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Playlist: News Station Picks for August '10

Compiled By: PRX Curators

 Credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39046851@N08/4581150872/">Mutasim Billah</a>
Image by: Mutasim Billah 
Curated Playlist

Here are August picks for news stations from PRX News Format Curator Naomi Starobin.

What Naomi listens for in news programming.

Maybe these slow news days of August have you thinking about something fresh, new and lively. Well, you can’t give each of your listeners a yappy puppy, but how about a new series? Great stuff out there. I had a look around on PRX and it was hard to pick just a few. This list displays a range from series with short interstitial pieces that you can plug in to a news magazine or show, to longer ones that would make great choices for weekend hours that right now just aren’t quite dazzling your audience. Have a listen!

Volunteers and Design

From Smart City Radio | 59:00

This is one in the series from Smart City Radio. All of the pieces are about cities...sometimes specific cities and how people are dealing with particular problems (Detroit, Syracuse), and other segments, like this one, are issue-oriented. These are heady and intellectual, and well-suited for an audience that is concerned or curious about urban life and its future.

It's hosted by Carol Coletta.

Default-piece-image-0 Ten years ago, two undergrads from Yale noticed the fundamental gap between their university and the community surrounds it.  To bridge this divide they formed the volunteer training organization that's now known as LIFT.  We'll speak with Ben Reuler, the executive director of LIFT, about harnessing the energy of students to engage them in the community and help combat poverty.

And...

Good design can do many things, but can it change the world?  My guest Warren Berger has written a book on how design is doing just that.  The book, titled Glimmer,  shows how design in action addressing business, social, and personal challenges, and improving the way we think, work, and live.

Unconventional Archaeology -- Groks Science Show 2010-07-28

From Charles Lee | Part of the Groks Science Radio Show series | 29:42

For that half-hour time slot, go science! Lots of lively interviews in these segments, along with commentaries and a question-of-the-week. This series is produced in Chicago and Tokyo by Dr. Charles Lee and Dr. Frank Ling, who also host the show. They are natural and curious, and lean toward short questions and long answers.

There are pieces on cancer-sniffing dogs, outsmarting your genes, number theory, ant adventures, and lots more, displaying great breadth.

It's geared to listeners who are interested in science...no college level inorganic chem required.

Grokscience_small Archaeology is often portrayed as a romantic adventure to the remote corners of the globe. But, what is the life of an archaeologist really like? On this program, Dr. Donald Ryan discussed unconventional archaeology.  For more information, visit the website: www.groks.net.

Are Freckles Just Cute or Something More?

From Dueling Docs | Part of the Dueling Docs series | 02:02

Dueling Docs is a great idea, well executed. Each two-minute piece answers a simple medical or health question. The host, Dr. Janice Horowitz, lays out a question (Should you get cosmetic surgery? Is dying your hair bad for you? Can stretching make you more prone to injury?), presents opposing views, and concludes with advice.

This would fit in nicely during a weekend or weekday news show. A good two minutes.

Duelingdocs_prx_logo_medium_small While the rest of the media doesn't bother to challenge the latest news flash, Dueling Docs always presents the other side of a medical issue, the side that most everyone ignores.  Janice gets doctors to talk frankly about controversial health matters - then she sorts things out, leaving the listener with a no-nonsense take-home message

Reading Russian Fortunes

From Rachel Louise Snyder | Part of the Global Guru Radio series | 03:03

This series, Global Guru, claims to "ask one simple question -- just one -- about somewhere in the world." Those questions have included: "How do the Hopi bring rain to the desert?" "How and why do Thai people categorize their food?" "Why are there so many barbershops in Tanzania?" This is a great series of three-minute pieces you can squeeze into just about any hour. Rachel Louise Snyder out of Washington, DC is the producer. She says "each week, our mandate is to surprise listeners." Your listeners would say she succeeds.

Guru_logo1_small

The Global Guru is a weekly public radio show that seeks to celebrate global culture, particularly in countries where Americans have either single narrative story lines, like Afghanistan (war), Thailand (sex tourism), Rwanda, (genocide), or perhaps no story lines at all, like East Timor, Moldova, Malta, Lesotho, etc. Engaging and rich in sound, the 3:00 interstitial seeks to enrich our collective understanding of the vastness of human experience. Presenting station is WAMU in Washington, DC and sponsored by American University in DC. Some of our favorite past shows include: How do Cambodians predict the harvest each year? How did Tanzania become the capitol of barbershops? How and why does Thailand categorize food? What is Iceland’s most feared culinary delight? How do you track a Tasmanian devil? What are the hidden messages in Zulu beadwork?

A Way with Words (Series)

Produced by A Way with Words

Public radio listeners, as you know, are curious and intelligent. And they are, as you know, sticklers for language. Satisfy their curiosity with this hour-long series. It's hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, who talk about word usage and origin, and take questions from callers. Often those questions center around a word or expression that the caller recalls from childhood and is curious about. The mood is informal and the hosts joust a bit in a friendly way with their answers.

