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Detail from Cloud in Your Teacup in Philadelphia by CW Art Director Josh Sarantitis & co.
Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
Today we are featuring links to work by the greatest talent pool on Earth, namely the subscribers of Continuous Wave. Are you talented as well?
I am delighted to host this brag-a-thon, which also demonstrates how an interest in audio can enable so many fascinating stories and projects.
First off, I'm going to assert privilege and brag on one special subscriber I've been working with this past year.
The Backfire Effect
Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist based in Atlanta, but the project she's been working on the past few years takes place all over Michigan. It's one of the most riveting and infuriating sagas I've ever gotten to work on as a story editor.
Josie has a law degree from Harvard University, and much of her reporting — whether in print or audio — concerns the US criminal legal system. She’s hosted several prior shows, including Justice in America and Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.
The story that Josie brought to Pushkin Industries is about an awful murder, the bizarre investigation and trial that followed, and a man sentenced for a crime he says he could not have committed, because he was far across the state when it occurred.
These seven episodes have all the twists and turns of the "true crime" genre, but thanks to Josie's deep understanding of the law, they teach us much about how our system can work in practice.
I am in awe of Josie's reportorial skills, her way with words, and her sense of humor. She and crackerjack producer Lidia Jean Kott have taken a mountain of interviews, archival tape and documents and turned them into a story you won't be able to forget.
The trailer is out now, and the first two episodes drop Sept. 14.
More links after this ad, which will help replenish the CW sanity fund if you click on it!
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More narrative podcasts
Now comes more work by the talented subscribers to Continuous Wave. I am bursting with pride!
First off, must brag by proxy about a couple of other recent Pushkin projects that are very worth your while:
In The Staten Island Problem, a series for Revisionist History, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey breaks down the centripetal problem that plagues big cities and big nations alike. (Though not all of them spawn the Wu-Tang Clan.)
Editor and producer Diane Hodson worked behind the scenes to bring the third season of the Pushkin show Death of an Artist to life. Hosted by Leon Neyfakh (Fiasco) and his wife, the writer Alice Gregory, it tells the story of a couple who planned their own deaths, via the dozens of letters they sent beforehand.
👉 Speaking of memorable letters, Sean Guillory has a tale of one in the two-parter A Gift for Stalin. Check it out on his show The Eurasian Knot.
It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know who, mails a letter from the outskirts of Moscow. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.” It arrives a few days later. And when Comrade Sentaretskya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry…that is, until she opened it.
👉 Also speaking of writing that bursts its bounds, don’t sleep on Dan Taberski's Manifesto, about the explosive power of these diatribes to the future, and the kind of people who make them. Producer Ben Goldberg writes:
Each episode tells a story of a different kind of manifesto — from Luigi Mangione to Occupy Wall Street, the hacker collective Anonymous, and Kathleen Hanna's Riot Grrrl — while the host Dan Taberski writes his own manifesto over the course of the series. More than anything, this podcast is about people who put everything they've got into a dream and try to make it a reality — for better or worse.
👉 Kasia Mychajlowycz produces In Her Defence from The Globe and Mail. The third season, "Breach of Trust," is just underway. It's about a police officer who uses his access to private information to trick women into relationships with a fake persona he created. “My host Jana Pruden and I make it mostly by ourselves (with some great scoring and final mix by David Crosbie) and it's the most important work of my career thus far,” writes Kasia.
👉 You're going to need a breather after all those intense podcasts. So head up to Canada check out Dominique Ferraton's Waders: Prairie Water Stories, a sonically-rich series that includes four seasons of field recordings and original music.
We journey to shallow wetlands, spring-fed lakes and drought-stricken farms. We listen to farmers, scientists, activists and naturalists. Weaving together natural and cultural history, this series considers how we might start to repair our relationship with water here in the driest part of Canada.
Broadcast history
No surprise that many of CW's subscribers are interested in this excellent subset of history, and work to keep it alive in the digital age.
Archivist Andy Lanset, author of this guest post, wants to make sure we know about the digitization of "radiowright" Norman Corwin's work over at the WNYC website, in particular his amusing play Radio Primer.
Paul Kornman is one keeper of The Old Time Radio Researchers, which features an incredible array of free resources including an episode library, art gallery, magazines, and scripts). Also check out their newsletter.
Longtime CBS Radio engineer Henry Lenz has started a newsletter and audio project about his career, the many fascinating people he worked with, and the events they witnessed.
👉 Jens Thiele has a seven-part series called Nocturno about a film he saw in the 1980s on West German children’s television. It was, he says, "a film I never forgot. The problem was, I could never find anything about it. I didn’t know its title, and no one I asked seemed to know what I was talking about. The podcast follows my search 40 years later and takes me into a fascinating world of television history that stretches across the Iron Curtain and leads all the way to the Czech Republic."
Note: Nocturno is all in German, but millions of people speak the language — perhaps you are one of them.
Audio drama
🪄 William J. Meyer is currently re-mastering and re-releasing his eight-episode "low-fi sci-fi (sorta) rom-com audio drama" The Transposition of Chloë Brontë. "Time is a slippery kirnoofel. Chloë and Max’s relationship is strained when they move in together and Chloë’s sleep paralysis appears to open a portal to another dimension."
🪄 George Drake brings us Dearest, a fictional epistolary series set in the late 1800's.
