859: Chaos Graph

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass.

I've been talking to someone here and there over the last couple of months about a situation she's in. And I think she typifies the thing we're going to try to do in this episode, so I'd like you to meet her. Her name is Annika Barber. She's a scientist, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, a runner. She's got purple hair and a particular way of organizing the world around her-- her books, organized topically and then by height, her lab, color-coded labels.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Lately, Annika has been trying to get her mind around a new situation that is deeply confusing for her and lots of people. She's tracking scientific meetings that are not happening.

When President Trump was inaugurated, he put a freeze on research grants. This meant the meetings where scientists like Annika get together at the National Institutes of Health to assess new research-- they're called NIH study sections-- those meetings were off. But then, a judge said the administration couldn't pause all research grants, so the meetings were theoretically back on.

They were listed on an NIH website as scheduled, but Annika says they did not seem to be happening. The website showed they were, but scientists were saying they weren't. Scientists who had submitted grants literally had no idea if their grant had been reviewed and moved on to the next step of the funding process.

But Annika learned there was a place you could get a way better picture of whether a meeting was going to happen or had already happened.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And if they're not posted to the federal register, they cannot meet.

It's a strange feeling knowing you're in the middle of an upending, knowing that something fundamental to the way that you live is changing, but you can't understand or see the scale of change as it's happening. You just can't. You have to wait.

What I like about Annika is she rejects this. She is not waiting. Annika immediately begins scraping data from federal websites, finding all the meetings that were supposed to happen, cross-referencing them with the federal register, reaching out to scientists to see if the supposedly-scheduled meetings did, in fact, occur, compiled all that into a Google spreadsheet, and posted it online.

Anxious and confused scientists all over America began consulting Annika's spreadsheet and passing it around to see is my study section actually happening? Has my grant been reviewed? Is there any point in submitting my next grant? Will I be able to keep my lab open?

Chana Joffe-Walt

For five weeks, there were no NIH study sections, till it was 205 study sections that did not meet. All of those proposals sat waiting, and all the ones that came after, stacking up behind them, a long traffic jam of uncertainty and science not happening.

And then, in March, a meeting appeared on the federal register, an NIH study section, and then another, and another. Now, the meetings to assess new research grants seem to have mostly picked back up. Scientists are doing peer reviews, but it's not clear if the government will actually cough up the money.

And a few of the grant proposals that were supposed to be reviewed at these meetings, they're being quietly disappeared from the lists. They're not being reviewed at all. They seem to be the grants with DEI words or other thought crimes in them that are no longer allowed. It's unclear if the scientists who submitted these grants even know that their proposals have been dropped.

Annika went to a meeting herself. It was two months late, pulled together at the very last minute, but it did happen.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The thing that is killing her is not knowing the shape of the new normal. How many grants will now be funded compared to before-- half, a quarter? Which scientists will get funding? What kind of research? There's no data she can turn to that will tell her that.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Will she continued to try to graph the chaos? Yes, she will.

Today's show is full of people who do not wait for the chaos to settle, people who run toward it, who will take whatever little data they have available to them and try to make it make sense. These are people who get answers. Stay with us.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. The questions people are trying to answer in today's episode, they are basic-- where and why? Act One-- Solve for Why.

One of the hardest places to see through chaos in the middle of a war-- fog of war, all that. This is especially true for the war in Gaza. There is very limited information moving in and out of Gaza. Israel has banned international press from entering the strip for nearly 18 months, except for a few brief trips, accompanied by and under the control of the Israeli military.

One rare outside group has gotten a view on the ground of Gaza-- medical workers. Since the start of the war, over 100 American doctors and nurses have traveled to Gaza, treated patients there for weeks at a time, and come back out. Producer Ike Sriskandarajah talked to a dozen of them who volunteered there.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Dr. Mark Perlmutter had been on about 40 medical missions all over the developing world before he went to Gaza. He's a white guy, almost 70, a hand surgeon in rural North Carolina when he's not doing humanitarian work. And when he found out patients in Gaza needed an orthopedic specialist like himself, he signed up and flew there in March of 2024. He'd worked in some pretty violent places, but never an active war zone, and only knew the basics about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Intifada is the word for Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. But Mark was about to get a crash course from one of his fellow doctors.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon from the US-- he's also volunteered as a doctor in the war in Ukraine and with Palestinians in the West Bank. He's closely studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though his family is from a small ethnic minority in what is now Pakistan.

