Diary of a Saudi Girl: Then & Now

01/21/22 • 38 min

3 Listeners

When we first met Majd Abdulghani, she was a teenager living in Saudi Arabia, one of the most restrictive countries for women in the world. She wanted to be a scientist, her family wanted to arrange her marriage.

Majd recorded her life over two years, she was one of our most prolific documentarians. With her microphone, Majd brought us inside a society where the voices of women were rarely heard.

Majd is 27 now. A lot has changed in her life. Today, we bring you a brand new conversation with Majd and her original story from 2016.

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Majd recorded her life over two years, she was one of our most prolific documentarians. With her microphone, Majd brought us inside a society where the voices of women were rarely heard.

Majd is 27 now. A lot has changed in her life. Today, we bring you a brand new conversation with Majd and her original story from 2016.

****

Today’s episode has support from GreenChef. Get $130 off when you use code diaries130 at check out.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Previous Episode

A Museum of Sound

A journey back to the very beginning of recorded sound and the strange, random, beautiful things people captured more than a century ago. We recommend listening with headphones.
On January 1st, 2022 all audio recorded before 1923 is entering the public domain because of a new law, the Music Modernization Act. Archivists around the country have been digitizing thousands of old records, tinfoil, and wax cylinders that few people have ever heard.
We hear one of the first recordings ever made, dated 1853. We then visit with Thomas Edison and his phonograph invention, which etched sound into tinfoil. There are amateur home and field recordings, instructional tapes, and commercial music. And then there’s Lionel Mapleson, the grandfather of bootlegging, who spent years recording the Metropolitan Opera from every possible vantage point.

Today’s episode is a collaboration with Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff of The World According to Sound. A live audio show and online listening series. Their next performance is January 6, grab your ticket today.

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Next Episode

A Voicemail Valentine

Nowadays we’re very accustomed to recording and hearing the sound of our own voices. But in the 1930s many people were doing it for the first time. And a surprising trend began. People started sending their voices to each other, through the postal service. It was literally voice-mail.

We combed through a large collection of early voicemail at the Phono Post Archive, and we discovered that many of these audio letters have the same subject matter: love.

This story originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2018.

You can see photographs of the voice-o-graphs on our website: https://www.radiodiaries.org/voicemail-valentine-2022/.

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