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Radio Diaries

Radio Diaries & Radiotopia

First-person diaries, sound portraits, and hidden chapters of history from Peabody Award-winning producer Joe Richman and the Radio Diaries team. From teenagers to octogenarians, prisoners to prison guards, bra saleswomen to lighthouse keepers. The extraordinary stories of ordinary life. Radio Diaries is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm

society & culture documentary

All Episodes

16:19

This Short Life

Radio Diaries ·

2025/11/20

Today on the show, we sit down with photographer Andrew Lichtenstein to discuss his new book, THIS SHORT LIFE, which combines photo essays with audio testimonies about 12 Americans, from a West Virginia coal miner to a Maine farmer, all united by how the struggles of their past have shaped their present. You'll hear audio testimony from some of the people in the book.Buy THIS SHORT LIFE here. If you liked this story, find more of our work at radiodiaries.org and follow us on Bluesky,

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11:42

Detained: The Last Columbia Protester

Radio Diaries ·

2025/11/03

In April 2024, over 100 students were arrested during protests outside Columbia University, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Leqaa Kordia, a young Palestinian woman living in Paterson, New Jersey, was one of them.Kordia was let go after the protests. But months later, ICE officials took her into custody and put her on a plane to a detention facility in Texas. Kordia has now been detained there for more than seven months. She is the last Columbia protestor still in detention.Kordia's cousin,

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17:10

Identical Strangers

Radio Diaries ·

2025/10/23

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were both born in New York City and adopted as infants. When they were 35 years old, they met and found they were “identical strangers.”This story originally aired on NPR in 2007. Liked this story? Donate and find more of our stories at www.radiodiaries.org. Follow us @radiodiaries on Bluesky and Instagram. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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16:38

The Gospel Ranger

Radio Diaries ·

2025/10/02

This is the story of a song, "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." It was written by a 12-year-old boy on what was supposed to be his deathbed. But the boy didn't die. Instead, he went on to become a Pentecostal preacher, and later helped inspire the birth of Rock & Roll. The boy's name was Brother Claude Ely, and he was known as The Gospel Ranger.Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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16:41

The Working Tapes, Revisited

Radio Diaries ·

2025/09/18

In the early 1970s, author Studs Terkel interviewed the owners of Duke & Lee's Auto Repair in Geneva, Illinois, for his bestselling book, Working. He went to talk to them about fixing cars. What he found was a story about fathers and sons working together, and the tensions within a family business. We went back to Duke & Lee's four decades later and found the family business still intact—tensions and all.That was nine years ago. Recently, we heard that the family, and the auto shop,

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29:52

The Last Place

Radio Diaries ·

2025/08/07

When you spend so much of your life moving around, getting to the next chapter, what's it like to find yourself in the last place?This week, we revisit audio diaries from a retirement home.Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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16:30

The View from the 79th Floor

Radio Diaries ·

2025/07/28

Eighty years ago, on July 28, 1945, an Army bomber pilot on a routine ferry mission found himself lost in the fog over Manhattan. A dictation machine in a nearby office happened to capture the sound of the plane as it hit the Empire State Building at the 79th floor.Fourteen people were killed. Debris from the plane severed the cables of an elevator, which fell 79 stories with a young woman inside. She survived. The crash prompted new legislation that—for the first time—gave citizens the

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37:17

Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl, Revisited

Radio Diaries ·

2025/07/17

When we first met Majd Abdulghani, she was 19 years old, living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We gave her a recorder to keep an audio diary about her life. Majd chronicled her dreams of being a scientist, her resistance to having an arranged marriage, and what it was like to be a teenage girl living in one of the most restrictive countries in the world for women. Her story first aired in 2016.A lot has changed in Majd’s life over the past nine years. Last year, she completed her doctorate at

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14:14

The End of Smallpox

Radio Diaries ·

2025/06/30

Vaccines have been in the news recently. Over the last few weeks, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has changed vaccination recommendations and gutted an influential committee that recommends which shots Americans should get. Some experts worry that these changes could lead to outbreaks of diseases the US has long had under control.So this week, we're revisiting a story we made a few years ago about the world's very first vaccine, and the disease it helped eradicate: smallpox.Smallpox

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16:16

The Detainees of Crystal City

Radio Diaries ·

2025/06/13

To justify mass deportations, President Trump has invoked an old wartime law: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Alien Enemies Act was last used after America’s entry into World War II. In response to the Axis countries’ detainment of Americans who were deemed potential spies, the Roosevelt Administration came up with an elaborate plan: find and arrest Germans, Japanese and Italians living in Latin America and detain them in camps in the U.S. The government would use them to exchange for

