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Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.

Professional opera singers often have to sing in languages with which they’re completely unfamiliar. And yet they’re expected to pronounce all the words correctly. How do they do it?

This week Bobbi Conner talks with Dr. Nichole Tanner about lung cancer screening as a tool to help with earlier diagnosis and treatment of this disease. Dr. Tanner is a Professor in the College of Medicine and she is the Co-Director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program at Hollings Cancer Center at MUSC.

This week Bobbi Conner talks with Dr. Eva Serber about the benefits of exercise to improve mood and help reduce feelings of depression. Dr. Serber is a Health Psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, in the Division of Division of Bio-behavioral Medicine at MUSC.

January 8, 2022 — The anniversary of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol; a preview of the upcoming South Carolina legislative session; the latest on the current flu season from SCDHEC; and more.

James Lundy's book, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina: 1920 to 2021, is a chronicle of the first 100 years of the oldest state poetry society in America, the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Founded in Charleston in 1920 by DuBose Heyward, John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, and Laura Bragg, the Society's first 101 seasons run from the Jazz Age to the COVID era, where everyone from Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Sherwood Anderson, Jericho Brown, Thornton Wilder, Robert Pinsky, and hundreds of others appeared before the membership.Talking with Walter Edgar, Lundy, also currently the Society's president, gives us an insider's view, with insights into the inner workings and disfunctions of the organization and its slow progress from a Whites-only organization of the segregated South founded in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, through the Roaring Twenties, into the darkness of the Great Depression, World War II, a resurgence during the Atomic Age, the turbulent Sixties, the decline of Charleston, its rebound into a tourist mecca, and into the present day.

A listener finds a brown water snake sunning... in December!

I attended an outdoor lecture at the Congaree National Park last month, an appropriate site as Dave Stahle, Professor of Geography at the University of Arkansas, and the world’s authority on bald cypress gave the talk, and the Park is home to the state-record holding cypress tree. Stahle takes very small and minimally damaging core samples from trees and studies them to age trees and document climate change -- he has sampled trees that are two thousand years old. The science of dendrochronology is studying information derived from tree ring growth. These ring samples allow to date exactly what years had normal, above normal, or subnormal rainfall as the rings are larger or very small depending on how much the tree grew. In our part of the country, bald cypress are the oldest trees and provide the most information.

When Hurricane Hugo came through South Carolina, Sumter County was really hit hard. The magnificent Swan Lake Gardens lost several hundred pine trees exposing camellias and azaleas to unwelcome sunlight. But only a few bald cypresses were lost. If you come across a young bald cypress, shake it and you’ll find that is flexible, even adult trees are not brittle like pines. The ones in water with their interlacing knees have a giant support system in play protecting them against strong winds, even hurricanes. In ice storms, they again have an advantage over pines as they are deciduous and have no needles for the ice to accumulate on and cause the trunks to break. You can grow bald cypress in a regular landscape – they don’t make knees in ordinary soils – just buy a bale of long-leaf pinestraw for mulch.

Celebrities from Bill Murray to Blake Lively are fans of our next guest’s feather fashion accessory business. And now, so is Garden and Gun magazine as the company was the recent winner in the Style category of the magazine’s annual Made in the South awards program. Mike Switzer interviews Ben Ross, co-founder of Brackish in Charleston, SC.