Scene on Radio
Society & Culture
About
Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Our latest is Season 7, Scene on Radio: Capitalism. Previous series include Seeing White (Season 2), looking at the roots and meaning of white supremacy; MEN (Season 3), on patriarchy and its history; The Land That Never Has Been Yet (Season 4), exploring democracy in the U.S. and why we don’t have more of it; The Repair (Season 5), on the cultural roots of the climate crisis; and Season 6, Echoes of a Coup, the story of the only successful coup d'etat in U.S. history, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. Produced and hosted by John Biewen, with collaborators, Scene on Radio comes from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The show is distributed by PRX.
Episodes
- Guest Episode: Drilled: Carbon Cowboys
Amy Westervelt, co-host of Scene on Radio
- Guest Episode: Master Plan: The Kingmakers
A special episode from The Lever's investigative series, Master Plan: The Kingmakers, details the rise of a legal concept that has influenced the American presidency. It examines the constitutional crisis sparked by Richard Nixon and its l…
- Guest Episode: More Muslim
This episode features a report by Aina Khan on the Cape Malay community in Cape Town, South Africa. The community, established by Indonesian roots, has endured historical colonialism and oppression and is now contending with gentrification.
- Historical Maturity and Cowardice: Keeping ScOR #15
In this episode of Scene on Radio, host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. He reflects on changes in his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota, following a visit and discusses America's current approach to its history.
- Voices of Hiroshima
This rebroadcast of Scene on Radio
- Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7
Host John Biewen reads an essay from his newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Reflections on the Trump Administration's attempt to wrangle control of the national story and how it's told. Will this attack on factual history succeed? Music by goodnigh…
- The New Old Racism: Keeping ScOR#4
Host John Biewen teases Season 8 and reads an installment from his new newsletter, Keeping ScOR. Eight years after our "Seeing White" series, whiteness is still a helluva drug -- and a powerful tool for Trump 2.0. Music by goodnight, Lucas…
- Bonus: Michael Kliën and the Body Politic
Michael Kliën wants to help bring about profound change in the world, but not through the usual means. An Austrian-born Dance professor at Duke University, Kliën is a leading social choreographer. He sets up experiments involving people mo…
- S7 E13: CAPITALISM Bonus, Live at Motorco
With our Capitalism season and the election behind us, now what? Can we find hope and a way forward? In a live show taped December 5, 2024, at Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina, Season 7 co-hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt are…
- Post-election '24 All-Star Special
Host John Biewen is joined by Celeste Headlee, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Ellen McGirt, and Amy Westervelt, co-hosts of Scene on Radio's full-length seasons -- Seeing White, MEN, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, The Repair, and Capitalism -- fo…
- S7 E12: Reimagined Economies
In our season finale, we visit with people on two continents who are turning core structures of capitalism on their heads – or, at least, sideways. By John Biewen with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews with John Fullerton, Ander Etxeberria,…
- S7 E11: Better Capitalism?
In the first of two episodes looking at responses to capitalism’s failings, we explore reforms aimed at making the current economic system more humane, fair, effective, and sustainable. By John Biewen with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews…
- S7 E10: The Extracted
A visit to West Africa and Western Europe to look at the cocoa trade. Did the colonial side of early capitalism – Western countries getting rich at the expense of poorer nations – ever change, or does it continue today? Reported by Ugochi…
- S7 E9: At the Tipping Point
In 1972, a team of young scientists at MIT published a study exploring what would happen to human civilization if people kept pursuing endless economic growth on a finite planet. They weren’t just disbelieved, they were ridiculed. The stor…
- S7 E8: The People's Pushback
S7 E8: The People’s Pushback Over several decades, a growing number of people in the United States and elsewhere – especially younger people – have turned against capitalism. The reasons are not mysterious. Reported by Lewis Raven Wallace…
- S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0
S7 E7: Gilded Age 2.0 After 40 years of neoliberalism, most Americans of every political stripe agree that the economy is “rigged” in favor of corporations and the wealthy. But we may not know the half of it. By John Biewen, with co-host E…
- S7 E6: Thirty Glorious Years
How the balance of power shifted, for a time, in the decades after World War II, and led to a better kind of capitalism – if you think prosperity being broadly shared is a good thing. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Interviews w…
- S7 E5: A New Thing in Human History
An age of invention and mass production, propelled by a new mechanism – the corporate research lab – leads to a surge in material wealth like the world has never seen. How does a new nation, the United States, overtake its parent as the le…
- S7 E4: Invisible Hand Guy?
