PODCAST · society
The Kitchen Sisters Present
by The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia
The Kitchen Sisters Present… Stories from the b-side of history. Lost recordings, hidden worlds, people possessed by a sound, a vision, a mission. Deeply layered stories, lush with interviews, field recordings and music. From powerhouse NPR producers The Kitchen Sisters (The Keepers, Hidden Kitchens, The Hidden World of Girls, The Sonic Memorial Project, Lost & Found Sound, and Fugitive Waves). "The Kitchen Sisters have done some of best radio stories ever broadcast" —Ira Glass. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced in by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell and mixed by Jim McKee. A proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
Episodes
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Signal Hill — Push Up Contest
Producer Zoe Kurland's father, costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, talks about designing the iconic push up bra for actress Julia Roberts for the film Erin Brockovich. Zoe follows the story interviewing the real Erin Brockovich and examining her own relationship to body image, confidence and...
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The Sonic Memorial - 25th Anniversary of 9/11
To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we present the Peabody Award winning Sonic Memorial Project with a post script recorded on the 10th Anniversary by our narrator, Paul Auster. The Sonic Memorial Project began in October 2001 as part of the Lost & Found Sound series. We opened a phone line on...
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The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex
Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed the Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful,...
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The Keepers - Archiving the Underground
The Hip Hop Archive at Harvard, the Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky, the Lenny Bruce Archive, the Internet Archive and more surprising stories of preservation and civic life. With host, Academy Award-winning actress, Frances McDormand. The Kitchen Sisters Present Archiving the...
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Cigar Stories: He Who Reads
Narrated by Andy Garcia. At the turn of the century until the 1930s in the cigar factories of Tampa and Ybor City, a well dressed man in a panama hat with a loud and beautiful voice sat atop a platform and read to the cigar workers as they rolled. These readers, known as Lectores de Tabaqueres,...
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Quilts as Monuments: Gert McMullin - Mother of the AIDS Quilt
As part of our Quilts as Monuments series we revisit the story of Gert McMullin and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, Harvey Milk, The White Night Riots and more. In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the...
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Olivia Wilde: The Invite
Olivia Wilde. Actor. Director. Producer. Olivia comes from a long line of journalists, a British father and an American mother, who have made groundbreaking investigative documentaries. The late writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of the family, was her babysitter. She grew up in a world of...
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Quilts as Monuments: Sew Their Names
Perhaps it was the AIDS Quilt that redefined what a monument could look like and who could create it. Or maybe it was the quilters of Gee's Bend or the Freedom Quilting Circle in Alabama, taking the scraps of their lives — old military camo uniforms, overalls, flour sacks — honoring the living…
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100 years of Route 66
John Steinbeck called it “The Mother Road.” Songwriter Bobby Troup said it was where to go to get your kicks. Mickey Mantle swore, “If it hadn’t been for Highway 66 I never would have been a Yankee.” The Kitchen Sisters spent the summer of 1984 traveling every inch of this storied highway — “The...
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The Brave Heart Women’s Society
Today we’re celebrating Faith Spotted Eagle, an Ihanktonwan Oyate elder who has just received an honorary doctorate from South Dakota State University. We first met Faith in 2009 when we were working on our NPR Hidden World of Girls series — stories about rituals and rites of passage, of women…
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Come Life, Shaker Life: From the Cradle to the Cradle
The Shakers. An offshoot sect of The Quakers, born in England in 1747. In worship they were known to break into states of ecstatic trembling. Trembling Quakers. Shaking Quakers. The Shakers. They came to America in 1774 with a utopian vision, egalitarian ideals, a belief in the equality of the...
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Requiem for Larry Massett
Pioneering radio artist Larry Massett, a producer's producer, who led listeners into unexpected worlds and influenced so many in public radio and beyond, died last year at the age of 80. The Kitchen Sisters were fortunate to work with Larry on our NPR series Lost & Found Sound and Soundprint. He...
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Lutah Maria Riggs Designs the American Riviera
Stucco arches, red tile floors, exposed beams — the look and feel of the houses in the oceanfront towns of Santa Barbara and Montecito can be attributed to a woman architect known by one name: Lutah. The Ohio-born and California-bred architect Lutah Maria Riggs was on track to be a teacher, one…
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Have a Seat, The Casting Director Will See You Shortly – The Legends of Juliet Taylor & Ellen Lewis
On Sunday the first Oscar for Achievement in Casting will be given in the 98-year history of the Academy Awards. Today, The Kitchen Sisters and host Frances McDormand bring you the story of two legendary casting directors: Juliet Taylor and Ellen Lewis. Listen to Part 1 of this saga: Everyone’s a...
