Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast

In 2019, as impeachment proceedings against President Trump were getting underway, we knew that the events called for daily coverage, and we decided to try an experiment: package one of Brian Lehrer’s daily conversations for a national audience in podcast form on its own independent feed. During those days, my tasks included booking legal analysts, lawmakers, Ukraine experts, diplomats, and other relevant voices; monitoring breaking news, and the moving schedules of the hearings; and cutting a 40-minute conversation down to a tight 20, careful to remove anything that would become outdated between the 10 AM live interview and early afternoon publication.

After the impeachment hearings concluded, we decided to continue the experiment, by pivoting to a daily podcast about national politics in general. To date, it has continued to expand the reach of those conversations by about 50% of the regular show’s online listenership.

All Of It, with Alison Stewart

Getting to work on All Of It is an incredible privilege. The team is extremely public radio cool and helps me see ‘culture and the Culture” as a participatory event, whether we’re talking about an exciting new celebrity memoir, or an innovative art show here in NYC that I’d otherwise not know to check out, or about caring for your houseplants.

I’m also grateful that working on All Of It has also brought me into the fold of the Public Song Project, which you can read more about on my “Audience Engagement” page.

How Open Data Stops Wars

All warfare is deception. But militaries can't deceive their enemies without also deceiving the citizens they’re tasked to protect. In this 30-minute feature, I wanted to explore the question: If the internet looked in 2003 the way it looks today, could the Bush administration’s bad intelligence have been more thoroughly challenged before the invasion of Iraq?

I had been watching this community of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) researchers sharing maps, marked up satellite images and photos scoured from social media with salient geographic details in the background, to piece together a verifiable, objective, near real-time account of things going on around the world, in some of the most challenging settings, like war zones and disaster areas.

I spoke with some members of this community about their work, and present it in The Boat Watchers, which explores the analogy of ‘The drums of war”: What they sound like in practice, how we’re better now than ever at listening for them, and how that act of listening might actually change the beat.