This past weekend, the Wisconsin Public Radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge aired its final episode. TTBOOK was something truly rare: a show that ran for 35 (!!) years and took an honest, thoughtful approach to interviewing some of the most significant writers and thinkers of our times. Now, as both public media and the podcast industry seem to be crumbling, the fact that a show like TTBOOK could be on the air for so long and reach so many people feels like nothing short of a miracle. Even more of a miracle, perhaps, is that the entire run of the show has been archived at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. There's enough audio in there to last a lifetime.
Working for this show changed my life. Back in 2013, I was living in State College, Pennsylvania. Penn State was four years removed from being rated the nation’s #1 party school (shout out to this legendary TAL episode), and it was still simmering from the Joe Paterno scandal and its fallout. I had a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship, which was both amazing and stressful. As you might guess, in a one-year job, you spend a lot of that year applying for your next job.
I applied to teaching gigs, to more fellowships, and then, to one thing that was different from the others, an ACLS Public Fellowship (now called ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships). The idea of the fellowship is simple: take recent grad students and give them jobs outside of the academy. In any given year, there are 20-30 organizations that apply to host a fellow and a billion desperate grad students who apply for those positions. That year, there was a posting to be a digital producer at a public radio show. I sent in my application.
The next few steps are obvious but were nonetheless thrilling: emails, phone calls, visiting Madison. Long story short, I got the gig.
When I started at TTBOOK, there were seven people on the staff: Steve Paulson was the executive producer, Anne Strainchamps was the host, Caryl Owen was the mixing engineer, and the producers were Doug Gordon, Charles Monroe-Kane, Sara Nics, and Rehman Tungekar. This is probably obvious, but working on a nationally syndicated show is not, in normal circumstances, an entry-level public radio position. These folks were pros; they had been cutting tape and filing stories for years. But they welcomed me with a spirit of generosity, and over the course of my two years there, they shared a lot of that accumulated knowledge with me. It's hard to overstate how much I learned just from being in their orbit. Nearly every single thing I know about how to do interviews, edit, write, score, sound design, and mix came from this group of people.
So over the last few days, as I listened to their last show and thought about my work there, a few moments stood out that I wanted to share here. These are almost certainly not the best or most impactful segments of the show that aired during my time there, but each of these little pieces of audio marked a moment in time in a very transformational two years of my life.
Nicholas Felton on Life and Data
(web link)
When I started at TTBOOK, I was the digital producer, which meant I took the audio from the show and made it work on the web: added metadata, put it on the website, turned it into articles and social media posts. But of course—of course!—I also wanted to make some radio. This interview is from the first episode that I worked on as an audio producer, called "The Quantified Self." At the time, I was really interested in "lifelogging" and automated journaling (kind of still am), and I wanted to get data collection and visualization guru Nicholas Felton as a guest on the show.
Working on this interview was the first time I really, really understood the mechanics of good audio editing. Sara Nics, who produced this segment with me, did an amazing job in the interview and then an even more amazing job turning it into something interesting in the edit.
For this whole show, we were circling around some central questions: why track data about yourself or others? Is it just a new way of asking the age-old question, "What is the meaning of life?" And Sara got Felton to go there, in a line that ended up being the very end of the segment:
Perhaps if I collect just the right data, and represent it in just the right way, it'll all make sense.
The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
(web link)
In early 2015, we were working on an episode about extinction. Elizabeth Colbert had recently published The Sixth Extinction, and there was new research about people doing de-extinction cloning experiments. This was how TTBOOK shows worked—ideas circulated like nebulae until they coalesced into a fully-formed theme.
From my grad school research, I knew a lot about one almost-certainly extinct bird: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. So I worked on a little essay about James "Jim" Tanner, who was a grad student on a Cornell expedition in 1935. This was the last group of people to see—and hear!—a confirmed Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the wild.
So I'm pretty sure this was the first time my voice was on the air. I got some great help on this episode from two TTBOOK / WPR engineers: Joe Hardke, doing some voice acting, and Caryl Owen, doing the sound design and mixing.
Scott Carrier in Salt Lake City
(web link)
Before joining the show, I did some music and event promotion. So when TTBOOK decided to do a live event in Salt Lake City in 2015, I jumped at the chance to help out with the production. Everything about this turned out really great, but one of the coolest moments was the opportunity to see and hear one of my personal radio heroes on stage: Scott Carrier. Scott is a Utahn, and hearing him talk to Anne about his work while being in Salt Lake City...there was just something really special about it.
This interview never aired on TTBOOK, but it was recorded live and shared by the station that hosted us that night, KUER.
When I got the fellowship at TTBOOK, I think I knew, but didn't really understand, that I was leaving my academic life behind. And for a while, I mourned that life, and thought about where I might be if I would have made a different choice that year in Penn State.
It feels like some circle of life stuff, but as I was writing this I was also working on the 300th episode of Song Exploder, which is out now. There's a direct line between where I was then and where I am now, and none of that would have been possible without Steve, Anne, and the rest of the TTBOOK crew. I can't wait to hear what they make next.