Radio Diaries

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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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. 
Liked this story? Donate and find more of our stories at www.radiodiaries.org. Follow us @radiodiaries on Bluesky and Instagram. 

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