tonight? Please do come. I want to see you, please. Please come. Please come, darling. It's Clive here. I don't care about anyone else. This is Clive here, in case you don't recognize my voice.]

OLIVER SACKS: Now he does not remember her in every way. He may fail to recognize her if she just passes. He cannot describe her. He may forget her name, but he does not forget her embrace, her warmth, her love, her kisses, her caring for him.

ROBERT: So the question is: what happened here that he could forget everything it seems, but not her? Well, when I asked Oliver, he referred to an experiment, a particular experiment.

OLIVER SACKS: Well, this was a famous—or infamous—experiment done by Claparède, who was a French neurologist in the beginning—and this was done at the beginning of the 20th century.

STEVEN JOHNSON: And there was this famous patient who basically had a version of the—of the memory problem that was in the film Memento.

ROBERT: That's science writer Steven Johnson.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Basically, she couldn't remember anything longer than kind of five or ten minutes. It would just disappear. And every day she would go see her doctor, and he would greet her and she would say hello and introduce herself, and he would say, "Well, we see each other every day," but she wouldn't remember. And then one day—this is kind of a funny story because it's not exactly what you want your doctor doing, one day what he did was, he concealed—as he was shaking her hand, he concealed a little thumbtack in his palm, and reached and shook her hand and pricked her hand. And she, you know, recoiled and said, "Well, you're a terrible doctor!" And then the next day ...

ROBERT: When she came back again and didn't know who he was ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: ... didn't recognize him at all as usual, and said hello and introduced herself. And then he reached out to shake her hand and she paused. And she had this instinctive kind of feeling like there was some kind of threat here. If she had no memory, if she couldn't remember who this guy was, how could she somehow remember this—this threat, the threat posed by the pinprick in the palm?

ROBERT: Well, this is Oliver's notion.

OLIVER SACKS: And I think memories of pain and joy, I think, are sort of primordial.

ROBERT: Deep down in the oldest parts of our brains, Oliver thinks, there may be a place for the memories that matter the most.

OLIVER SACKS: And I like the idea of a sort of subcortical safe vault.

ROBERT: For Clive, protected in the vault, out of reach from his amnesia, was love for his wife and one thing more.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah, I'd taken him off the ward to get some peace because he was hypersensitive to noise. And the most peaceful place happened to be the chapel. And we picked up an old hymn book, and for want of anything better to do, and because Clive talked jumble most of the time at that stage, I began to sing.

ROBERT: And all of a sudden, like it was the most natural thing in the world ...

DEBORAH WEARING: He joined in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [singing]]

DEBORAH WEARING: He could sing!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [singing]]

DEBORAH WEARING: I was amazed that he could still read music and sing.

ROBERT: Was it a tentative sort of stumbling thing, or ...?

DEBORAH WEARING: No, no. It was just like falling off a log.

ROBERT: Full voice, strong, everything.

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah. And I was so thrilled!

ROBERT: Did you want to sing another?

DEBORAH WEARING: Oh, you bet!

ROBERT: And another?

DEBORAH WEARING: Yeah, absolutely.

ROBERT: And if he could do that, she wondered, well what else could he do?

DEBORAH WEARING: We even brought his choir in ...

ROBERT: The one he used to conduct in London.

DEBORAH WEARING: ... to the hospital chapel. I had a hunch that if we stood Clive in front of them with a piece of music, he would be able to conduct. And it happened just as I'd hoped. His singers were flabbergasted. There was their old conductor bringing them in completely and utterly himself.

ROBERT: And almost the instant it was over, it was over. He had no memory of what he'd just done. In fact, later on she showed him a tape of that very performance.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: What would you say if I told you you conducted the Lassus Ensemble this week?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: [laughs] That's hilarious!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: I thought you'd say that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: That's absolutely hysterical.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Deborah Wearing: Do you want me to prove it to you? [singing]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: This is the strangest thing I have ever seen.]

ROBERT: On the screen right in front of him, there he is on the pedestal, baton in hand, and he's conducting.

OLIVER SACKS: He is fully in the music, fully himself. So music in a way becomes this Proustian rope from heaven, which will recall him to himself.

ROBERT: And no one really knows why.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Clive Wearing: I remember that now. [laughs]]

ROBERT: What music does that makes this possible. Not just in Clive but in many others. Maybe it's something about music itself, that it's so richly organized, that every time you're in a song, you can feel what has been and what's about to be. Maybe Clive was just carried along in the architecture of music.

DEBORAH WEARING: But when the music stops, he falls out of time. Music gives him a piece of time in which to exist.

ROBERT: Out of time, out of memory, out of himself. There's two things left: there's love and there's the joy of music. Everything else is gone, but for some reason, those stay.

ROBERT: Thanks to Deborah Wearing, she's written a book about Clive called Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia. Thanks also once again to Oliver Sacks, who's included a piece about Clive in his new book on music and memory called Musicophilia. And thanks to Uden Associates, producers of the 1986 Jonathan Miller documentary, Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness.

JAD: That's our show for today. And never fear, if you didn't absorb everything he just said because you can always go to our website, Radiolab.org. We will give you links there to any of the books that you just mentioned. I think ...

ROBERT: You can also subscribe to the podcast, right?

JAD: Yes. Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: Or go to iTunes.

JAD: Oh, one more thing.

ROBERT: Hmm?

JAD: You can send us an email, too.

ROBERT: Please.

JAD: Radiolab(@)wnyc.org. That's the email address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this was Radiolab.

