← Radiolab
Radiolab
The First Known Earthly Voice
00:38:07
What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity,” and it was a wide-ranging celebration of queerness in nature. It featured work by amazing writers like Ocean Vuong, Kristen Arnett, Carmen Maria Machado and adrienne maree brown, among many others. But one piece in particular struck Lulu as something that was really meant to be made into audio, an essay called “Key Changes,” by the writer Sabrina Imbler. If their name sounds familiar, it might be because they’ve been on the show before. In this episode, we bring you Sabrina’s essay – which takes us from the beginning of time, to a field of crickets, to a karaoke bar – read by the phenomenal actor Becca Blackwell, and scored by our director of sound design Dylan Keefe. Stay to the end for a special surprise … from Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls! Special th...
Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:01]
Lulu Miller
Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Heads up. Today's show does include a couple of curse words. So anyway, here we go.
- [00:31]
Becca Blackwell
Wait, you're listening.
- [00:32]
Sabrina Imbler
Okay.
- [00:33]
Becca Blackwell
All right.
- [00:34]
Lulu Miller
Okay.
- [00:36]
Becca Blackwell
All right.
- [00:37]
Lulu Miller
You're listening to Radio Lab Radio from wnyc. Okay, well, play this and then I don't think you're gonna be able to hear it. Lulu. That's fine.
- [00:56]
Sabrina Imbler
Honey.
- [00:56]
Lulu Miller
Harness the karaoke vibe. You got the proverbial sweaty beer in your hand.
- [01:01]
Becca Blackwell
Yes, I do. Yeah, I'm really feeling it.
- [01:06]
Lulu Miller
Hello. Hey, I am Lulu Miller, this is Radiolab, and we are warming up in the studio with an actor named Becca Blackwell.
- [01:13]
Becca Blackwell
Oh, yeah, I used to do a sound.
- [01:16]
Lulu Miller
I'm so. I'm so excited you're gonna read this for us.
- [01:19]
Becca Blackwell
I am, too. I'm just gonna.
- [01:20]
Lulu Miller
I was who we brought in to voice a truly gorgeous essay about so in the animal world, from crickets to whales to humans and karaoke bars, we count two. Okay. It's written by the author, Sabrina Imbler, who is a friend of the show. We've had them on before. They write about nature and feelings, basically, which is kind of my favorite genre. And this is a brand new essay of theirs just off the presses. And when I read it, it just screamed at me that it wanted to be freed from the page, that its words wanted to be free, filled with air and the spaces between them filled with music and natural sounds. And so we asked Becca, who we've worked with before, if they'd come in and read it. And we asked our sound designer, Dylan Keefe, if he would really bring it to life. And what they made is so beautiful. And so I am going to get out of the way and let you hear it.
- [02:17]
Becca Blackwell
All right, here we go. Key changes by Sabrina Imbler. The first sound in the universe is joylessly underwhelming white noise boring through the taffy stretch of nascent space. The Big Bang is not a bang, but a droning, robotic purr. Galaxies expanding from the hot throat of a cat. Things cool, atoms whirl into being. Then light scattering in the cosmic fog. Gas clumps to form the first stars, whose huddled masses in turn form the first galaxies. A storm of gas and dust collapses, perhaps T boned by a nearby supernova skidding and spinning into a sun, our sun. All of this cacophony, the universe ringing like a cosmic bell, would be brutal for anyone around to hear it. But there is no one. Not yet. Life remains entirely uninvented. And when it finally appears likely around 700 million years later, ears remain entirely uninvented too. So no one hears the torrent of the first oceans, the slick of the first big freeze, the jostling of the continents. Life pleats becomes multicellular. Sponges drink in the oce. Fungi unfurl. Worms slither in the murk. Eventually, the first plants extrude from land and insects skitter. The seedlings swell skyward, thundering into forests. Insects sprout wings and join them. This living does not happen silently. Bodies scraping through brush, whirring of wings, exoskeletons crunched by jaws. But these noises are unintentional. They're not meant for anyone. This changes 270 million years ago, when an insect akin to a cricket scrapes one ornamented wing over another. Veins stiffen like corduroy, creating a rasp. The rasp does not sound like a song or even a note. You might mistake it for one rock scruffing against another. But however tuneless the rasp of Permostridulus brogniardi became what biologist David George Haskell call the first known earthly voice, there is no single, agreed upon definition of animal song. Some biologists reserve the label for the steepled melodies of birds and tapestries of whale song. Others apply it more generously to any creature that calls out again and again toward others of its kind. Hermostridulus coarse, guttural call lacked the complex structure of modern cricket songs, but