BEHIND THE SCENES with Christopher Lydon and Mary McGrath

What inspired you to create a radio series about globalism

Christopher Lydon: I'd been experimenting for a year with global Internet radio from the Caribbean, west Africa, and southeast Asia. And I was full of ideas about alternative ways to talk about globalization. The run-up to war with Iraq made it more urgent to expand the conversation about war, health, food, culture, empire, and refugees (among other things) in a global age. So we went to work on seven slices of the subject

Mary McGrath: The main theme of the series is the contradictions of globalism and the question -- is the dominant economic system in the world bringing us closer together or is it tearing us apart? Six billion people are inextricably bound together in many dimensions: We watch many of the same TV shows, wear the same sneakers and eat the same burgers; but at the same time, the tensions of unequal wealth and power, not to mention terror, war, disease, pollution, and culture, conspire to keep the world separate

Why did you choose to include artists'/authors' perspectives on what many might consider to be a finance, trade, political story

MM: Stories and plays and music are often a better way to penetrate our consciousness than an endless stream of news stories and commentary. Peter Sellars revived a 2,500-year-old Greek play about refugees to reset a contemporary problem in a classic frame. He uses theater, or what he calls "the technology of the sacred," to get us to think anew about democracy, media and morality. Yo Yo Ma has spent most of his professional life making musical pilgrimages all over the world to explore the roots of human nature. His vocabulary is music and culture, of course, but the metaphor is powerful

CL: It is a fundamental doctrine (or conceit) in our thinking that the novelists and artists get there first, and all the interviewing on this series confirmed our prejudice. In almost any circumstance or any country, it's my instinct now more than ever to go to the artists -- musicians, poets, story tellers -- and let them tell you what is really going on

How did the stories of refugees -- which we hear in this particular episode -- affect you

CL: The refugee stories persuaded me that nobody but refugees should be allowed to tell their stories. They are carrying the main freight of the hidden history of our times -- in the Balkans, in Cambodia, in Latin America, in China, in eastern Europe. The world has created a new nation of roughly 30 million displaced people that we very rarely talk about, and even then in stereotypical terms. Refugees are the wallpaper of TV news -- helpless folk who never get to speak. But in fact they know everything about surviving in this rough world, and are waiting to be asked

What role does the interactive Web site world.law.harvard.edu play in the project

MM: Interestingly, the Web site wasn't very successful. It's hard to develop and sustain an interactive community over just seven weeks. At the time we were working on the series, Chris met Dave Winer, arguably the king of webloggers, who was also a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard. He encouraged Chris to start a blog and it turned out that Chris and Dave and other bloggers spread the word about the series much more efficiently around the blogosphere

As host, Chris brings a lot of energy to the series and the music also infuses the program with a sense of urgency. How did you arrive at the "sound" of the series

CL: Mary and I both counted on independent producer Jay Allison to hold us to a high standard of sound-rich production. And what better allies could we have had than Yo-Yo Ma and the central Asian chanter in Peter Sellars' production of The Children of Herakles ? I would love to think there is energy -- some curiosity and intensity -- in my voice, but it's just my voice. I talk the way I have always talked

MM: The musical sound was inspired by a band of Argentinian musicians living in exile in Paris called the Gotan Project. Jake Shapiro (executive director of PRX) discovered their first album La Revancha Del Tango and we immediately loved the funky fusion of world music with electronic and trippy dance music. Neo-tango, if you will

Do you feel that The Whole Wide World is a hybrid of the talk show and documentary forms? If so, what are the benefits of fusing these styles together

CL: It felt to me a lot more like documentary than talk-show. Or maybe as you suggest it might be a hybrid "conversational documentary." A lot of the best elements had the tone of serious thinking aloud—as opposed to testimony. But the series was also meticulously edited and in that sense "constructed." Truth is: I missed the freewheeling and sometimes reckless speed and surprise of the live conversation of a talk show, and equally I missed the opportunity to hear from callers we never met or expected to meet.