My Iron Lung (Revisited)

In the 1990s, Arch Coal began mountaintop removal mining in a corner of West Virginia called Pigeonroost Hollow. There used to be dozens of houses in the area, but within a few years there was just one. It belonged to Jimmy Weekley.This story originally aired on NPR in 2011. Lear ...  Show more

This week we're sharing a story from the audio magazine Signal Hill.The story, "What's Inside the Moon," is about the poet Kenneth Koch and a group of elementary school students he taught to write poetry in the 1960s. Half a century later, producer Jess Shane tracked down the stu ...  Show more

On this episode of Our American Stories, Daryn Glassbrook of the Mobile Medical Museum tells the story of the iron lung, a device used to keep people with advanced polio alive in the first half of the 20th century. Indian American hotelier H.P. Rama the story of the ethical dilem ...  Show more

In the 1950s, polio spread throughout the United States. Heartbreakingly, it affected mainly children. Thousands died. Thousands more were paralyzed. Many ended up surviving only in iron lungs, a machine that breathed for polio victims, sometimes for years. Scientists raced to fi ...  Show more

On this episode of Our American Stories, Daryn Glassbrook of the Mobile Medical Museum tells the story of the iron lung, a device used to keep people with advanced polio alive in the first half of the 20th century. New York Times bestselling author, Harlow Giles Unger, of twenty- ...  Show more

Prodigy made up half of the hugely influential hip-hop duo Mobb Deep, but spent his life in excruciating pain due to a debilitating disease called sickle cell anemia. On this episode, the hosts of WNYC's The Realness podcast chronicle Prodigy's struggle with the disease, share th ...  Show more