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Playlist: News Station Picks for August '10

Compiled By: PRX Curators

 Credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/39046851@N08/4581150872/">Mutasim Billah</a>
Image by: Mutasim Billah 
Curated Playlist

Here are August picks for news stations from PRX News Format Curator Naomi Starobin.

What Naomi listens for in news programming.

Maybe these slow news days of August have you thinking about something fresh, new and lively. Well, you can’t give each of your listeners a yappy puppy, but how about a new series? Great stuff out there. I had a look around on PRX and it was hard to pick just a few. This list displays a range from series with short interstitial pieces that you can plug in to a news magazine or show, to longer ones that would make great choices for weekend hours that right now just aren’t quite dazzling your audience. Have a listen!

Volunteers and Design

From Smart City Radio | 59:00

This is one in the series from Smart City Radio. All of the pieces are about cities...sometimes specific cities and how people are dealing with particular problems (Detroit, Syracuse), and other segments, like this one, are issue-oriented. These are heady and intellectual, and well-suited for an audience that is concerned or curious about urban life and its future.

It's hosted by Carol Coletta.

Default-piece-image-1 Ten years ago, two undergrads from Yale noticed the fundamental gap between their university and the community surrounds it.  To bridge this divide they formed the volunteer training organization that's now known as LIFT.  We'll speak with Ben Reuler, the executive director of LIFT, about harnessing the energy of students to engage them in the community and help combat poverty.

And...

Good design can do many things, but can it change the world?  My guest Warren Berger has written a book on how design is doing just that.  The book, titled Glimmer,  shows how design in action addressing business, social, and personal challenges, and improving the way we think, work, and live.

Unconventional Archaeology -- Groks Science Show 2010-07-28

From Charles Lee | Part of the Groks Science Radio Show series | 29:42

For that half-hour time slot, go science! Lots of lively interviews in these segments, along with commentaries and a question-of-the-week. This series is produced in Chicago and Tokyo by Dr. Charles Lee and Dr. Frank Ling, who also host the show. They are natural and curious, and lean toward short questions and long answers.

There are pieces on cancer-sniffing dogs, outsmarting your genes, number theory, ant adventures, and lots more, displaying great breadth.

It's geared to listeners who are interested in science...no college level inorganic chem required.

Grokscience_small Archaeology is often portrayed as a romantic adventure to the remote corners of the globe. But, what is the life of an archaeologist really like? On this program, Dr. Donald Ryan discussed unconventional archaeology.  For more information, visit the website: www.groks.net.

Are Freckles Just Cute or Something More?

From Dueling Docs | Part of the Dueling Docs series | 02:02

Dueling Docs is a great idea, well executed. Each two-minute piece answers a simple medical or health question. The host, Dr. Janice Horowitz, lays out a question (Should you get cosmetic surgery? Is dying your hair bad for you? Can stretching make you more prone to injury?), presents opposing views, and concludes with advice.

This would fit in nicely during a weekend or weekday news show. A good two minutes.

Duelingdocs_prx_logo_medium_small While the rest of the media doesn't bother to challenge the latest news flash, Dueling Docs always presents the other side of a medical issue, the side that most everyone ignores.  Janice gets doctors to talk frankly about controversial health matters - then she sorts things out, leaving the listener with a no-nonsense take-home message

Reading Russian Fortunes

From Rachel Louise Snyder | Part of the Global Guru Radio series | 03:03

This series, Global Guru, claims to "ask one simple question -- just one -- about somewhere in the world." Those questions have included: "How do the Hopi bring rain to the desert?" "How and why do Thai people categorize their food?" "Why are there so many barbershops in Tanzania?" This is a great series of three-minute pieces you can squeeze into just about any hour. Rachel Louise Snyder out of Washington, DC is the producer. She says "each week, our mandate is to surprise listeners." Your listeners would say she succeeds.

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The Global Guru is a weekly public radio show that seeks to celebrate global culture, particularly in countries where Americans have either single narrative story lines, like Afghanistan (war), Thailand (sex tourism), Rwanda, (genocide), or perhaps no story lines at all, like East Timor, Moldova, Malta, Lesotho, etc. Engaging and rich in sound, the 3:00 interstitial seeks to enrich our collective understanding of the vastness of human experience. Presenting station is WAMU in Washington, DC and sponsored by American University in DC. Some of our favorite past shows include: How do Cambodians predict the harvest each year? How did Tanzania become the capitol of barbershops? How and why does Thailand categorize food? What is Iceland’s most feared culinary delight? How do you track a Tasmanian devil? What are the hidden messages in Zulu beadwork?