it used the same mechanism. So you might agree that the moment hundreds of millions of years ago when a rasp crackled out of two wings and bellowed out into the insect's presence for some unknown escaping a predator, threatening a foe, finding a mate, marked Permost stridulus as the planet's first singer. The fact that I have never been a skilled singer has never, never kept me from karaoke. In adolescence, I was a part time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of spotlight. I began singing in earnest after college, in matchbox rooms, with friends, co workers and strangers, in bars where we all thrummed against one another. My voice is loud and clear, but also flat and often tone deaf. I could never command a room as well as a talented singer, a fact I was reminded of whenever I karaoke with certain friends. When they sang, the rooms fell silent. I envied this attention, how it felt alchemic, sublimating into self worth. I too wanted to conjure delight and affection in this way. I suppose I am no different from any other creature. The evolutionary basis of any animal song is a bid for a mate. Karaoke is famously an outlet for rage, the rare public place where screaming will be met with applause. But in my experience, the night always ends with love songs. A thinning, bleary crowd, some too many drinks deep, listening to a ballad of the unrequited. In my 20s, my favorite karaoke ballad was Hinder's Lips of an Angel, a grungy confession sung by a man to his ex girlfriend over a whispered phone call. Whispered because his new girl's in the next room. Lips is so wretchedly self serious in its generic valorization of cheating that it is transmuted almost endearingly into camp. I listened to the song in middle school on some torrented copy of now that's what I Call Music. I was not necessarily drawn to the lyrics, can't cheat on your girlfriend if you don't have one, but rather its naked emotional core. It's a song about yearning, which was then my favorite pastime. I yearned for everything a crush, adulthood, a body and self I could love more. My friends and I loved to karaoke, to the pop divas we grew up blasting from our boomboxes. But the first time I heard one of them sing Lips of an Angel, a song I had not consciously listened to in nearly a decade, I felt a swell of my old adolescent kinship. I started my own surreptitious relationship with it, singing it in rooms and bars full of strangers until it felt as inextricable from my identity as my haircut. I grew to relish the way some people often men reacted to my performance, nodding along to the melancholic opening chords before surprise plastered their faces when they saw who held the mic. At the risk of being reductive, lips of an angel is a boy song, not a girl song. When I first began to sing, my face soft and eyebrows painted on, I felt a certain Frisian, as if just for this moment I was stepping into another body. As an alto close to a contralto, I had always felt more comfortable singing songs written for men. I wonder now if my singing voice was the first plane on which I would claim to have passed, even briefly, as something other than a woman. Each time I sang Lips, I practiced embodying this man the self defeating, aspirational cheater, too afraid to leave a relationship that rendered him dispassionate. During the chorus, I gripped the sweaty neck of my beer and held it like a candle. But girl, you make it hard to be faithful. During the guitar solo, I thrashed my head along. I spat gravel from my throat and sang not to the back of the room, but beyond it. The morning after, I'd wake up without a voice. We never learn if the singer gains the courage to go back to his ex, but it seems unlikely that he moves beyond his comfortable stasis. The song ends with the same line that opens it. Honey, why you calling me so late? As a middle schooler, I never questioned the idea that his ex's call came too late to act on. I was obsessed with the idea that my life had already foreclosed certain possibilities, such as becoming a figure skater or speaking Mandarin. Only when I got older would I learn that it is never really too late for anything. Humans, birds and whales learn their songs over the course of their lives. They practice, learn through mistakes, and even compose new songs together. But crickets, who live only a few months and hatch long after their parents generation has perished, cannot learn their songs from elders. Rather, each species is born with its own signature song. The composition is genetically encoded and manifests in the specific ridges of the male's wings. Even if a cricket is raised in total isolation, having never met another of its kind, he will know how to sing his own particular song, at least after a few raspy attempts. As soon as the cricket known as the handsome trig molts into an adult, he can rub one wing over another and emit his characteristic rattling trill. A cricket's song is a beacon of connection to to his kind. If it were ever lost, he may be doomed to wander alone in the reeds.
