Is it time to find new synonyms for Orwellian and Kafkaesque? In early 2001, I was trying to explain to some Dutch friends why Americans would never accept a population registry. In most of Europe, you need to register with the local municipality when you move from one place to another. This way the tax service, the police, the housing authority, the voter registration office, the post office, Dominos pizza and, of course, the government knows where you live.

?Americans would never accept this...? I explained, ??because we have an historical and philosophical individualism that inherently distrusts government.? As this program from American Radio Works posits, this was never true and no less so than now. In terms of radio making, American Radio Works certainly utilizes the twin weapons of sober presentation and cold, hard facts to create a chilling one hour listen. And timely too, as the government looks set to make a deal that will extend the patriot act.

As for the matrix, it exists. You may not have heard of it, but odds are it knows who you are. Echelon anyone?

The program comes neatly packaged according to the NPR clock and can be easily pegged to the current Patriot Act debates.

I take no pleasure in it, but cannot award more than 1 star to this program.

It started off badly with our host mispronouncing the word poignant (the 'G' is replaced by an ?ny? sound, sorry). The second thing I noticed was the poor sound quality. Host Dr. Shamaan C. C. Eagle takes herself very seriously: not only in tone, but also in distance from her mic. Dr. Shamaan, please put a few more inches between yourself and your microphone.

The topic and guest were interesting and timely. But a good host guides the guest into a linear story with relevant practical examples, and takes the role of devil's advocate. Here guest and host are too chummy. Ideas are never challenged and they both come off sounding esoteric and out of touch.

The end result is a program that sounds like the self-indulgence so common in the worst of community radio.

This review refers specifically to the "War and the Soul" program and no other program in this series.

A fascinating idea: brief first person essays from all walks of American life touched by the Vietnam War. They are read by the authors at a Buddhist retreat with each piece ending with a single chime from a bell: very effective. Some of the writing is outstanding and the readings are all honest and heartfelt. It is, of course, timely in the context of the mire in Iraq. "Litany 911" and "Soldier's Demons" are particularly compelling.
So why only three stars?

The sound quality is abominable! The levels are low, there is no treble and a background hiss is present through the whole thing. I listened to all the pieces and, while I was moved by the words, I also felt annoyed that technical laziness has taken much away from something that could have been great. PD's should audition the sound quality before programming.

"Ding! Turn the page." This highly informative and audiophonic production recounts the history of American innovation in a way that will make any American high school history teacher instantaneously want to add to their syllabi. Great speakers, reenactments and sound collages all make this an easy and interesting listen. However, radio stations may want to reserve this program for after school programming.

There's only one real downside: the presentation. It's slick and overly professional in the same way a Hollywood blockbuster's perfection can be sterile and off putting. Otherwise, a worthy effort.

Making religious programming is always a tricky business. The program maker must always ask him or herself the questions, "For whom am I making this: the converted or for the general public?" "Will this be an entertaining secular exploration or a sober religious exaltation or a bit of both?"

This program seems to have chosen for a hybrid which, frankly, doesn't work. Two clearly erudite men, one a rabbi, ploddingly discussing the fine points of history and Talmud as plaintive Semitic hymns pop in and out behind them. The idea is to distill the modern and religious significance of the Jewish Festival of Lights over the unfortunate length of an entire hour. I say unfortunate because the format of such meditative discourse is somewhat soporific.

Ironically, this show is a good example of the Jewish culture of endless argumentation about tiny Talmudic issues that is the ancient predecessor of the Jewish neuroses powering the comedic generator behind Seinfeld. This, however, isn't at all funny; it’s just long.

Men like these should be respected for their towering scholarship, but they need help producing engaging radio: a missed chance.

The BBC World Service is a fixture in my house. Its AM signal blasts across northwest Europe, so the quality of the signal is exceptional in my kitchen. The most welcome guest in the World Service's (alas) dwindling lineup of quality programming is "From Our Own Correspondent".

