Chatter Marks

About Chatter Marks

Chatter Marks is a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska’s identity through the creative and critical thinking of ideas—past, present and future. Featuring interviews with artists, presenters, staff and others associated with the Anchorage Museum and its mission.

Publisher

Anchorage Museum

Category

arts · education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Sept 2020

Latest episode

28 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

143 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Sept 2026

   EP 143 More than a game with Kyle Worl

   Kyle Worl is an Alaska Native athlete, coach, and cultural advocate who has spent most of his life competing in, and helping pass on, Arctic Sports and Traditional Games. He’s earned more than 100 medals, been named an Outstanding Athlete multiple times at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, and competed in Traditional Games throughout the circumpolar North. He’s even competed on American Ninja Warrior. But as important as all that is, a big part of his life now is making sure the games continue with the generations coming up behind him. Through coaching, he’s helping rebuild Juneau’s Native Youth Olympics program and creating opportunities for a new generation of athletes to learn the games. That means advocating for their growth, while making sure the culture, history, and sense of community at the heart of the games aren’t lost along the way. Kyle’s dad, Rod Worl—who competed in Arctic Sports in the 1980s and ’90s—introduced him to the games. He was an accomplished athlete, too. In fact, for almost 40 years, he held the world record for the Knuck Hop—a game that leaves your knuckles bloody and your body exhausted. These days, Kyle reflects on what it took for his dad to push himself that far—to establish a record that was only recently beaten—and how differently he understands that accomplishment now that he’s tested those same physical and mental limits. It’s a lot to think about, especially when you consider that these games carry histories much older than the competitions themselves. Their movements grew out of life in the North—hunting, communicating, testing endurance, and preparing the body and mind for an environment where those abilities mattered. So, every time these games are taught to another athlete, they pass along something that goes beyond technique: a connection to people, place, and lifeways.

2. 

   14 Sept 2026

   EP 142 The Notorious Bars of Alaska with Doug Vandegraft

   For the last 40 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than just places to drink—they were gathering places, landmarks, and repositories of local history. He eventually spent years researching their histories, digging through liquor licenses, newspapers, business records, and archives, while visiting bars and talking with the people who owned them, worked in them, and drank in them. The result is a history of Alaska told from the barstool, where stories of gold rushes, fishing, military expansion, Prohibition, boom-and-bust economies, and colorful characters all come together in the places people gathered at the end of the day. When Doug moved to Anchorage in 1983, one of the things that struck him was just how many bars there were—and how each one seemed to have its own identity. If you liked reggae, there was a bar for that. If you liked blues, rock and roll, or country, there was a bar for that, too. And these weren’t just weekend destinations. Bars could be crowded any night of the week, something Doug came to see as a reflection of an Alaska economy where jobs were plentiful and people had money to spend. That early experience shaped the way he came to understand bars as reflections of the communities around them, places where music, work, personality, and local culture all came together. And after visiting more than a hundred of them, he developed a simple rule for walking into any bar, no matter how unfamiliar: act like you’ve been there before.

3. 

   26 Aug 2026

   EP 141 The Politics of Nature with Jonathon Keats

   Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher, and his work uses imagination to question some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works. His new book, “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about politics, drawing lessons from bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humans didn’t invent governance. Living things have been organizing, cooperating, competing, and adapting to one another for billions of years, and Jonathon argues that we might have something to learn from them. He asks us to reconsider what intelligence looks like, who—or what—we're willing to learn from, and ultimately, what our place is within the natural world. In “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” Jonathon takes that idea and asks what it might actually mean for the way we govern ourselves. Bacteria become models for collective decision-making, lichens offer lessons about cooperation and conflict, and other species challenge our assumptions about hierarchy, resilience, and even democracy. Jonathon calls this approach “political biomimicry”—looking to the strategies that have evolved throughout nature and considering how they might inspire new approaches to human politics. It's an imaginative way of thinking about some very real problems, and one that asks us to reconsider whether humans should always be the only ones setting the terms. Photo courtesy of The Berggruen Institute

Who has been a guest on Chatter Marks

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Dr Stefan Brandt
• Ben Kellie
• Merrick Johnston
• Monica Shah

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

16 ratings

Spotify

4.2 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 36 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

39

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

82

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  This American Life

• 

  Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

• 

  The Moth

• 

  Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked

• 

  Ologies with Alie Ward

• 

  The Daily