A little over a decade ago, we went to interview a woman at her small one-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex in the Bronx. She was living a quiet and somewhat anonymous life. But many years earlier, she had done something remarkable.

The woman’s name was Claudette Colvin. In 1955, she was a 15-year-old girl growing up in Montgomery, Alabama. On March 2nd of that year, Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus, and was arrested. This was nine months before Rosa Parks would do the exact same thing. But while Rosa Parks became an icon of the Civil Rights movement, Colvin spent most of her life in obscurity.

Claudette Colvin passed away this week, at age 86. We’re remembering her by revisiting the story we did with her in 2015.

Looking for love is an art, not a science. People have been trying to crack the code, with mixed success, for a long time. 

This week we're going back to the 1960s, when a couple Harvard students had an idea.

Businesses had started using a new technology called the computer to process payroll or match a client with the right type of insurance. What if these same computers could be used to get a date? 

This is the story of the very first computer dating service, Operation Match.

Today on the show, we sit down with photographer Andrew Lichtenstein to discuss his new book, THIS SHORT LIFE, which combines photo essays with audio testimonies about 12 Americans, from a West Virginia coal miner to a Maine farmer, all united by how the struggles of their past have shaped their present. You'll hear audio testimony from some of the people in the book.

Buy THIS SHORT LIFE here. 

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To support our work, go to www.radiodiaries.org/donate. 

In April 2024, over 100 students were arrested during protests outside Columbia University, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Leqaa Kordia, a young Palestinian woman living in Paterson, New Jersey, was one of them.

Kordia was let go after the protests. But months later, ICE officials took her into custody and put her on a plane to a detention facility in Texas. Kordia has now been detained there for more than seven months. She is the last Columbia protestor still in detention.

Kordia's cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, talks to Kordia through a detention phone line almost every day. Today on the show, we'll hear one of those phone calls.

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were both born in New York City and adopted as infants. When they were 35 years old, they met and found they were “identical strangers.”

This story originally aired on NPR in 2007. 

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This is the story of a song, "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." It was written by a 12-year-old boy on what was supposed to be his deathbed. But the boy didn't die. Instead, he went on to become a Pentecostal preacher, and later helped inspire the birth of Rock & Roll. 

The boy's name was Brother Claude Ely, and he was known as The Gospel Ranger.

In the early 1970s, author Studs Terkel interviewed the owners of Duke & Lee's Auto Repair in Geneva, Illinois, for his bestselling book, Working. He went to talk to them about fixing cars. What he found was a story about fathers and sons working together, and the tensions within a family business. 

We went back to Duke & Lee's four decades later and found the family business still intact—tensions and all.

That was nine years ago. Recently, we heard that the family, and the auto shop, had gone through some big changes. So we got back in touch.

This week, the story of a family and their business at three moments in history.

When you spend so much of your life moving around, getting to the next chapter, what's it like to find yourself in the last place?

This week, we revisit audio diaries from a retirement home.

Eighty years ago, on July 28, 1945, an Army bomber pilot on a routine ferry mission found himself lost in the fog over Manhattan. A dictation machine in a nearby office happened to capture the sound of the plane as it hit the Empire State Building at the 79th floor.

Fourteen people were killed. Debris from the plane severed the cables of an elevator, which fell 79 stories with a young woman inside. She survived. The crash prompted new legislation that—for the first time—gave citizens the right to sue the federal government.

When we first met Majd Abdulghani, she was 19 years old, living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We gave her a recorder to keep an audio diary about her life. 

Majd chronicled her dreams of being a scientist, her resistance to having an arranged marriage, and what it was like to be a teenage girl living in one of the most restrictive countries in the world for women. Her story first aired in 2016.

A lot has changed in Majd’s life over the past nine years. Last year, she completed her doctorate at Oxford University, where she was Saudi Arabia’s first Rhodes Scholar. She and her husband have a four-year-old daughter, and they recently moved home to Saudi Arabia after several years abroad.

Saudi Arabia has changed a lot, too. Back in 2016, women weren’t even allowed to drive. Now they can. And many more women have careers now—including Majd. She’s now a successful scientist working for a company based in Riyadh.

We recently met up with Majd while she was in Boston for a conference. Here's her diary from 2016, along with our conversation about how things have changed since then.