On December 21, 2025, activist and trailblazer Betty Reid Soskin passed away in Richmond, California. She was 104. Over the years we've chronicled Betty's remarkable story and want to share it today in honor of Betty and Black History Month.

In 2011, at age 89, Betty became America's oldest national park service ranger, a position she held until she retired at 100. Her bold and forthright tours and talks at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front Museum were legendary. As a Black woman who worked in the segregated war effort, she spoke from her personal experience revealing a fuller, richer understanding of the World War II years experienced by women and people of color on the home front.

Betty's Creole/Cajun family was from New Orleans and her great grandmother had been born into slavery in 1846. Displaced by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Betty moved with her family to Oakland, where she grew up in the late 20s and 30s. During WWII she worked as a file clerk for Boilermakers Union A-36, a Jim Crow all Black union auxiliary, where she witnessed firsthand the discrimination faced by Black workers in the wartime industry.

Betty raised four children in the highly segregated Diablo Valley area where the family was subject to death threats. She and her first husband, Mel Reid, owned one of the first Black record shops west of the Mississippi located in Berkeley. She also worked as a Field Representative for California State Assembly women Dion Aroner and Lonnie Hancock. In 2016, at age 94, Betty survived a violent home invasion and returned to work at the Rosie the Riveter Museum just weeks later.

A singer, songwriter, poet and musician, Betty chronicled her life and work in a memoir, "Sign My Name to Freedom," which inspired both a stage play and a documentary film. Betty received numerous awards and honors throughout her life, including a presidential coin from Barack Obama in 2015 after she lit the national Christmas tree at the White House.

Special thanks to: The San Francisco Public Library and Shawna Sherman of the African American Center of the San Francisco Main Library; This is Love Podcast and creators Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer; and A Lifetime of Being Betty, a Little Village Foundation recording release produced by Mike Kappus. Thanks also to Betty’s son, musician and songwriter Bob Reid  http://www.bobreidmusic.com/

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We are part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

The Gilded Age was a time of unparalleled wealth and prosperity in America—but it was also a time of staggering inequality, corruption, and unchecked power. Among its richest figures was Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who built his fortune on the backs of low-paid workers, only to give it away—earning him the nickname the Godfather of American Philanthropy. He didn’t just fund libraries and universities, he championed a philosophy: that it was the duty of the ultra-wealthy to serve the public good.

But, as it turns out, even philanthropy is a form of power. So, what exactly have wealthy philanthropists done with their power? We explore that question at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, inside Carnegie’s former mansion. There, a board game called Philanthropy invites players to reimagine the connection between money and power—not by amassing wealth, but by giving it away.

Produced by The Smithsonian's Podcast — Sidedoor.  With host and Senior Producer Lizzie Peabody. Featuring: 

• Christina de León, Associate Curator of Latino Design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
• Tommy Mishima, artist and co-creator (with Liam Lee) of the installation Game Room in Cooper Hewitt's triennial Making Home
• David Nasaw, author of the biography Andrew Carnegie

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

They don't make 'em like Marion Cunningham these days. Food writer, home cook, Fannie Farmer's new incarnation, James Beard’s sidekick, wizard of waffles. Marion was a treasured friend of The Kitchen Sisters, and in 2003, we sat down with her and recorded a long conversation.

We've been digging through our archive of late looking for people and stories that inspire, that illuminate, that cut a new path and nourish the soul. Marion's story ticks all those boxes and more.

Marion died in 2012. She left such a big hole in the firmament when she passed, but she left so much love, wisdom, guidance, and her amazing recipe for waffles behind. You can find that recipe on our website, kitchensisters.org.

This story is part of The Kitchen Sisters Grand Dames of Cooking stories —  kitchen visionaries who worked to preserve, develop and pass on traditional foodways and cultural history through the art of cooking.

