Scene on Radio
Episodes
Proxy: Nicole Can't Stop Being Aggro
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A guest episode from the podcast Proxy: Nicole is an organizer who's good at channeling her anger. The trouble is she can't always downshift -- or eve...
Historical Maturity and Cowardice: Keeping ScOR #15
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. After a visit to his hometown, Mankato, Minnesota -- the subject of the Scene on Ra...
Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're sharing an episode from another podcast that asks big questions about who we are and how we got here: The Alabama Murders, a new series by bests...
Voices of Hiroshima
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A rebroadcast of a Scene on Radio episode, eighty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The word “...
Lever Time: Trump, Colbert, And The War On Truth
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A bonus episode from the Lever Time podcast: Their latest, exploring the decision by CBS to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the wider co...
Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Reflections on the Trump Administration's attempt to wrangle control of the nationa...
The New Old Racism: Keeping ScOR#4
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host John Biewen teases Season 8 and reads an installment from his new newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Eight years after our "Seeing White" series, whitenes...
Bonus: Michael Kliën and the Body Politic
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Kliën wants to help bring about profound change in the world, but not through the usual means. An Austrian-born Dance professor at Duke Unive...
S7 E13: CAPITALISM Bonus, Live at Motorco
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With our Capitalism season and the election behind us, now what? Can we find hope and a way forward? In a live show taped December 5, 2024, at Motorco...
Post-election '24 All-Star Special
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Host John Biewen is joined by Celeste Headlee, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Ellen McGirt, and Amy Westervelt, co-hosts of Scene on Radio's full-length seasons...
S7 E12: Reimagined Economies
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In our season finale, we visit with people on two continents who are turning core structures of capitalism on their heads – or, at least, sideways. ...
S7 E11: Better Capitalism?
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the first of two episodes looking at responses to capitalism’s failings, we explore reforms aimed at making the current economic system more huma...
S7 E10: The Extracted
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A visit to West Africa and Western Europe to look at the cocoa trade. Did the colonial side of early capitalism – Western countries getting rich at ...
S7 E9: At the Tipping Point
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1972, a team of young scientists at MIT published a study exploring what would happen to human civilization if people kept pursuing endless economi...
S7 E8: The People's Pushback
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
S7 E8: The People’s Pushback Over several decades, a growing number of people in the United States and elsewhere – especially younger people – ...
S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0After 40 years of neoliberalism, most Americans of every political stripe agree that the economy is “rigged” in favor of corp...
S7 E6: Thirty Glorious Years
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How the balance of power shifted, for a time, in the decades after World War II, and led to a better kind of capitalism – if you think prosperity be...
S7 E5: A New Thing in Human History
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An age of invention and mass production, propelled by a new mechanism – the corporate research lab – leads to a surge in material wealth like the ...
S7 E4: Invisible Hand Guy?
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Economic change happens in a cultural context. We trace the tectonic shifts in the Western mind that made capitalism thinkable – in part through a l...
S7 E3: Ships, Swords, and Fences
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama to colonial conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade, to the privatization of land in western Europe: huma...
S7 E2: BC: Before Capitalism
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
To fully grasp capitalism, it helps to understand the system it replaced – and the most meaningful differences between feudalism and capitalism. We ...
S7 E1: Market Failure
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Introduction to our 7th season: Capitalism. The world’s dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn’t been for at least half a century. Millio...
Season 7 Trailer: Capitalism
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to Season 7: Capitalism. The world's dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn't been for at least half a century. This season tells the...
Bonus: Long Shadow, In Guns We Trust
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As we get ready to launch our Season 7, a bonus episode from another podcast we think our listeners will want to hear: Long Shadow. Episode 1 of its n...
S6 E5: A Way Forward
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What would it take, and what would it even mean, to heal from a wound like the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898 — or from centuries of white sup...
S6 E4: The Forgetting
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After the massacre and coup of November 10, 1898, white supremacists in North Carolina soon finished the job of disenfranchising Black citizens and in...
