
On Air
The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Graybill
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Steve Oney
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By:
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Steve Oney
About this listen
An epic, decade-long reported history of National Public Radio that reveals the unlikely story of one of America’s most celebrated but least understood media empires.
Founded in 1970, NPR is America’s most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural force and a trusted voice, and they have created a mode of journalism and storytelling that helps Americans understand the world in which we live. In On Air, a book fourteen years in the making, journalist Steve Oney tells the dramatic history of this institution, tracing the comings and goings of legendary on-air talents (Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Ira Glass, Cokie Roberts, and many others) and the rise and fall and occasional rise again of brilliant and sometimes venal executives. It depicts how NPR created a medium for extraordinary journalism—in which reporters and producers use microphones as paintbrushes and the voices of people around the world as the soundtrack of stories both global and local.
Featuring details on the controversial firing of Juan Williams, the sloppy dismissal of Bob Edwards, and a $230 million bequest by Joan B. Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonalds, On Air also chronicles NPR’s daring shift into the digital world and its early embrace of podcasting formats, establishing the network as a formidable media empire. Fascinating, revelatory, and irresistibly dishy, this is a riveting account of NPR’s unlikely launch, chaotic ascent, and ultimate triumph—a must-listen for anyone interested in the history of public radio and its impact on American culture.
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This book is a profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices. In this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence.
By: Roger Bartra, and others
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Feminism in the Wild
- How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior
- By: Melina Packer, Ambika Kamath
- Narrated by: Diana Blue
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded into animal behavior science match those of the already powerful.
By: Melina Packer, and others
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Family Romance
- John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
- By: Jean Strouse
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
By: Jean Strouse
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The Last Manager
- How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
- By: John W. Miller
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before the Moneyball Era, the Earl of Baltimore reigned over baseball. History’s feistiest and most colorful manager, Earl Weaver transformed the sport by collecting and analyzing data in visionary ways, ultimately winning more games than anybody else during his time running the Orioles from 1968 to 1982. When Weaver was hired by the Orioles, managers were still seen as coaches and inspirational leaders, more teachers of the game than strategists. Weaver invented new ways of building baseball teams, prioritizing on-base average, elite defense, and strike throwing.
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THE EARL OF BALTIMORE... ALWAYS A TREAT!
- By USA VETERAN on 03-21-25
By: John W. Miller
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Crescent Dawn
- The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age
- By: Si Sheppard
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 21 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Crescent Dawn features some of the legendary figures of the era – from Mehmet the Conqueror, and Suleiman the Magnificent on the Ottoman side, to Charles V and Vasco de Gama on the other – and some of the most exotic locales on Earth – from the sumptuous palaces of Constantinople to the bloody battlefields of the Balkans to the awe-inspiring mountains of Ethiopia. This is a colorful history that brings the great battles of the age to life and clearly shows how the western struggle against the Ottomans constituted the first truly world war.
By: Si Sheppard
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Funny Because It's True
- How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
- By: Christine Wenc
- Narrated by: Christine Wenc
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon.
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Her lack of knowledge.
- By Anonymous User on 04-20-25
By: Christine Wenc
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Waste Wars
- The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash
- By: Alexander Clapp
- Narrated by: Greg Lockett
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.
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Great writer of awful reality
- By Tracie B. on 04-15-25
By: Alexander Clapp
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The Unbiased Self
- The Psychology of Overcoming Cognitive Bias
- By: Erin Devers
- Narrated by: Erin Devers
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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So much human behavior can be explained by two motives: we want to be right, and we want to feel good about ourselves. But the tension between these two motives makes us especially vulnerable to bias—and bias distorts our view of the world and of ourselves and can keep us from doing even what we know is right. In The Unbiased Self, social psychologist Erin Devers lays out what psychology has discovered about bias and selfishness.
By: Erin Devers
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Rot
- An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
- By: Padraic X. Scanlan
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation.
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Really great work of history
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-25
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Homestand
- Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
- By: Will Bardenwerper
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players.
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Masterpiece - Baseball romanticism meets small town America - Field of Dreams Power
- By Timothy J on 05-21-25
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Murder the Truth
- Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful
- By: David Enrich
- Narrated by: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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David Enrich, the New York Times Business Investigations Editor and the #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers, produces his most consequential and far-reaching investigation yet: an in-depth exposé of the broad campaign—orchestrated by elite Americans—to silence dissent and protect the powerful.
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The current threat against journalists
- By Kirk Writes on 04-04-25
By: David Enrich
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Trespassers at the Golden Gate
- A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
- By: Gary Krist
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. “I did it and I don’t deny it,” she said when arrested shortly thereafter. “He ruined me and my daughter.”
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Story of a City
- By Suzanna on 04-29-25
By: Gary Krist