"Don't you think it's time you started taking life a little more seriously? Your mother and I understand how much you like this music, it sounds like a bunch of noise to us, but you like it and that's fine...I suppose. But you can't spend your whole life doing this. I mean, this isn't a career. This isn't how normal people make a living. Okay, it's fun, and it makes you feel like you're 'part of something.' But normal people just don't dedicate their entire lives to...a...band. Don't you want to settle down? Don't you want to be like everybody else? Okay, you 'get chills' when you listen to this band, but you can't put something like that in the bank. 'Getting chills' doesn't pay the rent, young man."

"Yeah, dad, but paying rent don't give me chills."

Remember, you can get just as high listening to this series without drugs. And if you do it straight, the radio doesn't change shape during the broadcast.

Breaking up is hard to do. Carolina Wheat's Dear John letter to Frequency Modulation would be funnier if it wasn't so depressingly true; if she didn't nail the relationship some of us have had with radio...intimate, forbidden, secret...and how that auditory lover has grown increasingly stupid and unresponsive. Witty and well produced, the piece would add perspective to any discussion of the concentration of corporate owned media and our personal relationship to what we listen to.

There's a theory about objects retaining energy and bits of personality. It may be true, or it may be something we profoundly wish. Either way, a prom dress can be about so much more than one teenage night. A pink gown can pack all the wallop of a Proustian cookie. Clear, uncluttered, honest, this is a simple essay about complex memories. Programable anywhere, certainly in discussions of mothers and daughters and the price of Alzheimer?s disease, but it's also about memory and what we value and what physical things we keep from our pasts. A small, precious cameo of a piece.

The sort of carefully crafted observational narrative you crave from a classic short story...but you'd reject as too perfect if it was presented as fiction. A superb look back in time that goes a long way to explain certain current situations, told with a inventive flare in a genuine voice. Programable anywhere, but would be a remarkable and unexpected punctuation mark to any discussion of American politics.

There's a conspiracy out there that has spent the better part of a century trying to convince us that Shakespeare is really, really hard to understand; that there is no way into the plays without the sophisticated guidance of people who are smarter than we are. This is the work of bacon-fed knaves and milksops. "What?s the Word" comes dangerously close to being excessively authoritative, but manages to remember that the plays of Shakespeare are vibrantly alive and profoundly accessible with modest effort. The takes on three of Shakespeare?s queens presented here are open, informed and careful to avoid freezing the characters in official interpretations. The only thing that's missing, and it's a surprising exclusion, are samples of the plays themselves. The characters are discussed, but we never get to hear their words. Shakespeare wrote to be performed, and one wishes we could hear the speeches intercut with the commentary.

"Radio is strange." Deft interviewer and journalist John Hockenberry effortless updates material from his series "Heat" produced way back in the 90's. The effect is that of someone carefully re-editing a vintage magazine and finding that the really relevant stuff doesn?t change. Calm, confident, patient, intimate, this is radio conversation at its best and its most unexpected.

Listening to Spalding Gray and Hockenberry switch host/guest roles is a rare gift to the audience.

Programable anywhere, but deserving of careful placement. Weekends and overnights would permit the pieces the space they need to breathe.

You can almost hear the "beat" torch being passed to a new generation as you listen to the pieces in this series. Each one brims with energy and imagination. There is nothing polite about these performances, but that's one of the things that makes them so vital. Some are ragged, some are wise, some are angry, some are all three things at once and more. The thrill that lives in these pieces is the palpable sense of young people testing the weight of words and experiencing the rush of wielding the tools of language. The programing possibilities are as limitless as the passions of the writer/performers. They could be folded into a music mix to fill a half-hour or an entire overnight block.

The spirit of Ferlinghetti is alive and well.

"The sun comes up, it's almost over."

A simple, unpretentious tumbling portrait of the voices of the men of New York's Fulton Fishmarket. It's meant to ramble, but as such it probably would benefit from programming in the context of a wider discussion of the American work place or labor in general. But the voices themselves are the irresistible heart of the piece. Studs Terkel would approve.

