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Call Sign Condor, a podcast about the thousands of Latin Americans who are fighting in Ukraine, for Ukraine.
5 Podcasts on Family Origin Stories
Each issue of our newsletter is curated by a different person. This week, our curator is Sayre Quevedo.
Family is its own kind of adventure. They are our first introductions to the ineffable aspects of life: the passing of time, grief, and the messy and occasionally rewarding act of learning to love someone else.
These five audio documentaries feature people going on journeys—geographic, emotional, or sonic—to understand their families of origin. I chose these pieces because while each of them has this in common, the nature of each journey is distinct. Each of these works wrestles with the ways we are shaped by our familial connections, and the ways our families are shaped by the forces of the societies we live in and by the passing of time.
ONE
BBC Short Cuts
Being Sound
This segment from “The Answer” episode of Short Cuts may be one of my favorite audio pieces. I play it for my students at NYU and Columbia every year.
It’s almost impossible to describe this work other than to say that it is about watching the person you love get older, and recording as an act of preservation.
TWO
UnFictional
Man Choubam (I am good)
Hard to choose between the many brilliant [Sharon] Mashihi pieces, but this one has always had a special place in my heart.
The writing is equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious. It’s a story about a mother and daughter going on a cruise, but ultimately ends up being about whether being seen and being loved are the same thing.
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THREE
Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael’s
The Police Officer and the Priest
This series begins with a conversation between father and daughter, and spirals outward into a journey about the painful history of residential schools and the act of storytelling itself.
There is a form-bending episode mid-way through that blew my mind. Start with episode 1, of course.
FOUR
Radio Ambulante
Hermanas (Sisters)
Fernanda and her sister grew up in different countries after their parents’ divorce. A rediscovered diary from childhood opens up wounds and questions about the emotional distance growing up apart created.
It also features one of the most honest and heart-wrenching sibling conversations I’ve ever heard. Worth listening and following along with a transcript even if you don’t speak Spanish.
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FIVE
Short Cuts
Self-Portrait
It’s a nice book-end to start and end this list on some form-breaking audio documentaries.
This segment from the “Self-Portrait” episode of Short Cuts features some lovely writing and sound design. It is the story of a journey to a place that awakens questions about the self, and gestures at all the ways that self is composed of our families, our histories, and the world we inhabit.
SIX
Reaching Out
Hailed by Ira Glass as the “best new show I’ve heard in years,” and winner of the Audio Memoir Award of the Tribeca Film Festival, Reaching Out is a story about fathers, sons, and the distance between.
The story begins on the eve of twin brothers’ Sayre and Connor’s 30th birthday, when they set out to find the biological father who abandoned them before they were born. Their search pulls them through desert raves, drunken nightclubs, and across borders of time and language, forcing the brothers to confront the truths they’ve hidden from each other and themselves. And it’s not long before the twins discover that their father is closer than they ever could have imagined.
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Listen to Call Sign Condor
Why would someone decide to risk their life for a country that is not their own? What might they be searching for?
Call Sign Condor is a podcast about the thousands of Latin American soldiers who are fighting in Ukraine — for Ukraine. Through the stories of our protagonist, Condor, and his fellow soldiers, this four-part series takes us inside the lives of Latin American men and women who’ve been fighting — some of them for years — in the war in Ukraine.
Listen to Call Sign Condor here→
Every time we flush, we send a valuable resource down the drain
Liquid Gold, the latest episode in UTS Impact Studios' All That We Touch series, explores the hidden value of human urine as a source of phosphorus, a critical resource for food production. Along the way, it asks a deceptively simple question: could rethinking the humble toilet help transform waste into a solution?
Listen to All That We Touch’s “Liquid Gold” →
Community News & Notes
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🖥️ Beamly replaces the patchwork: one place to host or import your show, build a full website, and sell premium content to your listeners. Add a blog, sync YouTube, or gate bonus episodes behind a membership - all on your own domain. [sponsored]
🗺️ Beyond Ecological Grief, hosted by Amy Romer, investigates the emotional realities of living through a planetary health crisis. Guided by the five stages of grief, each episode follows a personal story — from scientists to land defenders and youth — whose ties to land and history shape how they respond to a rapidly changing world.
😷 Narratives of Care: Puerto Rico is built from oral histories with caregivers, families, and experts navigating cancer and dementia/Alzheimer’s in Puerto Rico. The series explores what caregiving requires of people, what parts of that experience may feel familiar wherever we live, and how the place where care happens shapes what becomes possible.
🏅 No Time Off is the podcast where we explore the careers powering the sport industry. Behind every match, there's a whole world of people making it all possible.
👩💻 In this week’s issue of Podcast the Newsletter, Lauren Passell recommends The Fastest Girl in Somalia. She writes:
ESPN’s 30 for 30 audio documentaries cannot be beat. The last two, gripping stories about the Shohei Ohtani betting scandal and the 2006 murder investigation of University of Miami defensive tackle Bryan Pata, got a lot of attention. They’re flashy, had groundbreaking original reporting and were topics already prominently in the news. But the one that just dropped, The Fastest Girl in Somalia, is the one that has stolen my heart and is exactly the kind of thing I dream of hearing.
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