WPR | The Saturday Special

The Saturday Special airs every Saturday at 3pm on Ideas Network stations and web streams.

This special hour allows us to bring you interesting, unusual and often provocative programs selected from stations and producers from around the world. Some programs are just a single hour, while others present a short series of related programs.

This program honors the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, highlighting recordings made by Peace Corps volunteers throughout the world during their service.

Soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan can be faced with obstacles and wounds not clearly visible to the rest of the country. These current wars also illuminate how veterans of previous eras are still trying to come home years after returning from war. For our Veterans Special, SOTRU explores how some veterans are learning to come home after returning from their service.

Where does our food come from? Since we pay close attention to so many aspects of food in the holiday season, host Majora Carter visits the northern reaches of the New York metropolitan area, where Cheryl Rogowski, a fourth-generation farmer, grows 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables. She will give us a tour of her farm, and we'll hear from people she works with in the many programs she has created . . . from mentoring migrant farmers to creating low-cost CSAs for senior citizens, from supplying food for soup kitchens to helping with innovative sustainable farming programs in local communities.

A broadcast of "Gratitude, Gravy & Garrison," VocalEssence's celebration of all things Thanksgiving. Garrison Keillor performs his signature monologue and contributes comic new lyrics to familiar songs and hymns.

September 24 - October 29, 2011

Radiolab is an investigation. Each program is a patchwork of people, sounds, stories, and experiences centered around One Big Idea. On Radiolab, science bumps into culture... information sounds like music.

September 24th - "Where Am I?"

OK. Maybe you're in your desk chair. You're in your office. You're in New York, or Detroit, or Timbuktu. You're on planet Earth. But where are you, really? This hour, Radiolab examines the bond between brain and body, and looks at what happens when it breaks. Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks tries to find himself using magnets, we talk to a neuroscientist who uses an optical illusion to solve a century-old mystery that haunts some amputees, and pilots describe surviving out-of-body experiences while flying fighter jets.

October 1st - "(So-called) Life"

In this episode, Radiolab, asks what is natural in a world where biology and engineering intersect. Biotechnology is making it easier and easier to create new forms of life, but what are the consequences when humans play with life? We travel back to the first billion years of life on Earth, take a look at how modern engineers tinker with living things, and meet a woman who could have been two people.

October 8th - "Stress "

Stress may save your life if you're being chased by a tiger. But if you're stuck in traffic, it may be more likely to make you sick. In this episode of Radiolab, a long hard look at the body's system for getting out of trouble. Stanford University neurologist (and part-time "baboonologist") Dr. Robert Sapolsky takes us through what happens on our insides when we stand in the wrong line at the supermarket, and offers a few coping strategies: gnawing on wood, beating the crap out of somebody, and having friends. Plus, the story of a singer who lost her voice, and an author stuck in a body that never grew up.

October 22nd - "Zoos"

In a cruel trick of evolution, humans can stand just three feet from a ferocious animal and still be perfectly safe. In this episode, Radiolab, goes to the zoo to ask what's with our need to get close to "wildness"? We examine where we stand in this paradox, starting with the Romans, and ending in the wilds of Belize...staring into the eyes of a wild jaguar.

October 29th - " Sp**m"

S**rm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this episode of Radiolab, some basic questions and profound thoughts about reproduction. To begin, why so many s**rm? We turn to the animal kingdom for answers, which lands us on a tour of s**rm battles in ducks, flying pig s**rm, and promiscuous whippoorwills. Then, we ponder fatherhood, and wonder...in a world where s**rm m can be frozen and kept for all eternity...what does the future holds for men? And we end quietly, with a widow struggling to keep some essence of her husband alive.

September 3 - 17

More people are going to college than ever before. But in the United States, about half the people who start don't finish. There are 37 million Americans with some college credits but no degree - more than 20 percent of the working-age population. In an economy that increasingly demands workers with knowledge and skills, many college dropouts are being left behind.

College students spend a lot of time listening to lectures. But research shows there are better ways to learn. And experts say students need to learn better because the 21st century economy demands more well-educated workers.

