interviews

This year on Reveal, we’ve dug into issues that affect people's lives across the country. We told stories about worker abuse, toxic schools, women’s sports and private prisons. So we decided to round out this season with something different: This hour, we look back at stories you, our listeners, told us were the most memorable. 

Help us hold the powerful accountable and speak for the most vulnerable. Please go to www.revealnews.org/donate to support our work today. 

Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting. 

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Reveal

The year in Reveal

The Offshore team heads to the Big Island to gather material for Season Two, and author Lois-Ann Yamanaka gives us a humorous glimpse at working class life in Hawaii.

OFFSHORE

Episode 11: The Gift Shop [Bonus]

The bestselling author of The Blind Side, The Big Short, Moneyball and his newest, The Undoing Project, is known to be a master storyteller. He proves no different in this interview as he tells great stories about his years growing up in New Orleans and how that helped shape his world view and his approach to writing.

#48 Michael Lewis

America's digital dumping ground

Visionary and pioneering Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performed for us recently and talked about Bach, Chopin and his rare condition called synesthesia which means he associates colours with pitch.

"I have this thing from when I was like five or six… I have perfect pitch or absolute hearing so when I would you know think about F minor that would be blue for me, I mean A major would be yellow, B major is purple."
VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON

If you missed our Vikingur Olafsson pre-concert talk watch here and to hear more from great pianists see our International Piano Series - https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/classical-season/international-piano-series

Vikingur Olafsson

On August 17, 2017, an alert went out. 

Gravitational wave detectors in Louisiana and Washington state had detected a disturbance from deep space. 

The effect was subtle — these detectors and a sister site in Italy measure disturbances smaller than a proton. But the evidence was dramatic. And the story they told was truly cataclysmic: 

A pair of neutron stars had spiraled to their deaths.

That apocalyptic collision of two super-dense stars bent the very fabric of space time — just as Einstein had predicted. It sent Gamma rays out into deep space. It created an immense cloud of gaseous gold.

And, 130 million years later, astronomers on earth witnessed the final 100 seconds of these two stars’ dance of death.  It’s taught us where gold came from, and helped humans understand other intractable mysteries of the universe.

In this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller speaks with two astronomers who watched this cosmic death tango from the best seats in the house. 

We’ll hear from Dr. Vicky Kalogera. She’s Director of CIERA — the Center of Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern University. Kalogera was a lead author on a journal article on the neutron star collision co-authored by close to 4,000 scientists.

We’ll also hear from physicist Mike Landry. He’s Head of LIGO Hanford — one of the sites that, in collaboration with Italy’s VIRGO detector, measured the neutron stars’ characteristic gravitational waves.

 Orbital Path is produced by David Schulman. The program is edited by Andrea Mustain. Production oversight by John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler. Hosted by Dr. Michelle Thaller.

Support for Orbital Path is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance. More at sloan.org  

Image credit: CALTECH/NSF/LIGO Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet
Audio chirp credit: LIGO/University of Oregon/Ben Farr

For more about the show, visit orbital.prx.org

Star Death Tango

Inspired by the forthcoming Soundstate festival, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by Southbank Centre's Music Director, Gillian Moore; Susanna Eastburn, CEO of Sound & Music; and Dai Fujikura, composer of contemporary classical music. 

They discuss the trouble with genres, how writing music will never be the same and why they don't use the word 'classical'.

Think Aloud: Modern music – composing, curating and cl***ical

In this episode, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by paralympian, TV presenter and children’s author Ade Adepitan, and children’s book critic Imogen Russell Williams to talk about the lack of diversity in children’s literature.

“I suddenly started to get a perception that certain people did certain things, that main protagonists, that strong characters, that hero characters were all white, middle class.”
ADE ADEPITAN

They discussed why children’s literature is so behind, why we can’t eliminate the past and who should be dealing with this - the authors, the publishers or the parents?

Also, children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan answered the burning question: how do you create a character for children?

To see all the events at Imagine Children's Festival and to buy tickets, go to https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/imagine-childrens-festival

Think Aloud: Children's books – why literature for the future is stuck in the past

Malala Yousafzai's activist work championing the educational rights of girls led to her being shot by a Taliban gunman in 2012, when she was just 15 – but she refused to be silenced.

She came to the Southbank Centre to launch her memoir I Am Malala on Sunday 20 October 2013, appearing in conversation with former Southbank Centre Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The following year, Yousafzai became the youngest ever Nobel laureate. 

In our recording of that talk, hear Yousafzai speak about sibling rivalry, her love for the landscape of her home in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and, of course, her belief in the power of education.

'We need to change the ideology. We need to tell people what the real power is. You are not powerful if you have a gun, because through guns you can only kill. You are powerful when you have a book, when you have a pen, because through pens you can save lives. And that's the change that we want to bring in our society.'

Malala Yousafzai In Conversation with Jude Kelly

In 2019, Jean Paul Gaultier brought his Fashion Freak Show – called a 'fabulous fiesta of fabric and flesh' by The Guardian – to the Southbank Centre. 

But before his extravaganza exploded onto the stage at Royal Festival Hall, the designer himself appeared here in conversation with TV presenter Anita Rani, reflecting on his decades in fashion.

Born in a Paris suburb in 1952, Gaultier started his career at Pierre Cardin at the age of just 18. He has gone on to rise to the top of the fashion world with his own label, ruffling industry feathers and dressing huge stars – including Madonna in the now-infamous bustier – along the way. 

Hear him discuss his childhood inspirations, his love of British eccentricity and his vision for the future of the fashion industry in our podcast.

Jean Paul Gaultier in conversation

PRX is a leading media company, shaping the future of audio by connecting talented producers with their most engaged, supportive audiences.
PRX builds technology and creates cutting-edge content that reaches millions of listeners worldwide.

For 15 years, PRX has operated public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, offering thousands of shows including This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour and Reveal. Named one of Fast Company’s "Ten Most Innovative Companies in Media" in both 2015 and 2017, the company has pioneered new approaches to technology and talent.

In 2014, PRX launched Radiotopia, a curated network of extraordinary podcasts anchored by 99% Invisible from Roman Mars. The network has quickly grown to over 19 million downloads per month (November 2017, Podtrac).

Star Death Tango

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