Storyville

Episode #5: What Are We Going to Tell the Kids?

2009-01-04T15:16:00.000-08:00

What's is it worth to share your biology with another person on this earth? This month features a quartet of stories about uncommon families. We'll look at the difference between choosing our families and fertilizing them, between investing for the future and coming to terms with the past. Sara M. tells us what it's like for your own child to be first person you've ever met who's related to you. Jessica Hindman never thought that the simple act of going to college would leave a genetic trail of up to thirty children in her wake. Faced with a dud ovary, Abby Rabinowitz has to find some sperm, any sperm, in the greater New York area. And finally, mother and daughter Lacey and Anne Clarke reveal the forty year old secret that changed the shape of their small family forever.

Arts and Answers: Sun in a Bottle

2009-01-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

As the testing of the atomic bomb began at Los Alamos, there was another superweapon in development—one that relied not on fission, like the A-bomb, but on fusion. The resulting H-bomb was one thousand times more powerful than its atomic counterpart, and the harnessing of fusion power soon began a quixotic pursuit to create the world's first fusion reactor: one that that held the promise of endless renewable energy. An interview with science journalist Charles Seife about his new book Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.

Episode #4: Essay as Mix-Tape

2008-10-08T23:52:00.000-07:00

Allow me a moment of very recent nostalgia.

If only we could return to a simpler time, when stocks were high and our hearts were worn on our sleeves. Back to a time when we sat around the tape deck like it was a warm microwave and wrote out our dreams in teeny-tiny lettering on a super flimsy card-stock.

I want to return for another look at the mix-tape, because I having this inkling that mix-tapes are pretty much the perfect essay—cut and paste fragments of our lives stuffed hastily into a too-short spool of tape. This month we'll travel deep into the heart of Mix-Tape County, first to the Soundfix Lounge in Willamsburg, where there's a regular meeting of mix-kids who share music according to a monthly theme. And then it's back to Storyville, where we'd like to offer you a mix tape of our very own. Side A is Tomahawk Rock, in which Josh Garrett-Davis, boy from the plains, reveals the strange history of Native Americans in country, rock, and pop. And side B is Rough Transitions, in which Brook Wilensky-Lanford, girl from the north, traces her own awkward adolescence through the secret mix-tapes she kept as teen diaries.

A Large, Well-Rounded Head

2008-08-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

This piece was produced for the Radio Ephemera Contest, part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

[Photo: Walt Whitman in the 1840s, around the time he first became interested in phrenology. Not yet famous, he made his living as a journalist, printer, part-time poet, and full-time jaunty hat wearer.]

Dance party at the home for deranged scientists

2008-05-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I've never actually seen this...

Blinded By Science: The Playlist

2008-05-25T18:30:00.001-07:00

Josh was awesome enough to dig up a rare Devo LP just for this very show, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't able to use any of it. So I've put together a playlist of songs used and not used in the show, the usual amalgam of indie rock and 80s techno classics. In my opinion, it pretty much sums up the job we're trying to do here: first get thinky, then get dancy!

An elephant never forgets...REVENGE!

2008-05-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Or so the story goes in Charles Siebert's NYTM article on traumatized elephants in Uganda, mentioned in this month's show. It's the kind of science writing we like a lot around here. Also, while on the subject of cuddly rampages, here's an awesome article on bears. And some freakin' cute video from your most trusted name in bears, CNN.

An Elephant Crackup? [The New York Times Magazine]
Are Humans Causing Elephants to Go Crazy? [NPR]
The Bears Among Us [The New York Times Magazine]

Episode #3: Blinded By Science

2008-05-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

When writer Cris Beam sat down with a neuroscientist to discuss how a particular part of the brain worked, she found that they weren't even speaking a common language. This month's show explores the intersection of writing and science. In particular, the frustrations writers have in getting a narrative out of scientists, and the frustrations scientists have with writers who might oversimplify their findings.Columbia biology professor Stuart Firestein and first-year neurobiology student Carl Schoonover know how hard it is to communicate with writers working on deadline, and they're sure science writing can be better—it has to be. Because science misunderstood can travel around the world like a game of high stakes "Telephone." Like how groundbreaking work in particle physics has devolved into a black hole that will destroy us all.