An appropriately jagged series presenting the jagged work of poets aggressively struggling with the language and their own emotions, where the difference between a poem and incoherence can boil down to the attitude living in the writer's voice. All these dark flowers blossom from an archive with a provenance at the core of the beat movement. This isn't Wordsworth, this isn't even Whitman. This is a collection of ragged, not always successful attempts to carve something out of the air. Successful or unsuccessful they all fearlessly test the limits of words and the definition of writing.

The quality and impact of the individual pieces are all over the spectrum. The ones that speak to you should be programmed carefully, setting them in a music mix like dangerously sharp diamonds.

Just remember, in some cases, "angry" is exactly what the writer wants you to feel.

If there's a radio equivalent to the gooey indulgence of macaroni-and-cheese, this is it. Gleefully derivative of everything from "Lights Out" to "Mystery Science Theater 3000," this audio evocation of those youth destroying EC horror comics, the ones Stephen King used to hide under the mattress, is pure guilty pleasure. Uncontaminated by seriousness and higher purpose, produced with a careful eye for B-movie details, the piece is unrepentant balderdash and should be welcomed at any time of the programming day. "But, Jasper, you're a scientist. Surely you don't believe in this nonsense."

This program passes my ultimate test: Do I want to listen to it in a car on a late night drive through the desert. An Idiosyncratic, playful, anecdotal, essay on the nature of secrets and the irresistible need to release them to someone, somewhere reaches the strangely counterintuitive conclusion that a secret isn?t really a secret unless you tell someone. Well produced, flexibly programable and very appropriate for desert driving.

I?ll gladly confess a personal prejudice here: I think I?ve spent more time laughing out loud listening to Bob & Ray than I have to any other comedians. The dry wit and casual surrealism of Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding blasted the imaginations of countless radio listeners for more than a generation. Sophisticated and timeless, The Lost Episodes is an infectious collection of comedy that belongs on any station that celebrates radio drama.

One of the saddest and most consistent traits of the human heart is the need to make sense of the senseless. Part of what powers the search for answers, the need to turn the comprehensible into something graspable, understandable, is the knowledge of how fragile life is, how so many worlds can change catastrophically because of something as benign as a decision to go to the movies.

Profound in its simplicity, Sue Mell?s calmly courageous documentary about the painful ripples radiating from the violent death of a friend and the chillingly dismissive attitude of authorities that followed echoes with loss and frustration.

The discussion of conflicting sex-roles is appropriate, but not the most valuable lesson of the piece. The message that cuts across the gender lines is the vital importance of participation. Even in the worst moments of our lives, we need to be present, ask questions and demand answers, of those in power, those we love and ourselves.

Well produced and uncontaminated by irony, Powder River makes the assumption that there are still adolescent imaginations capable of stimulation by something other than the surrogate mayhem of an X-box. This is the sort of radio drama that speaks to the inner twelve-year-old boy, best listened to on the living room rug with a mug of Ovaltine, facing the fabric-covered speaker of an Atwater-Kent. As such, it makes another assumption: That the target audience has or is willing to develop an attention span.

Powder River is both a promise and a challenge to its young audience and should be programed away from the sort of high-octane children's radio that might overwhelm the simple strengths of this very faithful homage to the sort of radio that once shaped a nation.

?The Undiscovered Explorer: Imagining York? stakes out a daunting triple agenda for itself: First, documenting the true story of the only African-American to travel with Lewis and Clark, Clark?s slave, York. Second, putting the various myths and interpretation of York in social context. And third, commenting on the difficulty of learning the truth, any truth, at such a distance.

The piece begins and ends with questions and York remains a mix of myth, invention, and a handful of tantalizing facts. But the story of this one man serves to crack open a larger debate and pose more lasting questions.

Arguably a tad over-produced and teetering on a certain generic presentational slickness, the piece is ultimately most successful in using York as a cultural spine, a way to track the image of the black male through American history.

The program also benefits from an ability to speak to several different audience age levels simultaneously, making it perfect for use in any day-part. Certainly this would be a solid addition to programming during Black History Month, but the piece doesn?t deserved to be restricted to February.