Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal
Radiolab
11/21/25
•53m
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Today on the show, we’re bringing you an episode from Our Common Nature (https://link.podtrac.com/v7mx144d), a new podcast series where cellist Yo-Yo Ma and host Ana González travel around the United States to meet people, make music and better understand how culture binds us to nature. The series features a few familiar voices, including Ana González (host) and Alan Goffinski (producer), from our kids podcast, Terrestrials (https://link.podtrac.com/vysacqn1).
About the episode:
West Virginia is defined by its beauty and its coal, two things that can work against each other. Yo-Yo Ma felt this as soon as stepped foot in its hills.This episode explores how music and poetry help process the emotions of a community besieged with disaster and held together by pride and duty. We travel down the Coal River with third-generation coal miner Chris Saunders, who tells us how coal has saved and threatened his life. Poet Crystal Good shares her poetry, which channels her rage and love. And musician and granddaughter of West Virginia coal miners, Kathy Mattea, explains the beauty of belting out your home state in a chorus. The end of the episode finds host Ana floating down the New River with help from a group of high schoolers and Yo-Yo Ma.
Listen to the full series Our Common Nature (https://link.podtrac.com/v7mx144d).
Featuring music by Yo-Yo Ma, Dom Flemons, and Kathy Mattea and poetry by Crystal Good.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Radiolab Bits Produced - Anisa Vietze (Radiolab bits)
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Previous Episode
Quantum Refuge
November 14, 2025
•48m
Qasem Waleed is a 28-year-old physicist who has lived in Gaza his whole life. In 2024, he joined a chorus of Palestinians sharing videos and pictures and writing about the chaos and violence they were living through, as Israel’s military bombardment devastated their lives. But Qasem was trying to describe his reality through the lens of the most notoriously confusing and inscrutable field of science ever, quantum mechanics. We talked to him, from a cafe near the Al-Mawasi section of Gaza, to find out why. And over the course of several conversations, he told us how this reality-breaking corner of science has helped him survive. And how such unspeakable violence actually let him understand, in a visceral way, quantum mechanics’ most counter-intuitive ideas.
Special thanks to Katya Rogers, Karim Kattan, Allan Adams, Sarah Qari, Soren Wheeler, and Pat Walters
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Lulu Miller
Produced by - Jessica Yung
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger
and Edited by - Alex Neason
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Videos -
- A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics with Sean Carroll, The Royal Institution (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hVmeOCJjOU)
- Introduction to Superposition, with MIT’s Allan Adams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc)
- The Quantum Wavefunction, Explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOI4DlWQ_1w)
Articles -
Read a selection of Qasem’s published essays about his life in Gaza and the quantum world:
- I am stuck in a box like Schrodinger’s in Gaza (https://zpr.io/ALDVi9E5bRt8)
- Israel has turned Gaza’s summer into a weapon (https://zpr.io/YS4WK4hVQC5T)
- The Physics of Death in Gaza (https://zpr.io/hxsgxicVqPAd)
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Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.
Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Next Episode
Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine
November 28, 2025
•38m
Our original host Jad Abumrad returns to share a new podcast series he’s just released. It’s all about Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician who created a genre, then a movement, then tried to use his hypnotic beats to topple a military dictatorship. Jad tells us about the series and why he made it, and we play the episode that, for us at least, gets to the heart of the matter: How exactly does his music work? What actually happens to the people who hear it and how does it move them to action?
You can find Jad’s entire nine-part series, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Jad Abumrad
Radiolab portions produced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan
Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!
Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.
Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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