a selection of hosted, produced, sound-designed work

The Intercept

〰 Killed In The Darkness

Antoine and Tammy Bufford’s son, Cortez Bufford, was shot and killed by a St. Louis police officer in 2019. Nearly two years later, the city is still investigating Cortez’s case. No charges have been filed. And the Bufford family is still looking for answers. The police kill more people per capita in St. Louis than in any other American city. Seventy-two percent of these people are Black, like Cortez.

The Chicago-based Invisible Institute recently partnered with The Intercept to examine the circumstances of Cortez’s death. Their resulting investigation, reported by Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow, sheds new light in the search for truth about this police killing.

〰 The Border Patrol’s Abdication in the Sonoran Desert

Customs and Border Protection is dropping asylum-seekers in remote border towns with few resources to receive them.

〰 Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State

Organizer Mariame Kaba talks about her new book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us.”

〰 The Life and Death of an Anti-Fascist

Sean Kealiher was a defining presence on Portland’s protest scene. Why was his murder never solved?

〰 The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

A U.S.-backed militia that kills children may be America’s exit strategy from its longest war reported by journalist Andrew Quilty.

〰 "Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations"

The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux has been speaking directly to detainees inside of an ICE facility in Etowah County, Alabama. ICE maintains that it is following appropriate CDC protocols. But as Ryan recently reported in his story “'Burials Are Cheaper Than Deportations': Virus Unleashes Terror in a Troubled Ice Detention Center,” detainees in this facility, overwhelmed by their own precarious conditions in the face of the coronavirus threat, were forced to radically take matters into their own hands to ensure their own safety.

〰 Nakhane Discusses Decolonization in South Africa and Their Latest Album “You Will Not Die”

Like the United States, South Africa is a country whose history is inextricably built on state violence and the systematic oppression of people of color. Both countries are scattered with statues and place names that function as monuments to white supremacy. But both countries are also home to movements aimed at tearing down these monuments of oppression—from New Orleans, to Cape Town—to decolonize land and to reclaim their own history.

For Nakhane, a South African artist who resides in London, this decolonization came from within as they struggled with christianity and how they says it repressed their identity, and their sexuality. Nakhane’s record, “You Will Not Die,” was released in the U.S. earlier this year, and it tells the story of grappling with religion, growing up Queer in post-apartheid South Africa, and dismantling the history of colonization.

〰 Senior Archivist Jeff Place Talks About Pete Seeger’s Legacy

In the purest sense, Pete Seeger was an educator. He connected generations of audiences through his music — music of the U.S. south, of working people, radicals, indigenous peoples, of oppressed communities of the world — music that would have never reached a mass audience in this country had Pete Seeger never picked up a banjo. These songs often carried messages of peace and equality, but were deeply historical, some dating back over a hundred years and having survived through oral tradition alone. But Pete Seeger paid a price for his beliefs. During the McCarthy era, he was called before the House un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to partake in what he considered a “kangaroo court.” He was subsequently charged with contempt of Congress and ostracized from the mainstream of U.S. public life for nearly a decade.

To celebrate Pete Seeger’s legacy, The Smithsonian Folkways Collection recently released a career-spanning anthology of Seeger’s music. One of the producers of this collection is Jeff Place, a curator and senior archivist at The Smithsonian who has been cataloging Pete Seeger’s work for over 30 years.

〰 Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition,” an Audio Journey Mapping the Covert CIA Program

It’s clear that U.S. forever-wars have relied on constructing regimes of secrecy in order to circumvent democratic processes — to “operate on the dark side,” as Dick Cheney once infamously said. In these hidden spaces, anything is possible: the Geneva Convention is rendered meaningless, and a vast network of systematic kidnappings and brutal torture can blossom in remote corners of the globe.

“Spaces of Disappearance” is a comprehensive visual history of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. The spatial layouts of CIA black sites, interrogation rooms, and prison cells are rendered in architectural diagrams, recreated from the account of prisoners held in those sites. Alongside other visual elements — satellite images of the black sites in Romania and Afghanistan, snippets of the insidiously bureaucratic memos justifying torture, and photographs of the actual prisoners of this program — the book places the reader in these once unknowable spaces, to make an incomplete history seem slightly less incomplete.