Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
155 episodes listed below
History, power, and memory under close examination.
Scene on Radio treats history as an active argument, not a settled backdrop. Its episodes connect archival memory, conversation, and present-day politics to ask how systems train people to see the world.
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Scene on Radio is built around the idea that public life is shaped by stories people inherit, repeat, and sometimes refuse to examine. It is not a headlines-first show, even when it responds to the moment. Its recent episodes use history, reportage, essays, and selected partner work to trace how power survives through memory, institutions, and habit. One episode returns to Hiroshima by moving beyond the mushroom cloud image toward survivor testimony, Korean residents in Japan, wartime responsibility, and the city that continued after 1945. Another follows Mankato, Minnesota, from local silence around 1862 to public remembrance led by Dakota communities. The show is at its strongest when it slows down a national myth and asks who benefited from the simpler version. It also turns toward the present with urgency. Keeping Score essays consider Trump's attacks on historical knowledge, Columbus commemoration, white backlash, DEI, and the political value of making ignorance feel righteous. These pieces are openly argued, but they are grounded in chronology and civic context rather than spectacle. Partner episodes broaden the frame. A shared Revisionist History episode examines an Alabama murder case, death row, religious control, and the machinery of punishment. A Lever Time episode looks at legal intimidation, CBS, Donald Trump, and the pressure powerful figures can place on journalism. The show also makes room for emotional and bodily questions. A Proxy episode follows an organizer wrestling with anger, grief, ACT UP culture, and the fear that sadness might become disabling. A bonus conversation with Michael Klean considers social choreography, personhood, and what political life might learn from wordless collective movement. Across these subjects, Scene on Radio keeps asking how private feeling and public systems shape each other. It is serious without becoming sterile. It trusts listeners to sit with contradiction. Its recurring promise is context: the kind that makes a familiar story harder to dismiss and harder to repeat unchanged.
Made for: For listeners drawn to documentary history, civic analysis, and reported essays that connect current politics to older structures. It especially suits people who prefer careful context over fast punditry.
What sets it apart: Scene on Radio combines narrated documentary, essay, archival memory, and selected partner episodes with a consistent concern for systems and moral history. Its strength is the patient move from a single case or memory to the larger civic pattern around it.
Scene on Radio is a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast that dares to ask big, hard questions about who we are—really—and how we got this way. Our latest is Season 7, Scene on Radio: Capitalism. Previous series include Seeing White (Season 2), looking at the roots and meaning of white supremacy; MEN (Season 3), on patriarchy and its history; The Land That Never Has Been Yet (Season 4), exploring democracy in the U.S. and why we don’t have more of it; The Repair (Season 5), on the cultural roots of the climate crisis; and Season 6, Echoes of a Coup, the story of the only su...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Scene on Radio turns history, policy, and lived testimony into clear accounts of how power survives through institutions.
Scene on Radio builds season-length arguments from narrated history, interviews, and roundtable conversation, joining structural questions to the lives shaped by them.
Big systems go on trial; your jury notes include coups, subsidies, and ecological limits.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A murder case expands into a study of death row, church discipline, and the failures surrounding a botched execution.
The Alabama Murders begins with an affair inside a strict Church of Christ world, then widens into something colder and more troubling. Charles Sennett's 1988 arrangement to have his wife killed becomes less a closed true-crime case than a way into legal, moral, and…
A survivor-led Hiroshima documentary that holds memory and responsibility in the same uneasy frame.
Voices of Hiroshima moves the city out from under the mushroom cloud and into postwar life: office buildings, markets, a pro baseball team, and a million residents carrying history in ordinary streets.
A focused look at how lawsuits, settlements, and fear can shape the stories the public may never get to see.
Power rarely looks like a blunt order to stop talking. In this Lever Time episode, it shows up as pressure around CBS, Paramount, ABC News, and lawsuits tied to Donald Trump.
A studio's silence opens into a grounded case for bodies, shared movement, and unlikely beginnings.
Seen on Radio's conversation with Michael starts from a small but telling tension: the recording studio gives the voice a clean, intimate sound while removing echo, room, and some of the body's role in thought.
A live Durham conversation that treats economics as a question of freedom, ownership, and security.
This Durham episode starts with Gabriela Glick asking people at a farmer's market how they would describe the current economic system and what they would change.
A sharp post-election conversation about media habits, moral licensing, and why popular policies still get trapped by messaging.
Seen on Radio uses the 2024 election to pull together misinformation, horse-race journalism, and the way Democrats have handled the idea of progressivism.
A thoughtful case for an economy that shares risk as well as reward.
Scene on Radio follows John Fullerton from Wall Street into a harder, more interesting question: what should an economy actually protect? The move from his coastal Connecticut home to Mondragon gives the episode a clear shape, and the best stretches are the ones that slow down…
A careful case for why capitalism's rules are more flexible than they look.