Ike Sriskandarajah

So Mark sat next to Feroze, and when they arrived at the European Hospital-- that's the name of the hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza-- their team dropped off their thousands of pounds of supplies.

European Hospital was built for just over 200 beds, but is taking care of over 1,000 people, and families are living in every corner of the hospital. Mark hadn't seen anything like it. Feroze hadn't either, but he told me he didn't linger on that long. A nurse took them on a quick tour, let them know where everything was-- the operating room, the ICU.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Feroze works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I mean, it was a war zone, but still, this was a lot. And then, he moved on. There were so many people that needed medical attention. The only way he could keep track of his patients was to make notes on his iPhone. Just to warn you here, the details are graphic.

Ike Sriskandarajah

He pulled up an entry from a random day, just to give me a sense of what it was like.

Ike Sriskandarajah

90 minutes-- it's intense. But in that endless stream of traumatic injuries, there's one that jumped out at him every time, kids getting shot in the head. Whenever he saw this, he'd make a note of it on his phone.

Ike Sriskandarajah

At the same time that Feroze was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients-- he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.

Ike Sriskandarajah

These weren't kids injured by collapsing buildings. They were kids who'd been shot-- direct gunshot wounds into 12-year-olds, eight-year-olds, even toddlers.

Ike Sriskandarajah

13 children in 14 days. Even with all the other traumatic injuries and deaths they saw, the kids who were shot really stuck with Mark. It was haunting him.

Ike Sriskandarajah

That's as far as Mark thought about it at the time. The detail of 13 kids, all with gunshot wounds to the head and chest, it just got added to the long list of things they saw in Gaza and couldn't fully understand. It didn't come back to Feroze until they were back home and got invited to speak at a conference in Dearborn, Michigan.

The panel had another American doctor, who also volunteered in Gaza. He worked in two different hospitals a couple months before Feroze and Mark arrived.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Dr. Adam Hamawy is a plastic surgeon from New Jersey.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Because of Adam's specialty, he would have only seen children who survived a gunshot to the head long enough to make it to reconstructive surgery. Not many did. He saw one. It was still shocking to him.

Adam had served in Iraq as a surgeon in the US Army. He treated lots of injured people, but what he was seeing in Gaza was different.

Ike Sriskandarajah

There were documented cases where Americans did kill Iraqi children, but nothing near the scale that these doctors saw in Gaza.

As somebody with US military experience, do you have a perspective that could explain the circumstances that lead to a kid getting shot? How do you answer that?

Ike Sriskandarajah

The medical worker I spoke with who spent the most time in Gaza also saw the most kids shot-- 50. She showed me a picture she took of a scan of a five or six-year-old's skull. There's a bullet in the middle of it. She was told this child was playing with their friends when an armed quadcopter drone came overhead and shot the child.

Dr. Ahlia Kattan also responded to Feroze's callout. She's an anesthesiologist from Southern California. She went with her husband, and between the two of them saw 15 kids who had been shot in the head or chest. The one that really stuck with her also happened to be the youngest case I'd heard of.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Feroze reached out to as many American medical workers as he could-- doctors, nurses, paramedics. He created a survey to send out and compiled all the answers. The results stunned him.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Out of the 53 American medical workers surveyed who did emergency care for children in Gaza, 44 said they saw kids shot in the head or chest. Here's Mark.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Feroze published an op ed in the New York Times with the results of the survey. A group of the doctors wrote two letters to then President Biden outlining what they saw. Feroze thought that would mean two things-- they'd get a call from the White House and there'd be an investigation.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I talked with three people who worked at the US State Department and reviewed allegations like this, including the person who, until recently, was the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, a position that used to be called the War Crimes Ambassador. They all agreed the doctors' report sounded credible and significant enough to investigate.

Each of them said the next step should be asking Israel for answers. One, who is involved in vetting US weapons transfers, told me if this had been another country other than Israel, this is what would have happened.

