Far From Home

While I'm taking a break from releasing new episodes, I wanted to share an episode of another great podcast I heard recently and that I thought all of you might enjoy. The show is called Making Peace Visible , and it features conversations with journalists, peace-builders, activists, and scholars on the front lines of peace and conflict. Making Peace Visible also aims to analyze how the media cove...

In the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen, there's a small building with a garden and wooden seats. It's the Menneskebiblioteket or Human Library , where the "readers" and "books" are actually people having deeply personal and intimate conversations about topics that might normally be considered off-limits or taboo in polite society. It's staffed by volunteers whose life stories and experiences m...

When he was growing up in Southern California, Addi Somekh wasn't quite sure what to do with his life. But he knew from a young age that he wanted to "spread warmth" and make other people happy. On this week’s episode, the unusual story of how Addi’s quest to do just that set him off on a worldwide mission to make people laugh. Addi and his friend Charlie hatch a plan to travel around the globe ma...

When he was 26 years old in 1948, Garry Davis did something that would make the rest of his life really complicated. Over the next six decades, he’d be detained and imprisoned 34 times in 9 countries, dragged off the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, and gain millions of followers, all while confronting countless bureaucrats who had absolutely no idea what to do with him. What set this...

Over the past few months, President Trump has taken a sort of a slash-and-burn approach to much of the U.S. government, and among the many taxpayer-funded programs he’s axed has been American foreign assistance distributed through the Agency for International Development or USAID. That’s billions of dollars that helped with things like Ebola prevention in West Africa, malaria testing in Myanmar, f...

Montreal is a city often split between English and French languages and cultures, but one thing that almost all residents can get behind is cheering on their beloved hockey team, the Canadiens. This isn't just your run-of-the-mill, sports-crazed city, however. The love of hockey here runs much deeper. It's tied to both the history of the game's creation as well as the identity of the Quebecois peo...

The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine is now entering its third year, and it’s been a humanitarian disaster. According to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, it’s displaced nearly 7 million Ukrainians globally. And on the other side, an estimated 900,000 Russians have also fled their country for various reasons. Among them are economic migrants, conscientious objectors, and politic...

As we wrap up another year, I'm re-sharing an episode I originally released back at the end of 2020 about a holiday tradition I got to witness while I was visiting Puerto Rico. I often travel over Christmas and New Years, and I love seeing how people in other places have cultural practices that are different from my own. This was one of those experiences. My friend Rob took me to a parranda, which...

As I spent time abroad over the past few months in the lead-up to the American presidential election, I was struck by how often news and politics from back home seemed to be on the minds of all the locals I met. It’s like no matter how far away I went, it was impossible to escape! On this episode I reflect on how important what happens in the United States is to people the rest of the world, and w...

I'm still working on my next episode, where I'm asking listeners around the world to send me short voice memo recordings from their phones, talking about how people where they live have reacted to the recent American election results and how they think a second Trump presidency would impact ordinary folks in their country.  If you have any thoughts or observations you'd like to share, please email...

If you travel around Canada, you’ll find lots of regional dishes, but there isn’t really a strong national culinary identity the way there is in Italy or Mexico, for example. So I embarked on a quest to figure out how exactly to define "Canadian cuisine" beyond the stereotypical maple syrup, poutine, and butter tarts. The answer turned out to be much more interesting than I ever could have imagine...

In the course of reporting my documentary about Freetown Christiania -- Copenhagen's famous anarchist commune -- for the 99% Invisible podcast, I took two trips to Denmark and recorded many hours of interviews that unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor. In this bonus episode of Far From Home, I present some of the highlights as well as some additional context and backstories of the peop...

In 1971, a group of squatters took over an abandoned military base just across the harbor from downtown Copenhagen, Denmark. They created a a politically autonomous anarchist zone -- in other words, a commune -- with its own flag, marching band, and consensus-driven governance process, and they decided to call their community Christiania. The thousand or so residents were free to do pretty much wh...

