The Kitchen Sisters Present

In the early morning hours of August 16, 2020, 12,000 lightning strikes exploded across northern California, igniting more than 585 wildfires. In the Santa Cruz Mountains scattered blazes grew into one massive burning organism — The CZU August Lightning Complex Fire — eating all in its path, scorching some 86,000 acres, destroying over 900 homes and Big Basin Redwoods, California’s first state par...

John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road.” Songwriter Bobby Troup described it as the route to get your kicks on. And Mickey Mantle said, “If it hadn’t been for Highway 66 I never would have been a Yankee.” For the Dust Bowl refugees of the 1930s, for the thousands who migrated after World War II, and for the generations of tourists and vacationers, Route 66 was “the Way West.” Route 66, the firs...

Today we’re thinking about Pack Creek Ranch in southern Utah and an incredible archive of material, gathered by river guide and environmental activist Ken Sleight, that was consumed by fire in early June, 2021. The archive held over 50 years of photographs, writings, and correspondence chronicling Ken Sleight’s years of guiding on the Colorado River, his fight to stop the damming of Glen Canyon an...

In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the quilt that began with one memorial square in honor of a man who had died of AIDS, and that now holds some 95,000 names. Gert never planned it this way, but over the decades she has become the Keeper of the Quilt and has stewarded it, repaired it, tended it, traveled with it and conserved it for some...

Fifty years ago, a group of some of the top musicians from the United States — Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, Santana and more -– boarded a plane bound for Ghana to perform in a musical celebration that was dubbed the “Soul to Soul Festival.” Thousands of audience members filled Accra’s Black Star Square for a continuous 15 hours of music. The festival was planned in part...

We’re excited about The Genius Generation, a new podcast hosted by Danni Washington, and we want you to get in on it. The Genius Generation — innovative kids, tweens and teens who are making discoveries, taking on the issues and problems they see around them and inventing new solutions using science. Host Danni Washington is a young science communicator dedicated to inspiring and educating youth a...

“A blue note in a minor key—America has its secret sonic weapon—Jazz.” That was the headline in 1955 when the United States sent its top musicians overseas to promote democracy. They called them the Jazz Ambassadors—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dave Brubeck. Today, in honor of Dave Brubeck month (May 4 is Dave Brubeck day — that’s 5/4 named for the 5/4 time signature of ta...

Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Silly  dog treats,  Trill Paws  enamel ID Tags,  The Dog Father of Harlem's Doggie Day Spa , gorgeous rainbow beaded Dog Collars from  The Kenya Collection ,  Sir Dogwood  luxurious modern dog-wear. “The d...

Francis Ford Coppola talks about homelessness, life, friendship, neighborhood history, and his ideas about the future as he tells the remarkable story of North Beach Citizens, the volunteer organization he spearheaded twenty years ago to help grapple with the lives and needs of homeless and unhoused people living in his neighborhood in San Francisco. This month marks the 20th Anniversary of North...

The women who were murdered in Atlanta were Korean, not Vietnamese. They were doing massage, not manicures. But they faced the hate and violence that is mounting against Asian American people in the United States. We produced this story in 2000 as part of the Lost & Found Sound series on NPR. We presented it again as Vietnamese and other manicurists were losing their jobs and livelihoods durin...

The impact of Shonen Knife, the 1980s all-girl punk band from Osaka—a story of cultural exchange through the cassette tape. Shonen Knife, the three-woman band from Japan, formed in 1981—a time just before the internet drastically changed the way we consume and discover music. A time when a cassette tape, alongside fanzines and college radio created an environment that made possible the seemingly i...

It’s February 23, 2021— and we’ve just received word that our dear friend and North Beach neighbor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, has passed on at age 101. In honor of Lawrence we’re sharing a story we produced for his 99th birthday, featuring the work of sound designer Jim McKee who, for more than 20 years, recorded and chronicled Lawrence’s life, poetry and world. In this lushly produced soundscape, La...

Stories of Black pioneers, seekers and entrepreneurs — self-made men and self-taught women, neighborhood heroes and visionaries. People who said "yes we can" and then did, hosted by Alfre Woodard. A man tapes the history of his town with a scavenged cassette recorder, a woman fights for social justice with a pie, a DJ ignites his community with a sound. Stories of Georgia Gilmore and the Club from...