[LISTENER: Hey, I'm Liz Landau. I'm calling you from Washington, DC. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Luis Viera and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

-30-

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New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.

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On today's show:

Susan Page, USA Today Washington bureau chief and the author of several books, including THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters (Simon & Schuster, 2024), talks about her new biography of Barbara Walters, plus the latest national political news.

Stephen Nessen, WNYC and Gothamist transportation reporter, brings updates on the latest transit news, including a launch date for congestion pricing, the end of free bus routes and more.

Matt Katz, WNYC/Gothamist reporter covering public safety and host of the new podcast "Inconceivable Truth," went on a quest to learn the truth of his paternity after surprising DNA test results. Along the way, he uncovered a web of shady artificial insemination practices in 1970s New York City that produced countless children with unknown biological fathers. He shares his findings and listeners share similar stories.

Transcripts are posted to each segment as they become available.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.image-main.alt-text
Counter protester Caren Ayden, of Pikesville, Md., carries an Israeli flag as students wave Palestinian flags during a demonstration against the Israel-Hamas war at George Washington University in Was

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.image-main.caption
Counter protester Caren Ayden, of Pikesville, Md., carries an Israeli flag as students wave Palestinian flags during a demonstration against the Israel-Hamas war at George Washington University in Was

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Brian Lehrer leads the conversation about what matters most now in local and national politics, our own communities and our lives.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].title
Politics, and the Life of a Broadcast Trailblazer

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].tease
Susan Page rounds up national political news and discusses her new biography of Barbara Walters, "The Rulebreaker."

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].title
Transit Latest: Congestion Pricing, Fare Evasion, the End of Free Bus Routes and More

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].tease
The MTA has set a June 30th start date for congestion pricing. And there's money in the state budget for increased city bus service.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].title
The 'Inconceivable Truth' Hidden in New York City

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.segments[].tease
Matt Katz discusses his new podcast series, "Inconceivable Truth", which documents his quest to learn the truth of his paternity.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.tease
Monday morning politics; Barbara Walters: Trailblazer; Transit news on congestion pricing, buses; DNA test results reveal surprising truths about 1970s fertility practices in NYC

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.title
Monday Morning Politics; Barbara Walters: Trailblazer; Transit News on Congestion Pricing, Buses; DNA Test Results Reveal Surprising Truths

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.twitter-headline
Monday Morning Politics; Barbara Walters: Trailblazer; Transit News on Congestion Pricing, Buses; DNA Test Results Reveal Surprising Truths

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].bio
He has written many pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe, and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Remnick began his reporting career as a staff writer at the Washington Post in 1982, where he covered stories for the Metro, Sports, and Style sections. In 1988, he started a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.” In 1994, “Lenin’s Tomb” received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

Since Remnick became editor, The New Yorker has garnered a hundred and forty-nine nominations for National Magazine Awards and has won thirty-seven. In 2001 and again in 2005, the magazine won an unprecedented five National Magazine Awards; in 2014, the magazine won four awards. In addition, in 2000 Remnick was named Advertising Age’s Editor of the Year.

Remnick has written six books: “Lenin’s Tomb,” “Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia,” “King of the World” (a biography of Muhammad Ali), “The Bridge” (a biography of Barack Obama), and “The Devil Problem” and “Reporting,” which are collections of some of his pieces from the magazine. Remnick has edited many anthologies of New Yorker pieces, including “Life Stories,” “Wonderful Town,” “The New Gilded Age,” “Fierce Pajamas,” “Secret Ingredients,” and “Disquiet, Please!”

Remnick has contributed to The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Esquire, andThe New Republic. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Princeton, where he received his B.A., in 1981, and at Columbia. He lives in New York with his wife, Esther Fein; they have three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].lede
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992...

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].shows[].about.body
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a weekly program presented by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, and produced by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Each episode features a diverse mix of interviews, profiles, storytelling, and an occasional burst of humor inspired by the magazine, and shaped by its writers, artists, and editors. This isn’t a radio version of a magazine, but something all its own, reflecting the rich possibilities of audio storytelling and conversation.

Theme music for the show was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tUnE-YArDs.

You can hear The New Yorker Radio Hour on

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WNDY-FM | Crawfordsville, IN

Iowa
KWIT-FM | Sioux City, IA
KLNI-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Decorah, IA
KOJI-FM | Okoboji/Sioux City, IA

Kansas
KMUW-FM | Wichita, KS
KANQ-HF — Kansas Public Radio | Lawrence, KS

Kentucky
WEKU-FM | Richmond/Lexington, KY
WEKP-FM | Pineville, KY
WEKF-FM | Corbin, KY
WEKH-FM | Hazard, KY

Maine
WMEA-FM — Maine Public Radio | Portland, ME
WMEP-FM — Maine Public Radio | Camden, ME
WMEW-FM — Maine Public Radio | Waterville, ME
WMEH-FM — Maine Public Radio | Bangor, ME
WMED-FM — Maine Public Radio | Calais, ME
WMEF-FM — Maine Public Radio | Ft Kent, ME
WMEM-FM — Maine Public Radio | Presque Isle, ME

Maryland
WYPR-FM | Baltimore, MD
WESM-FM — Delmarva Public Media | Princess Anne, MD
WYPF-FM | Frederick, MD
WYPO-FM | Ocean Cty/Salisbury, MD

