Death, Sex & Money
By WNYC Studios
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Description
Death, Sex & Money is a podcast about the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation. Host Anna Sale talks to celebrities you've heard of—and to regular people you haven't—about the Big Stuff: relationships, money, family, work and making it all count while we're here. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Note to Self, Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin and many others.
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ExplicitDead People Don't Have Any Secrets | When Amanda* met Sam* in her mid-20s, she thought he was the most interesting person she had ever met. "It was almost like he had tried to live his life a different way," she told me. "I was just enchanted by that." Three years into their marriage, th | 4/5/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
CleanRosie, Sixto, Hari, Uma, Mahershala, Amatus, Lisa & Dan | For Rosie Perez, it's her cousin, Sixto Ramos. For Mahershala Ali, it's his wife, Amatus. And for Hari Kondabolu, it's been his mom, Uma Kondabolu. Our recent live show in Brooklyn was all about times of big change in life and the family who keeps us g | 3/22/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
CleanAfter My Brother Avonte Disappeared | Danny Oquendo was in the spotlight long before his 14-year-old autistic brother, Avonte, disappeared from his New York City school. Growing up, Danny was a football star — “sort of a golden child,” he sheepishly told me — eventually playing for | 3/15/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
ExplicitFalling in Love... With Heroin | Susanne* met Mike* when she was 16. He was 18, and her supervisor at the call center where they worked. They flirted and started dating. "Average teenager stuff," Susanne recalls. Soon after they got together, Mike offered Susanne heroin. She says she h | 3/1/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
CleanMichael Ian Black's Middle-Aged Angst | Being a rebellious smart-ass helped comedian Michael Ian Black launch his career. And it occasionally got him into trouble. “Once I called the head of MTV a drunk,” he told me. “She was very offended.” It didn’t help that he was working for MTV | 2/16/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
CleanDANCE BREAK! | We've been asking you to tell us about the songs that have meant a lot to you during times of big change in your life. You've sent in more than 500 suggestions so far—along with a lot of great stories. Our listener Kevin Chung from Seattle sent us his | 2/9/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
ExplicitLucinda Williams Says Whatever the Hell She Wants | When Lucinda Williams was in elementary school, all the other kids brought rock collections and other standard fare to show-and-tell. But she brought a folder. "I put this notebook together of seven poems and a short story by Cindy Williams," she remembe | 2/2/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
ExplicitWhy Jeb Corliss Jumps Off Cliffs | Jeb Corliss says he's "impossible to be in a relationship with." He's a professional BASE jumper and wingsuit flier—who's learned to very carefully analyze and control his emotions, including fear. "People don't realize that feelings get you in big tro | 1/26/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
CleanBrooke Shields, Recovering Daughter | Brooke Shields became famous as a sex symbol long before she was actually having sex. At 12, she played a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby. Soon after, she starred in the sexy teen romance Blue Lagoon. And at 15, she became the controversial fac | 1/12/2016 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
CleanLiving Alone, One Year Later | Today, more than a quarter of American households are home to just one person. And living alone has its perks. You can eat what you want, crank up the stereo and let your dishes pile up for days. But there's also no one to help foot the bill, and no on | 12/29/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
CleanStop Calling Me 'The Homeless Valedictorian' | A year and a half ago, Rashema Melson’s story made national news. She attracted attention after she graduated at the top of her high school class in Washington, D.C., and earned a full scholarship to Georgetown, all while living in a homeless shelte | 12/17/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitAutism Isn’t What I Signed Up For | Diane Gill Morris was 25 when her first son, Kenny, was born. About 15 months later, she and her husband realized that he’d stopped talking. By the time Kenny was officially diagnosed with autism, Diane’s second son, Theo, was eight months old. Less | 12/8/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
CleanHolland Taylor Steps Off Her Island | Actress Holland Taylor has played roles like Judge Roberta Kittleson on The Practice, an ad executive in Bosom Buddies, and the emotionally distant mother Evelyn Harper on Two and a Half Men. She's built a reputation for playing patrician, self-assured | 11/24/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitWhy You're Not Having Sex | A 34-year-old listener we’ll call “Marie” emailed us not long ago. She’s never dated anyone seriously. She's never been kissed, and she's never had sex. She's not opposed to any of those things. They just haven't happened for her yet. And she | 11/17/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
CleanKevin Powell Doesn't Fight Anymore | Born in Jersey City to a poor, hard-working single mother from the South, Kevin Powell was a gifted young writer who earned a scholarship to Rutgers. Then things fell apart. He got expelled after a series of violent outbursts, two of which were directed | 11/3/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
ExplicitAll in the Family of Norman Lear | I spoke with Norman Lear, the veteran writer and producer behind such hit TV shows as All in the Family and The Jeffersons, at his luxury apartment in Manhattan. He told me he wanted to make sure his kids would never be "desperate for a dollar" -- but | 10/27/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
