KUOW Presents

In New York, this school year was the first year neighborhood schools were required to accept students with special needs into regular classrooms. They've made the transition with the aid of high-tech gadgets. You can hear that story online.

Michelle Buetow says we could learn something from New York's experiment. She's co-president of Seattle's Special Education PTSA. She says although Seattle is a high-tech city, its approach to special education is decidedly low-tech. She says “it’s borderline criminal that a city built on high-tech resources has chosen not to fund these kinds of gadgets for students with special needs.” But school districts strapped for cash have struggled to find money for these kinds of technologies.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, June 5:

There's a new Superman movie coming out this month. Why does the story of the man of steel continue to resonate with people? Perhaps he represents a myth we like to tell ourselves: that given absolute power, we would choose to use it for good.

That's right, keep telling yourself that.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, June 4:

Slavery. When we hear that word, we often think of it as something in the distant past. But an underground network of human cargo thrives right under our noses.

Today, we hear the first in a special series on human trafficking. We'll start small, as police bust up a prostitution ring in a small Boston town. It's a story that could have happened anywhere. Here in Seattle, police busted a similar ring two years ago.

Boston investigative reporter Phillip Martin wanted to go deeper than the breaking stories of busts and find out what's beneath the surface. As he began unraveling the story, it took him all over the globe. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll follow him from Boston to Thailand to China and back, and over that period we'll discover that these stories of prostitution rings are part of a much larger story. It's a story that links two different kinds of men: the western man who believes Asian women are more willing to please, and the kidnapper who transports young girls across Southeast Asian borders.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, June 3:

Strange fruit has black seeds. Papaya pearls dropping tropics in our mouths.

from "Traveling Seeds"

Contemplating the generative power of papaya seeds led writer Jourdan Keith to write a parable about the African diaspora. Her story-poem "Traveling Seeds" is a hybrid of African folktales, Native American legend, Japanese poetic forms and also pays homage to the Harlem Renaissance.

Based in Seattle, Jourdan Keith is a poet, storyteller and environmental activist. She served as the Seattle Public Library's first Naturalist-in-Residence and is a Seattle Poet Populist Emerita.

Her essay, "Human Estuaries," which is based on her 2011 TEDxRainier talk, appeared in YES! Magazine.

She is the founder and director of Urban Wilderness Project, "providing storytelling, environmental education and wilderness service learning programs rooted in social change."

She was recorded in the KUOW Studios May 10, 2013.

The 1920s and 1930s are sometimes called "the age of the dirigible." Dirigibles were giant, steerable blimps and zeppelins, and they used to be a popular way to transport crowds of people from place to place. But then there was the fiery Hindenburg disaster. And during wars airplanes could easily shoot them down. After that airships were pretty much reduced to flying above football games and other kinds of surveillance.

A Persistent Problem Overcome

Dirigibles never regained popularity because of a basic problem: they could only dock at special places where they could be tied down. Otherwise, they'd spring up into the air the moment you off loaded the cargo.

Now engineers have overcome that problem by simply compressing the helium upon landing. It's such a simple fix that its inventors are kicking themselves for not having thought of it sooner, and because dirigibles can lift extremely heavy loads much more efficiently than airplanes, the new airship's inventors believe we could see a new age of dirigibles.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, May 30:

Margaret grew up in the arctic regions of Northern Canada. Her childhood was happy. She played with caribou hide balls and snacked on dried beluga whale skin. Her family slept together in a one room tent, surrounded by icebergs and kept warm with polar bear fur blankets. 

At night, her sister would read her stories in a foreign tongue. The sister had picked up English in a Christian boarding school. Margaret wanted to learn to speak this way, too. So she signed up for school. Unfortunately, she didn't realize she was agreeing to be torn from her family and her culture and to spend her days doing unending chores at an isolated boarding school.

She had to let her parents know. But how? Listen to find out.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, May 29:

The Smithsonian Institution held a contest recently to see who could create the best portrait. The competition drew lots of engaging photos and paintings. But contest winner Bo Gehring took a completely different approach. A video camera pans slowly over his subject, almost like an MRI machine, with the lens only inches above her body. It begins with her feet and ends with her face. The portrait's soundtrack is a piece of music chosen by the subject.

Above you can see Gehring's winning entry, a portrait of Jessica Wickham. Her chosen music was Arvo Pärt's “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.”

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, May 28:

North Korea announced it would take China's advice and enter talks with the United States. But that doesn't seem likely because the United States says no talks can happen until North Korea takes steps to denuclearize. But North Korea insists on holding on to its nuclear weapons.

One group in Seoul, South Korea, isn't waiting around for the diplomats to work things out. This group's members hope to build bridges with the North now. They want ordinary people on either side of the border to meet up. Their aim: to break down stereotypes and build relationships between North and South Koreans from the grassroots up.

Full list of stories from KUOW Presents, May 23: