In the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen, there's a small building with a garden and wooden seats. It's the Menneskebiblioteket or Human Library , where the "readers" and "books" are actually people having deeply personal and intimate conversations about topics that might normally be considered off-limits or taboo in polite society. It's staffed by volunteers whose life stories and experiences mean they face some sort of stigma, whether it be due to their ethnicity, religion, orientation, occu...
Jun 14, 2025•38 min•Season 4Ep. 12
When he was growing up in Southern California, Addi Somekh wasn't quite sure what to do with his life. But he knew from a young age that he wanted to "spread warmth" and make other people happy. On this week’s episode, the unusual story of how Addi’s quest to do just that set him off on a worldwide mission to make people laugh. Addi and his friend Charlie hatch a plan to travel around the globe making balloon hats for people, but what at first sounds like a fun and quirky adventure turns out to ...
May 14, 2025•27 min•Season 4Ep. 11
When he was 26 years old in 1948, Garry Davis did something that would make the rest of his life really complicated . Over the next six decades, he’d be detained and imprisoned 34 times in 9 countries, dragged off the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and gain millions of followers, all while confronting countless bureaucrats who had absolutely no idea what to do with him. What set this chain of events into motion was his decision to stand before a guy in a gray suit at the US Embass...
Apr 21, 2025•32 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Over the past few months, President Trump has taken a sort of a slash-and-burn approach to much of the U.S. government, and among the many taxpayer-funded programs he’s axed has been American foreign assistance distributed through the Agency for International Development or USAID. That’s billions of dollars that helped with things like Ebola prevention in West Africa, malaria testing in Myanmar, famine relief to war-torn Sudan, and food deliveries to refugees from Western Sahara. Leading the cos...
Mar 24, 2025•47 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Montreal is a city often split between English and French languages and cultures, but one thing that almost all residents can get behind is cheering on their beloved hockey team, the Canadiens. This isn't just your run-of-the-mill, sports-crazed city, however. The love of hockey here runs much deeper. It's tied to both the history of the game's creation as well as the identity of the Quebecois people, who've come to see their hometown team as a powerful symbol of their nationhood, even though th...
Feb 21, 2025•28 min•Season 4Ep. 8
The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is now entering its third year, and it’s been a humanitarian disaster. According to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, it’s displaced nearly 7 million Ukrainians globally. And on the other side, an estimated 900,000 Russians have also fled their country for various reasons. Among them are economic migrants, conscientious objectors, and political refugees, but also a smaller subset of hundreds of exiled journalists, who’ve had to leave in ord...
Jan 28, 2025•43 min•Season 4Ep. 7
As we wrap up another year, I'm re-sharing an episode I originally released back at the end of 2020 about a holiday tradition I got to witness while I was visiting Puerto Rico. I often travel over Christmas and New Years, and I love seeing how people in other places have cultural practices that are different from my own. This was one of those experiences. My friend Rob took me to a parranda, which is sort of like a Puerto Rican version of Christmas caroling. But as you’ll hear, this particular p...
Dec 23, 2024•12 min•Season 4Ep. 6
As I spent time abroad over the past few months in the lead-up to the American presidential election, I was struck by how often news and politics from back home seemed to be on the minds of all the locals I met. It’s like no matter how far away I went, it was impossible to escape! On this episode I reflect on how important what happens in the United States is to people the rest of the world, and we hear from people in Poland, Haiti, Lebanon, Iran, India, Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, and Uganda abou...
Dec 12, 2024•26 min•Season 4Ep. 5
I'm still working on my next episode, where I'm asking listeners around the world to send me short voice memo recordings from their phones, talking about how people where they live have reacted to the recent American election results and how they think a second Trump presidency would impact ordinary folks in their country. If you have any thoughts or observations you'd like to share, please email me at info@farfromhomepodcast.org . In the meantime, I know a lot of new listeners have joined me fo...
Nov 19, 2024•27 min•Season 4Ep. 4
If you travel around Canada, you’ll find lots of regional dishes, but there isn’t really a strong national culinary identity the way there is in Italy or Mexico, for example. So I embarked on a quest to figure out how exactly to define "Canadian cuisine" beyond the stereotypical maple syrup, poutine, and butter tarts. The answer turned out to be much more interesting than I ever could have imagined! A version of this piece originally ran on Here and There, a Canadian Geographic travel podcast . ...