Massachusetts
WBUR-FM | Boston, MA
WCAI-FM | Woods Hole, MA
WGBH-FM | Boston, MA
WNNZ-AM — New England Public Radio--News Network WNNZ | Westfield/Springfield, MA
WAMQ-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Great Barrington, MA
WBUH-FM | Brewster, MA
WBUA-FM | Tisbury/Falmouth, MA
WZAI-FM | Brewster, MA
WNAN-FM | Nantucket, MA
WNNU-FM — New England Public Radio | Great Barrington, MA
WNNI-FM — New England Public Radio | Adams, MA
WAMH-FM — New England Public Radio | Amherst, MA
WNNZ-FM — New England Public Radio | Deerfield, MA
WAIC-FM — New England Public Radio | Springfield, MA

Michigan
WUOM-FM — Michigan Radio | Ann Arbor, MI
WGGL-FM — Minnesota Public Radio--WGGL | Houghton, MI
WVGR-FM — Michigan Radio | Grand Rapids, MI
WFUM-FM — Michigan Radio | Flint, MI

Minnesota
KNOW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio--News | Minneapolis/St Paul, MN
KNCM-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Appleton, MN
KNBJ-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Bemidji, MN
KBPN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Brainerd, MN
KNSR-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Collegeville, MN
WINH-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Hinckley, MN
KRFI-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Redwood Falls, MN
KNGA-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | St Peter, MN
KNSW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Worthington/Marshal, MN
KNWF-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Fergus Falls, MN
KCCD-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Moorhead, MN
KRXW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Roseau, MN
KNTN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Thief River Falls, MN
KXLC-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | La Crescent, MN
WSCN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Cloquet, MN
WIRC-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Ely, MN
WIRN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Buhl, MN
WLSN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Grand Marais, MN
KGRP-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Grand Rapids, MN
WIRN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Buhl, MN
KITF-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | International Falls, MN
KNSE-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Austin, MN
KZSE-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Rochester, MN

Missouri
KWMU-FM — St. Louis Public Radio | St Louis, MO
KMST-FM — St. Louis Public Radio | Rolla, MO

Nevada
KUNR-FM | Reno/Elko, NV
KNCC-FM | Elko, NV

New Hampshire
WEVO-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Concord, NH
WEVN-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Keene, NH
WEVS-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Nashua, NH
WEVF-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Colebrook, NH
WEVC-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Gorham/Berlin, NH
WEVJ-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Jackson, NH
WEVH-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Hanover, NH
WEVQ-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Littleton, NH

New Jersey
WNJT-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Trenton, NJ
WNJM-FM | Manahawkin, NJ
WNJN-FM | Atlantic City, NJ
WNJS-FM | Berlin, NJ
WNJB-FM | Bridgeton, NJ
WNJZ-FM | Cape May Crt House, NJ
WNJY-FM | Netcong, NJ
WNJP-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Sussex, NJ
WNJO-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Toms River, NJ

New Mexico
KANW-HF | Albuquerque, NM
KANW-FM | Albuquerque, NM
KIDS-FM | Grants, NM
KANR-FM | Santa Rosa, NM
KUUT-FM — Four Corners Public Radio | Farmington, NM
KUSW-FM — Four Corners Public Radio || Flora Vista, NM

New York
WAMC-HF | Albany, NY
WNYC-AM | New York, NY
WNYC-FM | New York, NY
WSUF-FM — *WSHU CT & NY News, Information, and Talk | Noyack/Greenport, NY
WAMC-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Albany, NY
WRVO-FM | Oswego/Syracuse, NY
WSKG-FM | Binghamton, NY
WSLU-FM — North Country Public Radio | Canton, NY
WEOS-FM — Finger Lakes Public Radio | Geneva/Ithaca, NY
WXXI-AM | Rochester, NY
WANR-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Brewster, NY
WAMK-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Kingston, NY
WOSR-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Middletown, NY
WWES-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Mount Kisco, NY
WAMC-AM — Northeast Public Radio | Albany, NY
WCEL-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Plattsburgh, NY
WANC-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Ticonderoga, NY
WANZ-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Stamford, NY
WRUN-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Remsen, NY
WCAN-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Canajoharie, NY
WRLI-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Southampton, NY
WRVD-FM | Syracuse, NY
WMVQ-FM | Fenner, NY
WRVN-FM | Utica, NY
WRVH-FM | Clayton, NY
WRVJ-FM | <Watertown/Oswego>, NY
WSQG-FM | Ithaca, NY
WSQC-FM | Oneonta/Cooperstown, NY
WSQE-FM | Corning/Elmira, NY
WSQA-FM | Hornell, NY
WXLE-FM — North Country Public Radio | Indian Lake, NY
WXLG-FM — North Country Public Radio | North Creek, NY
WXLB-FM — North Country Public Radio | Boonville, NY
WXLH-FM — North Country Public Radio | Blue Mountain Lake, NY
WXLL-FM — North Country Public Radio | Lake Placid, NY
WSLO-FM — North Country Public Radio | Malone, NY
WXLU-FM — North Country Public Radio | Peru, NY
WSLL-FM — North Country Public Radio | Saranac Lake, NY
WXLS-FM — North Country Public Radio | Tupper Lake, NY
WSLZ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Cape Vincent, NY
WSLG-FM — North Country Public Radio | Gouverneur, NY
WXLD-FM — North Country Public Radio | Lowville, NY
WSLJ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Watertown, NY