The podcast is an adaptation of an epistolary novel by the same name, which was a test case in and of itself. The novel was written by playwright Michael London who wanted to combine theatre and literature. The book isn't bound, instead it's a seemingly handwritten stack of letters, bound by a ribbon, individually numbered, and contained within a hatbox. When it's first opened it smells like honeysuckle, the reader sees the letters as well as some other artifacts — like a dried rose, a few train tickets, and a cigar band. The reader also needs to physically open some envelopes to read the content inside.
But there’s more…
✨ Fil Corbitt of the indescribable show The Wind mentions a special short-form version called Postcards from The Wind, made specifically for public radio and airing weekly on about a dozen stations.
It's been a fun exercise in brevity, and in considering audience — I have an idea of who listens to my artsy, winding, narrative podcast, but when these postcards are plopped into a slot during Morning Edition or All Things Considered, there are very different ears to hear it. Some favorites: A Time of Great Craziness, Sleeper Car, Taiwanese Yodeler Ho Lan (and a plug...they are available for free to any public radio station that wants to air them!)
✨ Leslie E. Thompson, who makes Niche to Meet You, a show about subcultures, is proud of a recent episode about Double Dutch.
Part of the reporting ran in an NPR feature the week of its release. The full episode itself has given rise to some pretty humbling and flattering feedback that tells me it might’ve been an untold story that resonates deeply with folks.
It's about Double Dutch jump roping in the States, and ultimately how it was forgotten in the history of Hip Hop at the hands of adult-ification of young Black girls. It features the 1980 world championship DD team, a leading ethnomusicologist and Double Dutch historian, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
✨ Elaine Appleton Grant recently had a piece on This American Life.
A doctor trained as a midwife tells the eye-popping story of how she and others came together to save a baby during a birth that suddenly went wrong, in a part of rural Maine where the local labor and delivery unit had closed less than a month before.
✨ Nick Andersen started a new show about work called pilot. princess. trash collector. Check out the first episode about an evolution from pianist to cheese monger. I heard an early draft of this, and I want more!
✨ In July 2026, AC Valdez soft-launched a show called Serious Nonsense. "It's short interviews with creative types like webcomic and comic book artists, architecture writers, podcasters (I know!), playwrights, comedians, movie trailer editors, scientists, visual artists, sports journalists...and if that's not enough variety for you, I make them play games in every other episode." Look for a new season soon, featuring at least one familiar guest.
✨ My Project C buddy James Cave runs The Jiffy, a newsletter and site devoted to arts and science in the Hudson Valley, New York. And he has a delightful podcast, right now featuring a series called CSA dedicated to stories of dairy farming.
✨ Radio artist Joan Schuman has some recent pieces to share:
Grief-wild (2024) In the week before a momentous war’s anniversary, a picture starkly intrudes. I force myself to look. And in looking at another’s pain, I am complicit in it.
On the dead bones (2025) History is not a mound of discrete moments of upheaval.
Feral Atlas (2026) Cartography is like dreaming in all its projections or reparations. We follow feral beasts in the yard like a map of warped coastlines and kinked highways or an echo of a candidate deemed too high-pitched in his screams.
Coming soon!
🔮 Isabel Hibbard and Ian Coss send this announcement of the next season of The Big Dig, a show centered on Massachusetts stories with national implications.
Healthcare is the problem American politics cannot solve. It’s the subject of screaming matches at town halls, the cause of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the justification for political assassination in cold blood.
Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy began their political journeys on opposite sides of the issue, and they ended once again on opposite sides, but for a brief period in the middle they worked together to pass a groundbreaking law – one that promised to finally transform the politics of American healthcare – the law known as Romneycare. So what brought this odd couple together, and what ultimately pulled Mitt and Ted apart?
🔮 Andrew Gill is producing several forthcoming series with Asian-American academics for Axis Mundi, a network of shows covering politics and religion. Keep an eye out for:
Radical Buddhism, hosted by Ryan Wong, tracking the history of activism in Asian American communities since the early 1970s when the term "Asian American" was coined.
K-Spirits: How The U.S. and Korea Create Evangelical Power, hosted by Dr. Helen Kim. This podcast shows that it wasn't a fluke that Charlie Kirk held a rally in South Korea just days before he was shot. The history goes back to the largest crusade that Billy Graham ever held, in 1973 in Seoul, and how those efforts helped the brutal dictatorship.
Between Qi & Science: My Experience of What Can't Be Measured. Hosted by Dr. Kin Cheung, this personal podcast delves into the world of traditional Chinese medicine and the crisis Cheung experienced when his father became a healer with dozens of followers and documented healings.
The Savage Remains, hosted by Dr. Esiteli Hafoka, about the island kingdom of Tonga and the effect Christian missionaries have had on the people there.
Mixed: Hosted by Dr. Khyati Joshi, this podcast draws on her own life and decades of research on forming mixed-race, mixed-religion families.
🔮 Finally, scholar Cynthia Meyer — who wrote for CW about the weird-to-our-ears program The March of Time — wants us to know she collects awesome ads for radios over at her Tumblr, A Word from Our Sponsor. We also get to read her new book Sell-e-Vision in April 2027. Can’t wait!
Thanks to all who sent in links and who remain creative despite the machines.