These are traditional folk songs from the Lango people of Northern Uganda. It is powered specifically by the Okeme (thumb piano) and supported by other locally made musical instruments. Okeme Mix Volume One (#OkemeMix Vol 1) is the first album from this project. The 11-song album brings a classical representation of songs touching numerous themes and subjects ranging from conservation, domestic violence, development and community service.

Okeme Mix Vol 1

Cwara Daa

“A superb biography of a singular life.”–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A Rolling Stone journalist presents the story of the late singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle.

When Justin Townes Earle died of an overdose alone in his Nashville apartment, his death sent waves of grief through the country-Americana music community. The son of alt-country hellraiser Steve Earle had long struggled with mental illness and various addictions. There had been encouraging periods of long-term sobriety and active recovery in his adult life, including the years that led up to his career peak when he released the 2010 masterpiece Harlem River Blues, a career-making album of rambling folk blues set to Southern Gospel.

He sang of cramped Brooklyn apartments and crippling hangovers, about emotional displacement, economic anxiety, and the wandering that characterized his feral, formative years as a rootless kid rambling around Nashville, developing his own unique guitar style and absorbing the musical influences that surrounded him. He was anointed by critics as the next coming of the authentic troubadour. By the time of his death, he’d recorded and released eight albums, creating a striking and original body of work.

Jonathan Bernstein, with the full cooperation of the Justin Townes Earle estate, unravels in these pages a short but incredibly creative life, and reveals the backstories behind Justin’s greatest songs (“Mama’s Eyes,” “White Gardenias”) and what happened when it all fell apart while also capturing a shadow world of the neglected children of Nashville legends who wrestle with the legacies of their hard-living, road-weary, often absent parents.

Justin’s journey to near-stardom is a harrowing story shot through with moments of clarity and promise, including his marriage to his wife Jenn Marie Earle and the birth of their daughter. But what Earle called “the myth”—the idea that one must suffer for one’s art—proved to be too powerful.

This heartbreaking, deeply researched tale is an exemplary music biography.

What Do You Do When You're Lonesome by Jonathan Bernstein read by John Pirhalla

This year LSE is celebrating its 130th anniversary, and how it has shaped history and driven change across the world. Much of LSE’s history is linked to the United States, from philanthropic support from the US in LSE’s early days to famous alumni and American directors of the School.

To talk about the LSE’s long and close relationship with the United States, in October 2025, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Professor Michael Cox. Professor Cox is a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS, LSE's foreign policy think tank, and was its Director between 2008 and 2019. He is also Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE and has been writing a history of LSE.

This episode was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.  

Further reading and resources

•	Cox, Michael, John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi (eds), American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (Oxford University Press, 2000)
•	Cox, M., & Stokes, D. (Eds.), US Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2026)
•	Celebrating LSE's 130th anniversary

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The Ballpark will be ten years old in 2026, and we want to hear from you to make the podcast even better, so we’re running a listener survey until 2 February 2026. 

•	Fill in our listener survey – it only takes 15 minutes – here: https://forms.office.com/e/Vcj8V8uGM1 
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LSE: The Ballpark | LSE at 130 and the United States with Professor Michael Cox

From bestselling author Lisa Graff, this important coming-of-age story follows a thirteen-year-old with a mysterious scar on her face—and a big secret she feels pressured to keep. 

Fallon Little has a secret—and it’s not how she got the enormous scar that divides her face in two.

Thirteen-year-old Fallon has only ever told one person what really happened on the day she got her scar. Why would she? The truth is dark, and Fallon has much brighter things to focus on, like being cast as the lead in the school play, and hanging out with her two best friends, Trent and Kaia. But when Fallon’s uncle Geebie dies, his funeral ignites a wildfire of events that Fallon can’t manage to tamp down. The school play is spiraling out of control, Fallon’s impossible Aunt Lune comes to live with them, and Trent and Kaia might just be so into each other that there isn’t room for Fallon in their friend group any more. And when secrets even worse than the one about Fallon’s scar threaten to come to light, Fallon might not have the strength to keep them buried for much longer.

Through unflinching prose and with a pitch-perfect voice, bestselling author Lisa Graff explores the power of confronting the past as a way to heal in the present in this propulsive and absorbing tour de force.

* “The story’s pitch-perfect tone balances sad and funny moments impeccably….Darkness and light interplay with perfection.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review   * “Graff infuses viscerally rendered realities of lingering trauma with moments of lightheartedness to deliver a meticulously calibrated work about a girl who refuses to be defined by her past.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

A Scar like a River by Lisa Graff read by Suzy Jackson

From the acclaimed author of Mao’s America comes the untold story of how misguided and selfish U.S. elites transformed China from a Communist wasteland into a global superpower—at America’s expense.

One of the most effective anti-communist voices in America today, Xi Van Fleet made waves with her breakout book Mao’s America, exposing eerie parallels between China’s past and America’s present woke revolution. Now, alongside renowned Chinese dissident Yu Jie, she sounds the alarm once more—revealing how the CCP’s rise was not just enabled by Soviet Russia but, shockingly, by the United States itself.

Understanding this hidden history is essential for Americans in confronting the CCP’s global ambitions and stopping the spread of Communism at home.
 
For over a century, progressive and Communist ideologies have steadily infiltrated American society, shaping U.S.-China policies that have, intentionally or not, empowered the CCP. From its founding in 1921 to its brutal takeover of China 28 years later, the CCP’s ascent was fueled by foreign support—first from the Soviets, then increasingly from the U.S. After the Sino-Soviet split and the near-collapse of China, the United States emerged as the CCP’s primary enabler, helping transform it into the world’s second-largest economy and our greatest geopolitical threat.
 
