7.30.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated July twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the article I

(00:23):
began last time, entitled Where ice Cream Is King by
Brian Kavin babaut Reischand, who's made a vocation out of
recording YouTube's marketing videos for Gangapour's tempo shops, says the
city has more than two hundred of them, double what
it had three years ago, servicing clients from as far

(00:44):
away as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Shah meanwhile estimates that
Gangapour has turned out four hundred thousand to five hundred
thousand ice cream tempos in the past ten years, of
which he has made about eighty having opened his own
fabrication shop four years ago to capitalize on the boom
when he's not bending into summer. If there's a ceiling

(01:06):
on the sub continent's appetite for ice cream, Ashish Suwalka
doesn't see it. Another Gangapur native from a farming family,
he now lives in Ua Dapur, a city of about
half a million in southern Rajasthan. At twenty four, he
owns three ice cream tempos and employs a small crew
to staff them. The population is growing, Zuwalka says, and

(01:30):
everyone wants dessert. Next the last swordsmiths of Japan. There
were once thousands of artisans crafting traditional katana blades. Today
only a small number remain. By Ellen Himmelfarbe, in a
converted barn on a residential lane on Japan's Tango Peninsula,
some seventy five miles north of Kyoto, three men are

(01:53):
playing with fire while robust flames lick the edges of
a twenty three hundred degree furnace. Kosuke Yamazoe uses a
fifteen pound hammer on a mass of white hot steel,
flattening it beat by beat in a hypnotic rhythm. Behind
the shower of embers raining down on the earthen floor.

(02:13):
Tomoyuki Miyagi grips the steel with a pair of iron
tongs and bangs a smaller mallet in a melodic counterpoint. Nearby,
a small stove next to a soot covered wall. Tomoki
Kloramoto is making tea. This is the headquarters of Nippan
gan Shosa, one of the few remaining katana foundries in

(02:35):
the world. For hundreds of years, experts swordsmith's forge blades
for Japan's warriors, including the famed Samurai. Early records show
craftsmen's names in the thousands, but a decline of the
art began in eighteen seventy six with the outlaw of
open kiri. After World War II, the occupying forces in
Japan then banned the production of katanas, resulting in additional

(03:00):
lost works and livelihoods. Today, it is believed there may
be some two hundred licensed makers left, not all active. Yamazoi,
Miyagji and Kuumoto are the only katana artisans in a
region that's home to one of the oldest blacksmithing workshops
in all Japan. There is a sadness that it's dying

(03:21):
out as a craft, Kurumoto tells me through an interpreter.
But together they are honoring and elevating the vanishing art.
The men, now in their thirties, met during a hard
sought ten year apprenticeship in Tokyo with Yoshi Kazu Yoshi
Hara and his father, Yoshindo Yoshihara, two of Japan's most

(03:42):
illustrious sortsmiths. The elder Yoshihara's work is in the New
York Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection. He himself was the
grandson of a celebrity sortsmith of the Showa period. In
the early nineteen hundreds. After a brief stint working on
their own, Kamazoi, Miyagi and Kromoto joined forces in twenty

(04:03):
nineteen and launched Nipon Gangshosha from an abandoned barn owned
by Kamzoi's grandparents. Sword making has long been an art
form in Japan, and experts can date a blade much
as a porcelain appraiser can date a oz or an
arborist a tree. Nipon Ganshosha's swords are entirely hand built,

(04:25):
average around fifteen thousand dollars and are sought after by collectors.
As with most katanyas, they they are made from tamahangane,
a type of steel that comes from iron sand mined
in the Shamane Prefecture north of Hiroshima. The five figure
price tag is a result of the laborious fabrication process,

(04:48):
which can take a year or more. It begins with
three days of round the clock smelting in the clay furnace.
The technique of heating and methodical hammering helps draw out
the slag, the waste product that results from smelting, and
purify the steel, which is fused and folded into hundreds
of fine layers. The hard steel is then worked into

(05:10):
shape and the razor edge of the blade is refined
much of a swords. A lure lies in the way
the surface of the blade catches and throws the light.
Instead of reflecting a clear beam of light, one solid beam,
it will be speckled or broken up, says Koromoto, twisting
a newly buffed blade in the sunlight as it pours
through a window. But while they work to keep an

