Best J P Wagner Podcasts (2025)

1
Plessy AND Ferguson—Activism and the Fight for Justice and Equal Rights 15:52

7d ago15:52

15:52

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impos…

1
Pie Down Here: Listening Back—Alabama Sharecroppers and Communist Organizers, 1930s 37:43

28d ago37:43

37:43

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression. Kelly used those oral histories to write his…

1
A Tribute to George Foreman: An Unexpected Kitchen—The George Foreman Grill 22:38

1M ago22:38

22:38

In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about immigrants and homeless people, who didn't have official kitchens, using the George Foreman Grill to make meals and a home. Did George Forem…

1
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - Revisiting Manzanar 44:49

2M ago44:49

44:49

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens Valley in the Mojave desert, where Japanese Americans wer…

1
The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex 53:14

2M ago53:14

53:14

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful, political, important, risky films and made sure there w…

1
House/Full of Black Women 52:59

3M ago52:59

52:59

For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls overwhelming their community.…

1
Spotlight on Black Pet Care Entrepreneurs 36:30

3M ago36:30

36:30

Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Silly dog treats, Trill Paws enamel ID Tags, The Dog Father of Harlem's Doggie Day Spa, gorgeous rainbow beaded Dog Collars from The Kenya Collection, Sir …

1
The Anti-Inaugural Concert: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon and the "Plea for Peace" music of 1973 Inauguration 33:14

4M ago33:14

33:14

Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration ceremonies across the years signaling change, new beginnings and reflecting the mood of the country and a new administration. In January 1973, following the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, conductor Leonard…

1
Edna Lewis: Christmas in Freetown 5:56

5M ago5:56

5:56

Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants established in 1866. Before she began writing books, Edna had been a cel…

1
Cecilia Chiang Spills the Tea 27:01

5M ago27:01

27:01

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history. Cecilia Chiang introduced regional Chinese cooking to America in th…

1
Catherine Bauer Wurster, Housing Advocate: A Thoroughly Modern Woman 49:00

5M ago49:00

49:00

A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families. Ca…

1
Beyond Architecture: The Fantasy Worlds of Phyllis Birkby 45:28

6M ago45:28

45:28

Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community, providing a creative and empowering space within a male-domin…

1
Constellation Prize: Nightwalking 30:53

6M ago30:53

30:53

It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. Souls to the polls today across the country, and so much hangs in the balance. On this fraught and tender Tuesday, when all our nerves are frayed, we offer a moment of respite and contemplation — an ep…

1
The Hope and the Scope: Young People and the Political Moment 32:07

7M ago32:07

32:07

July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gathered in the nation’s capital for the 29th annual Brave New Voices Festival — four non-stop days of slam poetry competition, coaching, workshops, late-night freestyling and in 2024, voting information. In …

1
Tupperware 10:52

7M ago10:52

10:52

Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy. It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when we were invited to a Tupperware party our friend Kirst…

1
Manny's: A Civic Gathering Place 32:25

8M ago32:25

32:25

As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet people working on the front lines of social change, and di…

1
Oprah, Kamala, and The New Orleans Four 17:38

8M ago17:38

17:38

There was a moment at the 2024 Democratic National Convention when Oprah took the stage — and the crowd went wild. She spoke boldly about Kamala Harris and her place in a long line of strong Black women who have paved the way. At one point she veered into the story of Tessie Prevost Williams, who recently passed away, and the New Orleans Four. Nove…

1
Burning Man: Archiving the Ephemeral 18:45

9M ago18:45

18:45

On the night of Summer Solstice 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built and burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach surrounded by a handful of friends. Burning Man was born. This summer, the 39th annual Burning Man gathering begins to assemble on a vast dry lake bed in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, the nomadic ritual's home…

1
Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française 31:18

9M ago31:18

31:18

In honor of the Paris Olympics and the astounding contribution of the French to culture and art of the world, The Kitchen Sisters Present, Archive Fever: Henri Langlois and the history of the Cinémathèque Française, featuring Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders, Tom Luddy, Lotte Eisner, Simone Signoret, Agnes Varda, Costa-Gavras, Barbet Schroeder. He…

1
Linda Ronstadt Day 30:20

10M ago30:20

30:20

San Francisco officially declared July 15th Linda Ronstadt Day. In her honor, The Kitchen Sisters Present this story about her book, Feels Like Home, about her family, and the food, culture and music of the borderland of Arizona and Mexico where she is rooted. Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands is an historical, musical, edible mem…

1
Traveling Route 66 — The Mother Road 58:59

11M ago58:59

58:59

Route 66—The Main Street of America— the first continuously paved highway linking east and west was the most traveled and well known road in the US for almost fifty years. From Chicago, through the Ozarks, across Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, up the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, and down into California to the Pacific Ocean. The first road of i…

1
Laying the Groundwork: Women in American Architecture, Spring 1977 26:33

11M ago26:33

26:33

In 1977, a cavernous, rarely used sculpture gallery in the Brooklyn Museum was filled with drafting tables, their tops tilted to display collages of the work and under-told stories of women working in architecture in the United States. We revisit this first significant effort to publicly tell the little known stories of American women in architectu…