North Carolina
WFAE-FM | Charlotte, NC
WUNC-FM | Chapel Hill, NC
WCQS-FM  — Blue Ridge Public Radio | Asheville, NC
WTEB-FM — Public Radio East - News and Ideas | New Bern, NC
WHQR-FM | Wilmington, NC
WFQS-FM  — Blue Ridge Public Radio | Franklin, NC
WMQS-FM — Blue Ridge Public Radio  | Murphy, NC
WFHE-FM | Hickory/Charlotte, NC
WFSS-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Fayetteville, NC
WRQM-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Rocky Mount/Wilson, NC
WBUX-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Buxton, NC
WUND-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Manteo, NC
WUNW-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Welcome, NC

North Dakota
KDSU-FM — Prairie Public--Mixed News and Classical & Roots, Rock, and Jazz | Fargo/Moorhead, ND
KCND-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Bismarck, ND
KPPD-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Devils Lake, ND
KUND-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Grd Forks/Devils Lk, ND
KPRJ-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Jamestown/Bismarck, ND
KDPR-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Dickinson, ND
KMPR-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Minot, ND
KPPW-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Williston, ND

Ohio
WKSU-HF — Ideastream Public Media | Kent, OH
WCPN-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Cleveland, OH
WKSU-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Kent, OH
WOSU-FM | Columbus, OH
WOUB-FM | Athens, OH
WVXU-FM — Cincinnati Public Radio | Cincinnati, OH
WYSU-FM | Youngstown, OH
WKRJ-FM — Ideastream Public Media | New Philadelphia, OH
WNRK-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Norwalk, OH
WKSV-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Thompson, OH
WKRW-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Wooster, OH
WOUC-FM | Cambridge, OH
WOUH-FM | Chillicothe, OH
WOUL-FM | Ironton, OH
WOUZ-FM | Zanesville, OH
WMUB-FM | Oxford/Dayton, OH

Oklahoma
KOSU-FM | Stillwater/Oklahoma City, OK
KOSN-FM | Ketchum, OK
KOSR-FM | Stillwater, OK

Oregon
KCPB-FM — Coast Community Radio--KCPB | Warrenton/Astoria, OR
KOPB-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Portland, OR
KSJK-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Talent, OR
KOAC-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Astoria, OR
KTMK-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Tillamook, OR
KOBK-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Baker City, OR
KOBN-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Burns, OR
KOGL-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Gleneden Beach, OR
KHRV-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Hood River, OR
KOJD-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | John Day, OR
KTVR-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | La Grande, OR
KOTD-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | The Dalles, OR
KETP-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Enterprise, OR
KOAC-AM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Corvallis, OR
KOPB-AM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Eugene/Springfield, OR
KRBM-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Pendleton, OR
KOAP-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Lakeview, OR
KOAB-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Bend, OR
KRVM-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Eugene/Springfield, OR
KTBR-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Roseburg, OR
KAGI-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Grants Pass, OR

Pennsylvania
WHYY-FM | Philadelphia, PA
WESA-FM | Pittsburgh, PA
WITF-FM | Harrisburg, PA
WPSU-FM — Penn State Public Broadcasting | State College/University Park, PA
WYPM-FM | Chambersburg, PA
WPSX-FM — Public Media for Central Pennsylvania | Kane, PA

South Carolina
WRJA-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Sumter/Columbia, SC
WNSC-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Rock Hill, SC
WJWJ-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Beaufort/Hiltn Head, SC
WHMC-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Conway/Myrtle Beach, SC
WLJK-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Aiken, SC

South Dakota
KAUR-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Sioux Falls, DS

Tennessee
WPLN-FM | Nashville, TN
WUTC-FM | Chattanooga, TN
WHRS-FM | Cookeville, TN
WTML-FM | Tullahoma, TN

Texas
KUHF-FM — Houston Public Media | Houston, TX
KUT-FM | Austin, TX
KETR-FM | Commerce, TX

Utah
KCPW-FM | Salt Lake City, UT
KUER-FM | Salt Lake City, UT
KUSU-FM — Utah Public Radio | Logan, UT
KUQU-FM | Enoch, UT
KUEU-FM | Logan, UT
KUXU-FM | Monroe, UT
KUOU-FM | Roosevelt, UT
KUHU-FM | Monticello, UT
KUSR-FM — Utah Public Radio | Logan, UT
KUST-FM — Utah Public Radio | Moab, UT
KCEU-FM — Utah Public Radio | Price, UT
KUSL-FM — Utah Public Radio | Richfield, UT
KUSK-FM — Utah Public Radio | Vernal, UT

Vermont
WVPS-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Burlington, VT
WXLQ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Bristol, VT
WVBA-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Brattleboro, VT
WBTN-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Bennington, VT
WRVT-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Rutland, VT
WVPA-FM — Vermont Public Radio  | St Johnsbury, VT
WVPR-FM — Vermont Public Radio  | Windsor, VT

Virginia
WVTF-FM — Radio IQ | Roanoke, VA
WQIQ-FM — Radio IQ | Spotsylvania, VA
WRIQ-FM — Radio IQ | Charles City, VA
WLUR-FM — Radio IQ | Lexington, VA
WIQR-FM — Radio IQ | Lexington, VA
WEHC-FM — Radio IQ | Emory, VA
WVTR-FM — Radio IQ | Marion, VA
WISE-FM — Radio IQ | Wise, VA
WVTW-FM — Radio IQ | Charlottesville, VA
WVTU-FM — Radio IQ | Charlottesville, VA

Washington
KUOW-FM | Seattle, WA
KWSU-AM — Northwest Public Radio--NPR News | Pullman/Moscow, WA
KQOW-FM | Bellingham, WA
KUOW-AM | Tumwater, WA
KSWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Chehalis, WA
KLWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Moses Lake/Ephrata, WA
KMWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Mt Vernon, WA
KQWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Omak/Okanogan, WA
KWWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Walla Walla, WA
KYVT-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Yakima, WA

Wisconsin
WUWM-FM | Milwaukee, WI

France
WRP-HD —World Radio Paris | Paris, France

Guam
KPRG-FM | Mangilao, Guam

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].shows[].description
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a weekly program presented by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, and produced by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Each episode features a diverse mix of interviews, profiles, storytelling, and an occasional burst of humor inspired by the magazine, and shaped by its writers, artists, and editors. This isn’t a radio version of a magazine, but something all its own, reflecting the rich possibilities of audio storytelling and conversation.

