You’ve heard of a band playing a house party, but what if the band played the house itself? A new music venue in New Orleans called Music Box Village is investigating the acoustic possibilities of architecture. Rob Walker reported this story and I edited and produced it for The Organist (KCRW).
Category: Audio
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Acts of Kindness Help Family Overcome Travel Ban
For Here & Now (NPR + WBUR) and Kind World, I reported this story about an Iraqi family split up by President Trump’s executive order in January limiting travel from seven countries. Labed Al-Hanfy, the father, had been an interpreter for the U.S. military in Iraq. He wanted to move his family to America to escape militants who were killing collaborators in his neighborhood. But his eldest daughter, Banah, got stuck behind when her visa was delayed. Then, the executive order dropped, and it looked like Banah would be forced to hide in Baghdad indefinitely. Until a group of Mainers heard about the family’s plight and decided to try to help. You can hear the story on iTunes or at WBUR.
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How the Rorschach Got Its Blots
For The Organist (KCRW & McSweeney’s), I produced this story on the surprising backstory of the Rorschach test, that all-purpose metaphor we use for “means whatever you want it to mean.” As Damion Searls, the author of a new biography of Hermann Rorschach explains, that’s not what the test is really about at all. Check out the story in iTunes or at KCRW.
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As You Dislike It
Sometimes you don’t like what everyone expects you to. When you’re a critic, that can look contrarian or intentionally provocative. Longtime Pittsburgh theatre critic Ted Hoover is neither of those things, but he does throw some very entertaining shade on Shakespeare in this feature I produced for Studio 360.
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Way to Go, Einstein
On the 100th anniversary of the publication of the theory of relativity, I produced an episode of Studio 360 (PRI + WNYC) looking at how Einstein upended the way we see space and time, his effect on pop culture, and how one of his most preposterous ideas was ultimately proven right.
For this hour, I came up with the idea, wrote the treatment, booked and prepped the interviews, and wrote the script. For the 18-minute narrative feature that opens the show, I produced the interviews, wrote the script, edited the audio, provided scoring and sound design.
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Is Laughter Good for Your Health?
For this episode of Studio 360, Kurt Andersen and Only Human host Mary Harris go to a session of laughter yoga to find out about the health effects of laughter. We trace the origin of laughter with researcher Robert Provine, and look at laughter’s effect on the brain with neuroscientist Sophie Scott. Chris Gethard talks about the positive effect that comedy has had on his struggles with depression, and doctors talk about when it’s OK to laugh with patients (and when it’s not).
I came up with the concept, wrote the treatment, booked and prepped the interviews, and provided sound design and scoring for this hour.
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Hilary Mantel Reimagines History
The novelist Hilary Mantel has definitively updated our idea of Henry VIII—and our notion of what historical fiction can be. In her stylistically daring and formally inventive novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” she focuses on a less well-known figure who’s always been depicted as kind of a weasel: Thomas Cromwell. He was the son of a blacksmith who maneuvered his way to become Henry’s right-hand man. The novels have been huge bestsellers, and they both won the Man Booker Prize. The books have been adapted into a Masterpiece Theater miniseries on PBS and a two-part, five-and-a-half hour show that ran on Broadway, both called “Wolf Hall.”
I produced this interview with Mantel for Studio 360.
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Claudia Rankine on the Experience of Racism
Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book of poetry Citizen: An American Lyric became the first book ever nominated in two categories by the National Book Critics Circle Awards — poetry and criticism. That reflects the book’s varied literary approaches as well as its timely, acute critique of racism in contemporary American culture.
I produced this interview for Studio 360.
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Basia Bulat’s Pop Transformation
Break-ups pretty much always suck. But when you’re a songwriter, at least you might be able to get some material out of it.
Not so long ago, the Canadian songwriter and singer Basia Bulat suffered her own difficult split. She pulled herself together, wrote a set of acoustic breakup songs, and drove south from Toronto to Louisville, Kentucky. There, she went into the studio with My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James to record her fourth album. The results were very different from what she expected.
I produced this interview + performance chat for Studio 360.
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The Music Collector
When a friend showed Nathan Salsburg some old records he had come across while clearing out an abandoned house, Salsburg at first wasn’t interested. He’s the curator for the Alan Lomax Archive, so he knows most old records are junk. But when he saw a rare 78-rpm Mississippi John Hurt, he knew his friend was onto something. That discovery led to a late-night Dumpster-dive and days spent rescuing fragile 78s from the collection of an enigmatic hoarder. I produced this story for The Organist, the podcast from KCRW and The Believer.
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JFK Sings on the Moon
Recently, the Fort Worth Opera decided to commission a new opera to tell the story of JFK’s final night—a night he spent with the first lady in a Fort Worth hotel room. They turned to two up-and-coming stars of contemporary opera, the composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek. I interviewed Little and Vavrek and produced this feature for Studio 360 explaining how they wrote an opera about one of the most famous political figures of the 20th century.