S6 E3: A Day of Blood
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On November 1898, North Carolina Democrats won a sweeping victory at the polls – confirming the success of their campaign based on white supremacy, ...
S6 E2: Crying "Negro Rule"
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By 1898, two decades after the end of Reconstruction, white elites, backed by violent terror groups, have installed Jim Crow across most of the South....
S6 E1: What Was Lost
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This series tells the story of the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history, and the white supremacist massacre that went with it. It happened in...
Season 6 Trailer: Echoes of a Coup
03 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Introduction to Season 6, a series co-produced by Michael A. Betts II and Scene on Radio producer and host John Biewen, with story editor Loretta Will...
Update: Scene on Radio status report
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scene on Radio is on an extended hiatus, but is on its way back. Host and producer John Biewen explains that the show has found a new home: the Kenan ...
"The Excess of Democracy": Rebroadcast
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men got together in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the United States, replacing the new nation’s ori...
White Affirmative Action: Rebroadcast
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to U.S. government programs and support designed to benefit particular racial groups, history is clear. White folks have received most o...
Losing Ground: Rebroadcast
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The next in our summer mini-season of rebroadcasts: For Eddie Wise, owning a hog farm was a lifelong dream. In middle age, he and his wife, Dorothy, f...
Bonus: Introducing Hot Take
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this bonus episode we share a recent installment from Hot Take, the climate podcast co-hosted by Amy Westervelt (co-host/reporter for our Season 5 ...
Himpathy: Rebroadcast
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Several years after Janey was sexually assaulted by her former boyfriend, Mathew, she told some of her closest friends, and her mother, what Mathew ha...
Things I'm Afraid to Say: Rebroadcast
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A refugee from war in Eastern Europe. An NYC-born survivor who grew up poor, Black, Muslim, and gay. And how one, and her music, saved the other. By A...
Prince and Philando and Futures Untold: Rebroadcast
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How to grieve when the deaths come so quickly? How, as a Black mother in America, to protect your child’s innocence and hope? An audio essay by Stac...
S5 E11: Change Everything
15 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our Season 5 finale: What’s the cultural transformation we need to make — in the West, and the U.S. in particular — to live in good health ...
S5 E10: The Power Structure, Not the Energy Source
08 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The first of two concluding episodes in Season 5, in which we focus on solutions. In Part 10 of The Repair, we look at the actions and policies that ...
S5 E9: Pachamama
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In several countries around the world, including Ecuador, New Zealand, and the U.S., some people are trying to protect the planet using a legal concep...
S5 E8: Last Orders
24 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Among the wealthy, industrialized Western countries that created the climate crisis, Scotland is one of the leaders in pivoting away from fossil fuels...
S5 E7: Deluges and Dreams
17 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The climate crisis is not new to Bangladesh. For decades, global warming has exacerbated storms and flooding and turned many thousands of people into ...
S5 E6: "We Don't Have the Power to Fight It"
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Earth’s changing climate is already displacing millions of people, worsening tension and conflict, and sometimes violence – for example, between f...
Bonus Episode: Manchin on the Hill, and Introducing Drilled
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Co-hosts John Biewen and Amy Westervelt discuss the U.S. Congress’s effort to pass its first major climate bill ever, and Senator Joe Manchin’s mo...
S5 E5: Jakarta, the Sinking Capital
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Southeast Asia is especially vulnerable to storms, rising oceans, and other climate effects—though countries in the region did very little to create...
S5 E4: Up to Heaven and Down to Hell
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why has the United States played such an outsized role in the creation of the climate crisis? As a settler nation, the U.S. emerged from the colonizin...
S5 E3: "Managing" Nature
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If the Enlightenment was so great, why was it not a course correction? In fact, did cultural values that took hold in the West in this period speed u...
S5 E2: To the Victor
22 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How western Europe really broke bad in its understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world, from the Crusades to capitalism. Part 2 of our se...
S5 E1: In the Beginning
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Part 1 of our series on the climate emergency. How did we drive ourselves into the ecological ditch? And, crucially, who is this ‘we’? Our story s...