A Way with Words (Series)

Produced by A Way with Words

Public radio listeners, as you know, are curious and intelligent. And they are, as you know, sticklers for language. Satisfy their curiosity with this hour-long series. It's hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, who talk about word usage and origin, and take questions from callers. Often those questions center around a word or expression that the caller recalls from childhood and is curious about. The mood is informal and the hosts joust a bit in a friendly way with their answers.

Most recent piece in this series:

Off the Turnip Truck (#1532)

From A Way with Words | Part of the A Way with Words series | 54:00

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The new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is a smart, engaging, introduction to language and linguistics in general. It's also rich with insights about how we communicate online. With verve, wit, and nerdy delight, linguist Gretchen McCulloch demonstrates that the internet isn't at all destroying language. Instead, language in the digital age has forked into formal and informal versions, and the addition of emojis adds a whole new layer of nuance.
Nadine in San Antonio, Texas, disagrees with her boyfriend, who insists that the word surprise suggests something inherently good, so it's impossible to call something a bad surprise. A quick look at data from the Brigham Young University corpora of English-language, however, shows that he's wrong. The word surprise keeps company with plenty of negative words in English, such as nasty, unpleasant, and yes, bad. 
If you're mafted, then you're exhausted -- especially if it's due to heat, crowds, or exertion. Mafted is a Britishism, and its origin is unknown. 
Sam from St. Paul, Minnesota, says his dad often used the expressions Do you think I just fell off the turnip truck? and I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, meaning "I'm not naive" or "Do you think I was born yesterday?" Turnips have long been associated with supposedly unsophisticated rustic folk, and the phrase fall off the turnip truck conjures an image of country bumpkins piling into the back of a truck to bring their crop to market in the big city. During his years on The Tonight Show, TV talk-show host Johnny Carson often used this alliterative phrase. 
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has crafted a puzzle about cocktails with rhyming names. For example, in Jackson or Biloxi, you might be served a libation inspired by the long-haired subculture of the 1960s. What drink would that be?
Sherry from Green Bay, Wisconsin, remembers that whenever she balked at doing a chore as a kid, her grandmother would say If ifs and ands were pots and pans, a tinker would have no trade. Her grandmother was suggesting that merely paying lip service to something doesn't get the task done. Another version goes If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands. A still longer version:  
If wishes were horses, then beggars could ride / If turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side / If ifs and ands were pots and pans / There would be no work for tinkers. Dandy Don Meredith often recited a similar a somewhat similar phrase about wishful thinking that involved candied nuts. 
The term fair game, meaning someone or something that's a legitimate target for criticism derives from old laws governing the hunting of wildlife.
Amber in Mansfield, Texas, has a friend from London, England. After she moved to the States, the friend was surprised to find that when she's conversing with strangers from the United States, they'll drop in stereotypical British terms like Right-o or Cheerio! and even shift their accent to sound more like her. Why do people mimic other people's accents? Some of this behavior may simply be thoughtlessness, but it could also be an earnest, if awkward, attempt to communicate. 
Paul in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has long been mystified by the title Commander-in-chief. Why, he wonders, isn't it Commander and chief? The title Commander-in-chief is a vestige of French military titles, specifically the construction en chef, which denotes the top officer. The same construction appears in the title Editor-in-chief. The French term, in turn, goes back to Latin caput, or "head," and a relative of capital.
In baseball lingo, to dial 8 is to hit a home run. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the expression arose back when traveling baseball players had to dial the number 8 on a motel phone in order to begin a long-distance call.
It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, advocated answering with  Ahoy!, while Thomas Edison argued for Hello. As linguist Gretchen McCullough says in her excellent new book Because Internet, this disagreement is worth remembering when we think about how other forms of greeting are evolving. Today older speakers of English might hesitate to greet someone with Hey, but younger people tend to be perfectly comfortable with it. 
A high-school teacher in Los Angeles, California, says many of his teaching colleagues have different opinions about how to handle profanity among teenagers. The simplest solution is to prohibit all taboo language in the classroom, but acknowledge that the rules will likely differ in other contexts.
A listener who grew up in Ukraine recalls that her family always referred to chicken drumsticks by a name that translates as Bush's legs. This jocular term refers to an agreement between U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev struck in 1990, during a time of scarcity in the Soviet Union. The agreement called for frozen chicken to be sent from the United States to help stock empty store shelves. Years earlier, under the Lend-Lease program, powdered eggs sent to Russia came to be known by a Russian name that translates as Roosevelt's eggs. 
Elizabeth from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wonders why some people say Charlie's dead to indicate to someone that her slip is showing. No one knows which Charlie this expression refers to. Similar euphemisms include It's snowing down south, Your Monday is longer than your Tuesday, and You have a Ph.D. 
 
This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.