Martin Norden tells Anne Strainchamps that the disabled have been in films from the beginning, but only as stereotypes: bad disabled people get killed off, while good disabled people get cured.
Martin Norden tells Anne Strainchamps that the disabled have been in films from the beginning, but only as stereotypes: bad disabled people get killed off, while good disabled people get cured.
Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun have been photographing life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for 30 years. They talk about the conditions in the prison - nicknamed Angola, for the plantation that was formerly on the site - and how they've changed over time. When they see the inmates working in the fields, they say, it looks a lot like slavery.
Melissa Coleman spent the formative years of her chilldhood roaming the lands of her family's farn in rural Maine. Melissa, her sister Heidi, and their parents, Eliot and Sue Coleman, lived off the grid, and became media darlings when the Wall Street Journal ran an article about her father. Coleman writes about that time in her memoir "This Life is in Your Hands."
So maybe you're not going to be the next Richard Pryor.
Even if you don't get many more laughs, you can laugh more. Katie West tells us how.
Poet Anja Sieger, who often writes under the pen name Notanja, is the current Narrator-in-Residence at the storied Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee. Her writing implement of choice? A vintage typewriter.Hear the interview as well as the bonus reading of a poem that she wrote on-site for producer Seth Jovaag's daughter, Lydia.
Back in 1969, Marlantes was dropped in the middle of a jungle in Vietnam - at the age of 23, put in charge of the lives of 40 other young men. He was not psychologically or spiritually prepared for that or for what came after the war.
A ghost story from listener Jonathan Blyth, called "You Are What You Eat."
John Spalding is a humor columnist for the on-line magazine Belief Net, and the author of “A Pilgrim’s Digress: My Perilous, Fumbling Quest for the Celestial City.”