Season 5 Trailer: The Repair
23 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This season will explore the cultural roots of our current ecological emergency, and the deep changes Western society will need to make to save the Ea...
REBROADCAST: S4 E8 The Second Redemption
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This special re-broadcast of a Season 4 episode is in response to the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. A look at the right-wing counter...
BONUS EPISODE: Election 2020
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What does the 2020 election in the United States tell us, or remind us, about the state of democracy in America? A follow-up to our Season 4 series on...
Hearing Hiroshima (Rebroadcast)
03 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The word “Hiroshima” may bring to mind a black-and-white image of a mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that it’s an actual city with a millio...
S4 E12: More Democracy
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What will it take to make the United States a more fully-functioning democracy, and how can we, as citizens, bring about that change? By host and pr...
S4 E11: More Truth
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How well do the news media serve us as citizens, and what role does the notion of “objective,” or “neutral,” journalism play in the failings o...
S4 E10: Schooled for Democracy
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In most American schools, children *hear about* democracy, but don’t get to *practice* it. What would a more engaged brand of civics education look ...
S4 E9: American Empire
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“America” and “empire.” Do those words go together? If so, what kind of imperialism does the U.S. practice, and how has American empire change...
S4 E8: The Second Redemption
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The conservative, neoliberal counterrevolution in the face of expanding democracy in America: It started long before Donald Trump. Even before Ronald ...
S4 E7: Freedom Summer
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1964, about a thousand young Americans, black and white, came together in Mississippi to place themselves in the path of white suprem...
Bonus Episode: Pandemic America
27 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this special episode, host John Biewen and series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika discuss the coronavirus pandemic and how the crisis, and the nat...
S4 E6: A New Deal
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Great Depression presented a crisis not only for the U.S. economy, but for American democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to save the nat...
S4 E5: Feminism in Black and White
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
People fighting for more democracy in the United States often have to struggle against sexism and racism. In fact, those two struggles are often insep...
S4 E4: The Second Revolution
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After the Civil War, a surprising coalition tried to remake the United States into a real multiracial democracy for the first time. Reconstruction, as...
S4 E3: The Cotton Empire
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades after America’s founding and the establishment of the Constitution, did the nation get better, more just, more democratic? Or did it ...
S4 E2: "The Excess of Democracy"
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men got together in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the United States, replacing the new nation’s ori...
S4 E1: Rich Man's Revolt
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the American Revolution, the men who revolted were among the wealthiest and most comfortable people in the colonies. What kind of revolution was it...
Season 4 Trailer: The Land That Never Has Been Yet
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Our season-long series will touch on concerns like authoritarianism, voter suppression and gerrymandering, foreign intervention, and the role of money...
S3 E12: The End of Male Supremacy?
12 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In our Season Three finale, co-hosts Celeste Headlee and John Biewen talk about where American culture goes from here, sexism-wise. And we hear from s...
S3 E11: Domination
28 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Host John Biewen dips into the world of sports talk radio, where guys talk not just about sports but also about how to be a man in twenty-first-centur...
S3 E10: The Juggernaut
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Writer Ben James and his wife Oona are raising their sons in a progressive and “queer-friendly” New England town. They actively encourage the boys...
S3 E9: Be Like You
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lewis Wallace, female-assigned at birth, wanted to transition in the direction of maleness—in some ways. He shifted his pronouns, had surgery, start...
S3 E8: American Made
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
American history—law, economics, culture—has built different notions of masculinity (and femininity) for people of varying races and ethnicities. ...
S3 E7: Himpathy
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Several years after Janey was sexually assaulted by her former boyfriend, Mathew, she told some of her closest friends, and her mother, what Mathew ha...
S3 E6: Warriors
19 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Do nations fight wars because men are naturally violent? Or do societies condition men to embrace violence so they’ll fight the nation’s wars? Al...
S3 E5: More Than Paper Cuts
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The #MeToo Movement has shed a harsh light on sexual harassment in the workplace. Just how bad, and how pervasive, is sexism on the job in the U.S., f...
