Under the Radar with Callie Crossley

Under the Radar with Callie Crossley is a GBH production that goes looking for stories away from the main news. Its recent episodes keep coming back to Boston: Brandeis University, the Handel and Haydn Society, the Boston Wine School, a fictionalized Harvard. The opening promo pitches the program as a place for discovery and for voices a listener has not heard before. The guest list backs that up. Civic stories and cultural ones sit side by side, and the show makes no fuss about switching between them. One episode recalls how Celtics player Reggie Lewis collapsed during a 1993 off-season practice at Brandeis. It then turns to the ‘Every Minute Counts’ Act, which pushes for defibrillators near playing fields and a quick way to identify who can help. A guest in that conversation mentions being CPR certified and always wanting to know where the nearest device is. The environmental episode is more pointed. In it, a guest argues that renewable energy is the only kind that cannot be blockaded, and the episode also covers a poll on solar support among Trump's backers. Culture gets equal room, much of it inside a segment named for a Creole word meaning something extra. That segment is home to Bookmarked, the show's book club. For J.R. Thornton's Lucien, a dark academic thriller about a scholarship student and his wealthy Harvard roommate, Crossley promises listeners she will keep some of the mystery and starts with the characters, not the plot. She admits the Cambridge and Boston setting is part of what drew her in. The same segment brought together composer B.E. Boykin, organizer Robin Baker and high school senior Daniel Valtz to preview the I Dream a World Youth Choral Showcase. At the showcase, three youth choirs perform work drawn from Langston Hughes and Phillis Wheatley and give the world premiere of Boykin's Freedom Hymn. Boykin talks about honoring the moments when Wheatley seems to speak straight from the page. Then the mood lightens. Amy Traverso of Yankee Magazine and Jonathan Alsop of the Boston Wine School, both welcomed back as returning guests, predict a spring of lavender and taro in place of matcha. Encore episodes bring earlier conversations back. An Easter replay looks at Black Catholic communities in Boston and beyond, Black parishes founded during the Jim Crow era, and the push to canonize a member of the Saintly Six. Crossley keeps this mix together by introducing her guests' backgrounds herself, greeting them by first name, and then letting them talk. A good first listen is the choir episode, where a preview of a local concert also works as a short lesson on the first published African American poet.