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Record W4375835042 · doi:10.1353/ajh.2022.0048

Radioactive: The Father Coughlin Story by Andrew Lapin

2022· article· en· W4375835042 on OpenAlex
David E. Weinstein

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Jewish history · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicRadio, Podcasts, and Digital Media
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAntisemitismNarrativeStyle (visual arts)JudaismHistoryMedia studiesLiteratureSociologyArt historyArtArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reviewed by: Radioactive: The Father Coughlin Storyby Andrew Lapin David Weinstein (bio) Radioactive: The Father Coughlin StoryAndrew Lapin, host Eight episodes (10 12, 2021 to 11 23, 2021) Produced by Tablet Studios, with support from Maimonides Fund, in association with The WNET Group's reporting initiative Exploring Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and Extremismhttps://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/radioactive Radioactive, a terrific eight-part podcast series from Tablet, examines the life and legacy of Father Charles Coughlin. Tablet is well-established in Jewish news and culture circles for its daily Tabletonline magazine and weekly Unorthodoxpodcast. Radioactiverepresents a significant step forward for Tablet as a podcast producer. Unorthodoxfollows a standard format for culture podcasts: smart, charismatic hosts share their thoughts on the news and interview one or two guests, who usually have a book or other product to promote. Radioactivetakes elements of this format: An insightful host, Andrew Lapin, presents Coughlin's story assuming that the listener is well-educated and curious about history and culture, especially Jewish people and ideas. But Radioactivealso expands on the familiar podcast style by ambitiously incorporating elements that are more typical in historical documentary films. Radioactiveis driven by a rich narrative, meticulous research, surprising archival material, and apt clips of interviews with scholars who are experts in their respective fields. The series will engage historians and general listeners, including those who already know a little about Coughlin. Radioactiveis the first podcast series for the Detroit-based Lapin, an experienced print journalist, and occasional commentator on other radio shows and podcasts, who has published widely about film, popular culture, and American Jewish life. Lapin contextualizes Coughlin's biography within the histories of radio, American Catholicism, American Nazism, 1930s political movements, and political communication. The host peppers his fast-moving narrative history with surprising anecdotes about people who came into Coughlin's orbit, from Babe Ruth to J. Edgar Hoover. Lapin also interviews appropriate archivists and scholars who succinctly analyze Coughlin and his times. For example, American Jewish Historyreaders will hear the familiar voices of Gary Zola, Richard Breitman, and Thomas Doherty. Throughout the series, Lapin incorporates rare archival audio of Coughlin's radio speeches, including many that have not circulated among radio collectors and will be new to most Radioactivelisteners. The audio quality of these archival programs is excellent. Radioactive's engineers have removed the crackles, pops, and broadcast interference typical of radio disks from this era. Links to [End Page 334]additional audio clips, primary articles, scholarly books, and full program transcripts are available through co-producer WNET's Exploring Hate website: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/series/radioactive/. These resources will be useful to teachers, though there is, at this time, only one link to additional Coughlin programs: a poorly organized online Coughlin archive at the University of Detroit-Mercy. The producers may have been unable to secure rights to stream Coughlin's broadcasts on the Exploring Hate site. In fact, neither the website nor the individual episode credits are as clear as they should be about the provenance of the best Radioactiveclips of Coughlin. A popular Catholic priest with a weekly radio program, Coughlin stands today as a prominent symbol of, and catalyst for, American antisemitism during the 1930s. Radioactivepresents a nuanced account of Coughlin's career and politics. Born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1891, Coughlin was ordained in 1916. His career took off in 1926, when Reverend Michael Gallagher, Bishop of Detroit, offered Coughlin an opportunity to start a new parish, the Shrine of the Little Flower, in Royal Oak, north of Detroit. Coughlin used the emerging medium of radio to expand his influence through weekly sermons: a fiery mix of anti-communism, isolationism, populism, and commentary on Scripture. During the late 1920s, radio became a powerful force in American life, reaching listeners across the country with the same programing simultaneously. "Radio could sell cereal," Lapin asserts, "But was it big enough to sell God? In 1927, just a few months into his radio career, Father Coughlin took a big bet that the answer was going to be yes." By 1930, Coughlin was airing nationally on the...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.785
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.232 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it