John Biewen
John Biewen’s radio work has taken him to more than forty American states and to Europe, Japan, and India. He has produced for all of the NPR newsmagazines, This American Life, Studio 360, American RadioWorks, and the BBC World Service. He is audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies, where, in addition to producing Scene on Radio, he teaches audio courses to undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students. With co-editor Alexa Dilworth, he edited the book, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, now in its second edition.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
As Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) audio director John Biewen preps for the next season of Scene on Radio, the podcast is headed to 5 million downloads, episodes are being used in classrooms and independent discussion groups across the country, and media outlets—Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, Buzzfeed, among others—have taken note. Here, John sets the scene for the upcoming season.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
In the early episodes of MEN, co-host Celeste Headlee and I dive into history and science to explore questions like, How and when did men seize for themselves the top spot in the gender hierarchy? (Spoiler: It happened long after “cave man” days.) How did the patriarchy survive Enlightenment ideas about universal human rights? What is gender, anyway, and what does the latest research say about the old nature-nurture question—that is, are the differences that we think we see in male and female humans partly biological or are those differences entirely socially constructed and learned?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
From the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University: It’s not easy to stand out and get noticed in the existing sea of podcasts, but Scene on Radio grew its listenership at a steady, respectable rate. Then, earlier this year, John rolled out a new series of episodes—and things got crazy. An example, among many: one of the world’s leading radio production companies tweeted, “Currently the best thing coming out of the U.S. podcast scene.”
