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  • Delicious Predator

    Delicious Predator
    2026/01/08
    The Chesapeake Bay is ballooning with an apex predator that can only be defeated with grease and breading – blue catfish! They were introduced to Virginia’s freshwater rivers in the 70s and 80s for recreational fishing. Now, the Bay is teeming with 700 million to 1 billion pounds of blue catfish. Michael Schwarz says that we can restore balance to the bay by eating the fresh, white saltwater catfish filet. And it’s best served fried! And: Growing up, Maurica Bynum smelled the funk of the Franklin County paper mill and collected water samples with her parents who were water treatment operators. Now, she brings her childhood experience with public health and environmentalism to the classroom, preparing the next generation of public health experts. Later in the show: Indigenous people throughout the Amazon basin understand themselves to be deeply connected to the more-than-human world. So the pollution of waterways and loss of biodiversity is not just an environmental loss, it’s a loss of spiritual protection and livelihood. Jeremy Larochelle says that indigenous amazonian people honor poets as much as they honor the fishermen. And poets like Juan Carlos Galeans and Ana Varela Tafur are sounding the alarm about the urgent need to save the Amazon by honoring it.
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    52 分
  • Recovery

    Recovery
    2026/01/02
    Universities have been trying to curb dangerous binge drinking for years. Today’s students are glued to their phones, and Abby Braitman (Old Dominion University) and her colleagues are meeting them where they are for interventions. And: Meagan Brem (Virginia Tech) says that drinking is intertwined with a lot of the intimate partner violence that happens on college campuses. Later in the show: There’s a psychedelic renaissance going on in Javier González-Maeso’s (Virginia Commonwealth University) biochemistry lab. He’s hoping to develop a new drug using psilocybin, the component found in magic mushrooms, to help people battling alcohol abuse disorder. Plus: How Jasmohan Bajaj (Virginia Commonwealth University) discovered that addiction lives in the gut, not the mind.
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    52 分
  • Holiday Hand Me Downs

    Holiday Hand Me Downs
    2025/12/25
    As we age, we come to appreciate the holiday traditions of our youth. Ricky Mullins (University of Virginia at Wise) remembers receiving treat bags at his small, backroads church. The poke bags were stuffed oranges, peanuts, cracker jacks and sometimes even a chocolate bar. Now, he’s passing the tradition along to the youth at the church that he pastors. And: Mary Lou Williams was a renowned jazz pianist and composer. She brought sacred Black jazz music to Duke University’s chapel every year. Gayle Murchison (William and Mary) shares some of Williams’ music with us. Later in the show: How Ryan Stouffer (Longwood University) learned the value of fellowshipping over food from his dad’s rib spot. Plus: Mary Beth Matthews (Mary Washington) walks us through how the American traditions of Hanukkah and Christmas have changed over the years.
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    52 分
  • Holiday Tunes

    Holiday Tunes
    2025/12/18
    Music is wrapped up in how we celebrate the holidays. Musician and band director Stephanie Sanders (Norfolk State University) shares some of her favorite holiday tunes and why they’re so meaningful for her. Later in the show: As a performing trombonist, Dayl Burnett (Radford University) plays the same holiday songs year after year. But he doesn’t get tired of them! We listen to a few of the songs that he’s always happy to hear when December rolls around.
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    52 分
  • Grief Attacks

    Grief Attacks
    2025/12/12
    Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ concept of the stages of grief gave people real footing in understanding how we react to loss. But Sherman Lee (Christopher Newport University) says grief isn’t experienced in a linear, neat way. Have you ever been driving and suddenly found yourself in tears about a loss, real or imagined? Or maybe you were washing the dishes and suddenly spaced out and started having painful feelings as you anticipate or remember a loss? He calls these sudden, intense experiences “grief attacks,” and says they can happen at any time.
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    52 分
  • The Weight of a Whale

    The Weight of a Whale
    2025/12/04
    A new anthology of poems, including one that reflects on the weight of a whale, gathers voices from science, the arts, and Indigenous communities to create a portrait of nature in America. Former Virginia Poet Laureate Luisa A. Igloria (Old Dominion University) is co-editor of The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders. Plus: Ana Lang (Washington and Lee and Central Virginia Community College) is the first ever student Poet Laureate of Virginia Community College System. She is torn between her Cambodian family’s expectations of her and her desire to be a free and independent woman. Later in the show: The editor of a new online poetry journal, Steve Knepper (Virginia Military Institute) loves highlighting new lyric and narrative poetry.
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    52 分
  • Radical Acceptance

    Radical Acceptance
    2025/11/26
    New-to-this-country students are constantly being asked to adapt. And often, their wellbeing is measured almost entirely by their ability to speak English. Alfonzo Perez Acosta (Virginia Humanities K-12 Education Fellow) is an arts educator. In his classroom, he gives students the tools to let their art do the talking. And: Everybody has a story. Not everyone has a place to tell it. Through the Community Media Center, Chioke I’Anson (VCU ICA Community Media Center hopes to solve the problem of the untold story. Later in the show: Education has long been seen as a tool of racial uplift. In the early twentieth century, Phyllis Wheatley YWCA’s across the country served young Black girls and women. Cassandra Newby-Alexander (Norfolk State University) fondly recalls her days at the Norfolk YWCA, and is hopeful about what the old facility could become today. Plus: A generous grant from the Mellon Foundation has changed the game for many Richmond area high schoolers. Janelle Marshall (Pathways to the Arts and Humanities) and her team with the Virginia Community College System are helping get students enrolled, and sticking beside them all the way until the finish line.
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    52 分
  • The Food That Makes Us

    The Food That Makes Us
    2025/11/21
    Gumbo, BBQ, and biscuits–what makes Southern food Southern? Caity Finlayson (University of Mary Washington) talks about the fusion of cultures–African food brought by enslaved people, British and French food brought by early European colonists–that created a mouthwatering Southern cuisine. And: For indigenous communities in the Canadian Arctic and Sri Lanka, hunting and gathering is still a main source of food. Eranga Galappaththi (Virginia Tech) is working with these communities to address how climate change is affecting their food sources. Later in the show: Recipes from home can comfort us and connect us, both to the past and to the present. Suryani Omar is the Program Manager at Mozaic, a nonprofit that works with refugees and asylum seekers. She’s collaborating with some of the women Mozaic serves to write a cookbook of stories and recipes from their homes.
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    52 分