- [13:42]
Lulu Miller
Isn't that fucking cool?
- [13:44]
Becca Blackwell
I know that he just totally is like. He just wakes up and he's like, I know my song.
- [13:48]
Lulu Miller
I know my song. I don't learn it. It's like this outlier where it's just like you just wake up with your song.
- [13:53]
Becca Blackwell
I know.
- [13:54]
Lulu Miller
As you were.
- [13:54]
Becca Blackwell
No, it's so true.
- [13:55]
Lulu Miller
Also, can I start calling people like.
- [13:57]
Becca Blackwell
You'Re a handsome trig?
- [14:00]
Lulu Miller
What A handsome trig. Okay, sorry. I know.
- [14:02]
Becca Blackwell
They're gonna be like a mathematical equation.
- [14:05]
Lulu Miller
So wild. Okay, keep going as you work.
- [14:08]
Becca Blackwell
Thank you. Many crickets look identical, at least to us. Dark almonds with short wings and elbowed legs. But in the 1950s, researchers trudging into fields with tape recorders discovered many more cricket species than they had identified by eye. Although the first songs of early crickets, like the Permastridalis, were little more than rasps, modern species has since developed a vast repertoire of songs that feature chirps, trills, rattles and lisps. Carolina ground crickets make an impatient sloping trill that suddenly catches, as if their wings needed to take a breath. A tinkling ground cricket emits a quick hush. Series of cheeps. Like a bird wrapped inside a blanket, the confused ground cricket buzzes two short syllables again and again, raised like a question. Some songs, especially those of tree crickets, which often have wings translucent as a sugar crust, sound more beautiful than others. This beauty is human bias. The principles of cricket aesthetics remain a mystery to us and is also the afterglow of evolution. After all, the first cricket song emerged as a mutation. An insect born with an unusually craggy wing rubbed it against the other to produce a sound so soft that it was only perceptible from nearby, perhaps to a mate. Scientists suspect all the songs in a modern cricket's repertoire arose from this ancient intimacy. They needed to whisper before they could wail. But when they wailed, it was the males who became the first beacons of sound. Given the animal kingdom's penchant for male flamboyance, perhaps this is unsurprising. Only males make themselves vulnerable with song screeching out their presence both to potential lovers and potential predators. To protect themselves, males often hide while they sing. Nestled within clumps of grass and under rocks and leaves, they have no choice but to sing, even if it means opening themselves up to doom. I didn't start taking testosterone because I wanted to become a man. Rather, I coveted certain manly flourishes. A wispy mustache, flesh desperate to become muscle. A new mystery of a face. What I wanted most of all was a deeper voice, one that could drop into the abyss and skim the seafloor. As testosterone tilts your larynx and thickens your vocal cords, your voice sinks, stretches and breaks. Mine skipped like a broken record. It fell off cliffs in conversation, only to reappear moments later. It became a shadow I could not pin down. Although I knew others found this pubescence embarrassing, I felt thrilled by the discomfort. I could hardly blame my body transiting between one voice and another like a blinking satellite, Destination unknown. Of course, there would be blips along the way. But eventually I realized I had lost my urge to karaoke. If speaking had become a gamble, singing was an impossible hazard. I could no longer handle my old songs. Notes that my voice once wrapped around now dangled out of reach. When I did hit the right notes, a frog stuck in my throat. I ribbeted. I croaked. I tried switching octaves and often swung too deep. Still, I laughed it off. In the grand scheme of things, it was no big deal. It wasn't like I traded some perfect voice for an imperfect one. I mostly felt impatient, excited for the point when my new voice would feel worn in and familiar. I hardly thought about the notes I had lost, instead fixating on the new, deeper ones yet to emerge. Just how low could I go? No, I never miss my old voice, but I miss the way I used to feel singing Lips of an angel, punching each note with confidence, a beer swinging from my hand. I had stopped singing it a few years into testosterone. It's true that the song had become more difficult. It's true that one night at a karaoke work party, I told my co workers that I had left it behind. But I didn't admit to myself until now, as I write this, that I hadn't quit Lips of an angel as much as I had quit karaoke. In my most honest understanding, karaoke became hardest not when I could no longer sing, but when I could no longer drink. I had a problem, like many others have a problem not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough that it had run slipshod through my relationships, my health, and my ability to see myself surviving into old age. I had known this for years, but the only person I felt accountable to was myself. I shrugged off friends and lovers who had pulled me aside to share their fears. I desperately wanted to believe I was someone in control of their life, and quitting drinking felt like an admission that I was not. So I kept drinking and drinking and drinking. But this is the terrifying, miraculous thing about transitioning. Once you imagine a body that might bring you happiness instead of loathing, and once you imagine a version of yourself with less reason to hide, you might dare to imagine a more beautiful life. After I'd been on testosterone for a little more than a year, I found myself having more days in which I wished for nothing more than to be present in my body. I realized that quitting would be, in essence, to value my own life and wish myself into the future. So I stopped. But once I did, I felt far too exposed to strain for those old highs. At karaoke, I had never been more aware of myself, my body, my newly raw voice. The dark rooms and bars had lost their sultry twinkling. They made me remember a past self that was freer to abandon themselves into gauzy oblivion, the loss of the selves with nothing to be mourned. I was glad to have arrived on the other side. But I was too freshly molted, my shell soft and nerve endings still tingling. So in the years following, even as my changed voice began to grow roots, I stayed home.
