The RHODcasts

It all began with… a Chinese dinner? Or did it begin when HEATHER CAIRNS would invigilate the tests taken by two “child prodigy” graduate students in the engineering faculty at Stanford. Anyway, one thing led to another. Heather eventually returned to her home town on Boston’s North Shore where people still call her The Google Lady.

One hot day in June, Rhod joins BETTE HUNT, the emeritus historian of Marblehead, Mass. for a walk through the town’s almost 400 year old graveyard. Old Burial Hill connects the living with the dead in some strange ways as they discourse on Thornton Wilder’s famous play, George Washington’s favorite general, the Marblehead woman convicted at the Salem witch trials and the fairly undiscussed existence of a “negro” burial site in this quintessentially Yankee town. 

The BBC’s New York correspondent sees the USA that so excited him as a youth sapped of vitality, politically divided against itself but in an old saying, always headed to hell and never getting there. When America Stopped Being great merges Bryant’s reporting experiences with a historian’s perspective in a way which, as the Washington Post said, gives foreign laments a fresh arc.

He tried to hawk them from his wheelbarrow and even built a backyard museum for them without success. After his death some of his paintings were used as building material by his cash-strapped son. And yet as his huge output of historically significant work became better known in the 1950s, “a pretty big shadow” was cast over the art of JOJ Frost. What prevented people who owned his paintings from coming forward? Rhod hears from one of the mother and daughter team who have done more than anyone to try to bring the rest of Frost’s surviving “canvases” to light.

Who hid the painting in the wall of that old house? Rhod delves into the story of the eccentric artist JOJ Frost, who tried unsuccessfully to sell his pictures from a wheelbarrow, and whose paintings were worth less during the Depression than the boards they were painted on. Yet he left an incomparable account of a vanished way of life. And his paintings keep on turning up.

Rhod Sharp discovers the pilot of a never-to-be-made podcast series. This cornucopia of offbeat stories from the first week of July 2008 may be of special interest to fans of Rhod’s appearances on BBC 5 Live’s Up All Night.

The outrageous success story of RICK BOYD. Since being furloughed by the pandemic from his job managing a small resort in southern Florida, he has done so well trading Bitcoin that he says neither he nor his wife he will ever have to work again. 

As city planners ponder the possibilities of leaving lockdown, London has become Ground Zero for improving the experience of commuting on two wheels. But at whose expense? The UK government has already committed over half a billion pounds, but one London council removed a brand new cycle lane a mere seven weeks after it opened. Join Jeremy Vine and me as we explore London’s looming Cycle Wars.

At high noon, April 22.1889, a remarkable thing happened. The “Unassigned Lands” of Oklahoma which had not been “assigned” by the federal government to either of the traditional owners, the Cherokee or the Chickasaw, were thrown open to settlers from the east on a first-come basis. They came “like Zulu warriors” writes Simon Winchester at the start of one of many gripping stories in his new book, Land. Is land something to be owned, or just taken care of? What’s the answer to Tolstoy’s question, how much land does a man need?

The American ultra-right is back in the shadows, or at least keeping its powder dry. Seeing a massive show of state force with 25,000 National Guard packing Washington DC, and high alerts in state capitals, the far right is picking its fights. Nor will it have the country’s Chief Executive and his enablers minding its back. RHOD SHARP looks to the Wednesday’s Inauguration of President Biden and beyond with The Nation magazine’s National Correspondent JOHN NICHOLS.