Host Frances McDormand leads us through this rich international story collection of land, community and food. From the organic olive groves and vineyards being grown on confiscated Mafia land in Sicily, to secret night clubs embedded in Soviet dissident kitchens. From tales of "cooking dogs" in Medieval England, to the little-known tale of agricultural explorers — the "Indiana Joneses of the plant world" — who introduced exotic dates from the Middle East to the Coachella Valley. We also go underground into the world of wine, war, and counterfeiting.

Plus, actor Gael Garcia Bernal takes us to his grandmother's Sinaloa kitchen in Mexico, Salman Rushdie takes us to Chocolate Town, Werner Herzog eats his shoe, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti gives us his recipe for happiness.

Hidden Kitchens World was produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, along with listeners around the world. Mixed by Jim McKee.

The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of the culture and the culture and collections they keep.

In this hour Henri Langlois’ legendary Cinémathéque in Paris, The Keeper of the National Archives, Nancy Pearl: the first librarian action figure, The Dark Side of the Dewey Decimal System and stories of Prince’s epic vault in Minneapolis and the Lenny Bruce Archive. 

Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard. 

Marcyliena Hazel Morgan was born in Chicago, May 8, 1950 and passed away September 28, 2025. We were fortunate to interview her in 2018 as part of the opening story in our NPR series The Keepers, about activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Keepers of the culture and the cultures and collections they keep. Guardians of history large and small, protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Individuals who take it upon themselves to preserve some part of our cultural heritage. Marcyliena Morgan was all that and more. 

Our story delves into the the founding of the Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Morgan and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to “facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”

You’ll hear from Professor Morgan, Professor Gates, Nas, Patrick Douthit aka 9th Wonder, an array of Harvard archivists and students studying at the archive as well as the records, music and voices being preserved there. We've also included more of our original interview with Dr. Morgan. 

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We're part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story of the San Francisco Treat.

A Canadian woman, Lois DeDomenico, marries an Italian immigrant, Tom DeDomenico, whose family founded Golden Grain Macaroni in San Francisco. Just after WWII, the newlyweds rent a room from an elderly Armenian woman, Pailadzo Captanian, who teaches the young, pregnant, 18-year-old Lois how to cook — including how to make yogurt, baklava, and pilaf.

During those hours in the kitchen, the old Armenian woman tells Lois the story of her life — her forced trek from Turkey to Syria, leaving her two young sons with a Greek family, her husband’s murder, the birth of her baby along the way (his name means “child of pain”), the story of the genocide. Mrs. Captanian shows Lois a book she wrote shortly after her experiences — one of the only eyewitness accounts written at the time. Most survivor accounts were published 30–40 years later. Hers was published in 1919 for the Paris Peace Talks, in hopes that it would help provide context for the establishment of an Armenian state.

Years after the DeDomenicos move away from Mrs. Captanian’s home, Tom’s brother is having dinner at the young couple’s house. He looks down at the pilaf Lois made and says, “This would be good in a box.” They name it Rice-A-Roni.

In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on X-rays of peoples' bones and body parts, were sold illegally on the black market.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones—Bone Music.”

“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

And we follow the making of X-ray recordings into the 21st century with Jack White and Third Man Records in Nashville, Tennessee.

Production

Produced by Roman Mars & 99% Invisible and The Kitchen Sisters Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson. With help from Brandi Howell, Andrew Roth and Nathan Dalton. We spoke with Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev; Gregory “Grisha” Freidin, Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature from Stanford; Alexander Genis, Russian writer and broadcaster; Xenia Vytuleva, visiting professor at Columbia University in the department of History and Theory of Architecture; Anya Von Bremzen, author of a the memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. A version of this story originally ran on NPR as part of The Kitchen Sisters’ “Hidden Kitchens” series.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX.

Muriel "Aggie" Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for some five decades, along with their children, chickens, and horses. The two just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

They both have newly published books, and are out on the circuit telling their stories that stand at the intersection of the organic farming movement and the independent filmmaking movement of the 1970’s.

Director Francis Coppola, Walter’s longtime collaborator, describes his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, as "a vast encyclopedia of cinema and everything that can be touched by it."