Theme music for the show was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tUnE-YArDs.

You can hear The New Yorker Radio Hour on

Alabama
WTSU-FM — Troy University Public Radio | Montgomery-Troy, AL
WLRH-HF | Huntsville, AL
WRWA-FM — Troy Public Radio | Dothan, AL

Alaska
KMXT-HF | Kodiak, AK
KBBI-AM — Alaska Public Radio | Homer, AK
KCHU-AM — Alaska Public Radio | Valdez, AK
KDLL-FM — Alaska Public Radio | Kenai, AK
KTOO-FM — Alaska Public Radio | Juneau, AK
KFSK-FM  — Alaska Public Radio| Petersburg, AK
KODK-FM | Kodiak, AK
KSTK-FM — Alaska Public Radio | Wrangell, AK
KDLG-FM | Dillingham, AK
KXGA-FM — KCHU Public Radio | Glennallen, AK
KXKM-FM — KCHU Public Radio | McCarthy, Ak

Arizona
KNAU-FM — ​​Arizona Public Radio--Classical Music & News | Flagstaff, AZ
KPUB-FM — Arizona Public Radio--NPR News and Talk | Flagstaff, AZ
KNAA-FM — Arizona Public Radio | Show Low, AZ
KNAG-FM — Arizona Public Radio--NPR News and Talk | Grand Canyon, AZ
KNAD-FM — Arizona Public Radio--NPR News and Talk | Page, AZ
KNAQ-FM — Arizona Public Radio--NPR News and Talk | Prescott, AZ

California
KCRW-HF | Santa Monica, CA
KCLU-FM | Thousand Oaks/Santa Barbara, CA
KCRW-FM | Santa Monica, CA
KPCC-FM — Southern California Public Radio | Pasadena, CA
KVCR-FM | San Bernardino/Riverside, CA
KALW-FM | San Francisco, CA
KQED-FM — Northern California Public Broadcasting | San Francisco, CA
KAZU-FM | Pacific Grove/Montrey, CA
KCLM-FM | Santa Maria/San Luis Obispo , CA
KCLU-AM | Santa Barbara, CA
KDRW-FM | Santa Barbara, CA
KCRY-FM | Mojave/Antelope Valley, CA
KCRU-FM | Oxnard/Ventura, CA
KCRI-FM | Indio/Palm Springs, CA
KJAI-FM | Ojai/Sn Luis Obispo, CA
KUOR-FM | Redlands/San Bernardino, CA
KVLA-FM | Coachella, CA
KQEI-FM | North Highlands, CA
KPMO-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Mendocino, CA
KJPR-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Shasta Lake City, CA
KMJC-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Mt Shasta, CA
KSYC-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Yreka, CA
KNHM-FM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Bayside, CA

Colorado
KDNK-FM | Glenwood Springs, CO
KSJD-FM | Cortez, CO
KSUT-FM — Four Corners Public Radio--Southern Ute Tribal Radio | Ignacio/Durango, CO
KUTE-FM — Four Corners Public Radio | Ignacio, CO
KICO-FM | Rico, CO
KZET-FM | Cortez, CO
KPGS-FM — Four Corners Public Radio | Pagosa Springs, CO
KDNG-FM — Four Corners Public Radio | Durango,CO

Connecticut
WSHU-FM — *WSHU CT & NY News, Talk, and Classical | Fairfield, CT
WNPR-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Meriden/Hartford, CT
WSHU-AM — *WSHU CT & NY News, Talk, and Classical | Westport, CT
WYBC-AM — *WSHU CT News, Information, and Talk | New Haven, CT
WVOF-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Fairfield, CT
WEDW-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Stamford/Greenwich, CT
WPKT-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Norwich/Hartford, CT
WECS-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Willimantic, CT

Washington, D.C.
WAMU | Washington, D.C.

Florida
WQCS-HF | Fort Pierce, FL
WLRN-FM | Miami/Ft Lauderdale, FL
WQCS-FM | Fort Pierce, FL
WJCT-FM | Jacksonville, FL
WLRN-HF | Miami/Fort Lauderdale, FL
WUFT-FM | Gainesville, FL
WKWM-FM | Marathon/Key West, FL
WJUF-FM | Inverness, FL

Georgia
WRAS-FM — Georgia Public Broadcasting - Atlanta | Atlanta, GA
WJSP-FM — Georgia Public Broadcasting | Warm Springs/Columbus, GA
WUWG-FM | Carrollton, GA
WNGU-FM | Dahlonega, GA
WPPR-FM | Demorest, GA
WGPB-FM | Rome, GA
WWIO-FM | Brunswick/Savannah, GA
WXVS-FM | Waycross/Valdosta, GA
WNGH-FM | Chatsworth, GA
WSVH-FM | Savannah/Brunswick, GA
WWET-FM | Valdosta, GA
WACG-FM | Augusta, GA
WMUM-FM | Cochran/Macon, GA
WJWV-FM | Fort Gaines/Dothan, GA
WABR-FM | Tifton, GA
WUNV-FM | Albany, GA
WTJB-FM — Troy Public Radio | Columbus, GA