Why? It is merely this: simplicity. These are the insights and anecdotes too honest for the headlines. There is no music, no sound effects, nothing. There is merely straightforward storytelling that is erudite, professional and heartfelt. It it the antidote to today's rolling news. And because good storytelling is perennial, it is no wonder that it has survived five decades as a format.

If you are unfamiliar with FOOC, why not audition it as a podcast (there are 4 on my ipod right now).

In 1977, my mom, dad, sister and I were lounging around the pool at a Days Inn on a hot August afternoon in Florida when, rather unexpectedly, we witnessed the launch of Voyager 2. I was 10.

Since then I've been Voyager mad. Not only because they've shown us what our solar system's outer planets really look like, but also because the tiny, low-tech tin cans continue to send us data about the outer rim of the solar system, long after they've fulfilled their original missions.

It is then, no surprise I found the content of this hour-long discussion program generally fascinating. But it’s real hardcore science stuff, with guests including the former head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. If you like guy science, you’ll love this.

The second half of the show features an engaging discussion with a diabetes sufferer, guaranteed to charm the retired public to whom this program is marketed.

However, the program is not without a number of distracting flaws. The voyager interview, while illuminating, is devoid of any actuality and dry. Host Mike Cuthbert, while highly professional and an apt interviewer, has a rather old-fashioned, deep voiced presentational style I more associate with current commercial AM radio or an Edward R. Murrow broadcast. The opening fanfare and interstitial music would have sounded corny in the 60s. Now it just sounds clueless. The AARP funds this show so, who knows, the sound is likely calculated to fit the target audience.

Did you ever see “Journeys with George”? This documentary follows Dubya’s 2000 campaign through the eyes of a member of his press corps. The filmmaker was no friend of Dubya’s politically, but found it hard to resist his charming, engaging, friendly, accessible and down to earth style. In short, he was everything Al Gore was not. Now, lefties like me know that Al Gore had the better message for the average media user. And yet, no one was listening to him. Why? It was not what he was saying, but how. Because Al Gore could not frame his message in terms the average person could understand, few listened. The rest is history.
Cut to 2005. Media Reform in the United States and around the world is one of the most important issues of our day. This is particularly so in the context of the most media manipulative American government in recent history, and the current discussion in Congress regarding public broadcasting funding. Therefore, many kudos to the people of Making Contact for attempting to tackle the issue. It needs discussion. However, good radio is a happy marriage of form and function. Simply playing excerpts from speeches, however articulate the speakers may be, is dry stuff. Bone dry. Deadly. The irony is many of the speakers (the likes of Naomi Klein et al.) spoke of the need to reach broader audiences by speaking their language. Yet they did this cushioned in the idiom of academic intellectuals, dooming themselves to preach to the converted. And so it is with this program. It is a missed opportunity. One has to wonder if these speeches were actually intended for mass consumption and broadcast, at all.

Inspired! Put a booth somewhere central and invite people to record a moment from their lives. How easy is that! And how honest! Each little vignette is a glimpse into real life, not with the guilty surrealism of a reality series, but in a manner that is so pared down to the human level that absolutely everyone can relate.
It's true that genius sits in a corner, and StoryCorps proves it. Each piece is only around a minute. Do your listeners a favor and find a place to squeeze it into your schedule.

Mary Robinson has made a career of plain talking. It's the kind of talk so clear, so honest, so adiplomatic, one wonders why how it is she rose to the top of Irish and then world politics, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her plain talk won her fans around the world, as well as many enemies, including the US government, who are widely seen as having forced her resignation from the UN post. Why is she such an effective communicator? Because she has a gift for taking abstract, amorphous world issues, such as the rights of the child, and putting them in terms even a dunce like me can understand. Metaphors like, "Over 30'000 children die every day of preventable causes. That's a silent tsunami every 5 days" really bring it home.
She's a hero. And she has a real pretty voice too.

