Fantastic piece. Intimate, great conflict, find a place for it on your station.

I heard this piece at Third Coast in 2008. When I listened to it this time, I almost cried, thinking of how my sons are now 21 and 23 years old. Not many radio stories make me do that.

I really liked this piece, especially the repetition at the beginning. "I play D&D on Monday, play D&D on Tuesday, play D&D on Thursday ..." etc. I also feel like I got to know the protagonist's history, current dilemma and personality. Good work.

"Who wants to walk around downtown in the middle of winter?" asks a character in this futuristic, suburban, head-spinning, insightful documentary by Jonathan Mitchell. The answer, of course, is this: "Nobody." In City X, Mitchell masterfully layers interviews with average people, architects, bus drivers (who knows really, none of them are identified) into a mosaic of sound that gives us a clear understanding of why Americans love malls. Here are just a few comments, each delightfully enunciated in the documentary: "It was metropolitan ... When it came, we were hip and happening. We were a real town. We weren't just some little spot in the middle of the cornfield. We've made it!" There's also great stuff in here about mall culture: How the boys go there to scope out girls, how the girls go there to be scoped out by the boys, the mysteries of how to pronounce the "exotic" gyro and a debate about where to find the best parking spot. One person loves the lower level down by Sears. Another absolutely swears by the entrance that leads right into the middle of the Food Court. And to push the narrative forward, Mitchell uses Muzak, real Muzak, as his sole musical accompaniment.

I'm not sure what to make of this piece by producer Amanda Wells and that's a good thing. It's eerie. It's educational. It's an inside look at how cutting, or self-mutilation, caught on at one American school. A girl named Christie described her initiation to cutting this way: "I had an eating disorder going on at the time ... I didn't know what else to do. I would binge and purge each night and that didn't help anymore. I needed something more. Why not cut?" The reporter says 1 out of 10 teens cuts. Other reviewers have indicated that this piece appears to be pro-cutting and suggest offering it to listeners as part of a wider discussion on the subject of self-mutilation. That?s a valid point. But it?s seemingly unbalanced ending also serves another purpose: It puts the listener inside a world most of us never would venture. And that opens the door to understanding.

"You'll never hear another sound like a mother wailing whenever she's watching her son being executed," says reporter Leighanne Gideon. "There's no other sound like it. That wail surrounds the room." At the time this documentary was recorded, Gideon had watched Texas kill inmates on 52 separate occasions. ?Witness to an Execution? weaves the harrowing tales of reporters, prison guards, the warden and others who have observed or participated in state-sanctioned murder. Although Texas kills inmates by lethal injection instead of the rawer electrocution, the result is the same. One of the wonders of this documentary is that it doesn't get political, it doesn't state a position about the death penalty, it simply leads the listener through the process of an execution. One important step in that process is the action of the "tie-down" team. These are prison guards whose job it is to strap the inmate onto the gurney before lethal injection. Kenneth Dean, a member of the "tie-down" team says many inmates thank him after Dean has secured them into place. "After all the straps are done, they will look at you and say 'Thank you.' And here you've just strapped them into the (execution) table ... You know that's kind of a weird feeling." Dean believes in what he does, but another prison guard, Fred Allen, quit the job after the impact of dozens of executions left him in tears one day. Listening to Allen talk, however haltingly, is moving. There are many other great moments here, all worth airing.

The high rise public housing projects that lined the Dan Ryan Expressway on Chicago's South Side are widely regarded as a mistake. But does tearing down these high rises and dispersing thousands of people to private market apartments automatically improve their lives? That's the question that producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister attempt to answer in this half-hour documentary. Coco is the focus and narrator of this program. She's immediately impressed with her new apartment, which by most standards is humble: "This is like the Bahamas. This is literally like the Bahamas compared to Stateway ... I don't see no thugs hanging out on the corners." However, a few weeks later, she's admits to being bored with her new surroundings because there are "no friends around. It's boring. I miss Stateway." She also misses the beer drinking and pot smoking. Soon, her landlord scolds her for having too many people hanging outside the apartment. "I guess we just need to get out of our ghetto mentality," Coco says. This is an inside look at a person who is trying to turn her life around. It's done without expert interviews and without narration by the producers. It's sad, touching and insightful.

Way out in Montana, at a little radio station called KGLT, independent producer Barratt Golding produces some very fine work. It's also a bit strange and that's why I like to air it. He's fond of quirky, creative producers. In this show (his new series is called "The Plan"), Golding focuses on the life of Him. (That capital "H" is intentional.) Him, of course, is our Lord and Savior, Jesus. This piece includes an excerpt from the band King Missle and a song called "Jesus Was Way Cool." Sample lyrics: "He turned water into wine. And if he wanted to he could have turned wheat into marijuana or sugar into cocaine or vitamin pills into amphetamines." You get the idea. This show varies from Golding's usual offerings, which are mostly short pieces of reporting or essays linked together with a theme. "The Jesus Plan" is music for the first 16 minutes or so. This show also includes a story from the legendary Scott Carrier.

Few Americans are willing to ride public transit. Fewer still are willing to give up their cars. So that means our wear-and-tear on the environment will mostly likely be felt through the kind of car we drive. Rebecca Williams drives a 1989 Toyota with 188,000 miles on it. "Pieces of plastic trim fly off when I drive down the highway," she says. But that's not the worst of it. Her beater leaks oil. A lot of oil. Williams has to add one quart of oil every two weeks to keep the junker rolling down the road. So what's the environmental impact of that? That's the point of this piece. Williams checks with her mechanic and then a few scientists. It's a great journey and a pretty darn good story because it is something most listeners can relate to. If they ain't driving a junker now, chances are they did at one time. And my God, the environmental consequences of that are more than just an inconvenient truth, they are expensive to remedy.

