[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hello. Lulu. This is Radiolab, and I'm whispering because I have a secret for you, which is that if you are listening to this on the day we released it, April 2, 2024, then you may not realize it, but you are currently standing in the middle of a secret holiday! 4-2-24. 4-2-24. It is the first palindrome date of the calendar year! Yeah! [laughs] And apparently, this month we've got a bunch of them. 4-20-24 is also a palindrome. 4-21-24, 4-22-24—actually all the 20s.

LULU: So anyway, first of all, I just wanted to let you know that we are walking into a month with a bunch of palindrome dates in case you want to celebrate and throw a palindrome party, which would—I don't know. What do you—like, you serve some upside-down pineapple cake with a layer of right-side-up pineapple cake, so it's a palindrome cake. Or you go for a ride in a kayak or in a race car. I don't know. Anyway, so that? Cool! Palindromes.

LULU: But second, to honor this secret little holiday hiding in the calendar squares, I wanted to play a tiny morsel of audio for you. Going back to the original spirit of Radiolab, which was, you know, Jad just spinning audio documentaries, strange little pieces from all over the world, I wanted to bring you one that I recently heard that is itself an audio palindrome. It is the same if you play it forwards or backwards. It involved a crazy amount of production, there's a lot of voices, some eerie sound design. I really don't even understand how they did it.

LULU: But for me, when I listen to it, this sort of odd thing happened, which is that over these layers of confusion and beauty, a sort of meaning or feeling rose almost like a steam about how moving forward always involves some degree of moving backwards. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy. If you don't, if it's a little too aht-y for you, you know, arty like my people in the homeland of Boston say, then, you know, that's okay. It's six minutes of your life. We will be back with more narrative Radiolab very shortly. But yeah, I just thought I'd toss this out into the week, a little morsel of sonic candy as I palindrome parade by you. It comes from the show, the wonderful BBC show Short Cuts. If you don't know them, every week they are putting out experimental and adventurous audio, and this comes from their episode "Meeting Myself Coming Back." Here's their host, Josie Long.

JOSIE LONG: Hannah, Anna, Eve. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. I love it when it feels almost as if they're saying something deeply profound and important, the very rules of their existence, meaning that you have to repeat and reorder the same sounds again and again.

JOSIE LONG: What I didn't fully appreciate is that palindromes extend to sequences of symbols and sequences of music. You're currently listening to JS Bach's Crab Canon, an arrangement of two musical lines, the second line actually being the first in reverse. And when they're played together, they form something conceptually similar to a palindrome. And I love what this kind of thing does to my brain.

JOSIE LONG: But what about audio documentaries? In our next piece, Sarita and Alan explore a common theme among those who immigrate to new places: the yearning to return to the lands and the people left behind, to go back to where one begins. In doing so, they set up to experiment with a novel production technique, creating the first ever completely symmetrical audio documentary, a sonic journey that ends where it begins. When the tape is played in reverse, every word, note and noise sounds exactly the same, down to the millisecond. A true sonic palindrome titled "Drawn Onward."

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I grew up in Bombay, in India.

MAN: My family and I came here from Coapa, Cholula, Puebla, Mexico.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Very close to Thailand. It's where the sun rises first.

MAN: I was born and raised in western Germany.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I came here from Mexico.

MAN: I could see the whole Queen's Necklace, the Arabian Sea.

MAN: Each immigration community carries their own histories, experiences and narratives.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: The quail. You know, the bird? Early in the morning, the bird would ...

WOMAN: Millions of birds.

MAN: You could hear all the noises from outside. The sunsets were gorgeous as always. The city lights come on.

MAN: Smells of summer, warm summer.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: The flow of life. Even though it's crazy, it's poetic.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: In the monsoons, you would hear the wind ...

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: ... whistle through the cracks.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Like a big deal for us.

WOMAN: All 34 cousins would come to grandmother's place.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: In Hindi, it's very poetic.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: My dad used to sing, "Life is fleeting."

WOMAN: One song, which I loved as a kid, and I sing to my son. [singing]

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It's like this transborder spirit.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: That now haunts the community on both sides.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Here I am 22 years later.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: The same time I left my home.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I left India in 2008.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: In the 1990s, my brother and I were smuggled into New York City. I grew up in Indiana. Most of the diaspora is now there.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: Which I love, but it's also odd.

WOMAN: I don't have anything that I brought from Mexico. No, nothing.

WOMAN: I did have this little picture of Bala, of baby Krishna.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: The gray bag which is totally worn out.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It has all my old photographs in it.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Wherever I traveled, that journal is always with me.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I've always had a little diary and a pen.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: My clothes, my shoes, and that's it.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I didn't know the language, know people.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I was so afraid.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It's just like a lot of migration stories.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Initially, I used to get very homesick.

WOMAN: At the beginning ...

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: ... I was crying every single day. [laughs]

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It was really difficult. It was harsh.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It took time.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: At the same time ...

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: ... I have learned the language, which makes me feel so at home.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: The moment I became fluent ...

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: ... I was not an outsider anymore.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I'm not Indian enough to be in India anymore.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: And I'm not American enough to be American.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: It was all really very different.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: We are here for the moment, but we don't know when we're gonna go back.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I'm never quite natural here.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Culturally, I'm still Mexicana.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: I'm just stepping out and I'll be back.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Even if it's gonna be for 17 years.

MAN: You're coming back, you're finding your roots, but it's at a higher level now.

MAN: What is home now?

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: What does home mean for the new generations?

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: When I truly say "home ..."

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: ... it means where I can see the Arabian Sea out of my window.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: ... means "let's go home."

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Come back home. Your country is calling you home.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It's more than home.

[speaking in reverse]

MAN: It describes your roots.

[speaking in reverse]

WOMAN: Dead or alive, I'll be back.

LULU: That was "Drawn Onward," an audio palindrome by musician and producer Alan Goffinsky and producer Sarita Bhatt. If you want to hear the rest of that episode again, search for "BBC Short Cuts." The episode is called "Meeting Myself Coming Back." The other stories in it, by the way, are really great. There's a really funny one about a woman who makes a newspaper all about the mundanity of her life, and then a really dark one about a dad who kind of regrets becoming a dad and is very honest about it. Anyway, it's great.

LULU: Special thanks to Falling Tree Productions and Eleanor McDowall. And that's it. Enjoy your Palindrome Day. I will say all this really has me thinking, why isn't the word for palindrome a palindrome? Dictionary makers, linguists, get on that. Can you get on that, please? I humbly submit that the word "palindrome" should be extended to be "palindromordnilap." Palindromordnilap, so itself is a palindrome. Anyway, thanks for listening. Have a good one. Bye.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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