Lifestyle
From jailhouse melodies to vanishing salmon, rejuvenate your listening history
VPM; Connecticut Public Radio; NCPR; WWNO; OPB; Colorado Public Radio
VPM; Connecticut Public Radio; NCPR; WWNO; OPB; Colorado Public Radio
Enjoy the spring bloom, get outside, listen to a new podcast! The NPR One team has gathered a few returning favorites as well as some fresh releases from across public media.
The podcast episode descriptions below are from podcast webpages and have been edited for brevity and clarity.
NPR Explains… — NPR
Sea Change — WWNO & WRKF
Sea Change is back with a brand new season. And this time, the stakes are even higher. We launch new investigations, travel around the world, and look at how a sea change is underway to solve some of our biggest problems. Come with us to investigate and celebrate life on our changing coasts. Every two weeks, we bring you stories that illuminate, inspire, and sometimes enrage, as we dive deep into the environmental issues facing coastal communities on the Gulf Coast and beyond. We have a lot to save, and we have a lot of solutions. It’s time to talk about a Sea Change.
Listen to “All Gassed Up, Part 1: The Carbon Coast.”
Lost Patients — KUOW
Imagine a sprawling house in which every room, doorway, and hall passage was designed by a different architect. Doorways don’t connect. Staircases lead to nowhere. Rooms are cut off from each other. That’s how reporter Will James describes our complicated system for treating people with severe mental illness – a system that, almost by design, loses patients with psychosis to an endless loop between the streets, jail, clinics, courts and a shrinking number of hospital beds. Lost Patients is a deeply-reported, six-part docuseries examining the difficulties of treating serious mental illness through the lens of one city’s past, present and future. With real-life testimonials from patients, families, and professionals on the front lines, Lost Patients provides a real, solutions-oriented look at how we got stuck here…and what we might do to break free.
Listen to part one, “Churn.”
The Modern West — Wyoming Public Media
Exactly 100 years to the day after a woman named Eleanor Davis became the first recorded woman to ever climb the Grand Teton – a nearly 14,000 foot-tall mountain that’s the namesake for Grand Teton National Park – an all-female group of climbers is summiting the peak to celebrate her legacy. Hannah Habermann tagged along for the adventure.
Start listening to part one of High Altitude Tales, “Courage is a Muscle.”
Throughline — NPR
How did we get here? That’s the driving question behind Throughline’s series, Origins of the Middle East Conflict. The series explores Hamas’ roots in early Islamist movements, the influence of Iran and Hezbollah in their adoption of suicide bombing and other violent strategies, the role the Palestine Liberation Organization played, how both Intifadas moved the needle, and the roles of Israeli, Palestinian, and US politics in bringing us to the moment we’re in today.
Listen to “The Rise of the Right Wing in Israel.”
¿Quién Are We? — Colorado Public Radio
Get ready for a new season of ¿Quién Are We?, a podcast about being Latinx, Hispanic, Chicana – or however you identify – and the beautiful things that make us who we are. Host and journalist May Ortega is back with more everyday stories of incredible people who are exploring their heritage through their personal passions. You’ll hear from an artist, an anthropologist and a game-maker. You’ll hear about the relationship between two enemies, turned lovers and the connection between a father and son. Most importantly, you’ll hear yourself in these stories.
Start listening to “The Therapist.”
Track Change — VPM
As four men are held in a Virginia jail, they record an album to chronicle their efforts to break free from an oppressive cycle of addiction and incarceration. In each music-infused episode of this documentary series, host and trailblazing hip-hop artist Speech Thomas meets a musician at a crossroads in their uphill struggle for freedom, learns what brought them to this inflection point, and helps them record a song that captures this critical moment in their life. From soulful country to fiery hip-hop and haunting R&B, this music affirms the lives of people who are written off by society. And amidst a re-entry crisis afflicting millions of Americans every year, these intimate stories from behind the walls of a local jail ask: What does it take to rebuild a life after incarceration?
Listen to episode 1, “I Wrote This to Inspire.”
Salmon Wars — OPB
Salmon Wars tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before – through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations. We dig in to uncover who is to blame for the salmon vanishing, what can be done before it’s too late and why their disappearance impacts all of us…
Listen to “Ep 1: The Family.”
Unforgotten: Connecticut’s Hidden History of Slavery — Connecticut Public Radio
When we think of slavery in the United States, we don’t usually think of the North. But enslaving people was legal in Connecticut for more than 200 years and did not officially end until 1848. In our first episode, Reporter/Producer Diane Orson and Editorial Consultant and Curator Frank Mitchell dive into complicated questions: Who owns this history? Who should present it? In what ways was this history hidden? There’s a deeply-rooted perception that the North was home to the “good guys,” the abolitionists. The truth is far different. Hear from people who are shedding light on this history and why it matters.
Listen to “Episode 1: Slavery has deep roots in New England.”
