Audacious with Chion Wolf

It’s finally 2021. But that line in the calendar doesn’t mean that the pandemic is anywhere near over, so I want to start this year off by looking back at people whom I interviewed in the series that we launched before Audacious. US in the Time of Coronavirus was a living history of our experience over nine weeks at the beginning of the pandemic. In this episode, you’ll reconnect with an anxiety e...

It’s estimated that there are as many as 7,000 different known rare diseases in the world. In the The U.S., it’s defined as "any disease or condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. Today, you’ll meet two of them, and their mothers. GUESTS: Erin Rupolo is the Mid-Atlantic Regional ChairPerson for the Williams Syndrome Association and she's a Special Education Paraeducator in Kensington, MD...

The five senses (that we know of) are Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and Touch. And we’ve all at some point pondered what it would be like to lose one or some of those senses. Many people who can currently see consider blindness a scary prospect. But the thing is, when we sighted people try to imagine being blind? It’s nothing more than our best guess. And that fear you might feel at the thought of h...

This pandemic has shuttered so many events, including a few of my own. The Mouth-Off at the Mark Twain House was a storytelling show I hosted and produced for 8 years until 2020. But the good news is that now I get to show off some of my favorite true stories from the series here on Audacious! The theme for this one? Eat It Up. Stories that feature food. GUESTS: Christine Kalafus is a memoirist, p...

The older I get, the more excited I am to be corrected when I’m wrong. Sure, it may sting for a second because hearing someone say “actually…” can be kind of annoying, and if I’m wrong about something, then that means that contrary to my sparkling self-image, I don’t know it all. But as you know, a lifetime of listening to public radio has a tendency to remind you that there’s always stuff to lear...

Join us as we go behind the scenes to meet people who make the shows you love really, really great. You’ll hear about the power and beauty of natural hair from the hair stylist for actress Issa Rae of HBO’s Insecure , and you’ll find out how the food illustrations are done for the Great British Bake Off . Plus, an intimacy coordinator talks about the ins and outs of filming sex scenes. GUESTS: Ama...

Veterans Day is November 11th. Unlike Memorial Day, when we remember those who’ve died while serving in the military, and unlike Armed Services day, when we honor those who are currently serving, Veterans Day recognizes all people - living and dead - who have served in the military. The VA estimates that 134,000 U.S. Veterans are transgender, and over 15,000 trans people are currently serving in t...

This hour, visit a West Hartford history professor’s eye-opening Halloween display about Black Lives Matter and Covid-19, and hear what passersby think of it. Then, meet a pastor from Indiana who tells us about why he believes that the blue moon this Halloween is a sign of end times. Finally: Candy corn! The CEO of Jelly Belly gives us a history lesson, one woman reports back from having eaten Bre...

Fill in the blank: Love is… Patient. Kind. Love is Work. Hard to find. But if you wanna put your finger on what makes up “long-lasting love”, you’re gonna need some wisdom to fill in those blanks. So today, meet three couples who’ve been together for over 50 years. GUESTS: Angela and Grant Loavenbruck of Rockport, Maine, have been married for 55 years Emery Austin Smith and Vivian Ashton Smith of...

Imagine feeling like you have glass shards running through your blood, and imagine your doctors don’t believe how much pain you’re in. Then, imagine you’re in a different body, incapable of feeling any pain at all. Then, in body number three, you inflict pain on yourself so you can rate it. For science. Pain is a mystery in so many ways, but the way we evaluate it, make sense of it, and how we rec...

What does it mean to be a man? What is manliness? What is “toxic masculinity”? And what do - and don’t - specific body parts have to say about what it means to be male? Hear from two journalists and authors about how the ideas of manhood physically and socially may be far more malleable than you think. GUESTS: Thomas Page McBee is a journalist, and the author of “Man Alive: A True Story of Violenc...

Addiction affects people of all shapes and sizes. Skin tones and geographic locations. Ages, personalities, and genders. Today, meet two people who are committed to sobriety from alcohol, and the Chief Clinical Officer at a treatment facility. This won’t be the last time you hear stories from people in recovery on this show, so if you’d like to tell me your story about what the sober life has been...