There's an art to science writing, and it's a delicate one. Science writer Charles Siebert waxes poetic about the "metaphoric bridges" writers can build between scientists' work and readers' imaginations. And Meehan Crist reads from her forthcoming nonfiction book about the nature of consciousness. {ML}

You say "A-da" I say "Ah-da." Let's call the whole thing off.

2008-03-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

I take my book reading rather seriously and I expect my significant other to do the same. But what if he likes Bret Easton Ellis? Or the unbearable cuteness of Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Or...shudder... A Million Little Pieces?! Contributor Marco Roth soothes my frazzled nerves in a recent article on love, literary-style, from the NYT. {ML}

“I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level...sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.”

It's Not You, It's Your Books [The New York Times]

Times are hard in Radioland

2008-03-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

As two of you may have noticed, there was no show for the month of March. Blame it on the lion. Blame it on the lamb. But most of all, blame it on Spring Break, which sent our correspondents to the far corners of their bedrooms to catch up on some much needed time in the fetal position. One of us was busy, most of us were not. Please enjoy this embedded video as a token of our forgiveness, as we scurry away with our tails tucked between our legs, like unambitious dragons. {ML}

Episode #2: One Child Left Behind

2008-03-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

The only child can't seem to get a break. Call us spoiled, call us selfish, call us unwilling to share—we've heard it before. Why "we"? Because we is me, and a number of the students in the writing program here at Columbia. But see, the only child is no longer the odd one out; in New York city over thirty percent of children grow solo. Kids are expensive, women are working longer, having them later, and only children are no longer a statement, but a necessity. This month's show includes a discussion with Daphne Uviller and Deborah Siegel, editors of the anthology One Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Woes of Growing Up Solo, a reading by Daphne from her essay about her imaginary sibling, a story by only child Kristin Vukovic on the sudden illness of her father, as well as the disembodied voices of only children in the writing program who have achieved their biological destinies in perhaps the world's loneliest (and onliest?) profession. {ML}

(Photo: This is Ondine. She lives in New York City with her parents. She enjoys boxing and interior design. Her mother dosen't allow her to go outside alone because of potential serial killers.)

Episode #1: What We Talk About When We Talk About Books We Haven't Read

2008-01-10T20:40:00.000-08:00

Included in this month's show: Marco Roth (n+1), who hasn't read Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read and is damn proud of it. Keith Gessen (n+1), who occasionally forgets his English, but still has high hopes for the youth of today. Hannah Lepow (Columbia first-year), who wrote the book on bullshitting but foolishly didn't get it published. Annie Minoff (Columbia first-year), the voice of reason! Justin Vlasits (Columbia first-year), the man who has heard of 3,000 books, but still hasn't read Catcher in the Rye.

Discussed: books we haven't read, books we wish we had read, and youth...sweet youth, Also, a bonus, off-topic conversation about bathroom reading that WILL get scatological! {ML}

(Photo: Watch out ladies, Pierre Bayard is about to get thinky.)

2008-01-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

Michelle Legro (producer, host) is a second-year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia University.

Kate Daloz (producer) is a third year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford (editor: One Child...) is a second year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia. She is working on a book about failed searches for the Garden of Eden.

Jessica Hindman (editor: One Child...) is a second year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia. She grew up West Virginia.

Kim Tingley (editor: Blinded by Science) is a third year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia University.

Josh Garrett-Davis (contributor) was born in the hills of South Dakota. He is a second year MFA candidate in nonfiction.

Kristin Vukovic (contributor) is a second year MFA candidate in nonfiction at Columbia University, and the editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She is currently working on a memoir about her childhood experience as a figure skater.