The Howl — NCPR
True stories. No notes. That’s the HOWL Podcast. Recorded live on stages in the upper reaches of Northern New York, the HOWL features stories about being hunted by Bigfoot, cooking on car engines, and taking your dog’s medication. Host Ethan Shantie pairs tales from his time as a writer, punk musician, and life-long New Yorker with stories from everyday people in communities all over New York’s “North Country.” In the latest and final episode of season two, Ethan shares the story of his bootlegging family, and live storyteller, Olivia, tells us about the world of underground jelly wrestling.
Listen to “I just found out my great grandparents were bootleggers.”
NPR’s Jessica Green and Jack Mitchell curated and produced this piece.
In Alice and Steve, Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker play long-time friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
Lara Cornell/Disney+
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Lara Cornell/Disney+
I grew up watching episodic shows on network TV, nearly all of them formulaic but some indelibly great. Then, like everyone else, I moved into the days of what my colleague David Bianculli dubbed Platinum TV, where series like The Sopranos and The Wire and Fleabag aspired to something higher. What both these eras had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted — they had an internal logic, and a tone, that held them together.
In recent years, though, there’s been a proliferation of shows that, possibly obeying some algorithm, care less for coherence than sensation. They lurch among tones, from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness, stirring in random plot twists along the way. Bouncing all over the emotional map, these shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction.
A great example is Alice and Steve, an entertaining but sometimes exasperating six-part British comedy on Hulu about two 50-something best friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
While the premise is juicy, it’s also a tad yucky, and I mainly tuned in because its title characters are played by performers Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and Nicola Walker, whom I’ve raved up on this show more than once.
The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend’s funeral. Now, I always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact. As Clement and Walker bray their lines, we learn that Steve’s a divorced celebrity hair stylist who can’t find a girlfriend while Alice is a clothes designer with a doting younger husband, nicely played by Joel Fry, a sweetie-pie of a teenage son — that’s Tyrese Eaton-Dyce — and, of course, that 26-year-old daughter, Izzy, who has inherited her mother’s willfulness. Played by Yali Topol Margalith, Izzy kickstarts the plot by flirting with Steve. Predictably, he succumbs.
Almost immediately, they think they’re in love. While the weak-willed Steve wants to hide their romance — he knows it’s inappropriate — Izzy just blurts out the facts to her mom. Alice flips. And from hereon out in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hangdog, Alice drives the action. Betrayed and violently angry, she’ll do whatever it takes to break them up — no matter who gets hurt. Her antics unleash Steve’s own malice. We’re in Beef territory.
At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones. It’s a fascinating subject, which may be why I found the script by Sophie Goodhart so frustrating. I wanted her to dig deeper. While the show’s got some very funny bits — Alice’s sharp-tongued mother is a blast — it’s often annoyingly lax.
If Steve really does the hair of Charli XCX, how come he’s a clueless older guy whose pop culture references are Willie Nelson and Woody Allen? If Izzy truly adores her mother as she claims, why does she keep rubbing her relationship with Steve in her mom’s face? Halfway through, one character nukes the other’s career, but this life-shattering event has no real weight: It’s barely even mentioned for the rest of the series.
That said, Alice and Steve is worth seeing for scenes like the one in which Steve spinelessly sells Izzy out or the lacerating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasps that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge, not a man she likes hanging with. Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice, wise for once, smooths a romantic crisis between her son and his would-be girlfriend, a pair who are the show’s emblem of hope. For once, we understand why people love her.
While most viewers will find Steve more likable than Alice — the show takes pains not to make him appear predatory or creepy — the role doesn’t give Clement a whole lot to do except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort. The show gets its galvanizing zing from Walker, a beloved star in England with amazing, luminous eyes. Her Alice is the kind of complicated, volcanic heroine that you don’t see in movies and rarely see on TV, one who shows her apocalyptic rage freely and in many different forms.
At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, “Man, is this show a mess.” But that wasn’t a deal breaker. I kept watching. After all, life is messy, too.
How to enter your Sporty Spice era.
Getty Images/quantic69/Olga Kurbatova/Anastasiia Zvonary/Photo Illustration by NPR
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Getty Images/quantic69/Olga Kurbatova/Anastasiia Zvonary/Photo Illustration by NPR
Reality dating and professional sports are not as different as you’d think.
Brittany is in her Sporty Spice era – she watched the NBA playoffs, she’s following World Cup games, and she’s watching the New York Liberty play their WNBA season. These games are daily – and so is the reality dating show Love Island. And she noticed that the two formats are not very different at all. Defector.com staff writer and co-owner Kelsey McKinney came to the same conclusion – so the two of them discuss why these games of athleticism and love can bring us together… and why they get valued differently in our culture.
For more episodes on sports and reality TV, check out:
Get rich or die trying: how sports betting is changing our love of the game
Is this the end of reality TV?
The ugly truth of America’s expensive homes
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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