In this era of wars, conflicts, and polarized politics, talking to strangers has never been more important. A new season of episodes launches Tuesday, October 8th.(Thanks to Ali Lemer for editorial support)---People often say it’s a small world, but there are giant parts of the planet that most people never think about and billions of stories they’ve never heard. On Far From Home, award-winning pu...

After missing the opportunity to see the last total solar eclipse in the United States back in 2017, I decided to add this experience to my bucket list and vowed I would do whatever it takes to see an eclipse in the future. A few weeks ago, I got my chance. Joined by my brother Drew and his friends Jeremy and Claire, I drove up to the woods of northern New Hampshire, and together, the four of us w...

Thor Pedersen always felt like he was born too late. He grew up in a world where other people had already done most of the amazing things, like venturing to the North and South Poles, climbing the highest mountains, following the longest rivers, and exploring the depths of the deepest seas. But in 2013, at the age of 34, he discovered one record that no one had yet managed to achieve. So he went t...

After releasing my last episode where I shared stories from my time in Oklahoma many years ago, I came across one more short radio piece in my archives that I thought some of your might enjoy. It’s about another cultural phenomenon unique to Oklahoma that I experienced: the world’s only behind-the-walls prison rodeo . Before a stadium of 9000 cheering fans, a hundred inmates from around the state...

Two decades ago, I was just starting out as a public radio reporter, applying for literally every radio job opening I saw, and somehow I ended up getting hired by a small station in Norman, Oklahoma. Given that the culture, politics, and geography were so incredibly different from anything I’d been exposed to up to that point. moving there from my home state of New Jersey almost felt like going to...

If you listened to my last episode , you heard the story of my friend Jamie Yuenger, an American who moved from New York City to the Netherlands and was struggling to make the transition and figure out how to fit in. Following up on that theme, today I’m sharing a recent episode from my friends at The Bittersweet Life podcast, where co-host Tiffany Parks looks back at the past nearly two decades s...

From the age of 24 until she was 37, Jamie Yuenger lived in New York City. While she started out having a complicated relationship with the city, she grew over time to love her adopted hometown. Then a few years ago, she fell in love with a Dutch guy named Piet and decided to move to the Netherlands to be with him. That meant she’d be starting over in a new country where she didn’t understand the...

Last winter during the pandemic, Jack Boswell started to reevaluate his place in life and realize that at the age of 31, he still hadn’t chased his real passion of being a Hollywood screenwriter. So he decided to quit his job and hop on a plane where he lived in London to head to Los Angeles and give it a go. But instead of flying directly there, he figured he’d instead land in Boston and make his...

As you may have seen in my feed, I recently teamed up with my colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money economic podcast to report a story that prominently featured the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan — which is probably one of the most obscure countries in the world, and certainly not a place that most of us hear much about, much less visit. Only about 10,000 tourists a year cross its borders, but i...

A few months ago, a friend of mine named Oraz who runs an autobody repair shop in Turkmenistan came across a kind of puzzle. A new vehicle had just arrived on his lot. A white Lexus SUV. He could see by the registration sticker that it came from my home state of New Jersey, but the even stranger thing was the shape it was in. It was practically brand new, unlike like the dented and mangled cars th...

I’m always open to listener feedback on Far From Home, and I heard from someone recently who’s given me a new perspective on one of my past stories and forced me to see things in a new light, so I wanted to share it with all of my listeners. Several years ago on the show, I featured a series of stories about Lucho, a traditional medicine man from Peru who describes himself as a "curandero," or som...

While I’ve been hunkered down these past few years, avoiding traveling and staying home while I rode out the pandemic, I’ve been incredibly lucky that I’ve had a safe and comfortable place to live. But what has this experience been like for people in living situations that failed to provide basic levels of safety, privacy, and comfort? On this episode of Far From Home, I play an episode from the S...