Director Phillip Kaufman said this about Harvesting History While Farming the Flats: "Blackberry Farm is Aggie Murch's Walden Pond. She made existence sustainable, rebuilt life over and over, helped spirits enter the world and gently helped them leave. She’s got the gift."

We have known and admired the Murches for some four decades and asked if we might do a story to celebrate this moment of love and publishing and graciously they said yes.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva, in collaboration with Nathan Dalton, Brandi Howell and Hannah Kaye. Mixed by Jim McKee.  

Special Thanks to City Lights Bookstore and Peter Maravelis.

Funding for our stories comes from listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions, The Robert Sillins Family Foundation, The Every Page Foundation, The Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation, The Buenas Obras Fund, The TRA Fund, Barbara & Howard Wollner, Michael Pollan & Judith Belzer, Bonnie Raitt, and you.

Our deep thanks to our community for your spirit and for supporting the stories.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent podcasts that widen your world.

Thank you for subscribing and thanks for listening. 

The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola & Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world. 

Appalled by the racist treatment of Black jazz musicians in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, the Brubecks wrote a musical based on the Jazz Ambassadors Program established by President Eisenhower and the US State Department during the Cold War. In an effort to win hearts and minds, jazz musicians were sent out around the world to represent the freedom and creativity of America through their art form. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and most of the other Jazz Ambassadors were Black. The irony is that they were treated like royalty around the world, but could not stay in hotels or play in integrated bands in their own country.

Performed live only once, at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962, the Real Ambassadors featured Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae, Dave Brubeck and Lambert Hendricks and Bavan. 

The musical was a chance for Louis Armstrong to speak out about his deep feelings about racism and segregation in this country — feelings he rarely expressed publicly.

The story features original music, rare archival recorded letters sent back and forth between the Brubecks and Louis Armstrong about the project, rehearsal recordings and interviews with Dave and Iola Brubeck. Other voices include: the Brubecks' sons, Chris and Dan Brubeck, Keith Hatschek, author of the  book, "The Real Ambassadors,” Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and singer/actress Yolande Bavan, the last surviving performer involved in the project.

Thanks to: Keith Hatschek, Chris Brubeck, Dan Brubeck, Ricky Riccardi, Yolande Bavan,  Lisa Cohen, and Wynton Marsalis.

Special thanks to: The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and the Louis Armstrong House Museum; Michael Bellacosa and the Brubeck Collection, Wilton Library, Wilton, Connecticut; The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia & RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-66 Mosaic Records 270; The Milken Family Foundation Archive Oral History Project; and The Library of Congress.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson) and Brandi Howell in collaboration with Jackson Spenner. Mixed by Jim McKee.

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.    
You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.

WSPA was the brainchild of seven women, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Phyllis Birkby, Katrin Adam, Bobbie Sue Hood,  Ellen Perry Berkeley, Marie Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague. These women represented a mix of academic, professional, and practical experience. What they wanted to create was an educational curriculum, by women and for women, that freed architecture from the hierarchies of existing schools and practice. 

At their workshops, held on a succession of college campuses, starting with St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine, everyone was a student and everyone was a teacher. No one was passive. For many of the participants, it was their first experience of being the majority gender in a design classroom or architecture office. Even decades later, they remembered the experience with happy tears. 

As with many collaborative enterprises with shoestring budgets, WSPA eventually dissipated, but not before giving a generation of women architects the tools (sometimes literally) to imagine a more communitarian world.

Produced by Brandi Howell with host Alexandra Lange for New Angle: Voice, the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.  

Special thanks in this episode to Leslie Kanes Wisemen, Katrin Adam, Cathy Simon, and Paulett Taggart.  And to the Smith College Special Collections, which houses all of the WSPA archives.  Visit NewAngleVoice instagram page to see some incredible photos from this collection, including the Building Charades and Architecture Cakes. Visit New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts.  

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. We're part of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of curated podcasts created by independent producers. Visit kitchensisters.org for more stories and info about our projects and public events.