Oct 29, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 3
In the course of reporting my documentary about Freetown Christiania -- Copenhagen's famous anarchist commune -- for the 99% Invisible podcast, I took two trips to Denmark and recorded many hours of interviews that unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor. In this bonus episode of Far From Home, I present some of the highlights as well as some additional context and backstories of the people I interviewed. [N.B.: This episode contains some explicit language.] If you enjoy this podcast, p...
Oct 08, 2024•23 min•Season 4Ep. 2
In 1971, a group of squatters took over an abandoned military base just across the harbor from downtown Copenhagen, Denmark. They created a politically autonomous anarchist zone -- in other words, a commune -- with its own flag, marching band, and consensus-driven governance process, and they decided to call their community Christiania. The thousand or so residents were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted as long as it didn't infringe upon the rights of other people. There were just a fe...
Oct 08, 2024•44 min•Season 4Ep. 1
In this era of wars, conflicts, and polarized politics, talking to strangers has never been more important. A new season of episodes launches Tuesday, October 8th. (Thanks to Ali Lemer for editorial support) On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
Oct 01, 2024•2 min
After missing the opportunity to see the last total solar eclipse in the United States back in 2017, I decided to add this experience to my bucket list and vowed I would do whatever it takes to see an eclipse in the future. A few weeks ago, I got my chance. Joined by my brother Drew and his friends Jeremy and Claire, I drove up to the woods of northern New Hampshire, and together, the four of us witnessed an event that far surpassed whatever expectations any of us had had. Here’s an audio postca...
Apr 21, 2024•21 min•Season 3Ep. 40
Thor Pedersen always felt like he was born too late. He grew up in a world where other people had already done most of the amazing things, like venturing to the North and South Poles, climbing the highest mountains, following the longest rivers, and exploring the depths of the deepest seas. But in 2013, at the age of 34, he discovered one record that no one had yet managed to achieve. So he went to the store, bought a map, and began marking it with a blue pen and a red pen. Before long, he hatch...
Dec 11, 2023•49 min•Season 3Ep. 39
After releasing my last episode where I shared stories from my time in Oklahoma many years ago, I came across one more short radio piece in my archives that I thought some of your might enjoy. It’s about another cultural phenomenon unique to Oklahoma that I experienced: the world’s only behind-the-walls prison rodeo . Before a stadium of 9000 cheering fans, a hundred inmates from around the state competed in events like calf roping, steer wrestling, a wild horse race, and “Money the Hard Way,” a...
Jun 15, 2023•8 min•Season 3Ep. 38
Two decades ago, I was just starting out as a public radio reporter, applying for literally every radio job opening I saw, and somehow I ended up getting hired by a small station in Norman, Oklahoma. Given that the culture, politics, and geography were so incredibly different from anything I’d been exposed to up to that point. moving there from my home state of New Jersey almost felt like going to a foreign country. Yet despite any initial reservations I had, it turned out to be a really great e...
May 27, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 37
If you listened to my last episode , you heard the story of my friend Jamie Yuenger, an American who moved from New York City to the Netherlands and was struggling to make the transition and figure out how to fit in. Following up on that theme, today I’m sharing a recent episode from my friends at The Bittersweet Life podcast, where co-host Tiffany Parks looks back at the past nearly two decades she’s spent in Italy and discusses the milestone she’s just reached of having now officially lived in...
Mar 13, 2023•31 min•Season 3Ep. 36
From the age of 24 until she was 37, Jamie Yuenger lived in New York City. While she started out having a complicated relationship with the city, she grew over time to love her adopted hometown. Then a few years ago, she fell in love with a Dutch guy named Piet and decided to move to the Netherlands to be with him. That meant she’d be starting over in a new country where she didn’t understand the language or the culture. Jamie set about adapting to her new life, but it turned out to be way harde...
Feb 14, 2023•29 min•Season 3Ep. 35
Last winter during the pandemic, Jack Boswell started to reevaluate his place in life and realize that at the age of 31, he still hadn’t chased his real passion of being a Hollywood screenwriter. So he decided to quit his job and hop on a plane where he lived in London to head to Los Angeles and give it a go. But instead of flying directly there, he figured he’d instead land in Boston and make his way across the United States by train, documenting the places he visited and the people he met alon...