Most Americans remain unaware of their own country’s role in the CCP’s unprecedented success. While others have explored pieces of this story, no book has revealed the full picture—until now. With meticulous research and unflinching clarity, this book exposes the uncomfortable truth: to effectively counter the CCP, we must first dismantle communist influence at home.

Made in America by Xi Van Fleet and Yu Jie read by Cora Chang with An Introduction Read by Xi Van Fleet

The classic history of the political and economic devastation wrought by runaway inflation in Weimar Germany—“brilliant” (Guardian)
 
In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany’s finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.
 
Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, “quantitative easing,” that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country’s deficit—
necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax or blindness to expenditure—it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale. 

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson read by John Curless

From the #1 New York Times bestselling duo Preston and Child comes the Agent Pendergast origin story—a golden opportunity for longtime fans and new readers to learn about Agent Pendergast’s strange and shocking first case.

It only took six months for the life of Special Agent Dwight Chambers to crumble around him. First, he lost his partner, and then, tragically, his wife. Returning to work at the New Orleans Field Office, Chambers is dismayed to find himself saddled with mentoring a brand new FBI agent—a certain A. X. L. Pendergast. As Chambers tries to pull himself together, his enigmatic and exasperating junior partner pulls an outrageous stunt that gets both of them suspended.

Pendergast welcomes the banishment, because it gives him the opportunity to investigate a peculiar murder in Mississippi that has captured his fancy. Chambers grudgingly goes along. What starts off as a whimsical quest swiftly turns into a terrifying pursuit, as Chambers and Pendergast uncover a string of grisly, ritualistic killings that defy any known serial killer profile.
 
Thanks in large part to Pendergast’s brilliance and unorthodox methods, they solve the case and find the killer… and that is when the true horror begins.

Pendergast by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child read by Jefferson Mays

Heart Talk: Purpose, Impact, and the Courage to Begin

“A comprehensive exploration of postpartum traditions that emphasize the importance of nurturing mothers during their most vulnerable times. From traditional recipes to rituals, this book highlights sisterhood and the need for comprehensive care that honors both the mother and the newborn.”
―from the foreword by Erykah Badu, five-time GRAMMY Award Winner, singer/songwriter, and holistic healer

As a mother, grandmother, and traditional midwife, Shafia M. Monroe intimately knows about childbirth and the fourth trimester. For over forty years, she’s helped thousands give birth, and has taught thousands more how to support birthing parents, all integrating the deep wisdom of African American healing traditions. Long suppressed by the white medical establishment, these practices—such as belly binding, heat, herbs, the lying‑in period, and the “taking‑out‑of‑bed ritual”—are powerful healing tools. Using them, we mother the mother through a healthy postpartum period.

While this framework will be powerful healing for all mothers, the information in this book can save Black mothers’ lives; with African American women disproportionately suffering from maternal mortality and morbidity, there is an urgent need for an embrace of African American postpartum care that surrounds the new mother and her baby with community, love, and protection. Mothering the Mother is a resource for Black women and communities to reclaim their cultural traditions for a healthy postpartum recuperation.

Mothering the Mother by Shafia Monroe read by Janina Edwards

A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer Gothic novel.

Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer.

As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door and her body takes on a strange new shape. As the borders of reality begin to blur, she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself. 

Hemlock is a carnal coming-of-addiction, a dark sparkler about rapture, desire, transformation, and transcendence in many forms. What lives at the heart of fear—animal, monster, or man? How can we reject our own inheritance, the psychic storm that’s been coming for generations, and rebuild a new home for ourselves? In the tradition of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Hemlock is a butch Black Swan and a novel of singular style, with all the edginess of a survival story and a simmering menace that glints from the very periphery of the page.

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno read by Kira Fixx

A remarkably open-hearted, clear-eyed memoir of the ’90s Alternative era by the bassist of Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Even the Good Girls Will Cry begins with Melissa Auf der Maur’s bohemian upbringing in Montreal, where her early, deep connection to art and music gave her entry to the colorful and thriving local creative scene. Working as a cassette DJ and ticket girl, she would see (and sometimes meet) the luminaries who’d pass through town—Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, Pavement, Sonic Youth. Thanks to a thrown beer bottle and a long-shot fan letter to a PO Box, her band Tinker scored a life-changing opening slot for The Smashing Pumpkins and, sensing her natural talent on bass, Billy Corgan recommended her to Courtney Love, just one of the many uncanny threads that weaves destiny throughout this riveting memoir. Whisked from her local scene and thrust into the eye of a hurricane of grief on a global stage, Melissa joined Hole for the band’s 1994 Live Through This world tour just after the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Hole’s prior bassist, Kristen Pfaff, with Courtney Love at the center of it all. It was a tour of passionate intensity, as a chaotic yet stunningly powerful band constantly threatened to spin out of control. Melissa brings the reader with raging intimacy into the action, offering a heroic portrait of the unforgettable Courtney Love as she howled into the darkness as if to keep grief at bay. That was only the beginning of Melissa’s journey through alternative rock. Part rock memoir, part travel diary, part psychedelic scrapbook, Even the Good Girls Will Cry is a behind-the-scenes rock ’n’ roll memoir with a soulful intimacy and mystic undertone that sets it apart from memoirs by her peers. It is a vivid dispatch from the last analog decade, artistically capturing that bygone era in all its messy, angsty glory. 

Even the Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf der Maur read by Melissa Auf der Maur

Okere City is a radical community development project on a journey to create the first sustainable rural city in Africa. As part of this, we support cultural and creative expressiveness of our community. It is upon this background that we launched the Okeme Mix Project in 2022. Okeme, a world musical genre facilitate by the traditional thumb piano instrumental is extremely famous in Okere village. That's why we celebrate it!

Cwara Daa

Okere City: #OkemeMix

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