This documentary on the struggle for land reform in Brazil is a serious, well-made, professionally recorded thirty minutes. So what’s wrong with this program? The narration is read too fast, out of sync with the slow and plaintive music playing below it. The script text is very, very dense with acronyms, statistics and concepts belching by. Frankly, within about five minutes, I got lost. I know I was being lead somewhere I should care about, but I was simply too out of breath to follow. This is a shame because there’s a genuine story here and real snatches of talent that brightly spring out from in between the density of concepts and quick crossfades. My advice: go back and recut this program with a much slower pace, about a third of the scripted text and a much, much greater focus on these landless people. Make them real. Make me care about their plight. Convince me with their humanity and not the fact that agrobusiness is destroying tracts of cultivatable land the size of New Jersey with agrochemicals and monocrops. And, really, slow down with that narration.

Varied, utterly offbeat, somewhat gritty and highly listenable hour-long tour through the Bukowskiesqe creative underside of Southern California. Nice presentation too from a local radio maker who has a refreshingly extemporaneous style. On the downside, Pacific Drift is aptly named as it is very parochial. Don't care for Southern California? This is not for you. Also, the quality sometimes "drifts" into the amateur. Again, this will have charm for some but may exclude many listeners who have been weaned on the slick professionalism of NPR.
Highlights include all too short anecdotes with one of the former black extras from Gone with the Wind and a local artist who gets the better of Dick Clark. Worth a listen to see if it’s for you.

OK, so it's not suitable for air by any "reputable" public broadcaster interested in avoiding fines or protests from the more gray haired demographic. But it's funny. On the other hand, Howard Stern made a career out of making "bold" little ditties like this one. OK, so Howard Stern is a bad example when it comes to avoiding fines. But it's FUNNY. More than that, it's poignant and timely and pokes fun at the absurd situation we broadcasting grown ups seem to find ourselves in at the moment. Hey college stations! Are you out there? Maybe you morning drive time K-rocks would take a shot at this. Either way, it should be aired or, at the very least, added to a flash video animation and e-mailed all over the world. That'll teach 'em for messing with public broadcasting.

A beautiful nightmare: this is, I think, the right description for the sense of aural wonder induced by “Yesterday and Forever”. Ostensibly, the program is a simple retelling of the events of Pan Am Flight 103 through the eyes of the surviving wives of a number of businessmen. Yet this is anything but simple. “My sister said that I fell to my knees and that an animal-like sound came out of me that she has never heard before or since” says one woman. Other voices, harrowed, echo and sink like molasses into musical tones, chimes, poetry, or a single dark-brown baritone sax fading in. Voices shift from left to right. Yet the weaving is masterful and does not distract, but rather supports the interconnecting series of moments out of which this program is built. TAL or Next Big Thing in its sensibility, this program is a tour de force of the sonic personal narrative that seems to be gaining more airtime on American public radio. And that’s a good thing.

Abu Graib was no coincidence posits this interesting and solid hour of journalism from the Mainstream Media Project. The program points out the gross inconsistencies of, for example, the 3 strikes policy, the enormous expenditures and the failure to actually reduce crime. Far from rehabilitating the fallen, the American system takes the petty thief and returns him to society a hardened criminal. This is nothing new, but here it is, all in one place. The greatest inconsistency of all, so this program tells, is the failure to punish the white collar criminal, whose deeds affects thousands and costs millions.

My initial criticisms are limited to the odd hokey line, “My name is Mark Sommer. I’ll be your guide. Welcome to a world of possibilities.” Didn’t SNL mock clichés like this in the 70s?
Also, using Johnny Cash to illustrate a program on prisons is kind of an easy choice. More seriously, about a half hour in I realized those legislators responsible for creating this monstrous system were conspicuously absent. Did they get an opportunity to defend their creation? A certain balance is missing. Nonetheless, it’s an informative and serious hour well worth a listen.