Connecticut conversations with wider consequences.
Where We Live treats Connecticut as a starting point, not a boundary. Its episodes move from hospice care and data centers to poetry, pollinator lawns, chef biography, and the hidden politics of smell.
PRESS PLAY
Where We Live is a Connecticut Public conversation show with a wide civic and cultural reach. Its center of gravity is local, but its curiosity keeps expanding. One episode can begin with end-of-life planning and hospice work, then turn that difficult subject into a practical conversation about care, agency, and memorialization. Another can ask whether data centers are coming to Connecticut and use that question to examine AI, energy, water, jobs, and town-level quality of life. The show is at its best when a concrete Connecticut concern opens into something larger. It likes experts, but it also likes texture. A perfume shop owner and a scholar of olfactory ethics can sit together in a conversation about smell, identity, power, and the senses people often overlook. Poets and educators appear not as decoration, but as people building community through language. Gardening episodes stay useful, with attention to plant sales, weeds, sustainable landscapes, and pollinator waystations. Food enters through biography and labor, as in the story of Eduardo “Lalo” Garcia, whose cooking is connected to memory, migration, harvesting, and his mother’s kitchen. The book episodes can be intimate and odd in a grounded way, following a typo like “clam down” into family history, retreat, and resilience. The tone is gentle, informed, and accessible. It rarely rushes. Listener calls and emails give the hour a communal shape. The show is not built around confrontation or hot takes. It is built around patient questions. That makes it useful for people who want Connecticut stories with cultural range, practical stakes, and enough time for guests to explain what they know.
Made for: For listeners who like public-radio interviews, local context, and careful conversations about culture, science, books, food, nature, and civic life. It especially suits people who want Connecticut stories that do more than summarize headlines.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its elastic local lens: data centers, death care, poetry, gardening, smell, and chef biography all become Connecticut conversations without staying small. It balances practical listener questions with reflective, expert-led discussion.
Produced by Connecticut Public, 'Where We Live' puts Connecticut in context. Host Catherine Shen brings us fascinating, informed, in-depth conversations and stories beyond news headlines. We start local, but we take time to explore domestic and international issues and consider how they impact us personally and here at home.
Beavers, poets, teachers, and gardeners share the table when your curiosity refuses a lane.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Connecticut beaver story about ecology, habitat mapping, and beaver-human conflicts.
Where We Live treats beavers as a serious ecological subject rather than a woodland novelty. Catherine Shin speaks with Lila Phillip, a Connecticut author and journalist, about Beaverland, How One Weird Rodent Made America, and with Akibia Hicks, a wildlife biologist with the…
A Connecticut poetry hour that makes community feel built, not simply invoked.
Where We Live treats National Poetry Month as a community conversation, bringing together a Connecticut Poet Laureate, Poetry Out Loud, and a student headed to Washington, D.C.
A grounded spring gardening hour connecting weeds, plant sales, native plants, and pollinator habitats.
Where We Live makes spring gardening feel practical and close at hand, shaping plant sales, fresh flowers, and weeds into a broader conversation about productive, sustainable, beautiful landscapes.
Apple details, software habits, and everyday technical friction.
Records worth hearing, reasons worth arguing over.
Celebrity, clothes and chaos, talked through at full speed.
This episode of 'Where We Live' explores poetry's role in fostering community during National Poetry Month.
Host Catherine Shen leads a spring gardening Q&A with horticulturists Charlie Nardozzi and Tom Christopher, plus Donna Merrill from Pollinator Pathway.
Where We Live examines how immigration enforcement is affecting Connecticut schools, with Julie Sugarman explaining that the former ICE sensitive-locations policy was rescinded while Fourth Amendment protections still apply to private school areas.
Celeste Ng explains to Katherine Shin and Simsbury High School senior Ben Cash why she changed Everything I Never Told You so readers immediately learn that Lydia is dead, creating dramatic irony around family secrecy.
Where We Live examines soccer's rise in the United States through historian Brian D.
Where We Live hosts Katherine Shin, Francesca Fontanez, and Frankie Graziano assemble a Connecticut summer bucket list spanning literary landmarks, libraries, amusement parks, food, sports, music, museums, and animal attractions.
This episode explores how planning for end of life can be empowering, featuring an interview with a hospice nurse and death educator about new approaches to death care and memorialization.
This episode explores the growing demand for data centers in Connecticut, covering their operations, impacts on local infrastructure and communities, and includes an interview with AI ethics expert Reid Blackman about changes in AI since ChatGPT's release.
This episode explores how smell shapes culture, identity, and human experience through interviews with a perfume shop owner and a researcher specializing in olfactory ethics.
This episode explores how poetry fosters community in Connecticut during National Poetry Month, featuring interviews with poets and educators, including the Manchester Poet Laureate, and highlights student participation in the Poetry Out Loud competition.
This episode features horticulturalists Charlie Nardozzi and Tom Christopher discussing spring gardening tips, sustainable landscapes, and creating pollinator-friendly gardens.
This episode explores the life of celebrated chef Eduardo 'Lalo' Garcia through an interview with author Laura Tillman, discussing his migrant background and culinary journey.
Leila Philip's "Beaverland" connects Connecticut's recovering beaver population to the fur trade, the phrase "water keepers," and the idea of a keystone species.
Author Anelise Chen discusses her book 'Clam Down, a Metamorphosis,' exploring how a typo led her to study clams and mollusks as metaphors for resilience and personal healing during difficult times.
This episode revisits conversations with Connecticut authors, starting with Wally Lamb discussing his novel 'The River is Waiting' about addiction, tragedy, and prison injustice.
This episode features a reverse interview where host Catherine Shen discusses music's role in personal memories and identity, inspired by Susan Rogers' book.
This episode celebrates Jane Austen's 250th birthday by discussing her life, novels, and enduring popularity with guests including a professor and a librarian.