In 2025, many of us are on social media – and lots of us are hunting for a new job.  

If that sounds like your situation, a University of Colorado researcher says be thoughtful about what you post online. Because what you do on Facebook or Threads or BlueSky can change your odds of landing that new gig. 

Jason Thatcher has been studying how hiring managers use social media to make decisions about candidates. And he found 60 percent of hiring managers decide who to interview or who to hire, in part, by checking out applicants’ social media accounts.  

So how do your Facebook posts about politics affect your chances of landing your dream job? And is there anything you can do to make your social media accounts more appealing to a hiring manager? 

Thatcher recently spoke with Brad Turner about what he’s observed. We’re listening back to that conversation today. 

You can also check out his previous In The NoCo interview on how to keep “technostress” from driving you crazy at work. 

* * * * *

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!
 
Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
 
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

Researcher Caitlin Clark has a job a lot of people would envy. Clark is a food scientist who oversees a new laboratory devoted to the study of chocolate – how it’s made, what makes it taste so good, and how to make new and better varieties of it. 

She and her team, based at the Colorado State University Food Innovation Center in Denver, work to dream up new confections that hopefully will end up on grocery store shelves or, maybe, in your box of Valentine’s Day chocolates.  

Clark talked with Erin O’Toole about her work in the new laboratory, and how her expertise in fermentation helped pave the way for her to become a chocolate researcher.

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

In February of 1942, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military removed thousands of Americans of Japanese descent from their homes. Most of them were full citizens who had been born and raised in the United States.   

Families had just a few days to get their affairs in order before reporting to relocation centers, mostly in Western states. Roosevelt’s order affected about 120,000 Japanese Americans, including 17,000 children.  

Writer and poet Brandon Shimoda, who is fourth-generation Japanese American, says the impact of incarceration didn’t end with the war.   

Shimoda, who lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College, is a descendant of several family members who were incarcerated in internment camps. He says his family’s stories helped inspire his newest book, The Afterlife Is Letting Go.  

He spoke with Erin O’Toole about the legacy of Japanese American incarceration, and why the impacts still resonate today. 

Brandon Shimoda will be part of a discussion on untold histories, this Saturday, Feb. 15 during Fort Collins Book Fest. Find the full lineup of Book Fest authors and events here. 

* * * * *
Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!
 
Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
 
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

In the late 1960s, a new movement of Black music grew out of the end of the civil rights era. Black artists declared their “Black power” and rocked the airwaves with the sound of funk.    

Funk music was more than just a genre with excellent grooves. It had deeper social and political meaning. Funk began as a reaction to tumultuous times and would ultimately lay the foundation for the hip0hop and R&B we listen to today. 

This is the argument in the new book by Reiland Rabaka, called The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics.  

Rabaka is a professor of African, African American, and Caribbean studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the founder and director of the Center for African American Studies at CU, and hosts a podcast called The Cause. 

He joined Erin O'Toole to talk about the importance of funk, and why it deserves respect for its singular impact on music and culture.    

 
* * * * *
Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!
 
Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
 
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

If you grew up in the 80s, you might remember a famous anti-drug public service announcement from TV. There was a frying pan, a sizzling egg and an ominous warning:  “This is your brain on drugs.” 

Josh Gowin, a researcher with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, remembers that ad quite well. Anti-drug PSA's like that one inspired him to study the effects of marijuana use on the brain and find out if that fried egg analogy is accurate.  

Gowin, a neuroscientist, looked at more than 1,000 scans of people’s brains. And he saw something notable in the brains of frequent cannabis users: a reduction in their working memory, which is the brain function that helps people keep track of what they’re doing.  

Gowin recently published his research. He joined Erin O’Toole to explain what his findings mean for cannabis users – and what kinds of tasks might suffer if someone’s working memory deteriorates.

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

A vaccine against weight gain could be on the horizon, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder. 

The research shows that a particular strain of bacteria known as M. vaccae could help prevent obesity by reducing inflammation.  

Chris Lowry is a professor of integrative physiology at CU and led the research. His study found that he could prevent mice from becoming overweight even when they were raised on the equivalent of an all-McDonald’s diet. When his team injected mice with M. vaccae, the junk food mice gained no more weight than mice with healthy diets.   