CleanThe Power of Yesi Ortiz | On weekdays between 10 and 3, Yesi Ortiz is the warm, flirty host for the popular Los Angeles hip-hop station Power 106. But off the air, she’s a dedicated single mother of six adopted kids. Her kids' biological mom is Yesi’s older sister, who had | 10/20/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAn Astronaut’s Husband, Left Behind | Dr. Jonathan Clark and his eight year-old son Iain watched the space shuttle Columbia launch from Kennedy Space Center on January 16, 2003. Sixteen days later, Columbia exploded upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Jon's wife, Dr. Laurel Clark, was | 10/6/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitThe Sex Worker Next Door | I first heard from Emma—that's not her real name—after our cheating episode. She emailed me about all of the married men that she encounters through her job. "Am I facilitating cheating? I guess so," she wrote. "Can I sleep at night? Mostly." She w | 9/22/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanFrom Chaos to Sesame Street | Sonia Manzano, who spent more than 40 years playing Maria on Sesame Street, often gets asked by kids if she’s rich. It all depends on where you came from, she told me. Compared to Jennifer Lopez, she’s “poor as a church mouse.” But compared to wh | 9/8/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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21 |
CleanIn New Orleans: How to Get Elected Coroner | Dr. Jeffrey Rouse is New Orleans' coroner—a job he describes as the “interface between law and medicine.” But ten years ago, he was working in a lab studying the brains of people with PTSD, getting ready for a life in academia. When the storm hit, | 8/20/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanIn New Orleans: A Doctor Stands By Her Adopted Home | Ten years ago when Katrina hit, Dr. Kiersta Kurtz-Burke didn’t evacuate. Instead she stayed inside New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, where she worked for six days, caring for 18 patients on the 5th floor. There was no power, and it seemed like no one wa | 8/19/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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23 |
ExplicitIn New Orleans: Big Freedia Bounces Back | Even before becoming Big Freedia, Freddie Ross was known around New Orleans. Her "signature call"—an operatic bellow that she lets out when I ask to hear it—was legendary in the city. "They'd be like, 'Oh that's Freddie in the club'.... The signatur | 8/18/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanIn New Orleans: Becoming the Demo Diva | Simone Bruni never imagined she would someday run a demolition company. "I grew up in a very traditional Latin home," she says. "My mom did not work. I wanted her life. I wanted to be a stay at home mom." But when Hurricane Katrina hit, Simone was 32 a | 8/17/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ExplicitIn New Orleans: From Raising Hell to Raising Kids | A decade after Hurricane Katrina, Terri Coleman is teaching a summer class to incoming students at Dillard University—a historically black college in New Orleans. But 10 years ago, when she was about the same age as her students, she was not the kind o | 8/16/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLife as a Wife | Cindy Chupack got married for the first time when she was 25. Two years later, the man she married realized he was gay. They got a divorce. Chupack went on to have a successful career as an author and screenwriter, working on shows like Sex and the City. | 8/11/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJoy Williams' Public Breakup and Private Grief | Before singer-songwriter Joy Williams became one half of the Grammy-winning duo The Civil Wars, she was a fledgling Christian artist in Nashville without much romantic experience. “Pure as the driven snow would have been the moniker at that point, | 7/28/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanA Funeral Director's Life After Burnout | When I first spoke with Caleb Wilde last year, he joked that he's damned to be a funeral director for the rest of his life. But there's some truth there. He's a sixth-generation funeral director in the small town of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania. It's a commu | 7/14/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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29 |
ExplicitSiblinghood | For all the things we share with our brothers and sisters -- parents, genes, a childhood -- most of us have also wondered at one point or another how we could possibly be related to our siblings. As we grow up, it can be hard to update those relationshi | 6/30/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
ExplicitA Dirty Cop Comes Clean | Retired NYPD officer Ken Eurell says the first time he stole money on the job, he was responding to a burglary call. When he got back in the squad car, he says his partner Michael Dowd pulled out a wad of cash he'd taken from the scene and handed over a | 6/16/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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31 |
Clean2 Couples, 1 Poet, a Rock Band and a Dog | In celebration of Death, Sex & Money's one year anniversary, we brought two married couples, one Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a rock band, a dog and a turquoise couch onto the stage at BAM for a special live show during WNYC's RadioLoveFest. First, I | 6/2/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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32 |
CleanRobert Earl Keen Quit Nashville and Stayed Married | When Robert Earl Keen moved from Texas to Nashville in 1985, things were looking up: He’d just gotten married and put out his first album, No Kinda Dancer. Nashville was the place to be for an aspiring country musician...but that ended up being part | 5/19/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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33 |
