Today we're featuring a selection from an episode of the groundbreaking show Hearing Voices. With Montana-based producer Barrett Golding at the helm, the show was known for cross pollinating with performance and poetry to create a space for audio producers to experiment and grow. Each episode was adventurous, unpredictable and exciting. We've also got a whole collection of Hearing Voices episodes available to subscribers ($20 for the whole year!).
May 13, 2026•25 min
Today we're sharing a classic Sean Cole work from his time on the documentary team at WBUR's Inside Out. It's a beautiful work of scene and memory, taking listeners to a reunion for a town that hasn't physically existed for generations.
Apr 22, 2026•53 min
Today we're featuring a excerpt of a work that explores the relationship of art, documentary, and history through a search for class struggle in Appalachia. Beyond the limited academic concept of oral history, I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky is a essay-in-sound that weaves the words and stories of Harlan County residents with the sounds and music of the place itself. The result is documentary art, and a deeply compelling listen. Original Series Credit...
Apr 08, 2026•17 min
This week we're featuring a super interesting conversation with Eleanor McDowall, creator of Radio Atlas, about the world of the radio feature and the artistry of audio works that aren't in English.
Mar 25, 2026•37 min
Note: this week's episode is a video podcast because it is a celebration of audio subtitles. You'll need to experience it on a platform that supports video files. This week we're sharing a choice work from our new collection celebrating ten years of Radio Atlas, an English-language home for subtitled audio from around the world. A place to hear inventive documentaries, dramas and works of sound art that have been made in languages you don’t necessarily speak. Radio Atlas has subtitled stories fr...
Mar 11, 2026•57 min
Today we share a prescient work by Ross Sutherland from his long running, award winning show Imaginary Advice. It's a darkly funny spiral and a fantastic listen. ******* S.E.I.N.F.E.L.D. originally aired in 2016 on Imaginary Advice . It was written, produced and voiced by Ross Sutherland and a robot voice.
Feb 25, 2026•28 min
This week we're sharing a piece from The Big Read, a book club for public radio from the National Endowment for the Arts. This episode is about Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. Set in the fictional community of Bayonne, Louisiana, in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying tells the story of Jefferson, a twenty-one-year-old Black field worker wrongfully accused and convicted of the robbery and murder of a white man, and sentenced to death by electrocution. It's an incredible story of friendsh...
Feb 11, 2026•30 min
Today we're featuring one of our favorite series, American Icons, on a true work of art: I Love Lucy. It's a hilarious and bittersweet documentary, exemplary of the incredibly thoughtful work that Studio 360 bestowed upon listeners for twenty years until its end in F2020. Original Series Credits: American Icons: I Love Lucy was produced by Jenny Lawton , with production assistance from Chloe Plaunt and Claes Andreasson . David Krasnow edited the show. Peabody Award-winning Studio 360 with Kurt A...
Jan 28, 2026•49 min
This week we share a story from the front lines. Literally, from the front lines of a brutal war. But also figuratively, from the front lines of a change in technology that would shape how civilians understand war: personal recording. We've got two additional episodes in a new collection for subscribers including a special from Hearing Voices that is actually six individual pieces. It's great listening for the long night. Original Series Credits for The Vietnam Tapes: The Vietnam Tapes of Lance ...
Jan 14, 2026•23 min
In this episode, we offer a few of our favorite shorts as sonic gifts. We've got the humble farmer, an early work by Arlie Adlington, and one of the most formative works of contemporary audio: CAT NAMES.
Dec 17, 2025•13 min
This week we bring you a rare longform piece by Radio Diaries featuring Bridgette McGee, our narrator as she uncovers the truth about her grandfather's death, through uncomfortable interviews, original reporting, and some of the most arresting archival tape. We are with Bridgette for every step of her process, and in doing so, we share a history that could have otherwise been erased. Photo courtesy of Bridgette McGee. ***** Original Series Credits: Our story was narrated by Bridgette McGee-Robin...
Dec 03, 2025•24 min
This week we're sharing a banger documentary from Kelly McEvers which may leave you standing, staring at a wall by the end. The podcast version of a driveway moment. Ten years before McEvers' show Embedded hit the air, you can hear the idea for it beginning to form. Diary of a Bad Year is a bold and compelling look at why journalists risk it all for the story. ***** Jay Allison financed, produced, edited and mixed this series for Transom.org. More about the piece can be found at Transom: https:/...
Nov 12, 2025•57 min
Today we're presenting a documentary about an icon, Tony Schwartz, and made by icons, The Kitchen Sisters. For thirty years (1945-1976), Schwartz created and produced a radio program for WNYC featuring the people and sounds of New York City. He amassed an archive of recordings (now housed in the Library of Congress) that are expertly mixed together in this documentary so listeners can hear the world as Tony Schwartz did. ***** Tony Schwartz: 30,000 Recordings Later’ was produced by The Kitchen S...
Oct 29, 2025•24 min
This week we're sharing the story "A Level Playing Field" from John Biewen's series Contested, the first season of his iconic show Scene on Radio. Contested considers the American relationship to sports, and this episode looks at the way money permeates sport and how it distorts reality to create unrealistic expectations for young athletes and communities of color. Original Series Credits: Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody Award–nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about wh...
Oct 15, 2025•27 min
Today we present a documentary by The Heart that is astonishing. "When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small, but significant part of me." Based on writer Mariya Karimjee's 2015 essay "Damage," we hear a deeply intimate portrait of Mariya's a journey from her childhood in Pakistan, to her adolescence in Texas, through college, all the way to where she is now, back in Pakistan as she navigates family, love, her body and her personal relationships, all despite the ...
