KUOW Presents connects listeners to a diversity of stories and perspectives from around the Pacific Northwest and around the world on topics that matter to our daily lives.
Mary Miller fell in love with a man who flipped houses for a living. But he broke her heart, so she decided to beat him at his own house-flipping game. She was on her way to do just that when a song came on the radio. Its lyrics forced Mary to reconsider everything she was about to do.
During election season, how much of campaign stops or debates are actually spontaneous? And how much is pre-planned? Who actually designs the political theater we see on the campaign trail? Producers Roman Mars and Andrea Seabrook examine what goes into the theater of politics, and what happens when all that planning and showmanship goes wrong.
Eric Nuzum is vice president of programming for NPR and a writer. He’s also afraid of ghosts. When he was young, Eric became convinced he was being haunted by the ghost of a little girl who lived in his parents’ attic. It started as a weird premonition during his dreams and ended with Eric in a mental ward, having apparently destroyed his life before it truly began. The only thing that kept him from the brink was his friendship with a girl named Laura, a classmate who was equal parts devoted friend and enigmatic crush.
Even now as a fully functioning member of society with a great job and family, Eric still can’t stand to have any shut doors in his house for fear of what’s on the other side. So in order to finally face his fears, he enlists some friends on a journey to America’s most haunted places. Eric Nuzum's book is titled "Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to Be Haunted." Eric Nuzum told Wisconsin Public Radio's Anne Strainchamps about his fears.
One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time is called the attention blindness test, also known as the gorilla experiment. Here's how it goes. First, researchers sit their subjects down to watch a video of a basketball game. Then they tell the subjects to count the number of passes made. After a minute or so, a person in a gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the game, in full view of the camera. Now, here’s the fun part. When the researchers ask their subjects who saw the gorilla, more than half say they didn't. That's because the subjects were too focused on counting passes.
Duke University Professor Cathy Davidson says we can learn something important from this experiment. Davidson is the author of "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn." She tells Wisconsin Public Radio's Anne Strainchamps why attention blindness matters.
When designers look at US money, they usually see a whole host of problems. Aside from being just busy and confusing to look at, US money is so poorly designed that people who are sight-impaired can't even really use it. Yet there's no real movement in this country to change how our money's designed. Producer Roman Mars finds another country's currency that's designed with the user in mind.
Seattle’s Tudor Choir is a 20 year-old institution founded by a University of Washington student with a passion for music and history. During his years at the University of Washington, Tudor Choir founder and artistic director Doug Fullington put together a group of fellow students to sing English Renaissance music associated with the Tudor Monarchy of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Paula Sophia Schonauer is a 20-year veteran with the Oklahoma City Police Department. She’s also the agency's first openly transgender officer. When Paula was a man, she was the star cop in her police force. But when she transitioned to female, her past successes and reputation as top cop evaporated. Her colleagues didn’t think she could do the job she had excelled in for so many years as a man. In Tough as Nails, Paula told NPR Producer Stephanie Foo about her journey changing from police man, to police woman.
The pink ribbon has been an incredibly successful piece of marketing for breast cancer research. But for new media artist and cancer survivor Leonor Caraballo, that pink ribbon is supremely annoying. She always hated the color pink, and Caraballo wanted to come up with a symbol that she didn't find infantilizing.
As an artist, Caraballo collaborates with her husband, Abou Farman, under the name caraballo-farman. And the couple came up with a new approach to representing breast cancer that's very different from pink ribbons. They started making bronze models of real tumors, created from MRI scans, that you can wear around your neck or put on your desk.
In his story, Object Breast Cancer, Independent Producer Eric Molinsky also discovered that this artwork is creating buzz among cancer researchers.
If you've ever been cut off in traffic by a rude driver, you probably know how it feels to suddenly want revenge. Clare Lawlor acted on that impulse, and sought revenge on another motorist. Her actions caused her to wonder about why humans feel the need to take vengeance - especially when, as Clare learned, it rarely works out well. Clare told the CBC's Sook Yin Lee what happened between her and the other driver.