CleanBrooklyn Left Me Broke, But I Came Back | For more than a decade, Heidi Reinberg, a 54-year-old freelance documentary producer, lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn -- just a few doors down from Mayor Bill de Blasio. Then, her landlord decided to sell. Heidi got priced out | 5/5/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanW. Kamau Bell Wonders How Much Is Enough | For a long time, W. Kamau Bell’s fear was that he would complete his career in comedy and remain anonymous. Then, Chris Rock took notice of his one-man show, and they teamed up to create the television series Totally Biased. Bell moved across the co | 4/21/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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35 |
CleanHedwig, Older and a Little Less Angry | The day I went to meet John Cameron Mitchell in his apartment, he had glitter stuck to his face and two ice packs in his freezer for the knee he injured on-stage during a performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. "I was doing Neil Patrick Harris’s | 4/14/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanIn Sickness and In Mental Health | Giulia and Mark Lukach got married when they were 24. Three years later, Giulia began experiencing paralyzing anxiety and paranoid delusions. She started talking about committing suicide. Mark and her father drove Giulia to the emergency room while she | 4/7/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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37 |
ExplicitCancer Changed Ken Jeong's Comedy | Ken Jeong describes his role in the 2009 blockbuster The Hangover as "the most obscene love letter to a spouse one could ever have.” He peppered his dialogue with bits of Vietnamese as an inside joke with his wife Tran. Ken met his wife while they | 3/24/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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38 |
CleanWhere is Lisa Fischer's Backup? | Lisa Fischer has sung backing vocals for Dolly Parton, Bobby McFerrin, Luther Vandross and Beyoncé. She's also toured with the Rolling Stones since 1989, going from one swanky hotel to another, "eating caviar for breakfast" and playing sold out sta | 3/10/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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39 |
ExplicitCheating Happens. | People cheat. But they don't often talk about the aftermath, and how they and their partners decide what comes next. When I asked you to send in your stories about infidelity, I heard from so many of you. Listener Sasha* told us about how she suspected | 2/24/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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40 |
CleanReal Love: A Valentine's Special | This whole show started with a love story. I’d been married in my 20s, then divorced at 30. Months later, I started dating Arthur, a biologist studying wolves in Wyoming. The distance made things hard, and the relationship almost ended. Then I got a | 2/13/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanSongs In The Key Of Strife | Teddy Thompson was six years old when his parents, English folk rockers Richard and Linda Thompson, split up. The breakup coincided with the release of the duo's most successful album. They were on tour together as their marriage dissolved. That same | 2/10/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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42 |
ExplicitMargaret Cho's Sex Education | The daughter of Korean immigrants, comedian Margaret Cho made a successful career in comedy by making fun of her parents, and telling jokes about the ethnic snacks they put in her lunchbox. Cho felt that her parents seemed out of touch, and she was | 1/27/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDesiree Akhavan's Breakthrough Breakup | At 16, Desiree Akhavan says she was voted the ugliest girl at her school. In a play that she wrote that same year, Akhavan included a sequence based on the incident, turning a sad, victimizing event into something entertaining. But when you ask Akha | 1/13/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanLiving Alone and Liking It. Sometimes. | Living alone has its perks. You can eat what you want, wear what you want, and listen to show tunes as loud as you want. You can let your dishes pile up for days—or you can be a total neat freak. There’s no one to stop you. But there’s also no one | 12/30/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanI Killed Someone. Now I Have 3 Kids. | Lawrence Bartley watched his youngest son's first steps in a visiting room at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He is an inmate. On Christmas night, 1990, he killed a 15 year-old bystander during a shoot-out in a movie theater. Bartley was 17 at the time | 12/16/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanCollege Sweethearts: Transformed | Liam Lowery and Marisa Carroll have a charming, if almost archetypal, New York love story. They were college students. Liam had been crushing on her for a while, and one day, he spotted her on the subway. They came to his stop. And he stayed on the tra | 12/2/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJames McBride Resets | When you hear that someone’s a best-selling, award-winning author, what do you imagine their life is like? A big house with a BMW in the driveway? James McBride, author of the smash hit The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird, had all that for a whi | 11/18/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanA Funeral Director’s Dead Reckoning | Caleb Wilde jokes that he's damned to be a funeral director for the rest of his life. But there's some truth there. He's a sixth-generation funeral director in the small town of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania. He's been doing this for over ten years. In a comm | 11/4/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanEllen Burstyn's Lessons on Survival | When Burstyn was 18, she got on a Greyhound bus going from Detroit to Dallas. She had 50 cents in her pocket and a hunch that