The episode starts with George, a Durham listener who calls this not the best version of capitalism, and uses that plainspoken complaint to open up a wider argument.
Political power, tested under scrutiny.
One question, one expert, explained at 101 level.
Patient interviews for the deeply curious.
Evidence for the next newsroom.
News judgment, pressure-tested.
This trailer introduces a podcast season exploring the 1898 Wilmington coup, the only successful coup in U.S.
Host John Bewin announces that Scene on Radio has moved from the Center for Documentary Studies to the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University after being eliminated, with plans for a new mini-series this fall.
This trailer for Season 7 explores capitalism's impact on society, questioning its morality through global survey data and discussions on wealth inequality and values.
Scene on Radio Season 7 Episode 6 traces how the United States moved from Gilded Age inequality through the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and a post-WWII period of shared prosperity that economic historian Brad DeLong calls the '30 Glorious Years.' Hosts John Bewin and Ellen McGirt interview historian Eric Rauchway of UC Davis, who explains how William Jennings Bryan's 1896 Cross of Gold speech and Theodore Roosevelt's progressivism laid the groundwork for FDR's New Deal.
John Bewin reads his newsletter essay reflecting on how his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota, has evolved from willfully forgetting the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and the mass execution of 38 Dakota Sioux to embracing reconciliation efforts like monuments and educational programs.
A murder case turns into a look at the systems around it.
Eighty years later, Hiroshima is more than the cloud.
Why did CBS cancel Stephen Colbert?
John B.
John Bewin reads from his newsletter 'Keeping Score,' analyzing the resurgence of racism under Trump's second presidency, including explicit acts like Elon Musk's Nazi salute, anti-DEI policies, military purges, and the use of racism as a tool for power.
A recording studio changes the conversation right away.
Hey, hey Durham.
A post-election panel starts with blame, then stays there long enough to get uncomfortable.
"Walk down to the dock." From John Fullerton's eastern Connecticut home, the story returns to a former JPMorgan Chase banker thinking about death, sea level rise, and the shaky world that made him successful.
George is not alone.
Chocolate starts with a simple question.
John Fullerton comes back into view.
Financial security comes first.
Compared to what, exactly?
Start with 1776.
How did capitalism start?
This episode explores the origins of capitalism, focusing on the transition from feudalism in Europe and the role of colonialism and slavery.
This episode explores life before capitalism, focusing on medieval feudalism in Europe.
This episode introduces Season 7 on capitalism, featuring John Fullerton's journey from J.P.
Long Shadow podcast explores how guns divided America over 50 years, using Columbine as the watershed moment that transformed gun violence from an abstract statistic into a suburban fear.
This episode explores the legacy of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and Coup, featuring interviews with community leaders, scholars, and descendants who discuss the ongoing impacts of white supremacy, efforts at acknowledgment and reparations, and the resilience of black communities in seeking healing and justice.
This episode investigates the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup, where white supremacists overthrew the local government, killed black residents, and erased the event from history.
This episode investigates the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and coup, where white supremacists overthrew the local government and killed dozens of black residents.
This episode explores the 1898 Wilmington Massacre and coup, detailing the white supremacist campaign that targeted black political and economic success in North Carolina.
This episode explores the 1898 Wilmington coup, the only successful coup in U.S.
This episode explores the U.S.
This episode explores the concept of 'white affirmative action' through historical examples of government benefits exclusively for white people, from 1618 land grants to the GI Bill.
This investigative documentary follows Eddie and Dorothy Wise, black farmers in North Carolina, as they face systemic discrimination from the USDA, leading to the loss of their farm through foreclosure and eviction.
This bonus episode features a Hot Take conversation with writer David Wallace-Wells, exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced climate change discourse, media coverage, and societal responses.
Seen on Radio returns for a summer rebroadcast and links two 2022 stories: Dobbs v.
This episode features Alex Bobich's audio documentary about their friend Layla Noor, exploring themes of war trauma, LGBTQ+ identity, and music as healing.
This rebroadcast features Stacia Brown's audio essay reflecting on the 2016 deaths of Philando Castile and Prince, exploring themes of racial injustice, motherhood, and grief.
This final episode of Scene on Radio's season on climate and culture explores how societies must undergo profound cultural and economic transformations to address the climate emergency.
This episode explores the urgency of climate action, debunking doomerism and hopium while examining policy solutions like carbon capture, fossil fuel subsidies, and the Green New Deal.
This episode explores the legal concept of 'rights of nature,' examining how countries like Ecuador and New Zealand are integrating indigenous perspectives into Western legal systems to protect ecosystems.
This episode examines Scotland's transition from oil dependency to renewable energy, focusing on the town of Nigg.
This episode of Scene on Radio's "The Repair" series travels to Bangladesh to examine the country's garment industry, which accounts for 84% of its exports and employs 4 million people, mostly women.