Sometimes you read a book and it alters the course of your life. That’s what happened to Frances McDormand. Twice. First it was Olive Kitteridge, the HBO series she produced and starred in based on the book by Elizabeth Stroud. This time it's Nomadland. Academy Award winning Frances McDormand talks about the making of Nomadland which is coming to Hulu and select theaters and drive-ins starting Feb...

Music and poetry were powerful headliners at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris signaling change and new beginnings. This was not the first time the arts have reflected the mood of the country and a new administration. In January 1973, following the Christmas bombing of Vietnam, conductor Leonard Bernstein gathered an impromptu orchestra to perform an "anti-inaugural concert" protesti...

A mushroom farmer, food activist, business entrepreneur, foster mother to more than a dozen girls—Chido Govera is a kitchen visionary in Zimbabwe—a pioneer in the cultivation of mushrooms throughout Africa and the world. Chido was orphaned at 7 when her mother died of AIDS. As a girl, who never had enough to eat, she began cultivating mushrooms when she was nine. Some people look at a mushroom and...

It was Friday, April 10th, 2020. The pandemic was really starting to roar. PPE was scarce and the supply chains were already breaking down. Every hospital was scrambling to find enough masks, gowns and face shields. It was already every state, every institution for itself. It was everywhere in the papers. Page 1, Page 2, Page 3. On Page 9 of the New York Times, dateline: Sugarcreek, Ohio, a headli...

Frances McDormand talks about her extraordinary new film— Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao, based on the nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving in the Twenty First Century by Jessica Bruder. A tale for our times. The story centers on the very “now” many Americans find themselves in. People uprooted from their old jobs and old neighborhoods, places they've called home for decades, now living in DIY c...

With all of us thinking of home and family and of all the things we love and miss, we thought we’d spend some time with Angelo Garro – a Sicilian blacksmith living in a forge in San Francisco with a passion for hunting, foraging, opera, cooking, pickling, curing salamis, making wine and generously tending and feeding his friends and community. A Thanksgiving gift. The Kitchen Sisters join Angelo a...

In 1966, a young Marine took a reel-to-reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, Michael A. Baronowski made tapes of his life and his friends, in foxholes, in combat and sent those audio letters home to his family in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Then he was killed in action. Thirty-four years later, Baronowski’s friend Tim Duffie, shared these tapes which were used to produce...

For Winona LaDuke the best part of running for Vice President in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nadar was meeting so many people who really want to see a democracy that works—who really want to vote for someone they believe in. At rallies women would bring their daughters up to Winona saying, ‘We want them to grow up and be like you.’ Ojibwe leader, writer, food activist, rural...

Sometimes we find the story, sometimes the story finds us. Such is the case with this tale of two Keepers from the Pacific Northwest,  the official/unofficial archivists for Pearl Jam . Caroline Losneck, a radio producer in Maine heard our Keepers series about activist archivists and rogue librarians and said to herself, “Hey wait a minute, what about  that mythic vault  in Seattle I’ve been heari...

We go to New Orleans for a kind of biblical reckoning. A story of science and prayer, with a cast of improbable partners—environmental architects and nuns—coming together to create a vision forward for living with water in New Orleans. Mirabeau Water Garden, one of the largest urban wetlands in the country designed to educate, inspire and to save its neighborhood from flooding. New Orleans. Surrou...

The Peabody Award winning Sonic Memorial Project, an intimate and historic documentary commemorating the life and history of the World Trade Center and its surrounding neighborhood, through audio artifacts, rare recordings, voicemail messages and interviews. The Sonic Memorial Project began in October 2001 as part of the Lost & Found Sound series. We came together—radio producers, artists, con...

Picture this: 131 young people, 13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries—youth activists from around the globe— students, writers, poets, marchers, community leaders all gathered together in San Juan, Puerto Rico in August 2019, the week after the scandal-ridden government of Governor Ricardo Rosselló fell. A government brought down in large measure because of the resolve and activism of young people...