Economic change happens in a cultural context. We trace the tectonic shifts in the Western mind that made capitalism thinkable – in part through a look at two Enlightenment thinkers: Baruch Spinoza and Adam Smith. (The real Smith, not the…
- S7 E3: Ships, Swords, and Fences
From the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama to colonial conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade, to the privatization of land in western Europe: humanity’s turn toward the capitalist world we live in now. By John Biewen, with co-host Elle…
- S7 E2: BC: Before Capitalism
To fully grasp capitalism, it helps to understand the system it replaced – and the most meaningful differences between feudalism and capitalism. We visit the British Isles of the Middle Ages. By John Biewen, with co-host Ellen McGirt. Inte…
- S7 E1: Market Failure
Introduction to our 7th season: Capitalism. The world’s dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn’t been for at least half a century. Millions, young people especially, now see capitalism as the problem, not the solution. Others fear…
- Season 7 Trailer: Capitalism
Welcome to Season 7: Capitalism. The world's dominant economic system is on trial as it hasn't been for at least half a century. This season tells the story of capitalism -- how people with power built and shaped it over time. We'll also e…
- Bonus: Long Shadow, In Guns We Trust
As we get ready to launch our Season 7, a bonus episode from another podcast we think our listeners will want to hear: Long Shadow. Episode 1 of its newest season, In Guns We Trust, with host Garrett Graff. Mass shootings have plagued the…
- S6 E5: A Way Forward
What would it take, and what would it even mean, to heal from a wound like the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898 — or from centuries of white supremacist violence, disenfranchisement, and theft? An exploration of that question with comm…
- S6 E4: The Forgetting
After the massacre and coup of November 10, 1898, white supremacists in North Carolina soon finished the job of disenfranchising Black citizens and instituting Jim Crow segregation. They also took control of the narrative. A new propaganda…
- S6 E3: A Day of Blood
On November 1898, North Carolina Democrats won a sweeping victory at the polls – confirming the success of their campaign based on white supremacy, intimidation, and fraud. But in Wilmington, the state’s largest city, white supremacist lea…
- S6 E2: Crying "Negro Rule"
By 1898, two decades after the end of Reconstruction, white elites, backed by violent terror groups, have installed Jim Crow across most of the South. North Carolina, led by its largest city, Wilmington, is different. A Fusion coalition, m…
- S6 E1: What Was Lost
This series tells the story of the only successful coup d’etat in U.S. history, and the white supremacist massacre that went with it. It happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in November 1898. But before we get to that story, we explore t…
- Season 6 Trailer: Echoes of a Coup
Introduction to Season 6, a series co-produced by Michael A. Betts II and Scene on Radio producer and host John Biewen, with story editor Loretta Williams. Music by Kevin MacLeod, Okaya, and Lucas Biewen. Echoes of a Coup is a project of A…
- "The Excess of Democracy": Rebroadcast
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men got together in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the United States, replacing the new nation’s original blueprint, the Articles of Confederation. But why, exactly? What problems were the fr…
- White Affirmative Action: Rebroadcast
When it comes to U.S. government programs and support designed to benefit particular racial groups, history is clear. White folks have received most of the handouts. Part of our summer mini-season of rebroadcasts. By John Biewen, with Deen…
- Losing Ground: Rebroadcast
The next in our summer mini-season of rebroadcasts: For Eddie Wise, owning a hog farm was a lifelong dream. In middle age, he and his wife, Dorothy, finally got a farm of their own. But they say that over the next twenty-five years, the U.…
- Bonus: Introducing Hot Take
In this bonus episode we share a recent installment from Hot Take, the climate podcast co-hosted by Amy Westervelt (co-host/reporter for our Season 5 series on climate, The Repair) and writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. They talk with their guest…
