To The Best of our Knowledge is finished

The longtime Wisconsin Public Radio show To The Best of Our Knowledge airs its last episode this weekend. You can listen to the stream at that link or you can listen to it over the airwaves tomorrow with an FM receiver, the way God intended. Either way, there’s more than 1000 archived episodes for you to enjoy at your leisure.

I don’t know the story of why this show was cancelled, whether it had particular enemies, or whether it was the victim of budget cuts driven by hostility to public radio more generally. I’ve been on this show several times. Anne Strainchamps is one of the best interviewers I’ve ever heard. She listens, she goes wherever the thing wants to go (even when I the interviewee have no idea where it’s going to go), she’s funny in a way that works with, not in competition with, the person she’s talking to. Radio sounds old-fashioned, but it still has an sneaky, immense reach. Every time I did this show, people came up to me afterwards, people who would probably never pick up one of my books, to say, Hey, I heard you. The radio is there for everyone, everywhere, to find. It is public.

Public In the same way a public park in a small town is public, or the public schools I went to and my parents and kids went to are public, or a public highway is public. It’s not there to sell something, or to make you feel mad or angry or worried on the way to selling you something. It’s just a group of people doing some work to put something good out there for people to use. So little of our world is like this now. We should appreciate the parts that are, and mourn a little whenever one more public thing gets scraped away.