(05:32):
h old art form alive, the partners are fighting in
uphill battle. Demand for high dollar a katanas is waning,
and the success of Nippon Genshosha depends on finding and
developing a new generation of collectors, not just appealing to
existing ones. To that end, the men have begun taking
liberties with the hamon the pattern etched along the blade

(05:55):
edge Traditionally, a smith designs a unique hman, often featuring
landscape patterns tied to the area where the sword is manufactured.
But says Kumoto, if someone from the United States once
a scene from their front window, they can send a
panoramic photo and we can reproduce it. They've also pioneered

(06:16):
a method of encasing blades in a sealed, transparent resin
block rather than a traditional wooden sheath. The idea, says Kumoto,
was that this would allow people to appreciate Japanese swords
safely and thus focus more on their beauty. What is
the point of art if you can't see it in
a country reverential of long held traditions, The swordsmiths are

(06:38):
striking a delicate balance. It seems that ordinary people have
fewer opportunities to come into contact with Japanese art, says Kuamoto,
But today, as an art piece, swords have a place
in modern culture. Next finding Tranquility in Transylvania in a
corner of rural Romania a Byukalagwey of life is safeguardar

(07:00):
by a community preserving its ancient ways and offering a
template for a richer way of Living by Brett Martin.
On a chilly twilight evening, three men sit around a
wood table in the parsonage of a thirteenth century church
in Transylvania. Outside our ducks be hives, and a shaggy
white dog that we can hear barking at something in

(07:21):
the growing dark. Warmed by a wood burning stove, the
men sip tea and nibbles savory pretzel shaped cookies and
talk about their home, Karashkobalva, Transylvania. Is there a better
known place name and lesser known place, perhaps Timbuctoo. Even
when all of Europe was wilder, Transylvania stood for its

(07:43):
wildest edge. This is why Bramstokers ofw fit to use
it as a setting for Dracula, despite never setting foot there.
It's a place where Saxons, huns, Turks, Tartars, and a
dozen less famous tribes are still talked about as if
they may have passed through just last week. A place
where the forests are still filled with bears. Now that Europe,

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for all its charms, can sometimes seem like a continent
of mobile phone executives, it feels even more thrilling and
unlikely to find oneself in a pocket as remote and
in many ways untouched as this village in the valley
of the Hamarod River, like about eighty five percent of
the people who live in this region of rural central Romania.

(08:25):
The men in the parsonage table speak in Hungarian. They
are Zichhilles, ethnic Hungarians who have lived here for at
least a thousand years. At the head of the table,
with a short gray beard and bright, mischievous eyes, is
a seventy year old Orbon Saba, the man whose vision
is helping preserve this distant place even as the modern

(08:47):
world presses at its borders. Orban and Hungarian family names
come before given names, does so as the leader of
the Kurbitusac, the village's governing body. It's the centuries old
form of communal landownership and management that has helped make
this place so singular. The Kuzbir tokos shagh It helps

(09:11):
if you take a running start, manages the water, woods
and pastures, splitting their use, resources and income among three
hundred forty seven shareholders. Though time warn the system of
governance is remarkably sturdy, Orbon points out, and capable of
meeting the needs of the people here. When winter comes,
he says, everybody has enough wood that it exists at

(09:34):
all is a testament to Orban's vision. For the decades
that Romania was under communist rule, the Kosburiserhagh was lost. Indeed,
the infamous dictator Nikolai Chochescu aimed to wipe out places
like Kokashafalva and their way of life. He failed. Communism fell,

(09:55):
and the village regained communal control of some twenty seven
hundred acres of land in two thousand. Key to the
Korbusu Trazog restoration were written records of the intricate system
through which land rights had been passed down for generations.
Orban opens a leather valise and carefully lifts out a
thick folder of papers. Each page contains two columns of

(10:18):
neatly written names with numbers next to them. A nineteen
thirty six record of the shareholders of Karatschefalvas Horzobas Salkog.
It was pages like these, hidden away in houses and
buried in archives that aided the long legal fight of
Orbon and other Kubritish Sokog leaders to reclaim their villages

(10:39):
after Churchescu's overthrow in nineteen eighty nine. Orbon remembers sifting
through a mountain of documents in a government office and
coming upon the list. It was like thunder, he says,
Not even in our deepest dreams have could we have
hoped to restore what we had. Joining Orban at the
table is Ampali Geza seventy five. He is a lay