- [21:22]
Lulu Miller
When we come back, we'll see what happens when a song is lost, not just for Sabrina, but for a whole species.
- [21:41]
Becca Blackwell
This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Senator Alyssa Slotkin on what the Democrats misunderstand about Trump voters in Michigan in general.
- [21:49]
Lulu Miller
If you're not talking about the economy, you are literally having half a conversation. And I've had someone say to me, like, I can't pay for my kid to go to summer camp with Democracy.
- [21:59]
Becca Blackwell
Michigan's Alyssa Slotkin on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:14]
Lulu Miller
This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Today we are dedicating the whole episode to an essay I read and adored called Key Changes all about song in the Animal world and beyond. It's by Sabrina Imbler, and it is being read to us by the actor Becca Blackwell.
- [22:32]
Becca Blackwell
Almost a year after I stopped drinking, I learned about a population of crickets in Kauai. They were Pacific field crickets, Teleogrilis oceanicus, and their song was round, bright and sweet, four loud chirps culminating in a husky trill. Several decades ago, a biologist named Marlene Zook discovered that the males but suddenly stopped singing. Zuk started studying the crickets in the 1990s, when the insects would bleat together. But one year into the new millennium, she heard only a single male call out in the entire field season, an orchestra replaced by a soloist. The silence might suggest that the crickets themselves had vanished, or at least absconded. But when Zook and her team returned to Kauai in 2003, they found crickets abounding in the fields. The males still went through all the motions, scraping mute wings together, but their wings had slickened rid of the corrugations that once allowed them to sing. The culprit was a mustard colored fly, Ormia orchitrya, only slightly larger than a pea. The fly cannot attack the cricket like a typical hunter. Instead, it is a parasitoid. The fly listens for the cricket's song with its highly specialized eardrums, which waggle like a teeter totter to triangulate the insect's location. Then the fly unloads A heap of maggots atop the cricket's back. Babies that burrow through the exoskeleton and curl up inside the cricket as if its body were a womb. The maggots develop inside this walking, singing incubator, and when they hatch, they erupt out of the body and eat their way out. In singing their old song, the male crickets had unknowingly condemned themselves to a gruesome death. The crickets had lost their song and might now survive into the future. For generations, the mute flat wings hopped around the island, freed from the flies but scarcely able to find mates. But in 2018, biologist Robin Tingatella overheard a population of Pacific field crickets in Hawaii singing a new song. It sounded nothing like the species signature chirping, but rather like a cat's low, throaty purr. To the careful ears of female crickets, these calls are crude imitations of the old one. The alchemy of the first, crafted by eons of evolution, remain lost. But these new songs, however coarse and tuneless, may be the cricket's ticket to the future. When I wrote about the Hawaiian crickets from my day job, I recognized what seemed like parallels between us. We were creatures who had traded some original ability to sing for something else. Survival and a newfound masculinity. But I am not so obtuse as to conflate our situations. I had no life threatening predators around to silence me, no flies dumping a litter of maggots on my back to remodel my body into a nightmarish womb. Thinking about our situation side by side only reminded me of my luck. I had simply fallen a little out of love with karaoke. What once had been an outlet for rage, love and desire had now become a site of discomfort, even fear. It was no longer a place I could go to lose myself. In fact, I was running out of places to lose myself. Perhaps this was the point of stopping drinking. But it did not halt my yearning for times when I could step into a karaoke room, pick up a mic and become someone else for a few minutes. Now I'm much more myself. This is sometimes a relief, sometimes a restriction. When I used to sing Lips of an angel at karaoke, I often found myself reading the lyrics off a simple blue screen. But the fancier bars would play the actual music video. It opens with Austin John Winkler, the former lead singer of Hinder, a quasi tatted white guy with the dark stringy hair, talking to his old girl on the phone as his new girls in the next room. The video, like the song is quite literal. When I duetted lips with the video, I mirrored Winkler's affect as I wailed, holding up my own quasi tatted arms, nodding my own head of dark stringy hair. When I revisited the music video for this piece, I came across an interview with Winkler where he talked about reaching three years of sobriety after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure. He talked about addiction, a string of stints in rehab, and saying goodbye to the person he was. He talked about coming back from the other side, going to therapy, picking up a microphone again, and feeling alive. I was struck stupidly by how this man I'd only ever seen lip syncing in a cinematically jaundiced music video about the romance of cheating on your girlfriend was a real person trying to overcome something unimaginable. Something I didn't realize before quitting drinking is that sobriety is not a single decision, but an ongoing one. I didn't realize that every sober person I know has achieved something close to a miracle by choosing survival. I didn't realize how many of the sober people I know are also trans. In my early days of testosterone karaoke, I listened to a podcast about a trans singer who had also recently started testosterone. He talked about how he always feared the hormones would ruin his ability to sing. Instead, he feared killing his sweet old voice. This framing made me bristle, as does anything that frames transition in the language of death. Even after my worst vocal cracks, I never felt any grief over a voice that was becoming less accessible, less familiar. I didn't see myself as killing anything. Puberty, even delayed, is the promise of more life. Instead, I found a better resource. I called my friend Siobhan, a singer early in her own transition, and she coached me through the cracks. She told me to drop the song an octave down, to switch between octaves in a single song. She told me, when in doubt, I could always sing Elvis. But I wonder if I'm being unfair to that singer. Maybe I never thought of my own voice as something I could lose because I could never sing in the first place. The further I move in my medical transition, a journey that has not been without some regret, the more it has made me rethink what loss means and if it is always something to be mourned. Loss accompanies life in any body, trans or not. Our bodies are always in a state of change, strengthening, crumbling, breaking down, and repairing themselves in thousands of ways. Part of the wonder of medical transition is that you know to expect these changes, and yet each manages to astonish you in its particulars it is a gift to wait with bated breath for your body, which seems so solid and immutable, to surprise you, to constantly become strange to yourself, re encountering the wild slicken animal of yourself each day. And I am even more grateful to be wholly present so that I can experience these changes in their full vibrance. My voice is still changing, still dropping, still breaking. Singing remains a work in progress, but speaking has become a pleasure. Recently, when my partner heard my voicemail recording from several years ago, they thought they'd gotten the wrong number. I listened to the recording and felt no pang of remembrance, only shock. Surely there was a mistake. Could that really have been me? That old voice was beautiful in its own way. One time a girl from college referred to me as that bitch with the this American life voice. An insult come compliment that I carried with me like a badge of honor, proof that I had cleared some objective standard of beauty. But isn't survival more astonishing than beauty, especially with someone else's conception of it? Hormones and vocal training may not win you any voice you want, but they'll get you much closer than doing nothing at all. Perhaps this is the real joy of karaoke. Not hitting all the notes or nailing a vocal run, but giving yourself permission to be another person, another voice, just for the night. In these rooms, I now workshop future versions of myself. I sing low, I swagger. I'm learning how to tame a voice that is still unfamiliar, yet inconceivably my own. I've started singing pop songs in octave down. Kylie Minogue, if she were a baritone that I have always avoided, scared off by a feminine register that seemed out of reach. I still go back, sometimes the only person in the room without a drink in hand. Even if I only manage to sway in the back of a room as someone else wails into the mic, I'll sing along, my voice breaking, croaking. And if the song is good enough, screaming, I sing until at the end of the night, I lose my voice. But now I trust it to return. Turn.
- [33:04]
Lulu Miller
Author Sabrina Imbler.