Most recent piece in this series:

Gilded Age (#1633)

From A Way with Words | Part of the A Way with Words series | 54:00

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A professor who spent 25 years studying arthropods has some thoughts regarding our conversation about the phrase tight as a tick.
Karen in Charlotte, North Carolina, adores her son's cleft chin. Her husband, who also has one, calls it a butt chin. Karen prefers chimple, a combination of chin and dimple. Did she coin it?
If you're going up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, then you're going up to bed.
Is there a term for the need to sneeze when you step out into the sun? There are several, including the photic sneeze reflex, solar sneeze reflex, the Peroutka sneeze, and Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome, also known as ACHOO. Because exposure to sudden, bright light can be sternutatory, or cause sneezing, this phenomenon is also  called pepper on the sun. If you have a hard time sneezing, you have arrested sternuation, from Latin sternuere, meaning "to sneeze." The Old English word for "sneeze" is fneora.
A listener in Park City, Utah, says she and her fellow ski enthusiasts are having heated debates about the word nonplussed. It originally meant "at a loss," from Latin non plus, meaning "no more," suggesting a situation in which one can go no further, as in an argument. Perhaps because of confusion with nonchalant, the expression nonplussed also acquired the meaning of "not bothered." Both meanings now exist side by side, and linguists regard nonplussed as a skunked word. In other words, its use has become so problematic and contentious that it's best to choose a different word altogether.
People are forever saying that we live in one age or another, such as the Space Age or the Internet Age, which inspired Quiz Guy John Chaneski to create a Puzzle for the Ages. Imagine a world where people misunderstand words that end in -age, so someone needs to set them straight. For example, imagine someone going on and on about how we live in an age that's untidy:  "Everywhere you look there are clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, truly we live in this kind of age." A more rational person then explains that the other misunderstood a word that ends in -age. What's the word?
Carl in Sebastopol, California, was reminded of his childhood on New York's Lower East Side while ready Harry Golden's book For 2 Cents Plain (Bookshop|Amazon), the title referring to how customers ordered a plain glass of seltzer. For a little more, he could get the beverage with milk and chocolate syrup stirred into it. Why was that drink called an egg cream if it contained neither eggs nor cream? 
After our conversation about restaurant codes used to ensure efficient service, a chef in Charlotte, North Carolina, shares more examples from his experience in an upscale establishment.
Katie in Everett, Washington, is curious about the expression If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinkers. What is a tinker? She heard this phrase on the television series The Gilded Age, in response to a character who is fretting about a hypothetical situation. The idea is that just because you talk about something, that doesn't mean it will necessarily happen. For centuries, particularly in Ireland and Scotland, tinkers were itinerant metalworkers who traveled from town to town fixing pots and pans and other kitchen utensils. The origin of the word tinker is unclear. It may be an extension of the word tin, or it may have to do with the sound of metal striking metal. If you're tinkering in your garage, then you're working with your hands to figure out a problem. A longer version of this saying begins with If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride / If wishes were watches, I'd wear one by my side and the phrase is often rendered as a rhyming version: If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinker's hands.
Why is an exciting sports event called a barnburner? A real barn on fire can be a spectacular sight, with so many combustible materials inside. Metaphorically, then, a barnburner is a "humdinger" or a "doozy." There's also a political sense of barnburner, referring to certain politicians and activists. A radical wing of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s was known as the Barnburners, a spinoff of a faction called the Locofocos, a reference to a wooden match with a name that likely derives from loco suggesting "speed" and the Italian word for "fire," fuoco.
Acclaimed Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair's sumptuous memoir, How to Say Babylon (Bookshop|Amazon) tells the story of her struggle to break free from a rigid Rastafarian upbringing, and how her discovery of poetry, both memorizing it and writing it, became her way out. 
Published in the mid-19th century, the poem "A Chapter of Ifs" elaborates at length on the phrase If ifs and ands were pots and pans. The gist is that one shouldn't dwell upon things that may not come to pass. 
How are lakes named? Does the proper name of a lake come first, as in Candlewood Lake, or does the word Lake precede the proper name, as in Lake Erie. It's a question that's long puzzled limnologists, the people who study lakes. The authors of an article in the journal Freshwater Biology titled "Lake Name or Name Lake? The etymology of lake nomenclature in the United States" found that most lakes use the format Name Lake, although larger lakes tend to be named with the Lake Name format.
You know that feeling when you walk into a shopping mall and are so overwhelmed by all the distractions you lose track of what you came there for? That's the Gruen Transfer or Gruen Effect, named for Victor Gruen, the architect who designed the first suburban open-air shopping center in the United States. Naming expert Nancy Friedman writes about this and other matters of onomastics and branding on her Substack, Fritinancy. 
A Virginia listener says that often when she'd leave the house, her grandfather would tell her Remember you belong to the land of the blue hen's chicken. What in the world did that mean? The feisty blue hen is the state bird of Delaware.
A slatch is a brief respite or interval when the rain lets up, as in We must wait for a slatch of fair weather. 
This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.