Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Life
Graphic
Listen

Featured story: Meet Miss Subways

Beauty pageants promote the fantasy of the ideal woman. But for 35 years, the Miss Subways contest in New York City celebrated the everyday working girl.

Graphic
Listen

Featured story: The Gospel Ranger

Outside the Appalachian mountains, his name was barely known. But Claude Ely influenced some of the pioneers of rock & roll.

Graphic
Listen

Featured story: Mandela’s Election: 30 Years Later

Mandela was a lawyer, freedom fighter, leader of the African National Congress, and finally, president.

History
Graphic
History
Graphic
History
Graphic

Diaries We give people tape recorders and help them document their own lives in their own words

Graphic

My So-Called Lungs (Revisited)

Laura Rothenberg tried to live a normal life, with lungs that betrayed her and the awareness that she might not live to see her 30th birthday.

Listen
Graphic

Sofia’s Choice: A Ukrainian Diary

Sofia’s mother Vita was living in Kharkiv, Ukraine when Russian forces invaded. The family is now faced with an difficult choice.

Listen

Portraits Extraordinary stories from ordinary places

Graphic

The Final Frontline

Fourth generation funeral directors reflect on their experience of the coronavirus pandemic and prepare for a second wave.

Listen
Graphic

Lockdown in Lockup

Moe Monsuri shares his experience of the pandemic from behind bars at Sing Sing prison. Part of our new series Hunker Down Diaries.

Listen

Histories Exploring the past to tell the History of Now.

Graphic

Identical Strangers

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.”

Listen
Graphic

The View From the 79th Floor

On the Radio Diaries Podcast, we tell the story of the plane that crashed into the Empire State Building.

Listen
css.php