'Producer Picks' Week: Tommy Pico, NYC's Ghosts, 'WNYC At Curfew,' '76 Days,' Cory Doctorow, Space Exploration

All this week, we present "Producer Picks." Each day, a member of team All Of It curates their favorite recent conversations and tells some behind-the-scenes stories. Today's picks come from our Producer Zach Gottehrer-Cohen.

[REBROADCAST FROM April 30, 2021] Tommy Pico, a queer poet and Kumeyaay Indian joins to discuss Feed, his 2019 book-length poem, about what it means to hunger and to be nourished spiritually as a colonized person in America. Feed is the fourth and final book in his "Teebs Cycle," which uses scenes from the poet's life in New York City as gateways into deeper explorations of authenticity, heritage, love and striving. 

[REBROADCAST FROM October 30, 2020]  From the construction workers who died gruesome deaths building the Brooklyn Bridge, to the peg-legged specter of Peter Stuyvesant ambling along St. Marks, to believe in ghosts is to believe our history lives among us. Andrea Janes, founder of the ghost-tour company, Boroughs of the Dead, and author of a book of the same name, joins us to talk about the lingering spirits of New York City's history and where you might meet them.

[REBROADCAST FROM June 5, 2020] Last summer, amid historic racial justice protests and the first citywide curfew since World War II, Alison hosted an evening special as part of our "WNYC At Curfew" coverage. John Schaefer joined to discuss protest music and how it has been used in social movements across our history, and even brought a list of his favorite tracks to play.

[REBROADCAST FROM January 26, 2021] When Wuhan, the city in China where COVID-19 was first documented, went on lockdown, two anonymous reporters recorded inside a Wuhan hospital. The resulting documentary, "76 Days," directed by filmmaker Hao Wu and produced by MTV Documentary Films, provides an intimate look inside a hospital as it faced PPE shortages and an onslaught of infected patients. Wu joins us to talk about making the film and his experience documenting the genesis of what would become a global pandemic.

[REBROADCAST FROM September 16, 2020] Big Tech is watching us, plugging our behaviors into hidden algorithms and then serving up a digital experience customized just for us. It's a little... creepy. But it's more than that, according to blogger, journalist, and science fiction author Cory Doctorow, who's latest book is, Attack Surface. He joins us for a deep dive into the many problems of Big Tech, and how to fix them.  

[REBROADCAST FROM May 12, 2021] In February, NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars. We look at the line between exploration and colonization. Joining us are Dr. Alice Gorman, an archaeologist and who looks at spacecraft and off-earth landing sites, and Chris Schaberg, an English professor at Loyola University New Orleans specializing in the environmental humanities.