she could find work as a model. The actress and director, known for her roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Exorcis | 10/21/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMy Father's Secret Life | Whitney Joiner was 13 when her father Joe told her he was HIV-positive. He said he hoped to see her graduate from high school. Five months later, he was dead. It was rural Kentucky in 1992, and Whitney and her family thought it was best to keep quiet. | 10/7/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThe NFL Made Me Rich. I Won't Watch It Now. | It’s difficult, Domonique Foxworth says, to watch guys get knocked unconscious, carted off, then brought back out to play. And he knows something about injuries—a first-team All-ACC cornerback at the University of Maryland, Foxworth’s seven-year | 9/23/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanMeet the First Family...of Podcasting | Scott Aukerman and Kulap Vilaysack are the podcasting world’s ultimate power couple, but they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. When Scott was a musical theater-loving teenager in Orange County, California, Kulap was washing dishes | 9/16/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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53 |
CleanCult Comedy Heroes Have Bills to Pay, Too | Chris Gethard is at a personal peak, but in a professional valley. Maybe you’ve seen him in brief turns on The Office or Louie, but he’s best known for his Manhattan public access television show, The Chris Gethard Show. It’s beloved by New York co | 9/9/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanChaz Ebert on Life Without Roger | Don’t call Chaz Ebert a widow. She’s Roger’s wife. Since his death in April of 2013, she says she still feels his presence. She knows it sounds a little crazy, but she says they still communicate in their own way. There was always magic in their r | 8/26/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanA Player Leaves the Game | Jozen Cummings can’t get any woman he wants. But for a while there, the New York Post's dating reporter was doing pretty well for himself. He used to take out multiple women a day: one for coffee, another for lunch, and another for dinner. He left the | 8/12/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanI Love You, But There's This Money Thing... | We like to think of our romantic lives as pure and unbothered by the cold business of spreadsheets and tax documents. But here's the thing: serious relationships are both romantic and financial partnerships. That can come as a shock to a lot of people. I | 7/29/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanDan Savage Says Cheating Happens. And That's OK. | Occasional infidelity adds excitement to Dan Savage's marriage. He's not afraid of talking about that, he told me. What he doesn’t like discussing is money. Namely, how his husband Terry likes spending it: on shoes, clothes, and records he may never | 7/15/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanAlpha Dad Gets Snipped | In a lot of ways, vasectomies couldn’t have asked for a better spokesman than Australian Clint Greagen: weightlifter, Australian football fanatic, loving husband, and stay-at-home father of four who blogs about pretty much everything -- including the | 7/1/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanJane Fonda After Death and Divorce | What do you think of when you think of Jane Fonda? The sexy space traveller from Barbarella? Vietnam War activist? Fitness goddess? Fonda, now 76, has had quite the career. She’s also had three marriages — to a French director, an anti-war activist, | 6/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanI Married the Gay Father of My Child | New York-based performance artist Lucy Sexton was never one for convention. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when it came to having a family, she found a way to make it happen on her own terms. When she found herself childless, divorced, and pus | 6/3/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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61 |
CleanConfessions of a Nashville Power Couple | Jason Isbell was performing in bars before he could drink in them. By his early 30s, he’d played the Grand Ole Opry, joined the Drive-By Truckers, and gotten married and divorced. And when he found himself drunk one morning in a McDonald’s parking lo | 5/20/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanThis Senator Saved My Love Life | You have to give it to some elected representatives — they really will respond to the letters you send. Or at least, Alan Simpson did when my boyfriend Arthur sent a plea for help. We were in love, but I was a reporter in New York and he studied wildli | 5/6/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanBrooklyn Left Me Broke and Tired | Heidi Reinberg is tired of worrying about money. She’s 53 years old. She’s gotten by as a freelance documentary producer in New York for 30 years. But she told me her coffers have dried up just when her landlord is selling. She’s losing her apartme | 5/5/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CleanHow to Be a Man With Bill Withers | Maybe it’s not manly to say, “I’m scared.” But for Bill Withers, being a man isn’t about ignoring fear. It's about getting things done in spite of it, and knowing when to ask for help. Before he wrote some of the most memorable hits of the 70s | 5/4/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 64 Items |
Customer Reviews
I love this!
I can't understand how this hasn't been done before. It's such a fantastic idea. And I doubt anyone will be able to top this format. What a fantastic podcast! Enrich your life with this!
Great Stories!
Anna has a great voice, is easy to listen to, and tells great stories that I can enjoy while I'm running around on my tractor. (LoL!) Just marry that fella Arthur already, he seems like a great guy!
Very smart and engaging
I am already wishing it was next week so I can listen to the next episode. This show is on par with This American Life and Radio Lab, that says a lot.