Oct 01, 2025•38 min
Today we're sharing the 1998 documentary The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan, as well as the 2006 documentary The Imaginary Village by Sandy Tolan and Melissa Robbins. The Lemon Tree explores the relationship between a Palestinian man named Bashir and Dalia, a Bulgarian-born Israeli who moved into his childhood home in the West Bank. The piece was turned into an award-winning book of the same name. The Imaginary Village explores the longing for land and home by Palestinian refugees. They were released...
Sep 17, 2025•59 min
Today we present an all time favorite of the team at Selects. This iconic work by Dave Isay and Stacy Abramson is a vivid portrait of New York City’s Bowery, before it got swallowed by a museum and high end retail and luxury real estate. In the late 90’s The Sunshine Hotel remained one of the last flophouses left on the Bowery, New York’s skid row. As you meet the cast of characters at the Sunshine hotel you will be transported to another time in New York City history. This small collection of o...
Sep 03, 2025•26 min
This week we're featuring one episode of The Big Read, a series that is essentially a national book club for the radio. In 2007, America decided it was having a literary crisis (and Sold a Story wouldn’t come out for another 15 years). So, in response, the National Endowment for the Arts launched The Big Read, a program to bring people together to read some of the most acclaimed works of fiction by American authors. Alongside grassroots local events, the NEA produced a series of audio documentar...
Aug 20, 2025•31 min
Today we're publishing a new collection for subscribers featuring three eyewitness accounts to historical events we often know solely through images or history books. These Radio Diaries are gripping and immersive, with incredible tape that transports a listener from a cursory understanding to one that is rich with individual experience. We're sharing one of those here: a personal account of surviving the Tulsa Race Riot. The art of unscripted audio documentary has been perfected by Joe Richman ...
Aug 06, 2025•7 min
This week, we follow Dmae Lo Roberts and her mother, Chu-Yin, as they travel to Taiwan together. Dmae seeks an opportunity to grow closer with her mother, but the trip ends with them not speaking. First produced in 1989, Roberts’ Peabody Award-winning documentary is highly personal and groundbreaking -- weaving interviews and dramatizations to tell the story of a conflicted daughter and her mother who suffered abuse, starvation and the horrors of World War Two. ***** Original Series Credits: Mei...
Jul 16, 2025•29 min
This week we've got a new collection for subscribers and we're excited to share one of them with you today. Tossing Away the Keys is a documentary by Dave Isay and Sound Portraits, and a masterclass in audio documentary. It expertly uses the medium to take listeners somewhere they may never be, and let them hear something they'll never forget. Give it a listen and check out the whole Early True Crime collection with a free trial of the Selects channel. ***** Original Series Credits: Produced By ...
Jul 09, 2025•27 min
This Pride, we're proud to present a pointed and spicy documentary about fractures in the LGBTQ movement over the fight for gay marriage. This piece offers a nuanced and passionate analysis of something you rarely see put forward for public consumption: internal debate within a civil rights movement. This is a classic driveway moment, but one of those driveways that the city painted in a rainbow flag... **** Original Series Credits: Beyond Gay Marriage was hosted and produced by Lisa Dettmer and...
Jun 18, 2025•58 min
Mitra speaks with Sonja Williams, one of the producers of Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was about her career in audio, and in particular her relationship with archival audio and scholarship.
Jun 06, 2025•30 min
It’s the first thing you learn as a radio reporter. Check your levels by asking an interview subject the question “what did you have for breakfast?” It’s disarming. But it’s also revealing. In this piece by Annie Cheney and Jay Allison, the question becomes the story vehicle and we're treated to a story about the complicated relationship between food, eating, family, and friendship. More about Concerning Breakfast can be found on Transom: https://transom.org/2015/concerning-breakfast/ Concerning...
May 21, 2025•37 min
At the end of last month, we lost an audio icon: Larry Massett. As a sort of tribute, we want to share one of the Four Stories About Travel we just put on the Selects Channel. This piece originally aired on Hearing Voices. Larry is a legendary producer and host who describes himself as being present at the inception of public media. It's a trip down memory lane, literally and figuratively, with a fun payoff at the end.
May 14, 2025•13 min
We have got four stories about travel for you. However, these are not your typical travel stories - we've got a story from Outer Voices about nomadic sheep herders in Mongolia, the diary of a foul mouthed teenager on a camping trip read live on Mortified, Producer Larry Massett on traveling with his mother, and an early work by Arlie Adlington featuring a watchmaker considering time travel. These are transportive, funny and endearing works of audio. As summer approaches, maybe these stories will...
Apr 30, 2025•2 min
This month we're proud to present one episode of the six-part series Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was (1996), created by PRX and the Smithsonian telling the story of radio’s role in the 20th century transformation of the African American community. ***** Original Series Credits: Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was was a 12-episode radio series hosted by Lou Rawls and produced for the Smithsonian in 1996. Series Producer: Jacquie Gales Webb. Episode Producers: Sonja Williams and Lex Gillespie....
Apr 16, 2025•31 min
We've got a new show available for Selects members! These four selections of the American Icons series are astounding listens, and made by some of the most influential audio producers working (and not working) today. You can listen on our Apple Podcasts Channel or by going to Selects.fm
Apr 02, 2025•4 min
For our inaugural episode of Selects, we're proud to present Sean Cole's piece Call NOW! originally created for Life of the Law. ****** Original Credits for the Series: Production Credits: Reporter/Producer: Sean Cole Producer: Kaitlin Prest Music: Kyle Kaplan, Todd MacDonald, Matthew Darr Additional Production: Shannon Heffernan, Ashleyanne Krigbaum Additional Music – Andrea Hendrickson Social Media Editor – Rachael Cain Executive Producer – Nancy Mullane Executive Director – Tony Gannon...
Mar 19, 2025•25 min