1
A Floating City Vision - Mirabeau Water Garden, New Orleans 17:45

11M ago17:45

17:45

As this year's hurricane season ramps up, we go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed…

1
Dissident Kitchens 15:39

12M ago15:39

15:39

On February 16, 2024 Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died under unexplained circumstances in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the election that enthroned Vladimir Putin for another six years of near-absolute power. Within days of Navalny’s death his wife Yulia Navalnaya rose up, spoke out and vowed to continue her husband’s s…

1
Eleanor Coppola: Notes on a Life 52:43

1y ago52:43

52:43

On April 12, 2024, Eleanor Coppola, artist, filmmaker, mother and wife of director Francis Ford Coppola, died at her home in the Napa Valley surrounded by family. She was 87 years old and had lived a most remarkable life. Shortly before her death, Eleanor had completed her third memoir. In it she wrote: “I appreciate how my unexpected life has stre…

1
Cool Hair, Great Smile: Remembering Knox Phillips 40:02

1y ago40:02

40:02

Over the years, The Kitchen Sisters have zeroed in on Memphis, Tennessee in a big way. The inspiration for that and the inspiration for some of our favorite stories is Knox Phillips. Davia met Knox in 1997 in Memphis when she was doing casting for Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Rainmaker. She was on the set standing next to a guy. Cool hair, great…

1
The Romance and Sex Life of the Date 15:13

1y ago15:13

15:13

In 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture created a special department of men, called “Agriculture Explorers,” to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S. These men introduced exotic specimens like the mango, the avocado, and the date. In 1900, the USDA sent plant explorer, Walter Swingl…

1
Parsi New Year—First Day of Spring 17:52

1y ago17:52

17:52

Niloufer Ichaporia King lives in a house with three kitchens. She prowls through six farmer’s markets a week in search of unusual greens, roots, seeds, and traditional food plants from every immigrant culture. She is an anthropologist, a kitchen botanist, a one-of-a-kind cook, a Parsi from Bombay living in San Francisco, and the author of My Bombay…

1
Buildings Speak: Stories of Pioneering Women Architects hosted by Frances McDormand 50:55

1y ago50:55

50:55

Little known stories of pioneering architects — Julia Morgan, the first accredited female architect in California, who designed Hearst Castle and was nearly written out of the history books. Natalie de Blois, who helped imagine the first glass skyscrapers on Park Avenue by day and raised four children by night. Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black queer mod…

1
Black Chef, White House—African American Chefs in the President's Kitchen 16:13

1y ago16:13

16:13

A look at the President’s kitchen and some of the first cooks to feed the Founding Fathers—Hercules and James Hemings—the enslaved chefs of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Hercules, described as a “dandy,” had eight assistants—stewards, butlers, undercooks, waiters. He cooked in a huge fireplace—hearth cooking. He walked through the streets…

1
The Mardi Gras Indians—Stories from New Orleans 22:44

1+ y ago22:44

22:44

Jelly Roll Morton talks of being a “Spy Boy” in the Mardi Gras Indian parades of his youth. Bo Dollis, of the Wild Magnolias, tells of sewing his suit of feathers and beads all night long. Tootie Montana masks for the first time as Mardi Gras starts up again after World War II. Big Queen Ausettua makes connections between the black Mardi Gras India…

1
230 - Architecture, Family Style – Sarah Harkness & Jean Fletcher 44:42

1+ y ago44:42

44:42

Sarah “Sally” Pillsbury and Jean B. Fletcher were both architects who married architects. The two women and their husbands were founding members of The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a visionary, idealistic architecture firm founded just after WWII. The two women, who had 13 children between them, lived with their families and several other foundi…

1
229 - The Pancake Years - For Lenny on Christmas Eve 22:28

1+ y ago22:28

22:28

For five years Davia’s father, Lenny Nelson, asked her to go to Rattlesden, England, to visit the Air Force base where he was stationed during WWII and to find an old photograph hanging in the town pub honoring his 8th Air Force squadron. It was still there, over 50 years later, he told her. Finally, one fine Sunday, Davia headed out in search of t…

1
Emily Dickinson's Hidden Kitchen—Black Cake 30:05

1+ y ago30:05

30:05

Deep in the hidden archives of Harvard’s Houghton Library are the butter stained recipes of Emily Dickinson. Who knew? Emily Dickinson was better known by most as a baker than a poet in her lifetime. In this story a beautiful line up of “Keepers”— dedicated archivists, librarians, historians, poets and more—lead us through the complex labyrinth of …

1
Lou Reed's Tai Chi 34:34

1+ y ago34:34

34:34

Lou Reed, musician, rock icon, poet, leader of the legendary Velvet Underground, was obsessed with tai chi — the practice, the community, the health and spiritual benefits. Lou had been writing a book about this ancient martial art that was unfinished when he died in 2013. Lou’s wife, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson, looked at Lou's unfinis…

