Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael O'anger. This week, we are so

excited to be launching season two of the Divided Dial, our award-winning series reported and

hosted by Katie Thornton. Season one, as you may remember, was all about the right-word shift

of the AM and FM talk radio spectrum.

This season, Katie dives headfirst into the lesser-known world of short waves.

I'll let Katie take it from here.

Zith trans-oceanics.

This is such a cool radio with a little...

Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Goren.

These were, like, beautiful radio to...

I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together.

Not any old radio, not AM or FM.

Nothing you can pick up in your car.

But shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM, with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances.

David's been listening to Shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.

And I turned it on, and it's like the radio like leapt out of my hand with the North American

service of Radio Moscow.

Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.

In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan and the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

Today, he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a

sweaty Thursday afternoon last July, we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave

dial today.

...