- Himpathy: Rebroadcast
Several years after Janey was sexually assaulted by her former boyfriend, Mathew, she told some of her closest friends, and her mother, what Mathew had done. Janey was so troubled by her loved ones’ responses that she went back to them yea…
- Things I'm Afraid to Say: Rebroadcast
A refugee from war in Eastern Europe. An NYC-born survivor who grew up poor, Black, Muslim, and gay. And how one, and her music, saved the other. By Aleks Basic, featuring Laila Nur. Part of our summer mini-season of rebroadcasts. Editing…
- Prince and Philando and Futures Untold: Rebroadcast
How to grieve when the deaths come so quickly? How, as a Black mother in America, to protect your child’s innocence and hope? An audio essay by Stacia Brown. The first in a summer mini-season of rebroadcasts. Editing by Shea Shackelford an…
- S5 E11: Change Everything
In our Season 5 finale: What’s the cultural transformation we need to make — in the West, and the U.S. in particular — to live in good health with the rest of the natural world and with each other? Episode 11 of The Repair , our series on…
- S5 E10: The Power Structure, Not the Energy Source
The first of two concluding episodes in Season 5, in which we focus on solutions. In Part 10 of The Repair , we look at the actions and policies that people need to push for —now — to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.…
- S5 E9: Pachamama
In several countries around the world, including Ecuador, New Zealand, and the U.S., some people are trying to protect the planet using a legal concept called “rights of nature” – infusing the law with Indigenous understandings of Mother E…
- S5 E8: Last Orders
Among the wealthy, industrialized Western countries that created the climate crisis, Scotland is one of the leaders in pivoting away from fossil fuels – or promising to. Just how quickly will Scots be willing to cut off the flow – of oil,…
- S5 E7: Deluges and Dreams
The climate crisis is not new to Bangladesh. For decades, global warming has exacerbated storms and flooding and turned many thousands of people into refugees in their own country. Yet, even though Bangladeshis did almost nothing to create…
- S5 E6: "We Don't Have the Power to Fight It"
Earth’s changing climate is already displacing millions of people, worsening tension and conflict, and sometimes violence – for example, between farmers and traditional nomadic herders in Nigeria. Part 6 of The Repair , our series on the c…
- Bonus Episode: Manchin on the Hill, and Introducing Drilled
Co-hosts John Biewen and Amy Westervelt discuss the U.S. Congress’s effort to pass its first major climate bill ever, and Senator Joe Manchin’s move to block a key measure seemingly on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. And an episode of…
- S5 E5: Jakarta, the Sinking Capital
Southeast Asia is especially vulnerable to storms, rising oceans, and other climate effects—though countries in the region did very little to create the crisis. In Indonesia, among other climate-related challenges, the capital city is sink…
- S5 E4: Up to Heaven and Down to Hell
Why has the United States played such an outsized role in the creation of the climate crisis? As a settler nation, the U.S. emerged from the colonizing, capitalist West, but what did America and its cultural peculiarities bring to the part…
- S5 E3: "Managing" Nature
If the Enlightenment was so great, why was it not a course correction? In fact, did cultural values that took hold in the West in this period speed up our race toward ecological suicide? Part 3 of our series, The Repair , on the climate cr…
- S5 E2: To the Victor
How western Europe really broke bad in its understanding of humanity’s place in the natural world, from the Crusades to capitalism. Part 2 of our series, The Repair, on the climate crisis. By host and producer John Biewen, with co-host Amy…
- S5 E1: In the Beginning
Part 1 of our series on the climate emergency. How did we drive ourselves into the ecological ditch? And, crucially, who is this ‘we’? Our story starts with … Genesis. By host and producer John Biewen, with co-host Amy Westervelt. Intervie…
- Season 5 Trailer: The Repair
This season will explore the cultural roots of our current ecological emergency, and the deep changes Western society will need to make to save the Earth and our species. Through interviews with historians and other experts, The Repair wil…