Steven Thrasher

Brian Lehrer on the air

After publishing our piece yesterday "5 Reasons Why Touré Is Wrong On Blacks, Gay Marriage and Obama," we had the chance to talk about the president's new support for marriage equality with WNYC's Brian Lehrer.

We took calls from black listeners and talked to Lehrer about the many reasons why we believe black angst over gay rights is overplayed and how we strongly believe there will be no major fall out for Obama with black voters. Take a listen.

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Last night, the Voice was invited to appear on Yetta Kurland Live on WWRL to talk about this week's cover story, "The Nonprofit 1 Percent," as well as to discuss the rally for Trayvon Martin, which we'd just covered prior to arriving at the studio.

Kurland spoke with us about the Jewish Guild for Blind and the income disparity between some of its lowest paid employees (who were laid off) and its CEO, Dr. Alan Morse, who was paid $1.5 million in 2009, receiving an 82% raise the year after the financial crash. Guild music therapist Debbie Moran, laid off despite only earning $5,000 a year, called in to the show to talk about her choir members, whom she'd worked with for 20 years prior to receiving a pink slip.

Kurland also discussed the overlap between Occupy Wall Street and how the income disparities the movement has pointed out in the finance sector also seem to happen within the nonprofit world.

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Steven Thrasher

Yetta Kurland and Cathy-Merino Thomas

With advances in same-sex marriage equality on the march in the states of Washington, Maryland and New Jersey, this week could possibly shape up to be as historically gay as last week was for the institution of marriage.

To discuss what all of this state-by-state activity meant for same-sex couples wishing to wed, as well as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that California's Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, the Voice went on WWRL's Yetta Kurland Live last week to talk about it. We were joined in the studio by Cathy Merino-Thomas of Marriage Equality New York and on the phone from Washington, D.C. by our friend and legal skype scholar Chris Geidner.

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The Voice was invited to join WWRL's Mark Riley on the BBC's Up All Night this past weekend, to chat with host Dotun Adebayo from across the pond. Every Saturday night, BBC 5 broadcasts live overnight, while checking in with correspondents from around the globe and spending an hour with two New Yorkers in their mid-town studio. It was an honor to represent for our hometown.

Our conversation spanned all manner of things in the Big Apple and near Big Ben: weed arrests, big and small; Occupy Wall Street; British football (which we innocently knew little about); American football and the Superbowl (which we shamefully knew even less about); Philip Glass's 75th birthday; and what it's like to be a powerless New Yorker.

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Former Voice columnist and CUNY Journalist-in-Residence Tom Robbins was on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning on WNYC, talking about the fallout from the NYPD showing an anti-Muslim training video to 1,500 personnel.

It was great to hear Robbins credited for breaking this story (a full year before Michael Powell's follow up in the Times) in a January, 2011 Voice column titled "NYPD Cops' Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick."

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WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show did a segment on "The 100 Most Powerless New Yorkers" on its Martin Luther King, Jr. day show this morning. Audio of the segment is embedded below.

Our segment looked at the silly side of "power lists," and at the serious side of some of those we included on our powerless list. Brian was specifically interested in asking us why we included Public Advocate Bill de Blasio as #8 on our list (right between "Carriage Horses" and "The Person Holding the Sign at the End of the Trader Joe's Line") and why the list wasn't in any particular order.

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Last night, Yetta Kurland Live devoted the entire show to discussing the Voice's "100 Most Powerless New Yorkers."

Yetta did a pre-recorded segment with us about the Voice's selections for the city's most powerless at the top of the hour. That was followed by a live discussion with Dodge Landesman of Community Board 6 and with photojournalist Michael Premo, who shot pictures for the Voice's coverage of Mary Lee Ward (#14 on the list) and the Black Hebrew Israelites (#96).

Here's the full audio. Take a listen.

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Two Truths and a Lie is a live storytelling event in Brooklyn, which mixes real life tales with bald faced lies and challenges the audience to decipher which is which. The latest edition is happening tonight at Fada Bistro in Williamsburg. We chatted with the creators of the project, Mitra Bonshahi and Sylvie Lubow, to ask them about how it works, why they do it, and why the worst story (involving a facial yeast infection) was a truth, not a lie.

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Glass: "Ain't Too Proud to Craig!"

Earlier this week, the Voice reported about Julian Joslin's shocking discovery of a (public radio) celebrity sex tape between This American Life's Ira Glass and Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

After the jump, read Glass's response to the scandal, when our blog post continues.

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If you're as big a public radio nerd as we are, this may be the best laugh you'll have all week.

Updated: An interview with Julian Joslin, the producer and voice behind the Ira Glass Sex Tape.

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