1
226 - Kimchi Diplomacy—Hidden Kitchens: War & Peace and Food 20:17

1+ y ago20:17

20:17

Late autumn is Kimjang season in the Republic of Korea when families and communities come together to make and share large quantities of kimchi to ensure that every household has enough to sustain it through the long, harsh winter. This story is part of series Hidden Kitchens: Kimchi Diplomacy — War & Peace and Food “Kimchi is everywhere in Korea. …

1
Architect Anna Wagner Keichline: The Legacy of Invention 26:19

1+ y ago26:19

26:19

Anna Wagner Keichline (1889–1943) was the first registered woman architect in Pennsylvania and was among the first registered women architects in the United States. During her long career, she designed dozens of commercial and residential buildings, as well as numerous industrial products. She was awarded seven patents for her innovative residentia…

1
224 - Make Coffee Black Again 23:44

1+ y ago23:44

23:44

In this episode, we borrow a cup of sound from the podcast, What You’re Eating, a production of FoodPrint.org, hosted by Jerusha Klemperer. In the episode, “Coffee: From Seed to Cup,” Jerusha interviewed coffee entrepreneur Bartholomew Jones, who co-founded CxffeeBlack, a "multimedia coffee educational company," with his wife Renata Henderson in Me…

1
223 - Losing Lincoln 22:36

1+ y ago22:36

22:36

Since the start of the pandemic, more than 90 colleges have merged or closed permanently. One of these schools, Lincoln College, closed its doors with only about one month’s notice in May of 2022 — after 157 years. Due to the pandemic and a ransomware attack, administrators say the school was unable to retain, recruit, or fundraise. Since then, stu…

1
222 - Filmmaker Wim Wenders—The Entire Caboddle 17:42

1+ y ago17:42

17:42

Filmmaker Wim Wenders premiered two new films at Cannes this year — Anselm, a 3-D, cutting edge documentary about the contemporary German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, and Perfect Days, a quiet, meditative film about a toilet cleaner in Kyoto who who drives from job to job, listening to music on cassettes — Patti Smith, the Kinks, Lou Reed… E…

1
221 - Lena Richard - America's Unknown Celebrity Chef 29:51

1+ y ago29:51

29:51

When Lena Richard cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American women cooks worked behind swinging kitchen doors, Richard claimed her place as a culinary authority, broadcasting in the living rooms of New Orleans’s elite white families. She was an entrepreneur, educ…

1
220 - Archiving the Underground — Hip Hop at Harvard & Cornell 31:26

2y ago31:26

31:26

We delve into the story of the founding of the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor Henry Louis Gates to “facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.” You’ll hear from Prof…

1
219 - Edith Warner's Atomic Tea Room 24:45

2y ago24:45

24:45

It was top secret. But everyone in Santa Fe knew there was something going on up on the hill in the remote, desert mountains of Los Alamos in 1943. J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of the top scientists and thinkers in the world were sequestered away up there — fenced in, with military guard towers all around. But there was one little sanctuary dow…

1
218 - Remembering "The Day After Trinity - J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb" 34:16

2y ago34:16

34:16

In 1981, The Kitchen Sisters interviewed filmmaker Jon Else about his Academy Award nominated documentary, The Day After Trinity, a deeply moving film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the dramatic story of the creation of the atomic bomb. The film, now showing on the Criterion channel, traces Oppenheimer’s evolution from the architect of the bomb to…

1
217 - International Congress of Youth Voices—Youth on Fire 40:02

2y ago40:02

40:02

Behind the scenes at the International Congress of Youth Voices when 131 youth activists,13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries — students, writers, poets, marchers, community leaders all gathered together in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2019, to share and amplify their ideas and energy — to brainstorm possibilities for how to achieve a better world. Th…

1
216 - Amaza Lee Meredith, African American Architect: Love & Home 43:32

2y ago43:32

43:32

Born in 1895 in Lynchburg, VA, Amaza Lee Meredith was an African American architect, artist and educator who taught at Virginia State College where she founded the art department. Despite the fact she was never a registered architect, she was one of the few Black architects practicing at the time, and one of the country's very few Black women archi…

1
215—Prince and the Technician 22:59

2y ago22:59

22:59

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, and al…

1
214 - The Passion of Chris Strachwitz 1931-2023 —Arhoolie Records 52:06

2y ago52:06

52:06

Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimene…

1
213 - Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture Critic: The Art We Must Live With 45:05

2y ago45:05

45:05

Ada Louise Huxtable, who “invented” the profession of architecture critic, wrote countless articles for two great daily newspapers and had a gigantic influence on our understanding of the work of architects, real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and the city itself, over the course of six decades in print. Beginning in 1963, Huxtable was the fi…

1
212 - Tony Schwartz Centennial- 30,000 Recordings Later 22:50

2y ago22:50

22:50

Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. In honor of Tony Schwartz’s Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait of a man who spe…

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J P Wagner Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen