 | By Bianca Giaever |
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 | | Last Friday’s special episode was recorded in this trailer.Bianca Giaever |
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The seed for last Friday’s afternoon episode was planted one month and 18 days ago, when I received an email from the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who lives in Utah. She said that she enjoyed a podcast that I had made, and her email ended: “It is brutally hot here — You can burn grasses with your stare. I have taken to Night Walking.” |
Listless and lonely in our pandemic bubbles, we decided to embark on a personal project together. From our separate locations, we agreed to go on a night walk every night for 16 nights in a row, from the new moon until the full moon. After the walk, we would write each other a letter, record ourselves reading it and send it. |
Each morning I woke up to a new letter — a gift. Terry told me about her cats (Winslow Homer and Issa), the opening of the datura flower and an ant carrying a blossom. For me, the night walks were about establishing a relationship to the natural world, and a capacity to observe it, as an adult. |
After the project ended, we didn’t speak for a couple of weeks and I flew to Los Angeles to visit friends. When I got here, the fires began. I stopped exercising, and a few days later I woke up in a panic, wondering: What were we actually losing in the fires? What would grow back and what wouldn’t? What is this anxiety I feel, and do others feel it too? |
It felt obvious to ask Terry for her thoughts. She’s written about the American West for decades, and she speaks about the land the way other people speak about their lovers. So I emailed her with a phrase that had popped into my mind: “an obituary to the land.” |
Terry responded to this prompt, as she had with the letters. Then I called her and started recording. |
That phone call lasted an hour. We talked about the smoldering skies, the importance of bearing witness, the hoarseness of our voices in the smoke and her relationship to the West. At our Daily team meeting, I pitched the idea of an afternoon episode that could provide some comfort, in the form of poetry, to our listeners. Terry gave me permission to use the audio from our phone call, and the next night we covered similar ground on a more official call. |
It turned out that almost all of the audio we used in the piece was from the first call. As the editor Dave Shaw said: “The first take was from the heart. The second was from the brain.” Through the night walks, we had built a world out of words. When I picked up the phone during this crisis, she was ready to meet me there. |
The night was young, by Daily team standards. It was 10:23 p.m. on Wednesday — meaning there was still a full seven hours before our publishing deadline. Our show on the Trump administration’s influence within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was researched, scripted and recorded. Michael even teased the episode on Twitter. |
Then Andy Mills saw the news. |
Reports were emerging that two police officers had been shot in Louisville, Ky., during a night of protests. The Kentucky attorney general had announced that no officers would be charged in the death of Breonna Taylor, while one former detective was charged with three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree” for his actions during the raid of Breonna’s apartment. So Andy suggested a new show: |
“As a newer producer on the team, I felt like Andy was asking me to sprout another arm,” the producer Stella Tan said. “But once the surprise wore off, the adrenaline set in.” |
So the producers called Rukmini Callimachi, who was on the ground covering the protests in Louisville, and scrambled to contact reporters, like John Eligon, who had been recording their coverage of the protests throughout the day. “Andy and our co-producer Luke Vander Ploeg are pros, and I had faith the team could pull it off with Rukmini’s expertise,” Stella said. |
These screen shots capture what happens when a wild news cycle meets our daily turnaround. So instead of our usual newsletter recap, we thought we’d give you a bit more insight into the making of our other shows this week: |
Monday: After hearing about the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday night, our team got on a weekend call. As we wondered how best to understand her legacy, the politics and import of the moment came flooding in as Republican leaders began issuing statements about her replacement. Ultimately, that meant we made two shows for one morning — one about her life, and one about what might happen on the bench after her death. Tuesday: Making polls interesting can be hard. And capturing the nuance behind the numbers? Even harder. This week, the producer Robert Jimison had the idea to call voters to hear the opinions, and life experiences, that informed their responses to The Times’s recent polling of swing states. And after the death of Justice Ginsburg, we wanted to ask voters directly if their vote had changed. When we asked our colleagues at The Upshot about respondents who said they could be contacted, they gave us a list of nearly a hundred. Listen in on our conversations with swing voters across the country. Wednesday: In covering the current battle over Justice Ginsburg’s open seat, “we wanted to understand the perspective of someone who was viewing this moment as an opportunity and a culmination of a decades-long effort,” our producer Rachel Quester said. So we called Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, who believes this moment will help her organization shape the future of abortion rights in America for years to come. Friday: Our series The Field returned today, with the familiar voices of Austin Mitchell, a producer, and Astead Herndon, who covers national politics, reporting from the ground in Minneapolis on whether police reform may become a defining issue in the election. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to get out in the field, pandemic style: |
 | | Austin en route to Minneapolis, face shield in check.Austin Mitchell |
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Introducing ‘Sway,’ a new podcast from Opinion |
 | | Nancy Pelosi.Damon Winter/The New York Times |
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This week, our colleagues in Opinion Audio kicked off a new podcast called “Sway,” hosted by Kara Swisher. It’s a podcast about power — who has it, who has been denied it and how it shapes our lives. |
In the premiere episode, Kara interviewed the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, about the ambitions — and limits — of her influence. “If the election were held today, we would win it all,” Ms. Pelosi notably told Kara. And on Thursday, Kara spoke with the California governor, Gavin Newsom, about how, 20 months into his term, he’s confronting the state’s dual crises of the pandemic and the wildfires. |
That’s it for The Daily newsletter. See you next week. |
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