A few years ago, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee received reports that Mexican marine units were executing and disappearing people. The US stopped a shipment of machine guns for more than two years while they investigated the allegations. Eventually, Mexico agreed that American weapons wouldn't go to those units.

But that isn't what happened here. The Biden administration never met with Feroze and Mark. They didn't investigate these claims or make any public statements asking Israel to stop shooting kids in Gaza. They didn't try to get to the bottom of these allegations.

I read these doctors' accounts and had the same question they asked in one of their letters to President Biden. How could this be a series of accidents, such widespread shooting of so many young children over the course of an entire year? But I've also reported on war crimes before, and I know that cases that seem to a bystander, or even a doctor on the ground, like clear acts of atrocity-- they can be explained as a tragic but expected part of war, allowable under the rules of war.

The Gaza Strip is a small, densely populated place. It's nearly 50% children. Hamas is hiding inside that population. Any fighting between Hamas and Israel will have civilian casualties, including children.

So we asked the Israel Defense Forces how they explained the reports from American medical workers. They declined both my interview requests, but sent a statement, saying, "The IDF does not target minors and takes extensive measures to prevent harm to civilians, including children. The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm and operates in full compliance with international legal obligations. For security reasons, we cannot elaborate on operational policies."

Which doesn't explain why so many kids were getting shot. So I went looking for an Israeli soldier who'd served in Gaza, who could tell me what it was like on the ground and what the rules were on who they could shoot in what circumstances. And we found one who would talk with us. He's a reservist in his early 30s, a grad student whose unit got called up at the beginning of the war. He asked us to just call him M. He was worried about retribution, so we had an actor read his responses to my questions.

Ike Sriskandarajah

His company started in the north of Gaza, not near the hospital where Feroze and Mark and most of the doctors were. He said there was a humanitarian road running north and south, and near the humanitarian road, the rules of engagement were don't shoot unless there's an immediate threat. But once you got away from the humanitarian road--

Ike Sriskandarajah

He says there was one incident where his unit did see two young people they thought might be a threat. One day, when two teenagers, 14 or 15, were part of a convoy going south, they sprinted away and ran into a building. A Hummer and a tank followed them and ordered them to come out. The army thought the teens might be luring them into a trap. When the teens didn't come out, they fired at the building, killing them.

He says his unit never fired on any other teenagers or little kids. But, he says, different units operate differently.

Ike Sriskandarajah

So according to M, the broad permission to fire, and the types of units led by more aggressive company commanders, you can see how that could result in soldiers shooting Palestinian children. He didn't see this himself. This is just his opinion, he told me. But he believes that Israeli soldiers have probably shot some children on purpose.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I asked M for other possible explanations. What if the soldiers didn't know they were kids? It's a chaotic, tense environment full of people and places to hide. That could happen.

But he and another IDF soldier I spoke with, someone who didn't serve in Gaza but whose job was to identify targets for snipers, said it wasn't hard to distinguish a child from an adult. It wouldn't explain an 18-month-old being precisely shot in the head, or toddlers, or other grade school age kids.

Were the kids being used as human shields by Hamas, or even victims of Hamas in a false flag operation to blame Israel and draw sympathy? M hadn't heard of that happening in Gaza and hadn't seen it. He says when he tries to make sense of what happened, there's been a societal shift in Israel that he thinks is a factor.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The Israeli army has not announced any investigations into the shooting of children in Gaza. In the meantime, the Trump administration just authorized another $12 billion in arms sales to Israel. That's in addition to the reported $17.9 billion the US has given Israel in military aid since the war began.

The kids getting shot like this are a tiny part of the large number of casualties in Gaza. At least 65,000 people have been killed, more than 15,000 of them children. An expert who investigates war crimes described it as a haystack of needles.

Most of these allegations will never find their way to court, so sometimes, in cases like these, war crimes investigators look for emblematic crimes, clear instances of violence outside of the rules of war that tell us something about the war, like the My Lai Massacre, Srebrenica, the chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

What do these deaths tell us? The hundreds of kids American medical workers saw shot in the head and chest, what are they emblematic of? They tell us it's likely that an Israeli soldier can shoot a child in Gaza on purpose with no consequence, and the US isn't going to try to stop it.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Ike Sriskandarajah is a producer on our show. Avi Vichner is the actor who read for M.