The most popular college major in America these days is business. Some students think it doesn't pay to study philosophy or history. But advocates of liberal-arts programs say their graduates are still among the most likely to become leaders, and that a healthy democracy depends on citizens with a broad and deep education.

July 30 - August 27, 2011

The Moth Radio Hour is old-fashioned storytelling on modern topics. Each episode presents a selection of the very best stories from The Moth, which has been staging live storytelling shows since 1997. The Moth Radio Hour features true stories told live on-stage without scripts, notes, props, or accompaniment. Each Moth Radio Hour mixes humorous, heartbreaking, and poignant tales that captivate, surprise, and delight audiences with their honesty, bravery, and humor.

Some of the very things you love about The Moth - that it's smart, provocative radio that addresses some difficult topics - is why it's not always appropriate for all audiences.

July 30
A journalist goes to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and witnesses the musical underground just starting to reemerge. A comedian talks seriously about how the rituals of Judaism helped her through some of her darkest hours. And The Reverend Al Sharpton has to put the doctrine of "Forgive Thine Enemy" to the test. Hosted by Mike Daisey and Jay Allison.

August 6
The star of television's long-running children's show, Blue's Clues, details his complicated relationship with fame. A 13-year-old girl from Somalia immigrates to the U.S. and thrives, but struggles to keep her troubled sister in the country. On the eve of her high school reunion, a woman learns that her husband, "thinks he might be gay." Hosted by Tom Shillue.

August 13
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Phil Caputo shares how a bullet wound helped him heal his soul. A little girl learns what love is about after surviving a terrible car accident. A young man and his father succumb to guilt at the animal shelter. And a burnt-out corporate executive tries to shake her A-type personality at art school. Hosted by Jenifer Hixson, Senior Producer at The Moth.

August 20
Double-amputee Aimee Mullins chronicles her adventures with prosthetic legs as an athlete, actress and artist. The mother of a bullied teen tells the story of his suicide. Ex-NYC Mayor Ed Koch stands up to his anti-Semitic platoon leader while in training for WWII. And three teenagers from Grace King High School in New Orleans share their stories on the theme, Prejudice and Power. Hosted by Sarah Austin Jenness, Producing Director at The Moth.

August 27
The Moth's founder, George Dawes Green, details the fireworks when his mother learns that her family plantation is slated to be turned into a theme park. The genesis story of a true bohemian, including two children, one spectacularly eccentric mother and Savannah, Georgia. And a guard at Sing Sing is intrigued by a prisoner's unusual and mysterious tattoo. Hosted by Catherine Burns, Artistic Director of The Moth.

July 9 - 23, 2011 - BackStory

BackStory presents a special three-part series on the causes and consequences of the war. Below are descriptions of each of the hour-long episodes, as well as links to the shows themselves.

As America launches its multi-year commemoration of the Civil War, it's easy to overlook the fact that back in the spring of 1861, disunion was anything but inevitable. This episode traces the dramatic six months leading up to the outbreak of war, and explores the complex layers of logic and emotion that Americans experienced as they looked into a very uncertain future.

As Slavery, in a word, was what brought on the Civil War. But in the spring of 1861, most Southerners didn't own slaves and only a tiny minority of Northerners were abolitionists. So how are we to understand the willingness of soldiers on both sides to take up arms against each other?

In this episode, the History Guys respond to listener questions about all aspects of The Civil War.

July 2, 2011

June 4 - July 2, 2011

June 4 - "The Church of Scionology"

About one-third of the companies in the Fortune 500 are family-controlled firms. The family firm is a way of life. And it's a nice story. But someday, it's inevitable that the founder will retire (or die). So who takes over then? When it comes to putting the family scion in charge of a company, here's what we wanted to know: what do the numbers say?

June 11 - "The Economist's Guide to Parenting"

Becoming a parent means entering one of the largest seas of advice known to man. Much of it is written by amateurs. Little of it has any connection to the tools that social scientists have forged to analyze human behavior. In this hour, we turn back this rollicking tide of misunderstanding with the hyper-rational, un-emotional techniques of the economist. We hear from a roundtable of entertaining and smart economists about what really matters as a parent and what doesn't.

