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"Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act"

Aired on Wednesday, July 29th.

Our guest is the widely celebrated novelist and nonfiction writer Nicholson Baker, whose new book is an engrossing mash-up of history, journalism, and memoir. The book is called "Baseless," and it's focused on the modern-day Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Baker's gripping and typically candid account carefully documents what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, widespead cover-ups, and glacially slow governmental responses. Per Publishers Weekly: "Written with bemused fascination and occasional outrage...this lucid yet freewheeling narrative unearths much queasy detail about biological weapons and their promoters. The result is a colorful, engrossing recreation of a sinister history -- and a convincing case for opening government archives to public scrutiny."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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