(11:03):
leader of the Unitarian Church. The younger man sitting next
to him, Benedict Mihali, is its minister. Or Bond finds
a page from a second list of names, this one
from nineteen forty six, and points to line one hundred
sixty five inscribed there is the name of Zempali's grandfather.
When I look around the table, all three men are

(11:24):
blinking back tears. Karsavalva Kushino in Romanian is tucked within
rolling Tuscany like hills and swaths of deep forests, part
of a string of villages, each marked by the needle
like spire of a Unitarian church. His houses are topped
with roofs of rust colored tile. Many feature so called

(11:47):
Sekelli gates, elaborately carved wooden entrances that depicts Zekelli iconography
and ruins, and are capped with structures reminiscent of a
Japanese pagoda. From the courtyards within you can hear bleats
of sheep and squawking of chickens. Most families do at
least some subsistence farming. Electrical poles are topped by the

(12:08):
doughnut shaped hats of storknests. One afternoon, I step aside
as a raucous herd of cows is paraded down the
middle of the street, spurred on by young men with
sticks and shouts. It should also be noted that the
village has faster internet and generally better roads than I
do at home in New Orleans. Orban Saba commands obvious

(12:31):
respect throughout the village, but is also considered something of
an eccentric. The heads of other corbetous Saugjas can often
be identified by their expensive cars and big shot attitudes,
orbon drives, a beat up hatchback and dreams up projects.
There is the traditional open air bath that he renovated
in twenty nineteen as a gathering place, complete with a

(12:54):
medicinal herb garden and fire pit for making tea. Across
the village, in the shadow of the forest is the
sweet chestnut orchard, where he organizes an angul annual chestnut festival.
And there's the Corbetushar Community Center, where on a Saturday afternoon,
while I am there, the village gathers in traditional dress

(13:15):
to enact a children's wedding in which a local girl
and boy play bride and groom before a great feast.
Orbon's car is in a constant state of reminding him
to buckle his seat belt as he careenes down dirt
roads from one place to the next. All of the projects,
he says, are attempts to maintain the traditions of this

(13:35):
place while also cautiously opening it to the possibilities of
eco tourism. Orban often explains this careful balancing act through
an emblem depicting the Zachelli sun and moon standing independent
within the European Union's Circle of Stars. Above all, the
Kurtzbetursag acts as a steward of the village's most important resource,

(13:59):
the forest, which is both a source of crucial fuel
as a few nervous nights feeding a guest house woodstove
drives home, and fragile biodiversity. On a rainy day, I
am taken into the woods by a hunter and ingenious
tinker named Oksi Machas. He's invited me to tag along
on his daily visit to check the three motion activated

(14:21):
cameras he uses to monitor wildlife. We bounce up a
down deeply rutted trails in an all terrain vehicle he
has fashioned from an old land rover, and then hike
in silence, trailed by a stout fox that Okshee has
grown to know and has named Vuki. Aside from songbirds,
Vuki is the only living thing we encounter. But back

(14:44):
at Okshee's home, while my boots dry over the woodstove,
we review the photos he has retrieved. They show deer,
wild boars, all manner of small mammals, and many many bears.
A shiver thinking of them all having been hidden around
us as we moved through their woodland home. What especial
here is that the community owns the land, says Za

(15:05):
Kelly kinga RecA, a Unitarian minister several villages away. Nobody
can get too wealthy that they make other people suffer.
The irony, of course, is that such principles resemble nothing
so much as those of communism. With a small sea
we hate that word, but it's true. Ze Kelly admits,
we already had that system for a thousand years. We

(15:26):
didn't need them to come tell us. I met sze
Kelly's home for the annual ritual of slaughtering a pig
to be eaten over the course of the rest of
the year. By the time I arrived, the animal's still
steaming body has been splayed across a table outside. A
round faced butcher deftly works at disassembling it. Prime cuts

(15:46):
go into the brine, later to be smoked, while organs
another oval head to a temporary sausage factory set up
in the dining room. Excess sausages will be distributed among neighbors,
who in turn will share their own surplus when the
time comes. Skelly's husband, Zoltsava, a computer coder, distributes mourning

(16:08):
shots of Pelinka, a homemade brandy they've prepared from plums.
My generation is the last one that understands the meaning
of butchering. The pegy laments, what is the meaning? I
ask that you eat what you grow. He says that
you know where it comes from, that you are connected
on this Kelly's walls in many homes in the region

(16:29):
hangs a map showing Transylvania as part of the Greater
Austria Hungarian Empire. It's a good reminder that, as this
place knows all too well, there is no hiding from
the tides of history. Winters are getting warmer. The past
two summers have been brought drought. A new Romanian nationalism
is on the rise, potentially threatening the country's ethnic minorities.