Coming up, a woman discovers she is a central data point in a story she did not know was unfolding. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. Today's show, Chaos Graph, people trying to make sense of things, trying to map what is happening around them and see the bigger picture. We've arrived at Act Two-- Solve for Where.

In this next story, the bigger picture has become very clear to the rest of us over the last couple of weeks. It's in the news all the time. But the woman at the center of this story, she experienced it up close. She learned each fact in the most personal, direct way, and making sense of those facts, understanding how they all fit together for her was urgent. Nadia Reiman has her story.

Nadia Reiman

When Mari shows me this video, it feels like something I'm not supposed to be watching. On the screen is her fiance, Mikael. He's shirtless. He's crisply lined up. He's young, 23, bright green eyes, wild curly hair tucked under a baseball cap, and he's holding a tattoo gun, giving himself a tattoo on his stomach while she teases him, says he's never going to tattoo her again.

[MIKAEL LAUGHING]

He looks up and laughs, his mouth full of braces. Mari is always sort of dragging Mikael about his tattoos. He has lots of them, some which Mari finds offensively dumb.

Nadia Reiman

It's ET smoking a blunt. Mari is not her real name. She's from Venezuela. She's here applying for asylum, which is legal, but that seems to matter less and less nowadays in terms of who gets deported, hence the alias.

Mari and Mikael are the kind couple who wear matching outfits-- her idea, but she insists he's also into it, shows me a picture where they're wearing matching pink shorts that he chose. Mikael is a barber. Mari works cleaning hotels, so they work opposite hours. She gets up early, goes to bed early. He gets up later, goes to bed later. When their schedules do match up, they're usually so tired that they sit at home and watch TV on their fuzzy pink bedspread.

The morning it happened, Mari left early, like she usually does. She noticed a bunch of men outside. They were dressed in black, she says. One of them spoke Spanish. They came up to her, her roommate, and her landlord.

Nadia Reiman

It seemed like they were looking for someone. One of them showed her the photo on his phone. He was like, do you know this person?

Nadia Reiman

Mari figured she and Mikael had applied for asylum. He had his first court hearing already. His next one was coming up. They didn't think they were in any danger, so Mari sees no problem with letting any sort of law enforcement in. So she opens the gate, leads them down these narrow gray steps and into her basement apartment, where Mikael was still asleep.

Nadia Reiman

The men in black, Mari would later learn, were maybe ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or maybe police working with ICE and the DEA for some reason. We don't know for sure, because they won't answer any of my questions.

What we do know is that Mikael ends up one of the 238 men who are in the news now almost every day, men who were sent away to a prison in El Salvador, where no one can reach them. And the president has refused to try to get them back, despite a court suggesting he should.

But that's all in the future. On that day in February, Mari says there was one of them, one of the men in black, that spoke Spanish. He started talking to Mikael. He was calmer.

He was like, it's OK, man, just be cool. Don't move too much. It's going to be fine. He translates for the rest. He tells Mari that they are taking Mikael, that they need to question him, but that she is free to go. Mari is in a daze. She doesn't know why they are taking him but letting her go.

They uncuff her. They let Mikael get dressed. The one that speaks Spanish tells Mari that they're taking him to Federal Plaza, an ICE office in Manhattan. And then, it's over. The men in uniforms take Mikael away, and Mari is left looking around, wondering what just happened.

Nadia Reiman

Not going to work is not an option for Mari. She's been working since she was about 16, no matter what's happening around her. Her boss told me that she's never met someone so young yet so serious, reliable. She's the only one in her family who has left the country, the problem solver, the one her mom likes best, she said.

I asked her, would your mom agree? And without missing a beat, she said, I will FaceTime her right now and you can ask her yourself.

Mari met Mikael in Colombia three years ago. She was 21. He kept hanging out at the boutique where she worked and one day, she mentioned she wanted a tattoo. He was like, I'll do it for you. She was skeptical but agreed.

From the moment they started dating, they were inseparable. Mari told me she has a temper and liked that Mikael could handle it. She says he's funny and charming, a little more shameless than she is.

When they traveled up to the US, if they needed to ask for food, Mari always felt embarrassed. Not Mikael. He made friends with everybody.

