“After more than a hundred years of hard work from some of the greatest cryptological and linguistic minds on the planet, we still don’t quite know what this object is. There’s really nothing like it in the world.”

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Recently, Phoebe told a personal story about her mother, who died this year. In this episode, she talks to journalist Sebastian Junger, who was rushed to the hospital one day after feeling sick – and then, he saw something strange.

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For our 100th episode, a story from Phoebe about her mother, Valentine, who died this spring.

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When Drew Lanham was growing up in South Carolina, he used to lie down in a field and play dead, just so he could get a glimpse of vultures flying over him. He made binoculars out of toilet paper rolls, and wings out of cardboard. He loved birds. But when he went to college, he says, “I was trying to live up to the expectations of others who said, ‘You’re a Black kid who’s good at math and science.’” So he studied engineering, and was miserable. And then, he heard the call of a Prairie Warbler.

Drew Lanham’s book is The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

This episode first aired in 2020.

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Writer Andrew Leland talks with Phoebe about slowly losing his eyesight. He was diagnosed with the degenerative eye disease Retinitis pigmentosa when he was in high school. "It was like, 'I'm going out in the woods with my friends at night. And oddly enough, I'm bad at it.'"

Andrew Leland’s memoir, The Country of the Blind, A Memoir at the End of Sight, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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When Miguel Esteban was 14 years old, he got an idea to make his own science fiction magazine. He wanted Octavia Butler to write a piece for it. So he picked up the phone to ask her.

Special thanks to Terry Gross and Fresh Air, which is produced at NPR member station WHYY and distributed by NPR. Quotes reprinted with permission of the Octavia E. Butler Estate.

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One Saturday night in the 90s, Patrick Makuakāne and about 15 other hula dancers showed up to a club in San Francisco they called Old Dreamland. "It didn’t feel like taking risks. Because no one was there to tell me 'what the hell are you doing?'"

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Nurse BokHee is in the background of every season of "Grey’s Anatomy." She’s become one of the show’s most beloved characters – but she's only had a few lines.

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Gabrielle Gatto works at one of the most famous cemeteries in the country. Recently, she recorded a day in her life for the podcast Finally! A Show, for an episode called “Finally! A Show about a Crematorium Worker at Green-Wood Cemetery.” 

Criminal listeners might recognize one of the voices in this episode - Lynda Thompson-Lindsay - who runs the Lawrence H. Woodward Funeral Home. You can hear our conversation with her in our episode One Troy. 

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The synthesizer was invented in the 1890s. But for people to really start using it, it took half a century, a musician named Wendy Carlos, and an album called Switched-On Bach.

Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan of Switched On Pop tell Phoebe why Wendy Carlos is “the most significant figure in 20th century music that the least people know about.”

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The night sky is getting brighter almost everywhere in the world. We visit a place that is trying to stay dark.

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