Public Radio Redux

Okay, so you're 16 years old and your buddies decide it would be fun to steal beer from the local Quick-E-Mart. Things get out of hand and your friend pulls out a gun. He shoots and kills the clerk and you find yourself behind bars for life, no parole.

The California Senate is considering a bill to ban life sentences for juveniles, giving them the right to go before a parole board after serving 25 years. But is that fair to victims and their families? Is it ever okay to give a murderer the chance to live a normal life?

Judy Campbell presents a nuanced look at this highly controversial bill by mixing expert opinions with personal stories from families on both sides of the issue.

Producer Sue Mell delights us with her podcast, Unintended Detours. This sound-rich production layers music, archival tape, interviews, and Sue's own thoughts on different themes (this particular episode focuses on time). If someone were to put a microphone to one's brain right before drifting off to sleep, it might sound something like this...

WOXY gathered up a handful of Cincinnati's biggest RaRaRiot fans to eat pizza and watch the band perform a live in-studio set. Quite possibly the best pizza party ever.

Imagine going through life not knowing that there existed someone who looked exactly like you. Your identical twin. Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein, identical twins, met when they were 35 years old. Having both been adopted by loving families as infants, they later learned that they were separated as part of a "nature vs. nurture" scientific experiment, the only one of its kind.

Nikola Tesla lived his life in NYC hotels and stared at pigeons all day. He also invented the radio, AC current, and had a unit of measurement named after him.

Only Studio 360 could make this long forgotten mad scientist hip again. Through a series of unexpected larks like treking up the Empire State Building to see Tesla's waves in action and calling up the hotel where he died, Studio 360's creative editing unravels Tesla's mystery one sound bite at a time.

Producers Ellen Guettler and Catherine Winter spent more than a year with Chris and Amanda, two teenage siblings in search of a permanent home before they age out of foster care. Full of natural sound and candid real-life moments, this is documentary storytelling at its best.

Music is everywhere, but do you really want a canned symphony in your ears at the morgue? Well, maybe if David Lang is the composer. The always exceptional Radio Lab brings us the story of Lang's "Salle Des Departs." It's a creation for cello and vocals and it's impossible to perform live... which might make it the perfect piece for death.

In North Carolina you can't have a baby at home without a doctor, even if there's a certified midwife between your legs. So what do you do if you live on the Outer Banks where there's only one hospital?

Once upon a time, audio editors used razor blades and special scotch tape to make every interview sound erudite and crystal clean. You had one or two chances to make a perfect edit before you did some major damage to your tape. Yes, tape, as in reel-to-reel.

Now we use a little thing called technology. Digital editing software like ProTools makes modern day radio possible, but it can also lead to seriously neurotic behavior. Delete, trim, crossfade, repeat. Delete, trim, crossfade repeat. Over and over again on the same ten seconds of audio can make you feel like a star in your own Donna Summers workout tape for the OCD-inclined.

Most election years, Super Tuesday voters suffer from a bit of an inferiority complex. But this year, nearly all of the twenty-plus states are in the mix and NPR is all over it. Find out what voters in Alabama, Arizona, and California are thinking.