Tag: storytelling

#06: The Wonder Years

The Wonder Years married the bewilderment of a child with the nostalgia of an adult; and for a generation, the TV show created by Carol Black and Neal Marlens is a time machine back to the sixties, youth and innocence. In today’s episode, we return to “The Wonder Years” with Carol Black and writer Titi Nguyen to reflect on childhood with the help of Kevin Arnold.

From the theme song to the super-eight home movies in the opening credits, The Wonder Years, is steeped in nostalgia. Through a wistful narrator, it takes the audience back inside the mind and heart of a pre-adolescent boy as he tries to make sense of how the sixties impact his family. We all live at the intersection of our personal lives and the historical events around us. We grow up focused on the personal until one day we realize how history shapes us. For Titi Nguyen, her birthplace, Vietnam, loomed in the background of her childhood, but since her parents never spoke of the place or the war they’d fled, Titi turned to the TV, specifically The Wonder Years, to make sense of her story.

#5.5: Extended Stay — The Bike Incident

For this Extended Stay*, “The Bike Incident,” we continue the discussion of law and memory from episode #05 — “Court of Memory” — with another story of eyewitness misidentification that steered Caroline Sarnoff’s criminal justice career toward reforming the system.

If law enforcement asked you to answer a few questions, you may not welcome the invitation with glee, but Caroline Sarnoff, as an aspiring criminologist in her first year of college, did. She thought she’d hit the lottery when campus police wanted to question her about a bike stolen in her dorm, but her initial excitement quickly vanished when they accused her of stealing the bike. In “The Bike Incident,” Caroline finds herself on the wrong end of what she would eventually study: a coercive plea bargain, a false confession, and an eyewitness misidentification. What started as an opportunity to observe law enforcement at work escalates in a way that she could never have anticipated. Now, Caroline Sarnoff works as the Assistant Director of Data Outreach for Measures for Justice, which allows the justice system to see what needs reform through aggregated data. “If you can see what the problem is,” Caroline says, “then you can change it.”

*An “Extended Stay” is Memory Motel’s version of bonus material, a chance to linger, to hear one more story, to stay with an idea, theme, memory or thought before traveling on to the next episode.

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#05: Court of Memory

Photos of Nathan by Veronica Dominach | dominachphotography.com. Above: Nathan Brown with attorneys from the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck (left) and Vanessa Potkin (right). Below: Nathan Brown is welcomed by his daughter, Celine Brown, and his grandson, Kenard Jr.

In our daily lives, we often accept that our memories are poor, and eventually move on if our memories don’t exactly match up with another person’s. We often agree to disagree, but that’s not an option in court. And yet memory is as fragile and poor there as it is when we’re struggling to remember where we did have that second date. In “Court of Memory,” our host speaks with Nathan Brown, an exoneree, Karen Newirth, a Senior Staff Attorney from the Innocence Project, and Julia Shaw, author of The Memory Illusion, as he explores the high stakes of remembering in the criminal justice system.

dt.common.streams.StreamServerNathan Brown was exonerated on June 25th, 2014 after serving nearly 17 years for an attempted rape that he did not commit. Brown was 23 years old when he was convicted, and was eventually exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence. His conviction depended upon an eyewitness identification known as a “show-up,” where the suspect is presented to the victim shortly after the crime and, in Nathan’s case, at the scene of the crime. As the Innocence Project reports, “in eyewitness identifications, witness memory is impacted by a variety of factors that occur from the time of the crime onwards, and their memories can be easily contaminated. Scientific studies (particularly in the last three decades) have affirmed that eyewitness identification is often inaccurate and that it can be made more accurate by implementing specific identification reforms that prevent memory contamination.”

Karen Newirth is the senior staff attorney in the Innocence Project’s strategic litigation unit, where she focuses on the Innocence Project’s law reform efforts around eyewitness identification. As she points out in the episode, a witness’s memory can easily be contaminated by certain procedures, and by neglecting memory science, the courts risk convicting innocent people and retraumatizing victims who face with the consequences of their memory contamination: “When I think about the role of the memory expert in an eyewitness case what I think their greatest utility is Is giving the jury a framework for understanding that the testimony they’ve heard from the eyewitness is a story that the witness has put together based in part on his or her memory but also based on all of this other stuff that has come in in a neutral way, or maybe in a malicious way, or maybe in somebody’s attempt to help the witness, but that has come in from all all these different sources and have created this mosaic that the jury needs to sort out and weigh and maybe put to the side if they conclude that there’s just not enough reason to believe that the witness could actually have seen or remembered all of the things that she or he claims to.”