- [33:09]
Sabrina Imbler
Can I just say I love. I loved your essay so much. I thought it was incredible.
- [33:15]
Lulu Miller
All right, now, before we end for real, I have just gotta play one last, very special treat for you because Sabrina initially wrote that essay for a special issue of Orion magazine, all about queer ecology that I guest edited. And to celebrate the launch, we had this zoom in event where we brought Sabrina into conversation with this other voice you are hearing.
- [33:37]
Sabrina Imbler
Nature's music has been the most grounding thing for me.
- [33:41]
Lulu Miller
Amy Ray of The Indigo Girls. And we talked a lot about song. Animals sing because they need to find each other. And at one point, Amy Ray started talking about this bird she hears singing.
- [33:54]
Sabrina Imbler
At night called Chuck Will's widow. This time of year, they call all night long, which is kind of a lot of times I just can't sleep. So what I do is, you know, I'll play guitar or I'll go outside and I'll walk around the woods and I'll sing.
- [34:08]
Becca Blackwell
And.
- [34:09]
Sabrina Imbler
And I just. I wrote a song about it as a metaphor for, like, my own loneliness.
- [34:13]
Lulu Miller
And so I had to ask her if she would sing it for us.
- [34:17]
Sabrina Imbler
God, I'm not good at singing on zoom. I'll just put a disclaimer in there.
- [34:21]
Lulu Miller
We appreciate the adventure.
- [34:24]
Sabrina Imbler
Okay. Even a sad song. Let me start over. Even a sad song is better than no song at all. First, Chuck Will's widow of a season. I just figured out that lonely bird's reason. Sleeping all day Singing the same song all night long. Hope Will is gone. The sadness is defeating that aching in your heart. Surely there's repeating but it takes all day to gather up the strength to sing this song. I get lost Sad and lonely. So I count the stars above me And I sing when I should be sleeping. Cause that's when the world hears my weeping. Never spit shooting they can't get enough Baby, I'm just Billy Goats gruff Round midnight it'll get tough when it gets quiet it's just some old tin cans and a buckshotgun. I should be flying down the road in the warming sun. Mark my motorcycle when the day is done and say good night. I get lost, sad and lonely. So I count the stars above me And I sing when I should be sleeping. Cause that's when the world. Here's my weeping. Even a sad song Better than no song at all. Lose your will, Lose your destination. Voices in your head Keeping you guessing it all all go south Count it as a blessing that's where you are. Yeah, that's where that's where you are. All right, well, I messed a couple chords up, but I got it out.
- [36:59]
Lulu Miller
That was so great. Thank you.
- [37:02]
Sabrina Imbler
Thanks. Thanks.
- [37:05]
Lulu Miller
And that'll do it for today. Big thanks to Amy Rae. Big thanks to Sabrina. This episode was Produced by Annie McEwan and Pat Walters with original sound design and scoring by Dylan Keefe. It was fact checked by Kim Schmidt, edited by Taja Eason and voiced by the spectacular Becca Blackwell. Special thanks to Dr. J. Gallagher for his cricket sounds. Chirp, chirp. If you would like to check out that issue of Orion magazine if you it's called Queer Planet and you can go to orion.org and type in the code Radiolab when you subscribe for a 20% discount. All right, that's all. Peace be unto you night birds, morning birds, songbirds, and everything in between. Catch you next week.
- [37:59]
Becca Blackwell
Hi, I'm Keegan and I'm from Longmont, Colorado, and here are the staff credits.
- [38:04]
Lulu Miller
Radiolab was created by Jad Abumra and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co hosts.
- [38:10]
Becca Blackwell
Dylan Keith is our director of Sound design.
- [38:12]
Lulu Miller
Staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz, Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanan Sambandhan, Matt Kielty.
- [38:24]
Becca Blackwell
Annie McKeown, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Sarah.
- [38:27]
Lulu Miller
Sandbach, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.
- [38:31]
Becca Blackwell
Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily.
- [38:33]
Lulu Miller
Greger, and Natalie Middleton.
- [38:37]
Becca Blackwell
Hi, my name's Diana and I'm calling from Madrid, Spain. Leadership support for Radiolabs science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Science Sandbox, a Simons foundation initiative.
- [38:50]
Lulu Miller
And the John Templeton Foundation.
- [38:52]
Becca Blackwell
Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody award and a DuPont Columbia Award, among others. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.