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Everyone's a Casting Director – The First-Ever Academy Award for Achievement in Casting with Host Frances McDormand
Who discovered Diane Keaton and put her in Annie Hall? Who found Dustin Hoffman and made sure he played Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy? Who saw Jason Schwartzman and made sure Wes Anderson knew about him for Rushmore? Casting Directors, that’s who. When the 98th Oscar ceremony airs on March 15…
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Louis Jones - Activist Archivist, Detroit
Louis Jones is a keeper— working as a Field Archivist at the Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, he cares for the largest labor archive in North America. Home to numerous union and labor collections from around the country, the Reuther Library also actively collects material...
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Betty Reid Soskin - Sign My Name to Freedom - 1921-2025
On December 21, 2025, activist and trailblazer Betty Reid Soskin passed away in Richmond, California. She was 104. Over the years we've chronicled Betty's remarkable story and want to share it today in honor of Betty and Black History Month. In 2011, at age 89, Betty became America's oldest...
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The Giving Game: Andrew Carnegie and the Evils of Wealth
The Gilded Age was a time of unparalleled wealth and prosperity in America—but it was also a time of staggering inequality, corruption, and unchecked power. Among its richest figures was Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who built his fortune on the backs of low-paid workers, only to give it...
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Marion Cunningham: Late Bloomer, Agoraphobic, Food Pioneer
They don't make 'em like Marion Cunningham these days. Food writer, home cook, Fannie Farmer's new incarnation, James Beard’s sidekick, wizard of waffles. Marion was a treasured friend of The Kitchen Sisters, and in 2003, we sat down with her and recorded a long conversation. We've been digging...
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Hidden Kitchens World—With Host Frances McDormand
Host Frances McDormand leads us through this rich international story collection of land, community and food. From the organic olive groves and vineyards being grown on confiscated Mafia land in Sicily, to secret night clubs embedded in Soviet dissident kitchens. From tales of "cooking dogs" in...
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The Keepers—With Host Frances McDormand
The Keepers, from The Kitchen Sisters and PRX with host, Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand. Stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians. Guardians of history, large and small. Protectors of the free flow of information and ideas. Keepers of...
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Remembering Marcyliena Morgan - Keeper of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard
Today, we're thinking about Marcyliena Morgan, a keeper extraordinaire, a linguistic anthropologist who founded and championed the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard. Marcyliena Hazel Morgan was born in Chicago, May 8, 1950 and passed away September 28, 2025. We were fortunate to interview her in 2018 as...
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The Birth of Rice-A-Roni
The worlds of a young Canadian immigrant, an Italian pasta-making family, and a 70-year-old survivor of the Armenian Genocide converge in this story of the San Francisco Treat. A Canadian woman, Lois DeDomenico, marries an Italian immigrant, Tom DeDomenico, whose family founded Golden Grain...
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Bone Music - A Collaboration with 99% Invisible
In the 1950s, some ingenious Russians, hungry for jazz, boogie woogie, rock n roll, and other music forbidden in the Soviet Union, devised a way to record banned bootlegged music on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives. The eerie, ghostly looking recordings etched on...
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Aggie & Walter Murch — Family, Farming & Filmmaking
Muriel "Aggie" Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for some five decades, along with their children, chickens, and horses. The two just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. They both have newly...
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The Real Ambassadors — A Jazz Opera for Louis Armstrong by Dave & Iola Brubeck
The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola & Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world. Appalled by the racist treatment of Black jazz musicians in the United States…
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The Women's School of Planning and Architecture: Not Only Survive but Flourish
The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979. You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and...
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Kibbe at the Crossroads - Lebanese Immigrants and Cooking in the Mississippi Delta
We travel to the Mississippi Delta and the world of Lebanese immigrants, where barbecue and the blues meet kibbe, a kind of traditional Lebanese raw meatloaf. Lebanese immigrants began arriving in the Delta in the late 1800s, soon after the Civil War. Many worked as peddlers, then grocers and...
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The Honesty Boxes of Scotland
“Some people might think that honesty boxes are from the past, from a different age, a simpler age, a more honest age, but I would say they're a future thing as well.” – Mark Cousins Throughout the islands and out of way places in Scotland, along the rural roads, at the end of driveways, out on...
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Hidden Kitchens Texas — Hosted by Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson and Dallas-born actress Robin Wright, along with some wild and extraordinary tellers, take us across Texas and share some of their Hidden Kitchen stories. Gas station tacos, ice houses, Chili Queens, Stubb's BBQ, cowboy kitchens, car wash kitchens, space food. With special guests...