When they got to New York and their hours didn't match up, they spent what seems to me like basically their whole day video calling. When she got off the train in the morning, call from Mikael. When he got out of the shower, call from Mikael. At lunchtime, call from Mikael. While he's cutting hair, call from Mikael. They knew where the other was, what the other was doing, what the other was eating all the time, until now.

Mari is at a loss. She doesn't understand why Mikael would be in trouble. So she turns to the first person she trusts that knows this crazy system to see if she can help her make sense of what's going on, her boss at the hotel, a woman from Ecuador who's also an immigrant but a citizen.

Her boss always told her employees if they were ever in trouble with immigration, come to her, no problem. So even though it made Mari feel a little embarrassed to ask for help, she did it.

Mari's boss helped Mari find Mikael online through an ICE website. And it shows that, indeed, Mikael is being held in New York. That afternoon, he calls and tells Mari that they had to hold him there, even though there was no criminal record of him.

That night, Mari tracks him online again and sees that he's now in Pennsylvania. She thinks, why are they moving him?

Mari's boss tells her get a lawyer, like yesterday, so she starts to look for one. She needs one that she can afford and that speaks Spanish. It took her a week to find one. The lawyer looks into Mikael's case right away, trying to figure out why he got detained in the first place.

Much to the lawyer's distaste, Mari, a true gen Z'er, starts to post a lot on TikTok. Almost overnight, her feed morphs from dancing reggaeton videos to photo collages of Mikael set to cheesy Spanish ballads, laying out their story, asking people to make it go viral.

Nadia Reiman

Mari is particularly concerned with Mikael being moved to Pennsylvania like that, without him consenting to it. The lawyer tells her, don't worry about that part. The government can move him around detention centers all they want. They just can't deport him. A judge has to decide that.

So for the next few weeks, all of these moving parts become Mari's new normal-- TikToks about Mikael, calls with the lawyer, video calls from the Pennsylvania detention center.

Nadia Reiman

And then, one day in March, she doesn't hear from him for hours.

Nadia Reiman

Mari checks the website, and indeed, there he is in Texas, so much further away from her, from their little basement apartment. She's like, why are they taking him further away?

She calls the lawyer, who tells her, again, don't worry, they can move him, but they can't deport him. Which is true, at least legally speaking. Mari had a bad feeling, but she pushed it down and went to work.

Nadia Reiman

There, at 38 seconds in on the screen, was Mikael, profile sharp, curls falling around his face, his head held down while someone shaves his head. It lasts just a few seconds, and then the camera cuts to someone else. It was chilling, like a scene in some perverse movie.

Nadia Reiman

At that moment, Mari unknowingly became a data point, part of a group of people who figured out their loved ones were taken to a notoriously bad Salvadoran prison through a video.

A mom in Venezuela had the same experience at around the same time as Mari. She saw a close-up of her son Mervin Yamarte Fernandez's face on screen in the same Telemundo report, and that's how she knew where he was.

Another mom, same thing. Seeing a brief glimpse of his tattooed arms was the only marker of her son Francisco Garcia Casique and his whereabouts. Without these videos, they would have simply disappeared.

I know people say unprecedented a lot, but I really can't think of another word to describe this swift and secretive removal of 238 Venezuelans. It happened so quickly. Within four hours of the Trump administration invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Mikael and the other 237 got removed. Mari described it to me as a kidnapping. And this move of shipping people who were in the US abroad to some dank prison is unlike anything I've seen in US immigration.

We've sent hundreds to the mega prison CECOT so far, and we're paying the Salvadoran government $6 million to hold them. It's described as a prison no one leaves alive. And it's next to impossible to talk to people who are there. Not even lawyers can.

The government is saying Mikael was sent there because he's a gang member, Tren de Aragua. So is he?

The New York Times and CBS have made these lists with all the men taken there, looked into whether they could find any criminal activity here in the US, in Venezuela, and in surrounding countries. And so far, it looks like almost 90% either have no record or have been charged with minor offenses, like driving with a suspended license or trespassing.

I talked to a professor named Dorothy Kronick, who's making one of these lists. She studies crime and policing in Venezuela. I asked her specifically about Mikael. She hasn't found anything suspicious.

