Show Notes
Last week, Leqaa Kordia, young Palestinian woman from Paterson, New Jersey, walked out of an ICE detention center in Texas. Kordia had been held for more than a year.
Radio Diaries has been following her story and recorded Kordia while detention. Now, we bring you her first interview since her release.
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More from Radio Diaries
In the spring of 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings met for a minor league baseball game of little importance. But over the course of 33 innings—8 hours and 25 minutes—the game made history. It was the longest professional baseball game ever played. This story was produced in collaboration with ESPN's 30 for 30.
In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mountaintop removal mining in a corner of West Virginia called Pigeonroost Hollow. There used to be dozens of houses in the area, but within a few years there was just one. It belonged to Jimmy Weekley. This story originally aired on NPR in 2011.
This week we're sharing a story from the audio magazine Signal Hill. The story, "What's Inside the Moon," is about the poet Kenneth Koch and a group of elementary school students he taught to write poetry in the 1960s. Half a century later, producer Jess Shane tracked down the students to ask what poetry had meant for their lives. You can find more stories from Signal Hill at SignalHill.fm.
This week we're featuring an episode of Phonograph, a podcast that deconstructs the history and art of audio storytelling. The hosts of Phonograph recently invited Radio Diaries' Joe Richman on their show to talk about "24 Hours at the Golden Apple," a classic episode of This American Life that he helped produce. The Golden Apple is a diner in Chicago, and back in 2000, a group of producers took shifts hanging out there over 24 hours and talking to as many people as they could. Joe's story focused on the friendship between two high school students, Danielle and Allison, who he met during his shift. Here's an excerpt of Phonograph where Joe talks about making this story, and what it's like to listen back to it more than two decades after it first aired.
A few years ago we did a story about Martha Lillard, a woman who had spent most of her life sleeping in a device called an iron lung. Martha had caught polio in the early 1950s, and, like many polio survivors, she had difficulty breathing on her own. Her iron lung was a big metal ventilator that fit her entire body inside and used bellows to suck air in and out, helping her to breathe. Martha was the last person in the U.S. to use one. Martha Lillard died on June 26, 2026. As a remembrance, we're revisiting our story about her.