Radio Rose
Wednesdays at four, I pour a glass of rosé and turn the radio on. That is the whole tradition. It has a name because things around here tend to end up with names.
The show
Doctor Radio, channel 119
Doctor Radio is SiriusXM's medical channel, powered by NYU Langone Health — real doctors taking real calls from strangers, live. It sits on channel 119 now, having moved up from 110. Dr. Jessica B. Stern, who is a clinical psychologist, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone and my girlfriend, is on Wednesday afternoons.
Live call-in radio is a genuinely hard format and I have come to appreciate how hard. There is no draft. Someone you have never met describes a situation in ninety seconds, and you have to be useful about it immediately, on air, without overreaching what you actually know from ninety seconds. I have watched a lot of people be asked difficult questions in public — that is most of my day job — and doing it well is rarer than it looks.
The other thing that gets me is how little of it is advice. Most of it is asking a better question than the one that came in.
The tradition
Why there is a glass involved
Four o'clock on a Wednesday is a strange hour. The market has closed, the day is not over, and nothing useful gets started. It turns out to be the perfect hour to stop, sit down and listen to somebody else work.
Jessica livestreams alongside the broadcast, so I get both at once — the show, and the running commentary. I would like to claim this is sophisticated. It is a glass of rosé and the radio.
I have heard her make most of these arguments in a kitchen. Hearing her make them live, to a stranger, with the clock running, is a different thing entirely, and it is the reason this has become the appointment in the week I am least willing to move.
Contact