S3 E4: Feminism in Black and White
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The struggles against sexism and racism come together in the bodies, and the lives, of black women. Co-hosts Celeste Headlee and John Biewen look at t...
S3 E3: Skeleton War
08 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A few hundred years ago, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment began to declare that “all men are created equal.” Some of them said that notion ...
S3 E2: Ain't No Amoeba
25 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For millennia, Western culture (and most other cultures) declared that men and women were different sorts of humans—and, by the way, men were better...
S3 E1: Dick Move
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Launching our Season 3 series, co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee look at the problems of male supremacy. And we visit Deep Time to explore the ...
Scene on Radio Season 3: MEN Trailer
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Scene on Radio opens its Season 3 series, MEN, with this preview. Host John Biewen introduces the series with series co-host Celeste Headlee. Music ...
I Know It's You (Rebroadcast)
13 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A father turns on a recorder while tucking in his 7-year-old, having no idea he’s about to capture a poignant growing-up moment in his son’s life....
Transformation (Seeing White, Part 14)
24 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The concluding episode in our series, Seeing White. An exploration of solutions and responses to America’s deep history of white supremacy by host J...
White Affirmative Action (Seeing White, Part 13)
09 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to U.S. government programs and support earmarked for the benefit of particular racial groups, history is clear. White folks have receiv...
Losing Ground
26 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For Eddie Wise, owning a hog farm was a lifelong dream. In middle age, he and his wife, Dorothy, finally got a farm of their own. But they say that ov...
My White Friends (Seeing White, Part 12)
12 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For years, Myra Greene had explored blackness through her photography, often in self-portraits. She wondered, what would it mean to take pictures of w...
Danger (Seeing White, Part 11)
28 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For hundreds of years, the white-dominated American culture has raised the specter of the dangerous, violent black man. Host John Biewen tells the sto...
Citizen Thind (Seeing White, Part 10)
14 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Bhagat Singh Thind, and also of Takao Ozawa – Asian immigrants who, in the 1920s, sought to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that they w...
A Racial Cleansing in America (Seeing White Part 9)
31 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1919, a white mob forced the entire black population of Corbin, Kentucky, to leave, at gunpoint. It was one of many racial expulsions in the United...
Skulls and Skin (Seeing White, Part 8)
17 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to p...
Chenjerai’s Challenge (Seeing White, Part 7)
05 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“How attached are you to the idea of being white?” Chenjerai Kumanyika puts that question to host John Biewen, as they revisit an unfinished conve...
That's Not Us, So We're Clean (Seeing White, Part 6)
26 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John B...
Little War on the Prairie (Seeing White, Part 5)
12 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen heard next to nothing about the town’s most important historical event. In 1862, Mankato was the site ...
On Crazy We Built a Nation (Seeing White, Part 4)
30 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“All men are created equal.” Those words, from the Declaration of Independence, are central to the story that Americans tell about ourselves and o...
Made in America (Seeing White, Part 3)
16 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Chattel slavery in the United States, with its distinctive – and strikingly cruel – laws and structures, took shape over many decades in colonial ...
How Race Was Made (Seeing White, Part 2)
01 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For much of human history, people viewed themselves as members of tribes or nations but had no notion of “race.” Today, science deems race biologi...
Turning the Lens (Seeing White, Part 1)
15 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Events of the past few years have turned a challenging spotlight on White people, and Whiteness, in the United States. An introduction to our series e...
Movement Time
25 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Facts can be ignored by the powers that be and still ignite a movement. An interview with Tim Tyson, author of the new book, The Blood of Emmett Till....
Emmett and Trayvon (Rebroadcast)
11 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a long and painful history in the U.S. of white men killing black men and boys without punishment. In this episode, we listen in on “Dar H...
I Found No Strangers (Travels With Mic, Part 3)
14 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The last in our series exploring the spirit of America in the footsteps of one of its greatest writers, John Steinbeck. At key spots on Steinbeck’s ...