The Fishko Files and the Art of the Radio Essay

Blog posts are, in many ways, a bunch of essays of varying length that are collected, chronologized, and streamlined on this platform called "da blog." In the analog world, essays usually appear in newspapers, magazines, books, or other various tactile media, usually with a similar logic applied to their aggregation.

So where does that leave the radio essay?

For decades the radio essay was ephemeral, existing only for as long as it was broadcast across the airwaves and into the minds of its listeners. Then it vanished into the ether of time. Alistair Cooke, both before and after he hosted Masterpiece Theater on PBS, produced radio essays for the BBC called Letter from America. He broadcast thousands and thousands of them, from 1946 to 2004 (!), commenting on everything from the re-election of Harry Truman to the Second Iraq War. Most of those radio essays no longer exist but more than a thousand have been rescued and now, thanks to the Internet, are easily accessible.

The radio essay is now more lively and powerful than ever!

Which brings me to The Fishko Files, a wonderful oddity in the world of present day New York City radio. Broadcast on WNYC every Friday morning, and freely available online, they are short essays by culture critic Sarah Fishko. She covers the whole swath of culture in NYC and elsewhere, both past and present -- art, architecture, music, movies, TV, even unknown or recently discovered recordings. She "writes" about Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Woody Guthrie, Scott Joplin, Andy Warhol, the architecture of the Old Penn Station, movies about the Holocaust, the new Whitney Museum, film composers, and many, many more. It's an audio feast of culture, a compendium of cultural essays from the cultural capital of the world.

Sarah Fishko has been producing these essays for WNYC for more than 20 years and you can listen to them all now -- whenever, wherever, however you want.

The radio essay is homeless no longer.