Hawaii
KHPR-FM — Hawai’i Public Radio--HPR 1, News & Information, Jazz | Honolulu, HI
KANO-FM — Hawai'i Public Radio | Hilo, HI
KHPH-FM — Hawai'i Public Radio | Kailua, HI
KJHF-FM —  Hawai'i Public Radio | Kualapuu, HI
KIPL-FM — Hawai'i Public Radio | Lihue, HI
KKUA-FM — Hawai'i Public Radio | Wailuku, HI

Illinois
WBEZ-FM — Chicago Public Media | Chicago, IL
WNIJ-FM — Northern Public Radio | Dekalb/Rockford, IL
WQUB-FM — St Louis Public Radio | Quincy/Hannibal, IL
WBEK-FM | Kankakee, IL
WBEQ-FM | Morris, IL
WNIW-FM — Northern Public Radio | La Salle, IL
WNIQ-FM — Northern Public Radio | Sterling, IL
WNIE-FM  — Northern Public Radio | Freeport, IL

Indiana
WBST-FM — Indiana Public Radio | Muncie, IN
WFYI-FM | Indianapolis, IN
WVPE-FM | Elkhart/South Bend, IN
WBSB-FM — Indiana Public Radio | Anderson, IN
WBSH-FM — Indiana Public Radio | Hgrstwn/New Castle, IN
WBSW-FM — Indiana Public Radio | Marion, IN
WZJR-FM — Indiana Public Radio | Portland, IN
WISU-FM | Terre Haute, IN
WNDY-FM | Crawfordsville, IN

Iowa
KWIT-FM | Sioux City, IA
KLNI-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Decorah, IA
KOJI-FM | Okoboji/Sioux City, IA

Kansas
KMUW-FM | Wichita, KS
KANQ-HF — Kansas Public Radio | Lawrence, KS

Kentucky
WEKU-FM | Richmond/Lexington, KY
WEKP-FM | Pineville, KY
WEKF-FM | Corbin, KY
WEKH-FM | Hazard, KY

Maine
WMEA-FM — Maine Public Radio | Portland, ME
WMEP-FM — Maine Public Radio | Camden, ME
WMEW-FM — Maine Public Radio | Waterville, ME
WMEH-FM — Maine Public Radio | Bangor, ME
WMED-FM — Maine Public Radio | Calais, ME
WMEF-FM — Maine Public Radio | Ft Kent, ME
WMEM-FM — Maine Public Radio | Presque Isle, ME

Maryland
WYPR-FM | Baltimore, MD
WESM-FM — Delmarva Public Media | Princess Anne, MD
WYPF-FM | Frederick, MD
WYPO-FM | Ocean Cty/Salisbury, MD

Massachusetts
WBUR-FM | Boston, MA
WCAI-FM | Woods Hole, MA
WGBH-FM | Boston, MA
WNNZ-AM — New England Public Radio--News Network WNNZ | Westfield/Springfield, MA
WAMQ-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Great Barrington, MA
WBUH-FM | Brewster, MA
WBUA-FM | Tisbury/Falmouth, MA
WZAI-FM | Brewster, MA
WNAN-FM | Nantucket, MA
WNNU-FM — New England Public Radio | Great Barrington, MA
WNNI-FM — New England Public Radio | Adams, MA
WAMH-FM — New England Public Radio | Amherst, MA
WNNZ-FM — New England Public Radio | Deerfield, MA
WAIC-FM — New England Public Radio | Springfield, MA

Michigan
WUOM-FM — Michigan Radio | Ann Arbor, MI
WGGL-FM — Minnesota Public Radio--WGGL | Houghton, MI
WVGR-FM — Michigan Radio | Grand Rapids, MI
WFUM-FM — Michigan Radio | Flint, MI

Minnesota
KNOW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio--News | Minneapolis/St Paul, MN
KNCM-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Appleton, MN
KNBJ-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Bemidji, MN
KBPN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Brainerd, MN
KNSR-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Collegeville, MN
WINH-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Hinckley, MN
KRFI-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Redwood Falls, MN
KNGA-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | St Peter, MN
KNSW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Worthington/Marshal, MN
KNWF-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Fergus Falls, MN
KCCD-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Moorhead, MN
KRXW-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Roseau, MN
KNTN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Thief River Falls, MN
KXLC-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | La Crescent, MN
WSCN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Cloquet, MN
WIRC-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Ely, MN
WIRN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Buhl, MN
WLSN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Grand Marais, MN
KGRP-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Grand Rapids, MN
WIRN-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Buhl, MN
KITF-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | International Falls, MN
KNSE-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Austin, MN
KZSE-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Rochester, MN

Missouri
KWMU-FM — St. Louis Public Radio | St Louis, MO
KMST-FM — St. Louis Public Radio | Rolla, MO

Nevada
KUNR-FM | Reno/Elko, NV
KNCC-FM | Elko, NV

New Hampshire
WEVO-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Concord, NH
WEVN-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Keene, NH
WEVS-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Nashua, NH
WEVF-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Colebrook, NH
WEVC-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Gorham/Berlin, NH
WEVJ-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Jackson, NH
WEVH-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Hanover, NH
WEVQ-FM — New Hampshire Public Radio | Littleton, NH

