The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, debuting tonight on PBS, “does not shout, nor does it exult. It pays homage to sacrifice and achievement, and it leaves the door open to hope,” writes Ron Wertheimer in today’s New York Times. The website for the four-part series includes a section on how Jim Crow laws were sanctioned and supported by the national government.

Pacifica voted to return to its old home of Berkeley after its executive director said the move would save money, reports the Berkeley Daily Planet. Just last month the board voted to delay the move, reversing an earlier vote to return to Berkeley–which itself reversed an earlier vote not to return to Berkeley! Got that?

The increasingly busy Nic Harcourt, host of KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, tells the L.A. Times he’s “totally overworked.” He just supervised the music for the new film Igby Goes Down. [Hear Morning Becomes Eclectic online.]

PBS launched a major new website for parents. It features an activity search tool that correlates games, booklists, stories and fun projects with kids’ skills and interests.

“Luckily I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink; if I’d had a cup of coffee I might have actually been sweating steam and the little recording booth might have exploded,” says Ftrain’s Paul Ford of a recent taping for NPR’s Rewind. (The bit about Rewind is after the bit about Paul falling off a truck, which relates not a whit to public broadcasting but amuses nonetheless.)

Talks with NPR’s Ben Roe and the BBC’s John Evans from the PRPD are now online at the website of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio.

“If PBS only had a sense of humor and encouraged more independent creativity and originality, its programs would serve audiences far better,” writes Lawrence Grossman, in the latest Columbia Journalism Review. The ex-PBS and NBC News president reviews two recent books on public TV, and offers his own prescription for fixing it.

“I am not a well-read or a well-educated person,” WNYC’s Steve Post tells the New York Times. “But I have a deep voice, which makes me sound authoritative.” Post is back on WNYC as host of The No Show.

NPR’s Terry Gross is working with California-based producer Margaret Pick, formerly of A Prairie Home Companion, on a book that will compile transcripts of Fresh Air highlights, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune.

You can hear samples from the new Public Radio Weekend service on the show’s website.

Also online from PRPD: the results of Walrus Research’s focus groups with classical music listeners.

Audience researcher David Giovannoni’s speech from last week’s Public Radio Program Directors’ conference is online.

NPR promoted New York Correspondent Melissa Block to co-host of All Things Considered with Robert Siegel, the Los Angeles Times reports.

I know more than a few public radio listeners who, while admiring the news reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reserve their most ardent enthusiasm for what Bob Edwards once called “ornaments” — short, revealing commentaries scheduled between the “important” stories. A master of the form, Alice Furlaud, has been supplying commentaries for nearly as long as NPR has been broadcasting, first from Paris and more recently from her home on Cape Cod. Like another of my favorite NPR commentators, the psychiatrist Elissa Ely, Furlaud is a uniquely gifted, acerbic writer with a New England plainspokeness that adds considerable authority to what she says.

Lakota radio engineer Alex Lookingelk rides the highways of Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota, covering as many as 5,000 miles a month in his Chevy S-10 pickup. In the past seven years, Lookingelk has become known as a circuit-riding engineer for the public radio stations on the reservations and an all-around advisor to the stations. “He’ll say, ‘I have to go over to KGVA in Montana’ — that’s about a 12-hour drive,'” says Frank Blythe, executive director of Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), based in Lincoln, Neb. “He handles most of the Upper Plains’ technical problems and he also gets involved in the politics.”