Oct 08, 2022•22 min•Season 3Ep. 34
As you may have seen in my feed, I recently teamed up with my colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money economic podcast to report a story that prominently featured the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan — which is probably one of the most obscure countries in the world, and certainly not a place that most of us hear much about, much less visit. Only about 10,000 tourists a year cross its borders, but in the summer of 2016, my brother, my friends Rosi and Jane, and I were some of the lucky few. We dro...
Sep 13, 2022•20 min•Season 3Ep. 33
A few months ago, a friend of mine named Oraz who runs an autobody repair shop in Turkmenistan came across a kind of puzzle. A new vehicle had just arrived on his lot. A white Lexus SUV. He could see by the registration sticker that it came from my home state of New Jersey, but the even stranger thing was the shape it was in. It was practically brand new, unlike like the dented and mangled cars that usually come to him for repairs. Oraz wondered: how did this car get here, to his shop? And what ...
Sep 13, 2022•30 min•Season 3Ep. 32
I’m always open to listener feedback on Far From Home, and I heard from someone recently who’s given me a new perspective on one of my past stories and forced me to see things in a new light, so I wanted to share it with all of my listeners. Several years ago on the show, I featured a series of stories about Lucho, a traditional medicine man from Peru who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archaeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants, he claims t...
Aug 01, 2022•27 min•Season 3Ep. 31
While I’ve been hunkered down these past few years, avoiding traveling and staying home while I rode out the pandemic, I’ve been incredibly lucky that I’ve had a safe and comfortable place to live. But what has this experience been like for people in living situations that failed to provide basic levels of safety, privacy, and comfort? On this episode of Far From Home, I play an episode from the Shelter podcast series that I co-produced with Rutgers University, coLAB Arts, and the New Brunswick ...
Jun 15, 2022•34 min•Season 3Ep. 30
Over the past 2 months, more than 5 million people have left Ukraine, and another 6-and-a-half-million have fled their homes and are now displaced elsewhere within their own country, making this Europe’s largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Neighboring countries are struggling to keep up with the exodus, but they’ve generally been fairly welcoming, which many critics have pointed out is a markedly different approach from how they’ve treated African and Middle Eastern refugees in the p...
Apr 29, 2022•50 min•Season 3Ep. 29
On this episode, I speak to Savelli and Olexander, two Ukrainians who’ve suddenly had their lives upended after the Russian military invaded their country. ————- On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
Mar 28, 2022•21 min•Season 3Ep. 28
Central Asia is not a place that most Westerners know or think about very often. But now that I’ve been there, my ears perk up on the rare instances when it makes the news, as was the case on two separate occasions over the past few weeks. In light of recent developments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, I re-play excerpts of some episodes I featured several years ago on the first season of Far From Home , where I documented an 11,000 mile road trip my friends and I took from the UK to Mongolia in...
Jan 17, 2022•24 min•Season 3Ep. 27
Take Santa Claus. Then ditch the red suit and the flying reindeer, and you’ve got a guy who’s all about giving. On this last episode of my third season, I tell the story of the time my dad tried out the role and got more than he bargained for! This story originally aired many years ago on NPR’s Day to Day. Thanks to my editor Russell Lewis. ————- On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mong...
Dec 23, 2021•7 min•Season 3Ep. 26
Nearly 2 years into the Covid-19 pandemic, new waves of infection continue to spread around the world, and the Omicron variant is causing renewed fears in places that previously thought they had the virus under control. So I’m releasing another episode in my series where I check in with friends and colleagues around the world to get a sense of what things are like where they live. This time we hear voices from Thailand, Ukraine, Guatemala, Belgium, Finland, and Vietnam. If you’ve missed the prev...
Dec 06, 2021•20 min•Season 3Ep. 25
Having grown up just outside of New York City, I visited most of the big tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center when I was a kid. But when you spend a lot of time in a place and get to know it well , you start to discover some really cool but lesser-known areas, and those are the ones I always like to share with friends when they come from out of town. Recently, I played tour guide for my colleague Palle Bo, who’s the host of The Radio V...
Oct 27, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 24