Here's another excellent piece from the "Radio Rookies" in New York City. Veralyn, a native of Sierra Leone, has lived in the U.S. almost her entire life. And that's the hitch. She wasn't born here. Her parents never got around to filling out the proper paperwork to make her official in the eyes of the government. "I've lived in American nearly all my life but it feels like I don't exist," she says. So Veralyn, a feisty teen, begins questioning the adults in her life. Her Dad admits to being "really laid back" when it comes to helping her secure citizenship. Her uncle yells at her about exploring the topic on the radio: "You could get yourself deported. Do you understand that September 11 has changed the rules of the game?" Her siblings, all born in the U.S., shrug their shoulders. What's the big deal? Get the green card, they say. A programmer looking to put a personal face on the country's immigration debate should strongly consider airing this story. At just over 10 minutes long, it eats up a lot of airtime, but listeners love well-told personal stories and this is one of them.

Storyteller Spalding Gray killed himself in 2004 by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. Best known for the monologue and movie "Swimming to Cambodia," this documentary focuses on the period of Gray's life after a life-threatening car accident. Using audio from his one-man performances and several personal interviews, New York City producer Jon Kalish presents a portrait of Gray's personal struggles and work, which many people believed were the same. "He questions everything and ends up more exhausted than satisfied," wrote Michael Kuchwara, the Associated Press drama critic. To do that, Gray dwelled on yesterday's troubles. "One of the hells that I suffer is that I live in the past a lot of the time," he says at one point in the documentary. The strongest moment of this piece is Kalish's conversation with Gray near the end of his life. The actor sounds unhinged as the pair stroll around the grounds of a college campus. The only downside to this doc are the time references (there's a reference to January, which might make the listener believe Gray died recently, not in 2004) and a mid-documentary reference to the radio station on which the piece originally aired.

Why pay a psychologist $140 per hour when you can just go get your hair done? This story follows Margo Hubbard, a woman who cuts hair at 75 State Street Salon, a place that caters to older people. "You can feel down in the dumps. And you come and have your hair done and you can feel on top of the world," says one customer. She washes hair, cuts hair, but most importantly, she listens. "People come to you and you might have been the first person they've seen in a week," Margo says. "And that's part of being a cosmotologist, too." By the end of this piece, which at 4:04 is just the right length, I feel like I know Margo and I appreciate the great work she does to make the world a happier place. And that ain't easy. (Or maybe it is, and that's the message of this little gem.)

During the first few minutes of this piece, I thought the reporters just took tape recorders around to bars in Butte, Montana and that was the whole story. We hear happy drunks, incoherent drunks, fighting drunks, drunks of all kinds. And why not? It's St. Patty's Day, for gosh sakes. Fine, but predictable. And then the story takes a fun turn. The guys with the recorders decide to climb a fire escape and kick in the door of an abandoned building. They get arrested. They spend the night in jail. And then they learn some old guy lived in the first floor of the "abandoned building." Some old guy with a gun. He had it pointed at them as they were exploring the building. Yikes! Great tape of the old guy ... and a great turn of a story. Might be fun to play it on the morning of March 18 so the public radio listeners with hangovers can have a good scare.

Women often judge a barber's sense of flair by what her hair looks like. OK, I'm a man and I don't know this for a fact. But this is what Shana Sheehy tells me in her essay "My Muslim Hairdresser" and I believe her. This is also the central premise of Sheehy's tale of Alice, her Alaskan hairdresser who converted to Islam before 9/11. Sheehy begins with a set-up: We hear her voice as she describes making the appointment and being told her regular hairdresser isn't available. Instead, she's been assigned to Alice, a hairdresser she hasn't met. As she waits at the salon, we hear sounds of footsteps and nascent chattering. Sheehy describes her first impression of Alice, including what she's wearing: "She was fully covered in loose fitting black clothes and she wore a pretty hair scarf that covered every strand of her presumably black hair." The rest of the piece is all Alice. We hear about her early curiosity with Islam, her struggles with covering up her "moneymaker" (that is, her hair), her decision to stop cutting men's hair (because she didn't want to shampoo their hair --- a violation of her interpretation of the Qur'an). The piece reaches its climax at just after 5 minutes when Alice says, "There's freedom to be able to wear a scarf ... When you see a Muslim woman, you are see a woman who is wanting you to deal with her mind, not her body." Unfortunately, there's another 40 seconds or so still to come. I would have ended with that quote and forced the listener to consider that truth.

I wasn't prepared to like this piece. Since it was co-produced by Hoopa Tribal Radio, I assumed it would be one-sided and preachy in its telling of the story of an environmental disaster: The killing of 68,000 Chinook Salmon in the Klamath River Basin. While this documentary does indeed present only a single point-of-view, it's not at all preachy. But enough about my preconceptions. The focus should really be on this documentary. So, here goes: The production values are very high. There's a great mix of music, voices and natural sound. It's thoughtful and effective. The narrator is down-to-earth, easy to listen to and very non-NPR (and that's a great thing!). And most important, the content does a great job of telling the listener why the Chinook Salmon are so important to the tribal people in the area. Elders, anthropologists and tribal leaders explain the importance of the historical and cultural importance of salmon, but an average guy, about 19 minutes into this doc, says it best: "The salmon. That's our life ... We live in an area with 90 percent unemployment. Fish is what we eat in the winter time." And then there's this at about 23 minutes: "Fish can't live without water." OK. That's obvious enough. But wait. The government disagrees. At a public meeting, a federal official from the Bureau of Reclamation told a crowd, "We have no scientific proof that fish really do need water." Huh? It's an amazing, funny moment. It draws you in. And you want to learn more about the topic. Many programmers may be reluctant to air this piece in places far from Northern California, but this story --- the fight over water and the importance of natural resources to tribal people --- is universal.