Radio Diaries

In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mountaintop removal mining in a corner of West Virginia called Pigeonroost Hollow. There used to be dozens of houses in the area, but within a few years there was just one. It belonged to Jimmy Weekley.
This story originally aired on NPR in 2011.

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This week we're sharing a story from the audio magazine Signal Hill.
The story, "What's Inside the Moon," is about the poet Kenneth Koch and a group of elementary school students he taught to write poetry in the 1960s. Half a century later, producer Jess Shane tracked down the students to ask what poetry had meant for their lives.
You can find more stories from Signal Hill at SignalHill.fm.

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This week we're featuring an episode of Phonograph, a podcast that deconstructs the history and art of audio storytelling.
The hosts of Phonograph recently invited Radio Diaries' Joe Richman on their show to talk about "24 Hours at the Golden Apple," a classic episode of This American Life that he helped produce. The Golden Apple is a diner in Chicago, and back in 2000, a group of producers took shifts hanging out there over 24 hours and talking to as many people as they could. Joe's story focused on the friendship between two high school students, Danielle and Allison, who he met during his shift.
Here's an excerpt of Phonograph where Joe talks about making this story, and what it's like to listen back to it more than two decades after it first aired.

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A few years ago we did a story about Martha Lillard, a woman who had spent most of her life sleeping in a device called an iron lung. Martha had caught polio in the early 1950s, and, like many polio survivors, she had difficulty breathing on her own. Her iron lung was a big metal ventilator that fit her entire body inside and used bellows to suck air in and out, helping her to breathe. Martha was the last person in the U.S. to use one.
Martha Lillard died on June 26, 2026. As a remembrance, we're revisiting our story about her.

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Fifty years ago, a group of schoolchildren in South Africa changed history.
For decades, the whites-only government of South Africa had brutally enforced a policy of racial segregation known as apartheid—and had crushed any opposition just as ruthlessly. By the 1970s, an entire generation of anti-apartheid fighters had been silenced. May were imprisoned or killed.
But on June 16, 1976, students in Soweto township outside Johannesburg decided to hold a protest against a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans, the language of South Africa's rulers.
This is their story.

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