8c2aeb5aff931a840eb575e45af47aafDr. Julia Shaw’s study “Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime,” reveals our susceptibility to adopt false memories when led to recount a story that didn’t occur, even when the story is a crime we committed. The Innocence Project reports that “more than 1 out of 4 people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement.” Dr. Shaw’s study shows us how one might admit to a crime they didn’t commit, how easily fact and fiction can become blurred in our remembering.

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#04: Letters to the Dead

Photo by Andi Gohr from splitbrain.org

In the United States, the obituary article is reserved for the famous, to remember their greatest achievements and notable struggles. And if you’re not famous, the price of a public death notice ranges from $200 to $13,000.

In Iceland, everyone gets an obituary, from the plumber to the president, free of charge with a maximum of 3,0000 characters. In “Letters to the Dead” we examine the art of obituary writing and what’s created for the living by remembering the dead.

When we choose who to remember with our obituaries, what cultural landscape do we create? For the answer, we speak with a filmmaker who documented the New York Times Obituary Desk, Icelanders who religiously read the obituaries, and a renegade obituarist who finds the extraordinary in the ordinary. Featuring: Vanessa Gould, Director of Obit; Nanna Arnadottir, columnist for Reykjavik Grapevine; Karl Blöndal, Vice Editor of Morgunblaðið; Kay Powell, retired obit writer and editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and more.

Part 1: After the subject of one of her documentaries dies, director Vanessa Gould searches for a way to memorialize him.

Part 2: In Iceland, the local paper, Morgunblaðið, receives and publishes lengthy obituaries from citizens, and when remembrances of the dead started to overcrowd news of the living, they had to change the rules. Karl Blöndal, Vice Editor at Morgunblaðið, and anthropologists, David Koester and Arnar Arnason, tell the story of this shift.


Part 3: In response to the criticism of obituaries lacking diversity, Kay Powell, a retired obituary writer and editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, found the extraordinary in the ordinary when spotlighted the diversity of her city.

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#02: Everything In Its Right Place

With the help of memories, whether joyful or heartbreaking, an ordinary object can become a time machine. Since objects hold our memories how do we decide what to throw out and what to keep? “Everything In Its Right Place,” examines the power of mementos.

We start our inquiry with Marie Kondo, the professional organizer and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy. Her KonMari method of de-cluttering is a global sensation, but what if an object does not spark joy but we cannot bear to throw it away?

Part 1: The Museum of Broken Relationships invites people to anonymously donate love momentos, helping participants to both let go of and memorialize a significant relationship. “What we are commemorating are these memorable moments when you are able to say there is before and after,” says Olinka Vistika, the co-founder of the museum. “Things were never the same after that moment, and these are moments that mark us profoundly.”

Part 2: “The Significant Object Project” attempts to see if ordinary objects can become valuable mementos when paired with an imagined memory.

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Part 3: As humans, we’re in the business of making meaning. We want to make sense of our lives, and that’s why memories and objects are perfect bedfellows. They bond together and give us a vivid reality to play back, or a seductive fiction we want to believe. How do we tell the difference between reality and fiction when our future is on the line?

Image credits: Banner photo by Amanda Vandenberg; Photo on right by Samantha Martin; Artwork by Ruxandradraws.

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#01: Eyes of Another

Autobiographical memories are the stories we tell ourselves, but they’re also a window into other people’s experiences. They’re one of the best ways we have to connect to one another, which is why they’re critical to the bonding process within relationships, families and communities. But what if one person desperately wants to forget, and the other person desperately wants to remember? That’s Rachel Stephenson’s story.

For children, the sharing of memories, good or bad, is critical for their development. Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, psychologists at Emory University’s Family Narratives Lab, created a “Do you know test,” for children, which asked questions from “Do you know where your grandparents grew up?” to “Do you know an illness or something terrible that happened in your family?” The researchers came to an overwhelming conclusion: The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.

Rachel Stephenson lost her mother three days after her fifth birthday. She’d been told her mother was sick, but years later she discovered the truth. Rachel’s story tracks the search for details of that fateful night her mother died and how her unexpected discovery ultimately brings her closer to her father.

Photos courtesy of Rachel Stephenson.