FEATURE:

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot present the best albums of 2013. They talk about favorite releases by Savages, Chance the Rapper, Upset and more. Listeners from Willowbrook, IL, Minneapolis, MN and Denver, CO call in to share their number one albums.

YOUR SOUND OPINIONS:

At the end of the show we hear comments from listeners.

A lot of life happens in two decades. 

Back in the 1990s, Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman gave tape recorders to a handful of teens and asked them to report on their own lives.

Despite Marc’s wishes to the contrary, Jon Hamm is not much like Don Draper at all. In a Cat Ranch chat, Jon reveals what it was like to grow up in St. Louis, why he hung around a lot of alternative comedy shows in the 90s, and why a role on Mad Men saved his career.

Then Bryan Cranston talks to Marc about what led him to the role of Walter White in Breaking Bad. Along the way he almost became a cop, worked alongside some carnies, and was briefly wanted for murder.

Award-winning former American RadioWorks’ producer Sasha Aslanian explores the "divorce revolution" of the 1970s through the perspective of kids--like herself--who lived through it, and experts who have had three decades to make sense of it.

This program debuted on Minnesota Public Radio and received a torrent of positive listener calls and comments, and earned the top hits on the station’s web site. Listeners connected deeply with the topic and voices and wanted to contribute their own stories. Highly listenable, engaging and at times, humorous, consider airing “Divorced Kid” over the holiday season as families get together, or anytime in 2010. Newscast compatible and audio promos available.  Full web build-out at www.americanpublicmedia.org/divorcedkid

Using a lively blend of first-person storytelling, (surprising scenes like playing the reel-to-reel audio of her own parents' wedding vows back to them), interviews with Avery Corman, the author of Kramer vs. Kramer, and revisiting the now-grown kids who wrote "The Kids Book of Divorce" in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1979, the first half of the documentary reports on the lessons learned from the 1970s.
 

The second half of the program examines how the experience of divorce has changed for kids since the 70s. We hear the voices of 4^th and 5^th graders in a court-mandated class for kids in Minneapolis as they learn how to avoid “divorce traps” kids can fall into. Aslanian follows one of the kids in the class, 10-year-old Lizzy, as she gets a new stepmom, half-brother and stepbrother, and enters adolescence. The program also features judicial reforms to improve divorce.

 Note: Promos need tags. :23 + :06 music tails.

This 22-minute piece explores divorce and its lingering effects. It is the same story told through four different voices and perspectives: my own and that of my three older siblings (David, Crys, and Derek). They all stayed with Dad, experiencing a fairly quick re-marriage and relocation in the midst of their high school years. I alone moved with Mom. 

Psychological research shows that there are a number of long-term effects that children of divorced parents experience, many of which are common across family circumstance. As such, the piece proves relatable and potentially cathartic for a wide-ranging listening audience. 

My primary content sources are long-form narrative interviews with each of my siblings, supplemented by audio from old cassette tapes and conversations with my parents. Audio-only work provides an intimacy especially suited for this topic as listeners can internalize whatever image best suits their own schema—allowing for deeper connection and identification. 

Sealing: An ordinance performed in the temple eternally uniting a husband and wife, or children and their parents
Glossary, www.mormon.org 

In the winter of 1902, twelve robust, young men in suits gather in the basement of a government building in Washington DC.  Waiters serve them dinner prepared by chefs, courses like chipped beef and applesauce, served on fine china. The room and board is free.  The men eat what is served, though they know each course has been spiked with a dose of some unnamed poison.  They do this every day, three square meals a day, for the next six months.

The press named the group of men the “Poison Squad.”  Harvey Washington Wiley, the chemist who conceived this experiment, would go on to become the founding father of the FDA and the "Watchdog of America's Kitchens". A moral man, his heart with filled with righteous anger when confronted with tomatoes preserved in salicylic acid and eggs sprayed with formaldehyde.  His fight for "pure food" would span three vigorous decades, and he would take on tough opponents like Coca Cola or sodium benzoate, losing more often than he won.

This short radio documentary tells the story of Wiley and a colorful human experiment--one that began in a basement dining room and continues on our dinner plates today.

Editor and engineer: Brendan Baker

Jon Savage interviewed Kurt Cobain in 1993 for a profile that ran in The Observer. This interview has rarely been heard until now.

It's all here. Drinking tea with his mom. Realizing he was Irish. Wondering if he was gay. Dealing with his mom's homophobia. Hating on Zeppelin and Aerosmith. His stomach pain and anger that fed into his singing. And finding peace after his daughter was born.

The extended interview is available at RocksBackPages.com 

We travel the country and we travel in time in search of hidden kitchens and little-known corners of American food culture. From the Crossroads in Mississippi to the Birth of Rice-a-Roni in San Francisco. From the Sheepherder's Ball in the Basque Country in Boise to the Breadbasket of California's Central Valley. We hear kitchen stories and music from Michael Pollan, Rosemary Clooney, Robert Johnson, Super Chikan and more.

Entertaining, surprising, and soulful, a Kitchen Sisters' portrait of American life through food.

Some of the stories that are heard in this richly-layered documentary hour include: 

Kibbe at the Crossroads: A Delta Kitchen Vision: A story from the crossroads, in Clarksdale, Mississippi where barbeque, the blues and a kind of Lebanese meatloaf, meet.

Weenie Royale: Many hidden kitchen traditions come out of dark times, when surviving means adapting. We peer into a corner of America's not-too-distant past—the internment camps of World War II, where more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent—most American citizens—were incarcerated without trial for the duration of the war. Their homes, livelihoods, traditions and food taken from them. The Kitchen Sisters explore the impact of the internment on Japanese cooking and culture in America.  

The Sheepherder's Ball: Basque people fleeing Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain flocked to America. Many took jobs herding sheep across the West. We explore the world of Basque sheepherders and their outdoor, below-the-ground, Dutch oven cooking traditions.

Hidden Kitchen Mama: Kitchens and mothers. The food they cooked, or didn't. The stories they told, or couldn't.   

Breadbasket Blues: Travel down Interstate 5, straight into the agricultural heart of the California Central Valley, the nation's breadbasket, where the rates of juvenile obesity, type 2 diabetes and malnutrition are some of the highest in the country. The Kitchen Sisters explore some of the hidden causes of this epidemic and the local kitchen visionaries grappling with it.      

The Birth of Rice-a-Roni: Sometimes we find the story. Sometimes the story finds us. Nikki sat down next to this one at an NPR event in the Napa Valley. We were onstage interviewing Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. The topic was corn, and we played a little excerpt from our Hidden Kitchen story on the 1930s kitchen visionary who invented the Frito. Over dinner, the 80-year-old woman seated by Nikki confided that she too had a hidden kitchen, and began to tell the complicated saga of the birth of Rice-a-Roni.

And we take a little detour to visit Mozart's Hidden Kitchen.

Hidden Kitchens: The Raw & The Cooked. Stories from across America about the transformative power of food. With host, Academy Award-winning actress, Frances McDormand.