Mary McGrath

Caption: PRX default User image
  • Username: MaryMcGrath
  • PRX Member
  • Role: Producer Group Staff

Recent Pieces from Mary McGrath

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Thomas Frank on What's the Matter With College (Excerpt) (04:23)
From: Open Source

How did higher education, in general, turn from the days of the GI Bill — and the land grant colleges long before that — to being a trap for seventeen-year-old kids who are ...
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What Do We Make of The Big Bang? (58:34)
From: Open Source

We're clearing the deck to listen to wisdom of the physicists: where did we come from, what are we made of, what happens next, and why? And what do we do with what we're learning?
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Richard Rhodes: Is the Knowledge of Nukes Enough? (22:23)
From: Open Source

Richard Rhodes is the go-to analyst of nuclear weapons for most of thirty years now ever since the publication of his acclaimed history of the Manhattan project and the ...
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Richard Powers: A Musical Theory of Everything (47:52)
From: Open Source

Richard Powers is indulging us in a runaway riff on music, in a little room in the Boston Athenaeum, on the top of Beacon Hill, overlooking the Old Granary Burying Ground, ...
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Into The Woods with Helen Oyeyemi (21:58)
From: Open Source

Oyeyemi has a way of seeing modern life as a series of fairy tales, and she likes to scatter them throughout the forest, upending monsters and undermining as many myths as she can.
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The Student (20:08)
From: Open Source

We’re reading a famous story called “The Student.” It’s a late winter, early spring night in the 1890s, Easter weekend. A student is coming home from shooting, and he pauses ...
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Gusev (52:19)
From: Open Source

Chekhov wrote “Gusev” on shipboard, returning from his stark study mission to the prison island of Sakhalin in 1890. He was 30 years old, ten years into a concentrated ...
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Dreams (41:36)
From: Open Source

The story this time is called “Dreams.” It’s a dense 7-page fantasy of the good life in the far wilds of Eastern Siberia. It’s a dream of freedom that pops full-blown, ...
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Vanka (26:29)
From: Open Source

Vanka is a tiny tale that has the feel of Dickens, about a 9-year-old orphan in Moscow, pining for his grandpa in the village, his only vestige of family.
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Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music & Beauty, Part II (33:10)
From: Open Source

We're picking up the thread of a long conversation with Gunther Schuller. He’s the man who first mapped a Third Stream of “jazzical” music between classical and jazz ...