It's been a decade since Air released their debut album, Moon Safari. That modest release has had echoes that continue a decade later with artists like Zero 7, Goldfrapp and many more taking notes from Air's retro music for the future. Pulling sounds from old Moog synthesizers, Fender Rhodes pianos and vocoders, Air articulated a mix of cocktail cool and serenely surreal pop that hasn't dated a second. Moon Safari has just been re-released in a deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition. We go back to our 1998 interview with Air and see how prescient they were about their music.

City X is a history of the modern shopping mall through perspectives of people living in a real, yet unnamed, city. Using a sound rich audio mosaic of observations and ruminations, all scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or for worse. City X was commissioned by Hearing Voices radio with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It was first broadcast (in a shortened form) on NPR's Living on Earth in November, 2004. The version presented here is the full length version of the piece It has been heard on: NPR's Living on Earth WUIS's Living in Illinois WBEZ's re:Sound Third Coast Festival website (www.thirdcoastfestival.org) PRX podcast

Josh McPhee, a Chicago-based street artist and Author of "Stencil Pirates" took time to speak with me after a lecture in Portland, Maine. Stencils, unlike traditional hip-hop graffiti are quick and easy ways to pepper an urban landscape with messages. They often employ a certain base language--a picture and text. Most often people can't help but read and absorb the message as they walk by. Mcphee points out that street art, unlike art in galleries reaches a wider cross section of people for whom art may not be a part of their daily lives.

Maps set us up to face a profound existential challenge: They can tell us "you are here" -- complete with star and arrow -- but what they're pointing to is "there" on the map. Independent producer Jackson Braider talks with two enthusiasts who tell us that maps are far more than tools to tell us how to get there from here. Ronald Grim is the curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library whose recent "Journeys of the Imagination" exhibition offered 50 different ways of seeing the world. Dennis Cosgrove, professor of geography at UCLA, reminds us that "war is God's way of teaching geography to Americans."

The first of an award winning two-part show on Alaska's Tongass National Forest. Part One looks at the natural history of the Tongass. (Part Two looks at the contentious legacy of logging on the Tongass.) From the script: "Maybe it's the fluidity of this place, the way the rain softens hard edges, that gives the Tongass a knack for teaching connections: how salmon connect to trees, how trees connect to caves, how an intact, healthy ecosystem flows within itself, cycle within cycle." The Tongass aired on Living On Earth and won first place for Broadcast Feature Reporting in 2002 from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Long before the head of the James Beard Foundation was caught cooking the books, and long before the Foundation was even created, James Beard was cooking – cooking up a food revolution, that is. In the 1940s & 50s when the nation was reveling in American Jell-O salads, cocktail wiener canapes, and Pepsi-Cola Cakes, James Beard was busy creating local, seasonal American dishes, launching a revolution in food that is now only starting to be realized. Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, food historian Betty Fussell, Alfred A Knopf editor Judith Jones, and NYU food studies professor Marion Nestle join restaurant consultant and author Clark Wolf, in an intimate discussion about Beard’s life and the enormous influences of this remarkable chef.