I’ve had a recurring dream ever since I was a little kid: I’m playing in the front yard of the house I grew up in, and suddenly, the atmosphere around me changes. I feel an ominous breeze on my face. I look up, and barreling down the street, is a tornado headed straight for me. I turn to run… and the dream ends.  I think my compulsion to run away from dangerous weather - in my dreams and in real l...

This hour, we’re talking with people who have become memes. Like, “Hide the Pain Harold”, who is actually András Arató - a stock photo model who  is smiling wide but his eyes, well, there’s a real sadness there. And “Overly Attached Girlfriend”, who is Laina Morris. She entered a Justin Beiber song parody competition and just a few moments of her wide-eyed face from the video launched her into sup...

***This show originally aired on June 20, 2020*** Speech disfluencies are mysterious. They are defined as breaks or disruptions that occur in the flow of speech. For over 10 years, I was the midday host at Connecticut Public Radio, telling you the weather, the time, what show was coming up next — And at the top of every hour, the call letters. Our listeners had opinions - lots of opinions - about...

The art of tattooing has been traced back 7,000 years. While the significance or reason behind the oldest-known tattoos are total speculation, we do know that often, they were applied as sacred rites, and awarded as a signifier of adulthood. In Ancient Egypt, it’s likely they were used as a means of safeguarding women during pregnancy and birth. And in the ancient Greco-Roman world, they were appl...

What do the 2020 Doomsday Clock - you know, the calculation that tells us which technologies and conditions may annihilate us all - and the 2020 presidential election have in common? Your vote impacts the outcome. To talk with us about the election, Professor Allan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted the outcome of every election since 1994, gives us his prediction. Then, Professor Herb Lin of t...

For eight years, I hosted a storytelling show at the Mark Twain House, called The Mouth-Off . Five times a year, storytellers would take the stage with their true story on that night’s theme. Now that the pandemic has cancelled the remainder of this year’s season, I wanted to take the opportunity to play you some of my favorites. You’ll hear all sorts of stories in this episode, but the one thing...

When you were growing up, you probably heard about famous inventors. Maybe you thought they were brilliant. Rigorously trained. Confident. Capable. And that their inventions advanced humankind through and through. But Dr. Ainissa Ramirez spent the last 5 years writing a book that strips away those presumptions. In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another , she paints portra...

Today, you’re gonna hear from three people who had close encounters with wild animals - and have the scars to prove it. You’ll hear how - and if - any of these people felt defined by their experiences, and what sense they’ve made out of their encounters. Plus, you’ll hear from a wildlife expert about what animals you should be careful to keep away from here in New England. GUESTS: Kelci "Saff" Saf...

From ancient Egypt to Greek mythology, through Abrahamic religions, in ancient African and Native American spiritual traditions, in medieval Europe, and 16th century France (remember that Nostradamus guy?), humans have reliably attempted to predict the future, read minds, and communicate with the dead. And at this moment in our history, with a pandemic, protests, an upcoming election, climate chan...

Right now the world population is 7.8 billion, and growing fast. We have doubled our population over just the past 50 years! Even though the population is growing, fertility rates, overall, are dropping . So, more people are here, but we’re having fewer babies. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and one of them is infertility. The CDC estimates that nearly one out of eight couples struggles to con...

Last year, a 28 year-old guy in Mumbai tried to sue his parents - who are both lawyers - for having brought him into the world. He claims his parents didn’t get his consent to live. In addition to being a very bold person, he is an anti-natalist. That is, he believes that it is morally wrong to bring sentient life into this world - no matter how charmed or how troubled that life is - and that huma...

We’re all naked under our clothes. It’s when we take them off that things could get complicated. I didn't want to be clothesminded, so in 2012 I did something that I had never done before. I took off all my clothes and spent time at Solair, a nudist resort in Woodstock, Connecticut , all in the name of radio. Then, I revisited the resort a few years later to go skinnydipping with four members of o...

Imagine you’ve got breasts. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine, because most every human being has’ em! And that means that most of us are candidates for breast cancer. This hour, we hear very intimate conversations with two women who go through the process of getting a double mastectomy - the removal of all the breast tissue. One decides to get reconstruction, and one does not. I talked to them...