Sounds like “Whaddya Know? with Michael Feldman”! I loved that show! PRI cancelled it in 2016, but he’s been keeping it alive in Podcast form, at least under that name. The format isn’t the same, so it’s not as fun to listen to.
That was broadcast from Madison, Wisconsin. Feldman grew up in Milwaukee, I think, and he had been a D.J. or a teacher in Chicago at some point.
It’s kind of funny that he’s doing a podcast now, because he would routinely make fun of the internet and E-mail on his show. He wanted people to call in. He didn’t want E-mail.
For music, I’m almost exclusively MeTV FM, at the bottom of the dial, 87.7. In fact, not all radios can tune that low as I found out when I borrowed my dad’s car for a week one time. I routinely hear new songs or songs clouded in mist from my youth.
In what I recall as the “promposal” segment, reporter Elna Baker is talking about this one community where this kind of elaborate activity goes on. She also mentions that this is a community dominated by devout Mormons, and she also mentions that she was also at one time prone to grand gestures, until she left behind her strict Mormonism and started having sex.
It’s not surprising at all, but it’s not something that occurred to me until she mentioned it. That “revelation” has stuck with me.
And this isn’t something you could prove one way or another, but just to say it, you have these kids who are forbidden to drink or have sex. Maybe that’s one reason that their feelings for each other play out with these elaborate schemes, right? And that made sense to Elna.
Elna Baker
Yeah. No, I definitely-- once I started having sex, I stopped doing grand gestures. Because I was like, oh, turns out you can just-- [MUMBLING] You know? You could just have sex with someone.
Here’s another “This American Life” story that has stuck with me: “Sucker Mc-Squared,” about a mechanic who is convinced that he has proved Einstein’s theory of relativity wrong and can’t be persuaded by an actual physicist that he lacks the basic grasp of principles that would allow him to understand it: 293: A Little Bit of Knowledge - This American Life
I think about this a lot when I run into a situation in which someone is absolutely wrong about something, but you just can’t talk em out of es self-delusion. It makes me think about how this kind of phenomenon must be affecting society in so m any ways.
Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me is a must-listen every week. One of the things I like is that, despite nominally being a game show, nobody really cares about the contest side of it. A couple of the regular panelists seem to make a point disregarding who is ahead. Paula Poundstone may or may not know much what current event they are discussing, but often has an interesting response. And Maeve Higgins seems to show up having not watched the news at all that week, cheerfully gets most of the questions wrong and comes across as funny and whimsical.
I will also listen to Fresh Air if the topic is even remotely interesting to me. Terry Gross is wonderful in all the ways people have mentioned up thread, but I have one more:
She gets on with the show without making it about her, or rambling endlessly before the interview. It’s usually, “I’m Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air.” So many other programs / podcasts have a lot of dross in the lead-up.
I listen only in the car but while in the car, I listen to almost nothing else. I have a 20 minute commute so in the morning its news and in the afternoon “Fresh Air”. This American Life and Radio Lab if I’m driving any distance on the weekends. “Regular” radio is obnoxious with the morning “jocks” and their juvenile humor and non-stop commercials. There also seems to be a lot of right wing, Fox News style radio. I miss Click and Clack.