Radio Boise Podcast

When we walk through Boise today, we see tree-lined streets, historic homes, familiar neighborhoods, and local shops. But have you ever wondered how those places came to be—and what the city looked like before it was the Boise we know today? In this episode, we’re exploring the history of Boise through the details that make a city feel like home: its trees, its neighborhoods, the transportation sy...

Hosted by Esteban Anastasio. First off, yon namesake, Why Patterns by Nils Vigeland and Morton Feldman. A work for flute, glockenspiel, and piano you say? This is for you. Followed by Bill Baxter's Ambient Space Drift Music V. Only the choice stuff here. Enjoy.

Hosts Hailee Lenhart-Wees and Leslie Bing go guest-less and riff on signs of aging; if they're at the point in their friendship where they should be sharing location with each other on their phones; Leslie's basic girl phobias; Hailee's executive dysfunction; big regrets; Hailee's complicated family tree; and their unsolicited advice for comics.

Today, we’re talking about a challenge facing rural communities across Idaho and beyond: how to pay for the water infrastructure that keeps small towns running. Whether a community serves a few hundred people or hundreds of thousands, the cost of building, upgrading, and maintaining safe, reliable water systems doesn’t necessarily shrink with the population. In smaller communities, those costs can...

8-year-old Creighton joins hosts Hailee Lenhart-Wees and Leslie Bing for a rousing episode of the Boise Comedy Sessions. You'll want to listen to hear a kid completely burn a 31-year-old woman, learn that Marie Antoinette actually actually said "Let them eat cake," and find out what he thought of seeing comedian Brian Regan live.

Boise comic Sophie Hughes joins hosts Hailee Lenhart-Wees and Leslie Bing to talk about filming her special, her insane start in comedy, and how she's feeling about the current political climate in Idaho.

In rural Idaho, your doctor may need to deliver a baby one day—and know how to treat a rattlesnake bite the next. And in a state ranked dead last in the nation for physicians per capita, getting those doctors here matters. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Alexis Ericsson, a Soda Springs native and Idaho WWAMI graduate now beginning her Family Medicine Residency in Boise. We talk about why WWA...

Hosted by Esteban Anastasio. The title says it all. This is a piece by minimalist, drone, computer composer and mathematician Catherine Christer Hennix from 2023. Enjoy.

Hosted by Rebecca Evans and Ken Rodgers. Matt Bunk is an interdisciplinary artist obsessed with death, memory, community, and their interplays. He is a founding member of the curated happening collective Address Book and a proud field worker for the Ecogeoglyphic Observatory. His poetry can be found in outlets like Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Oroboro, and Paper Plane Press. He makes music with...

Jonathan Kuntz returns to take a deep dive into predatory gambling. Moving beyond ethics and morals, this episode brings hard stats and real-world examples to unpack how modern gambling targets teens, drains middle-class savings, and impacts banks. Jon is a professor emeritus at Boise State University's College of Business and Economics. He has studied gambling policy and its economic impacts for...

Hosted by Esteban Anastasio, who pays homage to his "Jesus" and "Santa Claus" Frank Zappa, with N-Lite/Negative Light/Venice Submerged/The Lifestyle You Deserve from 1976's Civilization Phaze III. Followed Wolves in the Throne Room with I Laid Down My Bones Among the Rocks and the Roots live at Roadburn, and completing the suite with Ode to Solitude (Somnium Obmutem) by Estatic Fear from 1996. Be...

Congress, political parties, and elections can seem complicated from the outside. But how did we get here, and what does it actually take to become a candidate? We recently spoke with Charles Hunt, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University. Hunt earned his Ph. D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, and his research focuses on Congress, congressio...

Hosted by Jodi Eichelberger. Porch Night, a collaboration with The Idaho Historical Museum, features three storytellers who do the setup, then come back later in the episode to tell us how they stories all end up. With three terrific stories. From Fort Hall, to the James Castle House to the Boise Soul Food Festival, this episode has you covered.

What does it really take to run a towing company and what happens behind the scenes? In this episode, we sit down with Michael Ellis, the young owner of Longhorn Towing in Boise. Michael started in the towing business at just 18 years old in 2022, when his family chose to invest in him rather than send him down the traditional college path. They helped him get his first tow truck, and from there,...

👀🔎 THINKING IN THE FUTURE TENSE: PART TWO — READING CHANGE Change rarely sends us an engraved invitation. Usually, it starts quietly. Something shifts at work. Your body feels different. A relationship changes. A new technology suddenly becomes part of everyday life. 🌎📱 The question is: Are we paying attention? This Tuesday on Elementary Watson, Jo-Ellen Watson and Sheepdog continue our three-...

🗺️ What if the problem isn’t that you’re lost… but that you’re using an old map? We all carry ideas about how life is supposed to go—career, relationships, family, health, retirement. But what happens when life changes and our expectations don’t? 🤔 This week, Elementary Watson begins a three-part series: Thinking in the Future Tense. ✨ In Part One, Updating the Map, Jo-Ellen Watson and Sheepdog...

What if a window cleaning business could be about something much bigger than clean windows? This week, we sit down with Brian Hoyt, founder of Poor Man Window Cleaning, to talk about a journey that began at one of the lowest points of his life—and ultimately became a lesson in how business can be used as a force for good. After a devastating hit-and-run motorcycle accident left Brian injured, unem...

Hosted by Ken Rodgers and Rebecca Evans. Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award (poetry). The recipient of three literature fellowships (Idaho Arts Commission) and the winner of Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence (2018), she was Boise’s Poet Laureate (2013) and Idaho’s Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). Her ninth collectio...

Our trusty retired Idaho hydrologist, Ron Abramovich, is back—and this time he's watching the Pacific Ocean. We're heading into a winter that could be one for the record books, with forecasters predicting an exceptionally strong El Niño—potentially among the strongest events we've seen in decades. So what exactly is El Niño? It begins thousands of miles away, with unusually warm ocean temperatures...

Jonathan Krutz has a mission: to stop predatory gambling. But what exactly is gambling—and when does gambling become predatory? Those questions have taken on a new urgency as gambling moves far beyond the casino floor and onto our phones, into sports, politics and even what increasingly look like financial markets. Where does investing end and gambling begin? What happens when a market is built ar...

Hosted by Esteban Anastasio. The space captain himself guides you through this sometimes terrifying, sometimes ecstatic journey, this time featuring Ash Ra Tempel with Reunion from the album Friendship. The Gottsching trip begins with that, followed by just as good of a palate cleanser as you can get, Suzanne Cianni, with Flowers of Evil. Buchla meets 60s psych to 70s rock. Count yourself in.

The Poetry Show: August 30, 2026 - Maya C. Popa by Radio Boise

Ali Ward is the Sustainability Supervisor for the Boise School District — and little do most of us know what that actually means. Here's a fact that might surprise you: school districts account for one of the largest building footprints of any sector in the country. Nationally, K-12 schools make up nearly half the square footage of the entire commercial building sector. Right here in Boise, the sc...

Hosted by your Maestro Nocturnal, Esteban Anastasio. Eberhard Blum, flutist and visual artist, dabbles in some beautiful electronica, with Four Systems, from 1954. Followed that thought leader of yore, Marshall McLuhan, with, yep, you guessed it, The Medium is the Massage, the audio companion.

💛 Grief touches every one of us—but most of us are never really shown how to move through it. And grief is about more than death. It can follow divorce, losing a job, retirement, a health diagnosis, an empty nest, financial hardship, the end of a relationship, or the loss of trust, identity, hope, and expectations. 🌧️➡️🌤️ Grief is a normal and natural response to loss and change. This week on Ele...