June 18 - "The Suicide Paradox"

There are twice as many suicides in the U.S. each year than murders. And yet the vast majority of them aren't discussed at all. Unlike homicide, which is considered a fracturing of our social contract, suicide is considered a shameful problem whose victims -- and solutions -- are rarely the focus of wide debate. In this hour, we'll push back suicide taboos, profiling who is most likely to commit this act (and least likely), and what we know about them. African-Americans, for instance, commit suicide at half the rate of whites, for reasons tied to everything from racism to faith. And we'll consider the opinion of those who see suicide as a rational act. The biggest surprise -- the suicide paradox -- is that suicide rates rise as does a country's standard of living. To some, this makes suicide (gulp) a luxury good.

June 25 - "The Folly of Prediction"

It's impossible to predict the future, but humans can't help themselves. From the economy to the presidency to the Super Bowl, educated and intelligent people promise insight yet repeatedly fail by wide margins. These misses go unpunished, both publicly and in our brains, which have become trained to ignore the record of those who make predictions. In this hour, we'll dream of the day when the accuracy rate of pundits appears next to their faces on TV, and when the weather man who botched the 10-day forecast by 20 degrees has to make his next appearance soaking wet. We'll also look at the deep roots of divining what tomorrow brings, from religion to new understandings of how we make these decisions. Finally, we'll look at the kings of prediction ? those who risk modeling the future and make millions.

May 28, 2011

For Memorial Day, Green Beret and poet, Major Robert Schaefer, US Army, hosts the voices of veterans remembering their comrades. We hear from troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear interviews from StoryCorps, an essay from This I Believe, and the sounds of a Military Honor Guard, recorded by Charles Lane. And we attend the daily "Last Post" ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium.

April 23 - May 21, 2011

A public radio show about leaders and visionaries who are transforming lives and communities. This season we focus on people who are making a difference in their own communities along the Gulf Coast.

For Nat Turner, garden rakes and shovels are tools for transformation. He's transformed an old store in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward into an urban Eden. Blair Grocery is now both a nontraditional school and an urban farm run by youth who've dropped out of mainstream education. Majora spends two days observing the teaching and training that makes the Blair Grocery Project a true innovation.

Vietnamese American fisherfolk in the Gulf region are trying to rebuild their lives, opening sustainable farms, gas stations, nail salons, and aquaponic projects, while also dealing with the mental anguish that surfaces when a lifetime on the water suddenly disappears.

Dr. Kyshun Webster is a man who gets things done. And before that, he was a kid who got things done. Now the founder and executive director of Operation Reach, an extensive family of programs for kids throughout the Gulf South, Kyshun has been working to improve his community since he was a kid himself. Majora joins Kyshun as he returns to his childhood roots to explain the inspiration for his 20 years of inspiring youth to greatness.

Chemist Wilma Subra has spent her career defending local communities against Louisiana's powerful oil and gas industry. Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, her phone hasn't stopped ringing. Majora Carter spends a day with Subra as she takes water and sediment samples and meets with community members whose concerns are now the focus of her investigation.

When Hurricane Katrina hit East Biloxi, Mississippi, it destroyed Sharon Hanshaw's home and the hairdressing business she had built over a lifetime. It also transformed her from cosmetologist to activist.

April 2 - 16, 2011

April 2 - "Help!"

What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own. We meet a Cold War negotiator who, in order to quit smoking, backs himself into a tactical corner, and we visit a clinic in Russia where patients turn to a radical treatment to help fight their demons. Plus, Elizabeth Gilbert on doing battle with your muses.

April 9 - "The Soul Patch"

In this episode of Radiolab, stories of unlikely (and surprisingly simple) answers to seemingly unsolvable problems. We get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check. Then, Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close, who are both face-blind, share workarounds that help them figure out who they're talking to. And a senior center stumbles upon an unexpected way to help Alzheimer's patients . . . by building a bus stop.

April 16 - "Desperately Seeking Symmetry"

This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence - from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror. Along the way, we look for love in ancient Greece , head to modern-day Princeton to peer inside our brains, and turn up an unlikely headline from the Oval Office circa 1979.

