This special episode comes from “On the Media” ’s Peabody-winning series “The Divided Dial,” reported by Katie Thornton. You know A.M. and F.M. radio. But did you know that there is a whole other world of radio surrounding us at all times? It’s called shortwave—and, thanks to a quirk of science that lets broadcasters bounce radio waves off the ionosphere, it can reach thousands of miles, penetrating rough terrain and geopolitical boundaries. How did this instantaneous, global, mass communication tool—a sort of internet-before-the-internet—go from a utopian experiment in international connection to a hardened tool of information warfare and propaganda? This first episode of Season 2 of “The Divided Dial” is called “Fishing in the Night.”
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From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
I'm Vincent Cunningham. Join me and my co-hosts for an episode on what can only be described as Pope Week. New episodes of Critics at Large drop every Thursday. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Adam Howard, a senior producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we wanted to share something special with you on the podcast this week. This comes from our friends at On the Media, and it's an episode from the second season of their series, The Divided Dial. Season one was all about the rightward shift of talk radio, and it won a Peabody Award.
In season two, reporter and host Katie Thornton travels to a lesser known end of the radio spectrum. Here's Katie Thornton reporting for On the Media.
Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin. I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM, with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances.
David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.
And I turned it on, and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.
Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.
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