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Wait, you're listening? Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. Hello. It's Lulu. This is Radiolab. And I'm whispering because I have a secret for you. Which is that if you are listening to this...
on the day we released it, April 2nd, 2024, then you may not realize it, but you are currently standing in the middle of a secret holiday. 4-2-2-4. 4-2-2-4. It is the first palindrome date of the calendar year.
Yeah! And apparently this month we've got a bunch of them. 420, 24 is also a palindrome. 421, 24, 422, 24, actually all the 20s. So anyway, first of all, I just wanted to let you know that we are walking into a month with a bunch of palindrome dates in case you want to celebrate and throw a palindrome party. And
Which would, I don't know, what do you, like, you serve some upside-down pineapple cake with a layer of right-side-up pineapple cake, so it's a palindrome cake. Or you go for a ride in a kayak or in a race car. I don't know. Anyway, so that, cool, palindromes. But second...
To honor this secret little holiday hiding in the calendar squares, I wanted to play a tiny morsel of audio for you. Going back to the original spirit of Radiolab, which was, you know, Jad just spinning audio documentaries, strange little pieces from all over the world, I wanted to bring you one that I recently heard that is itself an audio palindrome. It is the same...
If you play it forwards or backwards. It involved a crazy amount of production. There's a lot of voices, some eerie sound design. I really don't even understand how they did it.
But for me, when I listened to it, this sort of odd thing happened, which is that over these layers of confusion and beauty, a sort of meaning or feeling rose, almost like a steam, about how moving forward always involves some degree of
of moving backwards. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy. If you don't, if it's a little too addy for you, you know, addy like my people in the homeland of Boston say, then, you know, it's okay. It's six minutes of your life. We will be back with more narrative Radiolab very shortly. But yeah, I just thought I'd toss this out into the week, a little morsel of sonic candy as I palindrome parade by you. It comes from the show, the wonderful BBC show Shortcuts. It's a show that's
If you don't know them, every week they are putting out experimental and adventurous audio. And this comes from their episode, Meeting Myself, Coming Back. Here's their host, Josie Long. Hannah. Anna. Eve. A man. A plant. A canal. Panama.
I love it when it feels almost as if they're saying something deeply profound and important. The very rules of their existence meaning that you have to repeat and reorder the same sounds again and again. What I didn't fully appreciate is that palindromes extend to sequences of symbols and sequences of music. You're currently listening to J.S. Bach's Crab Canon, an arrangement of two musical lines.
the second line actually being the first in reverse. And when they're played together, they form something conceptually similar to a palindrome. And I love what this kind of thing does to my brain. But what about audio documentaries? In our next piece, Sarita and Alan explore a common theme among those who immigrate to new places, the yearning to return to the lands and the people left behind, to go back to where one begins.
In doing so, they set out to experiment with a novel production technique, creating the first ever completely symmetrical audio documentary, a sonic journey that ends where it begins. When the tape is played in reverse, every word, note and noise sounds exactly the same, down to the millisecond. A true sonic palindrome titled Drawn Onward.
I grew up in Bombay in India. My family and I came here from Coapa, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. Very close to Thailand. It's where the sun rises first. I was born and raised in Western Germany.
- I came here from Mexico. - I could see the whole Queens Necklace, the Arabian Sea. - Each immigration community carries their own histories, experiences and narratives. - Like my community. - The quail, you know the bird. Early in the morning the bird was saying. - Birds, birds, billions of birds. - You could hear all the noises from outside.
The sunsets were gorgeous, as always. The city lights come on. It smells of summer. Warm summer. The flow of life. Even though it's crazy, it's poetic. In the monsoons, you would hear the wind. It would whistle through the cracks. It would whistle through the cracks.
New Year's was like a big deal for us. On holidays, all the 34 cousins would come to grandmother's place. We would just sing and dance. In Hindi, it's very poetic. My dad used to sing, life is fleeting. One song which I loved as a kid and I sing to my son. I'm a little afraid hearing.
It's like this transporter spirit that now haunts the community on both sides. Here I am.
22 years later, I mean, I need fun. I have been here the same time I lived in Mexico. I left India in 2008. And I will make you that in a moment. In the 1990s, my brother and I were smuggled into New York City. Yeah, I grew up in
I did have this little picture of Lalan, of baby Krishna.
I've always had a little diary and a pen.
My clothes, my shoes. I didn't know the language, no people. I was so afraid. It's just like a lot of migration stories.
I'm a little bit of a noob.
Initially, I used to get very homesick. At the beginning, I was crying every single day. It was really difficult. It was harsh. It took time. At the same time, I have learned the language which makes me feel so
The moment I became fluent in English, I was not an outsider anymore. I'm not Indian enough to be in India anymore. I'm not American enough to be American. It was all really very different. The streets, food, the stores. We are here for the moment.
But we don't know when we're going to go back. I'm never quite natural here. I'm just stepping out and I'll be back. Even if it's going to be for 17 years.
You're coming back to finding your roots, but it's at a higher level now. What is home now? What does home mean for the new generations? When I truly say home, it means where I can see the Arabian Sea out of my window. It means where I can see the Arabian Sea out of my window.
Come back home. Your country is calling you home.
Dead or alive, I'll be back.
That was Drawn Onward, an audio palindrome by musician and producer Alan Gafinski and producer Sarita Bhatt. If you want to hear the rest of that episode, again, search for BBC Shortcuts. The episode is called Meeting Myself Coming Back.
The other stories in it, by the way, are really great. There's a really funny one about a woman who makes a newspaper all about the mundanity of her life. And then a really dark one about a dad who kind of regrets becoming a dad and is very honest about it. Anyway, it's great. Special thanks to Falling Tree Productions and Eleanor McDowell.
And that's it. Enjoy your palindrome day. I will say all this really has me thinking, why isn't the word for palindrome a palindrome? Dictionary makers, linguists, get on that. Can you get on that, please? I humbly submit that the word palindrome should be extended to be palindromordenalap. Palindromordenalap. So itself is a palindrome. Anyway, thanks for listening. Have a good one.
Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hi.
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