Regina G. Barber

This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones.

The audio engineer was Kweisi Lee.

Beth Donovan is our vice president of podcasting, and I'm Regina Barber.

Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwavers.

Real quick before the show, let's talk about public media.

Public media has been in the news a lot this year.

And public media is what makes NPR shows like Shortwave special.

It's made for you.

When you listen to an NPR podcast, the people who make it aren't thinking about shareholders or advertisers.

We're thinking about you and delivering on a promise to help you understand the world a little better.

From its founding in the U.S., public media was always meant to tell stories from underrepresented communities, providing cultural insight that expands your perspective.

At NPR, we still believe all of that.

We always will.

But as of this fall, federal funding for public media, including NPR and local NPR stations, has been eliminated.

And now we're heading into an uncharted future.

But we know you won't let public media go away.

We rely on your support to bring you Shortwave now more than ever.

This year, we have loved bringing you stories about what happens inside a top-secret nuclear facility, whether kids should be taking melatonin, why flowers are blooming early, how nightmares work, and what happens when AI cannibalizes its own data.

And we can't wait to bring you more episodes like that in 2026.