(16:52):
In the villages of the Homarud Valley you see children
and older people, but few in between. Many adults have
left in search of jobs, or pH ds, or just
an easier life than farming. Zickell's Zoltz Kazaba has been
forced to bring in Napoleese workers to help staff one

(17:13):
of the small groceries he owns. In the face of
all that, what Orbon Ksaba and the Corbitzer Cossac do
is a model of tending one's own garden, an attempt
to protect and sustain family, community and the gifts of
this small corner of the planet that they know better
than anybody else. At the parsonage table, Orbon packs up

(17:35):
his stack of documents and places them carefully back in
their valise. He pats it lovingly and puts it under
his arm. It would be nice to know who is
going to hold this next, he says. Next, how a
super tiny crustacean makes life work in the Southern Ocean.
Marine ecologist Kim Bernard is charting the huge impact of

(17:56):
an Antarctic krill by Tristram Corton one night last December,
National Geographic explorer Kim Bernard was stirring her earl gray
tea in the galley of a research ship off the
coast of Antarctica, preparing for a long night of observing
a remotely operated vehicle as it surveyed the sea floor.

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When the Marina cologist looked up to a monitor showing
a live video feed sent by the ro V from
a depth of more than three thousand feet in the
Southern Ocean's murky waters, something caught her attention. I see
this tiny little thing come in on the right hand
side of the screen and dart out, she said to
the other scientists abroad. Probably aboard it probably looked like

(18:41):
organic debris lofting down. But Bernard, forty six, has been
studying krill for fifteen years and knows how the shrimp
like crustaceans twirl in the water column and bolt backward.
When startled. That familiar movement sent her running down two
flights of stairs to the ship's control room. When she arrived,
she saw the action on the sea floor being broadcast

(19:03):
on a large bank of monitors, and she spouted a
handful of individual krills spread out on a hydro thermal vent,
a fissure in the ocean crust where hot magma and
sea water meat and create a mineral rich environment that
attracts a host of organisms. For Bernard, a professor of
biological oceanography at Oregon State University, finding krill here represented

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a momentous discovery. I kind of lost my mind, she recalled.
It was the first time the animal had been observed
on a vent Antarctic Krill are a keystone species that
allows everything else in the Southern Ocean to flourish. If
Bernard could learn more about their habitat on the sea floor,
her research could inform our understanding of virtually every predator

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on this hard to reach continent, from emperor penguins to
blue whales. Any new behavior from such a foundational animal
has the potential to effect the entire food above it.
That night, in the control room aboard the research vessel
from Schmidt Ocean Institute. Bernard soon realized all the krill
were females carrying eggs. The species usually release eggs higher

(20:12):
in the water column. What makes it worth the risk
to travel so far at this stage in reproduction? Were
they feeding on the bacteria covering the vent? She asked
the operator to use the rob's special suction arm and
gather a few of the crustaceans. This was also a first.
Bernard isn't aware of any researchers who have collected specimens

(20:33):
at that depth. She has since sent stomach and tissue
samples out for analysis. Bernard's work on the expedition, which
was supported by the National Geographic Society and Role's Perpetual
Planet Expeditions, is part of an ambitious project that sending
nearly two dozen scientists to all five oceans. Their efforts

(20:54):
will be the subject of a series of stories in
National Geographic as they searched for new insights, like say,
the presence of krill in under explored places in Antarctica.
The species is more than just a vital part of
the food chain. Krill are also a carbon sink, eating
phytoplankton that have absorbed CO two and then excreting pellets

(21:17):
to the seafloor, where it can take thousands of years
for the absorbed carbon to resurface. However, there are new
pressures on the species from both humans and climate change.
Krill are increasingly harvested as aquaculture feed, and the animal's
oil is highly sought after as a dietary supplement. Meanwhile,

(21:38):
as sea ice continues to melt, larval krill are losing
an important habitat where they can hide from predators, find food,
and develop into adults. Bernard hopes her ongoing research and
future insights from this discovery will protect this tiny animal
that so much life relies on. There's a thriving mass
of life down there, she said, and all up it

(22:01):
depends on krill. Next, seeing a glacier through a prehistoric lens,
a photographer uses Arctic ice and a unique technique to
offer a fresh perspective on a world transformed by climate change.
Glacial ice is formed from snow accumulating and compacting over millennia.