New Jersey
WNJT-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Trenton, NJ
WNJM-FM | Manahawkin, NJ
WNJN-FM | Atlantic City, NJ
WNJS-FM | Berlin, NJ
WNJB-FM | Bridgeton, NJ
WNJZ-FM | Cape May Crt House, NJ
WNJY-FM | Netcong, NJ
WNJP-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Sussex, NJ
WNJO-FM — New Jersey Public Radio | Toms River, NJ

New Mexico
KANW-HF | Albuquerque, NM
KANW-FM | Albuquerque, NM
KIDS-FM | Grants, NM
KANR-FM | Santa Rosa, NM
KUUT-FM — Four Corners Public Radio | Farmington, NM
KUSW-FM — Four Corners Public Radio || Flora Vista, NM

New York
WAMC-HF | Albany, NY
WNYC-AM | New York, NY
WNYC-FM | New York, NY
WSUF-FM — *WSHU CT & NY News, Information, and Talk | Noyack/Greenport, NY
WAMC-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Albany, NY
WRVO-FM | Oswego/Syracuse, NY
WSKG-FM | Binghamton, NY
WSLU-FM — North Country Public Radio | Canton, NY
WEOS-FM — Finger Lakes Public Radio | Geneva/Ithaca, NY
WXXI-AM | Rochester, NY
WANR-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Brewster, NY
WAMK-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Kingston, NY
WOSR-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Middletown, NY
WWES-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Mount Kisco, NY
WAMC-AM — Northeast Public Radio | Albany, NY
WCEL-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Plattsburgh, NY
WANC-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Ticonderoga, NY
WANZ-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Stamford, NY
WRUN-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Remsen, NY
WCAN-FM — Northeast Public Radio | Canajoharie, NY
WRLI-FM — Connecticut Public Radio | Southampton, NY
WRVD-FM | Syracuse, NY
WMVQ-FM | Fenner, NY
WRVN-FM | Utica, NY
WRVH-FM | Clayton, NY
WRVJ-FM | <Watertown/Oswego>, NY
WSQG-FM | Ithaca, NY
WSQC-FM | Oneonta/Cooperstown, NY
WSQE-FM | Corning/Elmira, NY
WSQA-FM | Hornell, NY
WXLE-FM — North Country Public Radio | Indian Lake, NY
WXLG-FM — North Country Public Radio | North Creek, NY
WXLB-FM — North Country Public Radio | Boonville, NY
WXLH-FM — North Country Public Radio | Blue Mountain Lake, NY
WXLL-FM — North Country Public Radio | Lake Placid, NY
WSLO-FM — North Country Public Radio | Malone, NY
WXLU-FM — North Country Public Radio | Peru, NY
WSLL-FM — North Country Public Radio | Saranac Lake, NY
WXLS-FM — North Country Public Radio | Tupper Lake, NY
WSLZ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Cape Vincent, NY
WSLG-FM — North Country Public Radio | Gouverneur, NY
WXLD-FM — North Country Public Radio | Lowville, NY
WSLJ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Watertown, NY

North Carolina
WFAE-FM | Charlotte, NC
WUNC-FM | Chapel Hill, NC
WCQS-FM  — Blue Ridge Public Radio | Asheville, NC
WTEB-FM — Public Radio East - News and Ideas | New Bern, NC
WHQR-FM | Wilmington, NC
WFQS-FM  — Blue Ridge Public Radio | Franklin, NC
WMQS-FM — Blue Ridge Public Radio  | Murphy, NC
WFHE-FM | Hickory/Charlotte, NC
WFSS-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Fayetteville, NC
WRQM-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Rocky Mount/Wilson, NC
WBUX-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Buxton, NC
WUND-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Manteo, NC
WUNW-FM — North Carolina Public Radio | Welcome, NC

North Dakota
KDSU-FM — Prairie Public--Mixed News and Classical & Roots, Rock, and Jazz | Fargo/Moorhead, ND
KCND-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Bismarck, ND
KPPD-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Devils Lake, ND
KUND-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Grd Forks/Devils Lk, ND
KPRJ-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Jamestown/Bismarck, ND
KDPR-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Dickinson, ND
KMPR-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Minot, ND
KPPW-FM — Prairie Public--News and Classical | Williston, ND

Ohio
WKSU-HF — Ideastream Public Media | Kent, OH
WCPN-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Cleveland, OH
WKSU-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Kent, OH
WOSU-FM | Columbus, OH
WOUB-FM | Athens, OH
WVXU-FM — Cincinnati Public Radio | Cincinnati, OH
WYSU-FM | Youngstown, OH
WKRJ-FM — Ideastream Public Media | New Philadelphia, OH
WNRK-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Norwalk, OH
WKSV-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Thompson, OH
WKRW-FM — Ideastream Public Media | Wooster, OH
WOUC-FM | Cambridge, OH
WOUH-FM | Chillicothe, OH
WOUL-FM | Ironton, OH
WOUZ-FM | Zanesville, OH
WMUB-FM | Oxford/Dayton, OH

Oklahoma
KOSU-FM | Stillwater/Oklahoma City, OK
KOSN-FM | Ketchum, OK
KOSR-FM | Stillwater, OK