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America Eats - 1930s WPA Chronicle of Food, Ritual and Celebration at The Library of Congress
Fish Fries, political BBQs, family reunions — during the 1930s writers were paid by the government to chronicle local food, eating customs and recipes across the United States. America Eats, a WPA project, sent writers like Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Stetson Kennedy out…
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The National Archives – The What and the Why
“From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records so that we would be able to hold the government accountable for its actions.” - David Ferriero During the first Trump administration, when access to certain websites and information was being...
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E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial - The Worst Video Game Ever?
Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all...
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Radio Pacific - A New Show From KALW San Francisco
The Kitchen Sisters are excited to share the first episode of Radio Pacific, a new monthly show from KALW in San Francisco that takes a deep and creative look at the issues facing California and the rest of our country today. The hour-long, monthly program features journalists, writers, and...
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Plessy AND Ferguson—Activism and the Fight for Justice and Equal Rights
In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law...
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Pie Down Here: Listening Back—Alabama Sharecroppers and Communist Organizers, 1930s
Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great...
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A Tribute to George Foreman: An Unexpected Kitchen—The George Foreman Grill
In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about immigrants and homeless people, who didn't have official kitchens, using the George...
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Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - Revisiting Manzanar
In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens…
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The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex
Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful,...
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House/Full of Black Women
For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking…
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Spotlight on Black Pet Care Entrepreneurs
Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Silly dog treats, Trill Paws enamel ID Tags, The Dog Father of Harlem's Doggie Day Spa, gorgeous…
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The Anti-Inaugural Concert: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon and the "Plea for Peace" music of 1973 Inauguration
Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration ceremonies across the years signaling change, new beginnings and reflecting the mood of the country and a new administration. In January 1973…
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Edna Lewis: Christmas in Freetown
Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virginia, a small farming community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants established in…
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Cecilia Chiang Spills the Tea
On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2000, The Kitchen Sisters, along with food writer Peggy Knickerbocker, visited the home of Cecilia Chiang, the legendary Chinese-American restaurateur, chef and founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco for a bit of an oral history. Cecilia Chiang...
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Catherine Bauer Wurster, Housing Advocate: A Thoroughly Modern Woman
A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement…
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Beyond Architecture: The Fantasy Worlds of Phyllis Birkby
Pushed to the side and rarely credited for her architectural work at Davis Brody, Phyllis Birkby became a significant figure in extending the lesbian women's movement to architecture during the 1970s. Her environmental fantasy workshops played a crucial role in galvanizing the community…
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Constellation Prize: Nightwalking
It is Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the day when millions of Americans go to the polls to vote for who will lead their towns, their states, the nation. Souls to the polls today across the country, and so much hangs in the balance. On this fraught and tender Tuesday, when all our nerves are frayed…
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The Hope and the Scope: Young People and the Political Moment
July 17, 2024, Washington, D.C. Some 200 young people from across the nation aged 14-19 — aspiring poets, storytellers, MC's, activists — are gathered in the nation’s capital for the 29th annual Brave New Voices Festival — four non-stop days of slam poetry competition, coaching, workshops,...
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Tupperware
Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy. It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when…
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Manny's: A Civic Gathering Place
As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Kitchen Sisters Present… Stories from the b-side of history. Lost recordings, hidden worlds, people possessed by a sound, a vision, a mission. Deeply layered stories, lush with interviews, field recordings and music. From powerhouse NPR producers The Kitchen Sisters (The Keepers, Hidden Kitchens, The Hidden World of Girls, The Sonic Memorial Project, Lost & Found Sound, and Fugitive Waves). "The Kitchen Sisters have done some of best radio stories ever broadcast" —Ira Glass. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced in by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) in collaboration with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell and mixed by Jim McKee. A proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.
HOSTED BY
The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Kitchen Sisters Present have?
The Kitchen Sisters Present currently has 297 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Kitchen Sisters Present about?
The Kitchen Sisters Present… Stories from the b-side of history. Lost recordings, hidden worlds, people possessed by a sound, a vision, a mission. Deeply layered stories, lush with interviews, field recordings and music. From powerhouse NPR producers The Kitchen Sisters (The Keepers, Hidden...
How often does The Kitchen Sisters Present release new episodes?
The Kitchen Sisters Present publishes regularly with 297 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Kitchen Sisters Present?
You can listen to The Kitchen Sisters Present on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Kitchen Sisters Present?
The Kitchen Sisters Present is created and hosted by The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia.
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