I also asked a local reporter in his hometown, this small island off the coast of Venezuela. She told me that there is no Tren de Aragua activity there.

Mikael lived in Colombia for a while. I did a criminal record search there, using his Venezuelan government ID number. Nothing.

This lack of information connecting Mikael to Tren de Aragua, that doesn't seem to deter our government. Robert Cerna, an acting field office director for ICE's removal operations, said something that stuck with me. Quote, "The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists, with regard to whom we lack a complete profile." So according to the government, no proof that you're a criminal is the greatest proof of all.

Mari is convinced that Mikael's tattoos, that's the only reason the government thinks he's a gang member, which is not crazy. The government is looking at tattoos. They have a list of Tren de Aragua suspicious tattoos, and it is broad-- trains, crowns, roses, clocks, star, a Michael Jordan. If this is a list of gang tattoos, everyone under 50 is in a gang.

Ronna Risquez, a Venezuelan reporter who has been following Tren de Aragua for 10 years and wrote the book about them, told me two things. One, as far as she knows, there are no Tren de Aragua specific tattoos, so basing anything on tattoos is ridiculous. To be fair, the government says they're relying on more than just tattoos, but it's unclear in a lot of cases what else. And two, Ronna confirmed what the local reporter said, that the place Mikael is from has no Tren de Aragua activity at all.

Mari scoffs at the idea that Mikael is some secret Tren de Aragua operative who could hide from the biggest snoop of all, her.

Nadia Reiman

What Mikael is is an asylum seeker. Regardless of what his asylum claim is and whether or not you think he should get asylum, I want you to put that aside for a moment. He's in the middle of a legal process that he followed our laws to participate in.

I cannot overstate how crazy it is that he and others got picked up and shipped away, like we just pretended due process doesn't exist anymore. Normally, someone like Mikael would present all his evidence to a judge-- documents, testimony. And then the judge would decide if under our law Mikael could stay or if he should be deported. That's what due process is, getting to stand in court and prove who you are, where you should be. Without it, the government could send anyone to CECOT. Without due process, you have no say.

Immediately after seeing the head shaving video, Mari gets herself together and calls for help, calls Mikael's lawyer. She's like, the lawyer will know what to do.

The lawyer does not know what to do. The lawyer is in shock. She told me she's never seen anything like this in over 20 years of legal practice. She can't get a hold of Mikael at all. The next day is his next hearing with the judge.

The lawyer told me that during that hearing, the judge kept calling Mikael's name. Subero? Subero? Where is Subero? The detention center didn't know. The ICE attorney didn't know. Mari was there listening in on Zoom.

Nadia Reiman

Throughout this story, I felt a lot like Mari, turning to scholars, to lawyers, to think tanks that track immigration for decades to ask, what exactly is this? What's happening? And the response, over and over again, was they have no idea. Everyone is wading into new water.

Mari hasn't heard from Mikael in over a month.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Nadia Reiman is an editor on our show. Interpreting for this story by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Our program was produced today by Valerie Kipnis. Our executive editor Emanuele Berry edited the show. The people who put together today's program include Phia Bennin, Mike Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Emanuel Dzotsi, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Ryan Rumery, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Laura Starecheski, Nancy Updike, James Williamson, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive producer is Ira Glass.

Special thanks today to Yael Even Or, Jeremy Ashkenas, Aaron Reicklin-Melnick, Muzaffar Chishti, Stephen Yale-Loehr, Julie Turkewitz, Carolina Arias Ipys, Dara Lind, Josbelk Gonzalez Mejias, Galya Walt, Breaking the Silence, and the Chronicle for Higher Education. Casting help from Sabrina Hyman.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. If you become a This American Life partner, you will get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, and more. The latest bonus episode is an Ask Me Anything episode, where Ira Glass answered questions sent in by subscribers. To hear it, and get all the other perks, and, most importantly, help us keep making the show, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes.

Thanks, as always, to my boss, Ira Glass. He went to a Hugh Grant convention this year. Everyone dressed up-- Four Weddings and a Funeral Hugh, Notting Hill Hugh, Love Actually Hugh.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I'm Chana Joffe-Walt. We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life.