(22:21):
As the pressure increases, crystalline layers are smoothed into one
of the clearest substances found in nature. That alchemy and
the knowledge that climate change is causing glaciers to rapidly
disappear inspired forty four year old artist Tristan Duke to
create a photo lens out of glacial ice. I just
felt this real sense of urgency, Duke says he wanted

(22:43):
to capture a glacier through its own eyes. He puts
it like a self portrait. In the spring of twenty
twenty two, Duke called dozens of pounds of gear to Spalbarred, Norway,
including a giant tent camera that he designed himself, and
molds for shaping the ice into lenses. The tent functioned
like a camera of skura. Duke would place a palm

(23:06):
sized piece of ice in a hole in the canvas,
projecting an image of the landscape inside the tent that
would then be captured on a forty two by one
hundred inch negative. Some of the photographs were clearer than
he expected, but as the lenses melted, the accumulation of
water produced its own effect. People have told me that
it looks like the world blurred through tears, he says.

(23:29):
To contain contact, to contrast this arctic sublime against a
world on fire, he traveled through the American West to
document wildfires and energy infrastructure with lenses created from locally
sourced ice. He wants to invert the romantic gaze. We
see a sort of fragile nature bearing witness to the
unbridled and cataclysmic power of the human world. This article

(23:54):
by Megan Brown next The City of seven hundred Languages.
It's been four hundred years since New York City was
founded as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. Back then,
some thirty European and native languages were spoken there. To day,
that number surpasses seven hundred. That's more than ten percent

(24:14):
of the world's nearly seven thousand languages, making New York
the most linguistically diverse city to ever exist. Can it
stay that way? A four hundred years of immigration loaded
New York with languages before Europeans arrived, and estimated fifteen
thousand Lennapis speakers may have lived in Lenapehuking, a region

(24:37):
that includes present day New York City. In sixteen twenty four,
the Dutch West India Company founded the city of New
Amsterdam on the site. By the mid sixteen seventies, it
was under British control and would be until the American Revolution.
Built on waves of immigration, it is now home to
the largest foreign born population of any major metropolitan in

(25:00):
the world. Those eras of immigration are envisioned here as
the rings of a growing tree. Each dot represents one
hundred immigrants each ring a decade. The result is a
snapshot of New York City's diverse ethnic populations over time,
from just a few hundred European settlers to three point
two million immigrants today, most from Latin America and Asia.

(25:24):
What New York City loses when languages vanish? By Ross Perlin.
Seca is an endangered language originally spoken in five villages
of northern Nepal, but its future may depend on a
handful of vertical villages apartment buildings in the middle of Brooklyn,
New York. How did a little documented, oral only language

(25:45):
used by no more than seven hundred people in the
High Himalaya come to the concrete jungle? Rasmena Gourung in
her twenties, one of Seka's youngest speakers, learned the language
from her grandmother in the village, but soon to the
country's capital, Katmandu, and eventually New York, where she estimates
at least a quarter of her pupil have ended up here.

(26:08):
They joined speakers of dozens of other endangered languages from
across the Himalaya, all forming new communities while getting by
in an ever evolving mix of Nepali, Tibetan, English, and
their own embattled mother tongues. But New York City, the
most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,
may be hitting peak diversity. Its seven hundred plus languages

(26:31):
represent over ten percent of the global total. Though largely indivisible,
invisible and inaudible to outsiders, the city's languages are from
all over. Many immigrants have arrived in just the past
few decades from linguistic hotspots such as the Himalaya, West Africa,
insular Southeast Asia, and heavily indigenous zones of Latin America. Today, however,

(26:56):
many of the forces that brought people together are beginning
to pull them upon art Given accelerating language laws even
in the language's home lands, threats to immigration, and the
rising costs of city life, time may be running out.
The remarkable linguistic convergence in New York and similar cities
could vanish fast before there has even been time to

(27:18):
document or support it. This urgency is what drives the
work of the Endangered Language Alliance, the organization i Codirect,
which has started to map this landscape. At stake is
an unprecedented set of cultural, scientific, educational, and even economic possibilities.
Never before have linguists and speakers been so well positioned

(27:40):
to document languages from which few, if any, records exists,
while also pushing for their maintenance and revitalization. This concludes
readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader
has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening
and have a great day.