My two favorite words in the English language are "Science Friday." Sometimes, after just five years or so on the show, I feel like the new kid. There have been several TOTN hosts, beginning with John Hockenberry, and many long-time listeners regard Ray Suarez as the definitive voice of the program, but Ira has been here since the start. The rest of us come and go, but Flatow rules!
The fact that there's a separate host and production staff on Friday resolves one of the most difficult problems of a daily news program.

 

Years ago, when I was the producer of "All Things Considered," the grind proved relentless - there was never any time to stop and think and the weekend was scarcely enough time to catch our collective breath and recover. Mondays always involved a lot of improvisation and the show always got better through the week. ATC has resolved a lot of these problems with a bigger staff than we had twenty years ago (and a producer who no longer gets surprised by events like Thanksgiving or Halloween ... a little planning always helps) but the TOTN crew is considerably smaller and I don't know what we'd do without the time to think and recharge on Fridays.
Which doesn't mean that everything's planned, or that our plans always get on the air. The truly obsessed among you may have noticed that we neglected to carry our usual "Letters" segment on Tuesday (yes, I know they're virtually all e-mails, but, as I've said, I'm hopelessly old fashioned). We had it slotted for the end of the first hour, but the calls on the Walter Reed scandal were so good that line producer Carline Watson and I decided on the fly to keep that conversation going. Which is one of the beauties of live radio - the plan we go into studio 3A with changes as soon as guests and callers and e-mailers (and now bloggers, too) begin to have their say and we try to adapt ... some topics (and some guests) run shorter or longer, depending, and we have to make decisions as we go along. Which is challenging and fun (usually), but demanding. Come 3:58:30 (ET) on Thursday afternoon, we celebrate Secret Friday...it's the one night of the week no one has any homework.