March 19 - April 16, 2011

March 19 - "The Good Show"

In this episode, a question that haunted Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, why would one creature stick its neck out to help another? Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

March 26 - "Lost and Found"

In this episode, Radiolab steers its way through a series of stories about getting lost, and asks how our brains, and our hearts, help us get home. We meet a woman who has spent her entire life getting lost, and go to a military base in New Jersey to learn about some amazing feats of navigational wizardry. Finally, we turn to a very different kind of lost and found: a love story about running into a terrifying, and unexpected, fork in the road.

March 5, 2011

Making electricity in America pumps out more greenhouse gases than all of our cars, trucks, planes, and ships combined. Half of our electricity comes from burning coal. From American RadioWorks, a look at the roots of our addiction to coal, and how the fuel we burn has changed American culture and history.

March 12, 2011

Hosted by Katie Davis, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound celebrates tales from some of public radio's most venerated independent story-makers -- Ira Glass, The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson) and Jay Allison. The program, produced by Atlantic Public Media, is from a live event recorded at WGBH Boston in Fall 2010 and inspired by the book of the same name edited by producer John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth.

February 5 - 26, 2011

Black History Month is a remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African American people. This month, WPR offers three programs from American RadioWorks, and a special program from poet Maya Angelou.

From American RadioWorks: Public speech making has played a powerful role in the long struggle by African Americans for equal rights. This collection, for the ear and the eye, highlights speeches by an eclectic mix of black leaders. Their impassioned, eloquent words continue to affect the ideas of a nation and the direction of history.

From American RadioWorks: Mississippi led the South in an extraordinary battle to maintain racial segregation. Whites set up powerful citizens groups and state agencies to fight the civil rights movement. Their tactics were fierce and, for a time, very effective.

From American RadioWorks: More than half a century after Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, African Americans and Latinos are still struggling with an unequal transit system.

Maya Angelou celebrates Black History Month in this one-hour special with discussions on film, the meanings behind African American comedy, and stories from her childhood, civil rights and poetry.

January 1 - 29, 2011

Radiolab is an investigation. Each program is a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea. On Radiolab, science bumps into culture... information sounds like music.

In this hour of Radiolab, we question what decides the trajectory of our lives--individual force of will, or fate?

If destiny isn't written in the stars, could it be written in our genes? Kids struggle to resist marshmallows, and their ability to holdout at age 4 turns out to predict how successful they're likely to be the rest of their lives. And an unexpected find in a convent archive uncovers early warning signs for dementia in the writings of 18-year-olds.

There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.

What is music? Why does it move us? How does the brain process sound, and why are some people better at it than others?

We re-imagine the disastrous debut of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in 1913 through the lens of modern neurology, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work.

If you look closely, you'll find that humor has very little to do with it. We ask what makes us laugh, and how it affects us. Along the way, we tickle some rats, listen in on a baby's first laugh, talk to a group of professional laughers, and travel to Tanzania to investigate an outbreak of contagious laughter.

This hour of Radiolab: birds do it, bees do it...yet science still can't answer the basic question: why do we sleep?

Every creature on the planet sleeps--from giant humpback whales to teeny fruit flies. What does it do for us, and what happens when we go without? We take a peek at iguanas sleeping with one eye open, get in bed with a pair of sleep-deprived new parents, and eavesdrop on the uneasy dreams of rats.

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November 2011

September 24 - October 29, 2011

September 3 - 17

Tomorrow's College

July 30 - August 27, 2011

The Moth Radio Hour

July 9 - 23, 2011 - BackStory

The Civil War: 150 Years Later

July 2, 2011

June 4 - July 2, 2011

Freakonomics Radio

May 28, 2011

Hearing Voices: "For the Fallen"

April 23 - May 21, 2011

The Promised Land

April 2 - 16, 2011

March 19 - April 16, 2011

March 5, 2011

"Power and Smoke: A Nation Built on Coal"

March 12, 2011

"Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound"

February 5 - 26, 2011

Celebrating Black History Month

January 1 - 29, 2011