'All Thing Considered' staff shares their most memorable stories from 2023
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
As the year comes to an end, we want to recognize the many people who work to get this show on the air to you every day.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That's right. So we asked the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED staff to share with you some of the stories that they will remember most from 2023.
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LAUREN HODGES, BYLINE: I'm Lauren Hodges, a producer on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, and I can't stop thinking about Teresa Calderez in Colorado Springs. She's 64 and one of the millions of Americans who was able to buy more food with her extra SNAP benefits during the pandemic. And she kept saying, I can eat when I'm hungry now, and that she was actually able to paint her nails again because they stopped cracking. Her favorite color, by the way, was this pale pink called lingerie. But when the emergency declaration ended earlier this year, she went back to her normal food stamp payment - just $23 a month - meaning she had to give up the healthy diet she'd gotten used to and the extra energy it gave her.
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TERESA CALDEREZ: Unfortunately, I have known hunger, and it's not a good feeling, you know? Buying a gallon of milk - a lot of people don't really give it another thought, but there are lots of us out here who can't buy a gallon of milk when we need it. So I'm just going to have to go back to not eating very much, about a meal a day.
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ELENA BURNETT, BYLINE: Hi. My name is Elena Burnett, and I'm a producer on the show. This summer, I traveled to Chicago with Juana and our editor, Courtney Dorning, for a profile on Brian Wallach, his wife Sandra Abrevaya and their foundation, I Am ALS, which helps patients navigate what is currently a fatal disease with no cure. Brian was diagnosed with ALS in 2017 and was told he might not live more than six months. Brian and Sandra's advocacy is obviously inseparable from their desire to survive, but we wanted to ask what he thought about when he thought about the future. Sandra helped translate for him.
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BRIAN WALLACH: I think about...
SANDRA ABREVAYA: I think about...
WALLACH: ...Being 70...
ABREVAYA: ...Being 70...
WALLACH: ...And sitting on the front porch with Sandra...
ABREVAYA: ...And sitting on the front porch with Sandra...
WALLACH: ...Sipping lemonade.
ABREVAYA: ...Sipping lemonade.
BURNETT: I learned so much about ALS and patient advocacy in working on the piece, but what has stuck with me the longest is the love story at the center of such extraordinary resilience.
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JONAS ADAMS, BYLINE: My name is Jonas Adams, and I'm the director of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Producers Kat Lonsdorf and Noah Caldwell worked with our host, Juana Summers, in putting together my favorite segments this year - a five-day series dedicated to hip-hop in honor of the genre's 50th anniversary. One of my favorite parts is where DJ Jazzy Jeff talks about the importance of hip-hop videos finally landing on MTV in the late '80s and how it helped the culture become permanent.
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JEFFREY ALLEN TOWNES: I always feel like that time was a very pivotal moment. Companies were trying to figure out, do I need to get into the hip-hop business? Is this something that's even going to be here in the next three, four years? And then I remember when you started to say, you know what, I think we're going to be here.
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BRIANNA SCOTT, BYLINE: I'm Brianna Scott, and I'm a producer on the show. If I had to pick a segment I really enjoyed working on this year, it has to be my "Saw" piece. I'm a huge horror fan, and I got to travel to New York City to interview the cast of "Saw The Musical: The Unauthorized Parody Of Saw," which reimagines the first "Saw" movie as a gay rom-com.
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ANDREW CAIRA: This musical is so bisexual. It is beautiful.
SCOTT: Andrew Caira plays Dr. Lawrence Gordon.
CAIRA: Right from the start, in 2004, you were having fan fictions of these two men because you're locking two guys in a room together. It's like, will they kiss?
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CAIRA: Like, of course they're going to kiss. They're in a room together. But they can't kiss because they're chained to the wall.
SCOTT: It's a raunchy, campy, chaotic, joyful musical, and I love bringing fun, weird, niche stories to life on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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TINBETE ERMYAS, BYLINE: I'm Tinbete Ermyas, and I'm an editor here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. One memorable thing I worked on was a book interview for Aaron Hamburger's "Hotel Cuba." It's a story about two sisters who immigrate to Cuba to flee religious persecution in Europe. It's loosely based on the life of his grandmother, and what I love about this is how he was able to use his creative outlet to explore his family's history and to honor the people who came before him.
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AARON HAMBURGER: I relate to my grandmother as a creative artist, and I just loved imagining how she might look at different materials and try to design them and what her design aesthetic might be in the same way that I, as a writer, think very carefully about the kind of language that I use, the kind of characterization and setting that I try to create with my words.
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GABRIEL J SANCHEZ, BYLINE: Hi. I'm Gabriel J. Sanchez. I'm a producer for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. And my favorite story this year was from back in January, when I joined a family that was at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. They were touring the Ireicho Project, which is an exhibit featuring a book filled with every name of every person sent to the U.S. internment camps during World War II. Two members of the family found their own names printed next to over 125,000 other interned Japanese Americans.
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FORD KURAMOTO: I'm glad that my family members who were present got a chance to see the book and the names and the exhibits so they have a better sense of what Frances and I went through, what my parents went through, my grandparents went through.
SANCHEZ: It was so nice because they were passing on their own family history and honoring thousands of others.
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MICHAEL LEVITT, BYLINE: Hi. My name is Michael Levitt, and the story that stuck the most with me this year is an interview I produced with Ari Shapiro and the iconic Indian chef, Raghavan Iyer. We booked Iyer to talk about the release of his new cookbook, but this conversation also happened at a time when he was very, very sick. And at the end of the interview, Ari asked him this.
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SHAPIRO: Well, this is a question that I've never asked a guest in 20 years of doing interviews. Have you decided what you want served at your funeral?
RAGHAVAN IYER: Yes, I believe so.
SHAPIRO: You have?
IYER: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: What's the menu?
IYER: Oh, gosh, all Bombay street foods, foods that I grew up with and foods of my childhood. Ari, you know, you're making me hungry.
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LEVITT: And I just found it so moving that despite the fact that he was nearing the end of his life, he was still so humorous and found time to laugh. Raghavan Iyer died about a month after this interview aired, and when we followed up, his publicist told us that at his memorial, his loved ones did in fact get to enjoy the delicious food that he loved so much.
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SHAPIRO: Some of our ALL THINGS CONSIDERED colleagues, highlighting their favorite stories of 2023. Our team also includes editors Ashley Brown, Christopher Intagliata, Justine Kenin, Kathryn Fox, Patrick Jarenwattananon, Jeanette Woods and Sarah Handel.
SUMMERS: And we have producers Alejandra Marquez Janse, Avery Keatley, Connor Donevan, Emma Klein, Erika Ryan, Fatma Tanis, Gurjit Kaur, Gustavo Contreras, Halisia Hubbard, Jason Fuller, Jonaki Mehta, Kai McNamee, Kat Lonsdorf, Karen Zamora, Lee Hale, Linah Mohammad, Matt Ozug, Manuela Lopez Restrepo, Mallory Yu, Marc Rivers, Megan Lim, Mia Venkat, Noah Caldwell, Tyler Bartlam, Vincent Acovino and Patrick Wood.
SHAPIRO: Our administrative assistant is Wendy Johnson and our technical directors are Stu Rushfield, Kwesi Lee and Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez.
SUMMERS: Adam Raney, Bridget Kelly, Courtney Dorning, Oliver Dearden and William Troop are our managers. Sami Yenigun is executive producer. And honestly, that is just a sliver of the folks who work to bring you this program every day.
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