Now Available on PRX and Content Depot
RESPONDING TO DISASTERS:From Prediction to Recovery

From re-creating tsunamis in the laboratory to tracking global pandemics, scientists and engineers around the country are seeking new insights into natural and man-made disasters. This one-hour special report looks at what researchers are doing to protect us from and help us survive these life-shattering events.

• Tracking Pandemics
• Tsunami in a Tank
• Disaster-proofing Communications
• An End to Cascading Catastrophe
• Emergency Improv
• New Radios for Collapsed Coal Mines
• Smart Bridges

“Responding to Disasters: From Prediction to Recovery” is part of the Engineers of the New Millennium Series, produced by IEEE Spectrum magazine and the National Science Foundation.

LENGTH: 1 Hour
COST: FREE
AVAILABLE: PRX, Content Depot,  Download (email for info)

Susan Suntree is a 2011 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award winner for Sacred Sites The Secret History of Southern California

Where: Saturday December 10, 2011 at 2pm-5pm
Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch
5366 College Avenue, Oakland, CA 94618

What: PEN Oakland, founded in 1989, is a chapter of PEN International, founded in 1921. Dubbed “the blue collar PEN” by the New York Times, PEN Oakland annually sponsors the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Book Awards, named for the late poet and faculty member of U.C. Berkeley’s English Department. This year marks the 21st anniversary of the awards. Each year PEN Oakland presents an award to outstanding book titles published in the previous year.

More information about Susan Suntree.

Action Speaks! talks Reagan, Unions, & Labor

President Reagan’s firing of the Air Traffic controllers for refusing to return to work, introduced a battle with labor whose echo is still very much a part of our contemporary political discourse.
The Action Speaks! panel of experts look at how this moment was nested into the rise of Free Market Philosophy and how it resonates today in the contemporary conflicts in Ohio, Wisconsin and in many other states and municipalities.

Available: PRX, FTP (email for instructions)

The Self-Pity Chronicles
“A Humorous Novel of Depression, Suicide and Public Radio”

Saturday November 12, 2011 4:00 PM at BOOK SOUP in Los Angeles

BOOK SOUP  8818 Sunset Blvd. W. Hollywood CA  90069

1971 An American Family; Our First Reality TV Show
What’s Real, What’s Not? Does Anybody Care?

Watch An American Family: Introduction on PBS. See more from THIRTEEN Specials.

In 1970-71 a camera was rolling in the house of an upper middle class Santa Barbara family. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal…or was it?
Available: PRX, FTP (email for instructions)

When Directors Alan and Susan Raymond put their cameras–and us–into the lives of an upper middle class white family from Santa Barbara in 1970-1971, California, the schisms in the American Family became readily apparent. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal…or was it?

With panelists Susan and Alan Raymond, Brown Media Studies Professor Lynne Joyrich and Brown History Professor Robert Self, author of American Babylon, we will look at how TV changed through the popularity of An American Family.

With the current proliferation of ‘Reality TV’ and its ‘reality’ which often seems quite suspect, we will wonder what accounts for its popularity, whether or not An American Family can be seen as its direct ancestor and ask what it might be ‘preparing us for.’

Here is a chance to look more deeply at a subject that sits with us in our living rooms, brought to you by an American Family that allowed us to sit in theirs.

LISTEN to an EXCLUSIVE interview with the Parents from An American Family by the host of Action Speaks!
LISTEN HERE
Marc Levitt’s phone interview with Bill and Pat Loud, October 2011 (28,5 minutes)