NPR Host
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289 appearances
55 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Jun
NPR Host’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Staking her escape on little more than her years of reading and a modest fellowship to grad school, the wounded Sohini flew to New York. Through understated language and jolting comic-style images, Sohini tells a vivid, multidimensional New York story of her own. There's her odyssey, a capsule history of modern India, and always references to books, books, books.
This beautiful, ridiculous city engages with a good slice of the essential New York City literary canon— From Anne Petrie to Fran Lebowitz, E.B. White to Dylan Thomas, Colson Whitehead, Nora Ephron, and fellow graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. Like all these chroniclers of the city, Sohini sometimes questions her illogical attachment to such a difficult place.
wondering if I am forever doomed to love things and people whose reciprocation is fraught with contradictions. But New York, in image and reality, saved her, and her love for the city remains hardy. One New York City writer Sohini doesn't mention is Gay Talese, who's hailed, along with Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, as a pioneer of new journalism.
Talese, now in his early 90s, has written a lot of great pieces about New York – many of which are gathered together in a new book called A Town Without Time. The very first piece Talese published in Esquire in 1960 leads off this collection. It's called New York is a City of Things Unnoticed.
Among the thousands of things Talese notices are the night workers, truck drivers, cops, hacks, cleaning ladies who line up for movies in Times Square at 8 a.m. Other essays here ruminate on the oft-overlooked Verrazano Narrows Bridge and mobster Joe Bonanno. Worth the price of this collection alone is Talese's masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.
This 1966 profile of old blue eyes packs the sparkle, fizz, and complexity of genuine New York seltzer. Here's Talese reading from the opening of that profile as originally heard on This American Life.
Just as Sohini assures us that New York still draws in dreamers, Talese reminds us that New York is already riddled with ghosts, many of them tough-talking and hard-drinking. Eight million stories and counting about the city, but still room for more.
If you love NPR podcasts, you don't need me to tell you the value of public media in your life.
This episode contains depictions of racist violence. Now, on to the show.
The United States v. Wong Kim Ark is one of the most important Supreme Court cases in U.S. history, a case that would shape the relationship between immigrants and the U.S. government and further define who gets to call themselves an American.
So what did this have to do with Sandra Wong and her dad? What was his relationship to Wong Kim Ark?
And I didn't have that opportunity. She became obsessed with learning more about the story her father never told her. She went searching through all the records she could find.
After all her research, here's the story she pieced together. Wong Kim Ark brought Sandra's father, Wong Yuk Jim, to San Francisco from China in the 1920s. Wong Kim Ark claimed Sandra's father as his son, but it's possible her dad was his grandson. So this would make Wong Kim Ark... My father's grandfather.
Finding out the truth was bittersweet. And there's a question Sandra still thinks about. Why didn't her dad tell her? You know, there are secrets.
Pain. Shame. Maybe it's because at the center of this story is one troubling fact — Wong Kim Ark, Sandra's great-grandfather, was born in the United States. Yet as a young adult, he was prevented from returning to San Francisco, his birthplace, after visiting family in China because of, quote, his race, language, color, and dress.
And he did fight. With help from the Chinese-American community, Wong Kim Ark's case made it to the Supreme Court. He fought for his right to be here.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order denying birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. More than 20 states have sued the Trump administration in response, contending that his action disregards over 125 years of legal precedent.
And a federal judge has already blocked President Trump's executive order.
When pressed by CBS's Margaret Brennan on the U.S.
On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man returning from visiting his parents' homeland of China.
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