En Route

In our recent story “Sacred Operator” producer Karen Robins takes us inside the mind and world of a tarot card reader. For En Route, Karen and I talk about the story, her biggest takeaways, and how the occult has suddenly become trendy.

In our recent story “Norman’s House” producer Ben Riskin brings us the story of Darren, Tom, and Norman. Ben discusses the process of discovering the story of their friendship, and what we learn from their story.

This is En Route, the microcast of ARRVLS featuring outtakes, extended interviews, and other extras from the ARRVLS podcast. In our recent story “Junji” producer Tally Abecassis, host of the “First Day Back” podcast brings us the story of Junji Nishihata, a Japanese Canadian who struggles with his identity as a foreigner amid the national crisis that followed the 2011 earthquake and Tsunami that hit Japan. Tally and I talked about how she came to the story, and how documentary filmaking does and doesn’t inform her radio work.

n our recent story “Movements” producer Sara Curtis and I shared our experiences, the sights and sounds, of the cities where we lived. Cities we were each moving away from..me from New York to Los Angeles and Sara from San Francisco to the Northeast. And this wasn’t just a whispy farewell to the cities where we lived..at the end of the day, both of us felt like we’d made something more universal. As if the stories we told were less about a specific place, and more about how each of us interacted with the world around us. Sara and I talked a lot after the show aired about what “movements” meant to each of us. And, naturally, as we did for the episode, we recorded our conversation.

In our most recent episode of ARRVLS featured the story of Ney Melo. He grew up in New York, in the Bronx worked as a trader for Morgan Stanley, and then later he became an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. At the time when he was working there the Lehman Brothers office was just down the street from the World Trade Center. And Ney was at work on September 11th, 2001. Listen to Ney's Story, "Manhattan Milonguero"The thing about Ney was that he'd known for a while that he wasn't happy in his job, and something about that terrible day made him reevaluate things, and through a series of twists and turns he found himself in Argentina studying tango. It's such a cool and inspiring story, and at the end of the interview I was just curious what it was about tango that he loved so much. Why not salsa or ballroom dancing or some other dance? And this is what he told me. 

For our recent episode "Felix The Different", Felix Neals chronicles his journey from being a quiet child in a small subdivision bordering the everglade swamp on the outskirts of Miami in the 1930's, to dodging harassment from the KKK while in college in Pocatello, Idaho. I met up with felix after our interview, at the Hudson River Park in Manhattan, and he shared with me a piece of writing that he hesitated to call a poem, but rather called it "reflections on a tin mirror".

For our recent episode "Mama I'm A Girl", Marlo Mack of the podcast How To Be A Girl, tells the story of raising her transgender daughter. At the end of our conversation, we wanted to know how Marlo has grown through the process of discovery of her child's identity, how her daughter has transformed her way of looking at the world, and whether or not she has advice for parents with children like hers.  Produced by Jonathan I. Hirsch

A poem by Drew Farrell.

When he was 15 years old, Jonathan Hirsch met a met in a superhero costume on a train. 15 years later, he found him again. Ethan's side of the story can be hear in episode 1 of ARRVLS: "The Blazing Echidna" at: http://www.arrvls.com Hosted by Gabrielle Lewis Produced by Gabrielle Lewis & Jonathan Hirsch Edited by Gabrielle Lewis & Jakob Lewis Sound Design by Jonathan Hirsch

Many New Yorkers will instantly recognize Matthew Silver's face; even some people outside of New York who caught wind of the viral video for which he was the subject, will recognize the scarcely dressed bearded eccentric dancing in the 42nd street subway station or Union Square Plaza, making fart noises and preaching his message of love. Why does he do it?