You never saw this coming, right? A little hip hop for NPR listeners. Adam Cole, a Stanford student, raps it out with Jenna Sullivan.

During the 1930′s and 1940′s, Raymond Chandler gave life to the detective Philip Marlowe, perhaps the most memorable character of the hardboiled crime fiction tradition. Marlowe took center stage in Chandler’s influential novels, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

The Leonard Lopate Show hits the airwaves every weekday in New York City, typically presenting four interviews with cultural figures. If you tuned in this Monday, you found Leonard on vacation and actor Christopher Walken filling in. We know Walken can act.

The CBS Radio Workshop was an “experimental dramatic radio anthology series” that aired between 1956 and 1957. And it premiered with a two-part adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s now classic 1932 novel, Brave New World. Huxley himself introduced and narrated the program, and now this classic radio drama has resurfaced online.

Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles launched The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio program dedicated to bringing dramatic, theatrical productions to the American airwaves. The show had a fairly short run. It lasted from 1938 to 1941. But it made its mark.

Since 1995, Ira Glass has hosted and produced This American Life (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), the award-winning radio show that presents masterfully-crafted stories to almost 2 million listeners each week. What’s the secret sauce that goes into making a great story, particularly one primed for radio or TV? Glass spells it out in four parts.

Here’s a quick fyi for iPhone users: The Public Radio Tuner, a free app available on iTunes, gives you (free) access to hundreds of public radio streams from across the US. Released in late January, the Tuner brings together feeds from NPR, American Public Media, and PRI, among others.

This web page doesn’t look like much, but it houses a great deal. Put simply, the page plugs you into an archive of 135
vintage American radio shows, spanning from the 1930s to the 1950s. This was the height of America’s radio days.