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19:51

Prisoners of War

Radio Diaries ·

2025/05/01

It's been 50 years since the end of the Vietnam war. In honor of the anniversary, we're revisiting a story about a notorious American military prison on the outskirts of Saigon, called Long Binh Jail. LBJ wasn’t for captured enemy fighters—it was for American soldiers. These were men who had broken military law. And there were a lot of them. As the unpopular war dragged on, discipline frayed and soldiers started to rebel.By the summer of 1968, over half the men in Long Binh Jail were

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16:18

March of the Bonus Army

Radio Diaries ·

2025/04/17

Author James Baldwin once wrote, "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."On this episode, we go back to 1932 when a group of World War I veterans set up an encampment in Washington, D.C., and vowed to stay until their voices were heard. It was a remarkable chapter in American history, and a demonstration of the power of citizens to come together for a cause. This is the story of the Bonus

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16:14

The Girls of the Leesburg Stockade

Radio Diaries ·

2025/04/03

On July 19, 1963, at least 15 Black girls were arrested while marching to protest segregation in Americus, Georgia. After spending a night in jail, they were transferred to the one-room Leesburg Stockade and imprisoned for the next 45 days.Only twenty miles away, the girls' parents had no knowledge of their location. A month into their confinement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) heard rumors of the girls' detention and sent photographer Danny Lyon, who took pictures of

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37:20

Guest Spotlight: Signal Hill

Radio Diaries ·

2025/03/20

This week we're featuring a story from a brand new audio magazine we've been listening to called Signal Hill."Pie Down Here" features oral history interviews with farmworkers and Communist Party members who organized a sharecroppers' union in Alabama during the Great Depression. The interviews were recorded by historian Robin Kelley for his book, Hammer and Hoe.You can learn more about Signal Hill and check out the rest of their first issue—eight original stories—at signalhill.fm.Learn

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12:30

Making Waves: The Woman Who Warned The World

Radio Diaries ·

2025/03/06

In 1939, Time Magazine called Dorothy Thompson a woman who “thinks, talks and sleeps world problems — and scares men half to death.” They weren’t wrong. Thompson was a foreign correspondent in Germany in the years leading up to World War 2, and she broadcast to millions of listeners around the world. She became known for her bold commentaries on the rise of Hitler. The Nazis even created a “Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad” to monitor her work. She was an eloquent and opinionated advocate

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12:32

Making Waves: The Original Angry Talker

Radio Diaries ·

2025/02/28

These days, we’re used to media that thrives on conflict and amplifies the most outrageous voices in the room. It's something we often trace back to shock jocks, like Howard Stern, and in-your-face talk show hosts like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh. But before all those guys, there was Joe Pyne.At the height of his career in the 1960s, the New York Times called him “The ranking nuisance of broadcasting.” Today, episode two of our series Making Waves: The Original Angry Talker. Learn

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18:08

Making Waves: The Happy-Am-I Preacher

Radio Diaries ·

2025/02/20

In 1934, the Washington Post called Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, the “best known colored man in America.” He was known as the Happy-Am-I Preacher. His Sunday services were broadcast to over 25 million listeners on CBS radio. Black America saw Michaux as a leader for racial harmony and progress. But during the civil rights movement, his reputation took an unlikely turn.This is episode 1 of our new miniseries Making Waves, three profiles of people who pushed the boundaries of radio. They

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20:41

Sealab: A Home on the Ocean Floor

Radio Diaries ·

2025/01/16

From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean has long been both a source of fear and fascination. For Captain George Bond, a Navy medical officer in the 1960s, the deep sea was humanity’s next frontier. Undersea agriculture, deep sea mining, and human colonies on the ocean floor made up his dream for the future.Today we bring you the story of the U.S. Navy’s little-known experiment building homes on the ocean floor. They

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13:45

Guest Spotlight: The Memory Palace with Nate DiMeo

Radio Diaries ·

2025/01/09

Happy 2025! We have a slate of new stories coming soon, but we want to start the year by shouting out fellow podcaster (and friend of the show) Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace. He just put out his first book, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past. So to celebrate, we're featuring one of our favorite episodes from The Memory Palace, "These Words, Forever." Joe also sat down with Nate to chat about his book, storytelling and the dream of having a device that could allow you to

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21:08

Teen Contender

Radio Diaries ·

2024/12/23

If you follow boxing, you've heard of Claressa Shields. At the 2012 Olympics, she became the first American woman to win gold in boxing. She repeated the feat 4 years later, becoming the first American boxer — woman or otherwise — to win consecutive medals. Now, she's the subject of a new movie called The Fire Inside, tracing her journey to Olympic stardom.Claressa Shields' story was one of our earliest at Radio Diaries. We gave her a tape recorder and asked her to document her journey

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