Oregon
KCPB-FM — Coast Community Radio--KCPB | Warrenton/Astoria, OR
KOPB-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Portland, OR
KSJK-AM — Jefferson Public Radio--News & Information | Talent, OR
KOAC-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Astoria, OR
KTMK-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Tillamook, OR
KOBK-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Baker City, OR
KOBN-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Burns, OR
KOGL-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Gleneden Beach, OR
KHRV-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Hood River, OR
KOJD-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | John Day, OR
KTVR-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | La Grande, OR
KOTD-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | The Dalles, OR
KETP-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Enterprise, OR
KOAC-AM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Corvallis, OR
KOPB-AM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Eugene/Springfield, OR
KRBM-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Pendleton, OR
KOAP-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Lakeview, OR
KOAB-FM — Oregon Public Broadcasting | Bend, OR
KRVM-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Eugene/Springfield, OR
KTBR-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Roseburg, OR
KAGI-AM — Jefferson Public Radio | Grants Pass, OR

Pennsylvania
WHYY-FM | Philadelphia, PA
WESA-FM | Pittsburgh, PA
WITF-FM | Harrisburg, PA
WPSU-FM — Penn State Public Broadcasting | State College/University Park, PA
WYPM-FM | Chambersburg, PA
WPSX-FM — Public Media for Central Pennsylvania | Kane, PA

South Carolina
WRJA-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Sumter/Columbia, SC
WNSC-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Rock Hill, SC
WJWJ-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Beaufort/Hiltn Head, SC
WHMC-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Conway/Myrtle Beach, SC
WLJK-FM — South Carolina Public Radio | Aiken, SC

South Dakota
KAUR-FM — Minnesota Public Radio | Sioux Falls, DS

Tennessee
WPLN-FM | Nashville, TN
WUTC-FM | Chattanooga, TN
WHRS-FM | Cookeville, TN
WTML-FM | Tullahoma, TN

Texas
KUHF-FM — Houston Public Media | Houston, TX
KUT-FM | Austin, TX
KETR-FM | Commerce, TX

Utah
KCPW-FM | Salt Lake City, UT
KUER-FM | Salt Lake City, UT
KUSU-FM — Utah Public Radio | Logan, UT
KUQU-FM | Enoch, UT
KUEU-FM | Logan, UT
KUXU-FM | Monroe, UT
KUOU-FM | Roosevelt, UT
KUHU-FM | Monticello, UT
KUSR-FM — Utah Public Radio | Logan, UT
KUST-FM — Utah Public Radio | Moab, UT
KCEU-FM — Utah Public Radio | Price, UT
KUSL-FM — Utah Public Radio | Richfield, UT
KUSK-FM — Utah Public Radio | Vernal, UT

Vermont
WVPS-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Burlington, VT
WXLQ-FM — North Country Public Radio | Bristol, VT
WVBA-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Brattleboro, VT
WBTN-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Bennington, VT
WRVT-FM — Vermont Public Radio | Rutland, VT
WVPA-FM — Vermont Public Radio  | St Johnsbury, VT
WVPR-FM — Vermont Public Radio  | Windsor, VT

Virginia
WVTF-FM — Radio IQ | Roanoke, VA
WQIQ-FM — Radio IQ | Spotsylvania, VA
WRIQ-FM — Radio IQ | Charles City, VA
WLUR-FM — Radio IQ | Lexington, VA
WIQR-FM — Radio IQ | Lexington, VA
WEHC-FM — Radio IQ | Emory, VA
WVTR-FM — Radio IQ | Marion, VA
WISE-FM — Radio IQ | Wise, VA
WVTW-FM — Radio IQ | Charlottesville, VA
WVTU-FM — Radio IQ | Charlottesville, VA

Washington
KUOW-FM | Seattle, WA
KWSU-AM — Northwest Public Radio--NPR News | Pullman/Moscow, WA
KQOW-FM | Bellingham, WA
KUOW-AM | Tumwater, WA
KSWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Chehalis, WA
KLWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Moses Lake/Ephrata, WA
KMWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Mt Vernon, WA
KQWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Omak/Okanogan, WA
KWWS-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Walla Walla, WA
KYVT-FM — Northwest Public Radio | Yakima, WA

Wisconsin
WUWM-FM | Milwaukee, WI

France
WRP-HD —World Radio Paris | Paris, France

Guam
KPRG-FM | Mangilao, Guam

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].shows[].featured.image-main.alt-text
A photographed portrait of filmmaker Werner Herzog, wearing a blue jacket and white button up shirt. 

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].shows[].featured.title
Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.appearances.authors[].shows[].featured.tease
The legendary filmmaker makes the case for his unconventional memoir. Plus, the fallout from the “kill them all” drug policy in the Philippines.

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Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

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A feature film about the making of the Pop-Tart? Even Jerry Seinfeld—who loves them, especially after a bad show—said “There’s no movie here.” But the idea developed into “Unfrosted,” a nutty postwar epic about the invention of the breakfast treat that Seinfeld compares to “The Right Stuff.” (The production did not, he says, have permission from Kellogg’s.) The comic talks with David Remnick about his film-directing début, making a life in comedy, and old age. As he turns seventy, Seinfeld posits that “God is, like, ‘I'm with you up to about thirty-eight. If you want to stay, you can stay. But I’m moving on.’ ”  Plus, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger—who refused to “find” some eleven thousand votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election—explains how he tries to convince dubious Republican voters that elections are fair.

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# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.show-tease
Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

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At seventy, the comedian débuts as a movie director with “Unfrosted,” about the invention of the Pop-Tart. And, Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger on how to convince an election denier.

# data.attributes.bucket-items[].attributes.title
Jerry Seinfeld on Making a Life in Comedy (and Also, Pop-Tarts)

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Jerry Seinfeld on Making a Life in Comedy (and Also, Pop-Tarts)