Lowry spoke with Erin O’Toole about this research, and why he thinks it’s a promising solution for weight gain.

Correction: An earlier version of this episode gave the incorrect last name for Chris Lowry’s colleague who helped with the research. The colleague’s name is Luke Desmond.

* * * * *
 
Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!
 
Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner
 
Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

Travelers making their way through Denver International Airport can experience a colorful, distinctive new art exhibit.  

The project, called “It’s Not What You Take, It’s What You Bring Back,” was created from 183 pieces of used luggage, suspended over a walkway in Concourse B. They’re painted in the vibrant colors of the Colorado sky – turquoise, baby blue, ruby red – and they form a shape resembling the infinity symbol.  

That painted baggage is part of a new installation by Colorado artist Thomas Evans, better known as Detour. He’s well known around Denver for his colorful murals of local sports legends like Denver Nuggets Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic.  

Detour talked with Erin O’Toole about what inspired his new art at DIA – and some of the stories behind the luggage. 

* * * * *

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner

Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

For many people, being stopped by police can produce a wave of anxiety. But that sense of stress and uncertainty is even worse for people with conditions like autism spectrum disorder, hearing loss, Tourette’s syndrome, or dementia.  

Boulder’s Police Department recently rolled out a new initiative called the Blue Envelope Program to help people with disabilities communicate when they encounter an officer.  

It allows a person to get an official blue envelope and fill it out with information that an officer might need to know to communicate with them. Then if they’re stopped by Boulder Police, they hand over the envelope. 

The program is used by agencies in a handful of states, but Boulder’s Blue Envelope Program is the first in Colorado. Alistair McNiven, Chief of Staff for Boulder Police, helped launch the program in January. He spoke with Erin O’Toole about why he thinks the envelopes may be a transformative tool for law enforcement. 

McNiven said people can email [email protected] to request an envelope or get one in person at the front desk of the Boulder Police Department.

* * * * *

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner

Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

If you visit the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge northwest of Denver, you see different types of wildlife, miles of hiking and biking trails and acres of rolling prairie.  

But you don’t see any trace of the astonishing history of what happened there during the Cold War: Rocky Flats was the site of a plant that made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until it was shuttered in the early 1990s.  

Officials removed later removed the buildings used in processing plutonium and cleaned up the area. And after a series of sometimes contentious public hearings, the wildlife refuge opened to the public in 2018. 

Filmmaker Jeff Gipe explores that history in a new documentary, Half-Life of Memory: America’s Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory. Gipe grew up in nearby Arvada. His father worked at the plant in the 1980s.  

Gipe says he made the film to remind people of the hazards buried beneath the wide-open spaces of the wildlife refuge, and to share the voices of workers whose lives were affected by the dangerous materials processed at Rocky Flats.  

Today we’re listening back to Gipe’s conversation with Erin O’Toole recorded ahead of the film’s premiere at the Denver Film Festival in November. 

The documentary is now available for streaming on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, and will be screened Feb. 23 at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival in Golden. Find the complete lineup and schedule for the festival here. 

You can watch the film’s trailer here.

* * * * *

Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner

Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.

You likely haven’t heard the word ‘bipartisanship’ used much lately when it comes to news out of Washington. Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress – and they’re making big policy moves. 

But Democratic Congressman Jason Crow still sees value in members of the two parties working together. Crow represents Colorado’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, which includes Aurora and parts of the Denver metro area.  

He has served for six years on the For Country Caucus – a group of Republican and Democratic military veterans in the House – and recently wrapped up a two-year term as the group’s co-chair.

Rep. Crow spoke with Erin O’Toole to share what he sees happening in Washington – and why he thinks the veterans caucus is an important group in Congress, particularly in this moment.   

Looking for more In The NoCo interviews with Colorado lawmakers? We recently spoke with Rep. Brittany Pettersen about her effort to change strict in-person voting rules for new parents in Congress.
And State Rep. Kyle Brown talked with us about how legislators are working to keep homeowner’s insurance viable in Colorado, despite the growing risk from natural disasters.

* * * * *
Sign up for the In The NoCo newsletter: Visit KUNC.org
Questions? Feedback? Story ideas? Email us: [email protected]
Like what you're hearing? Help more people discover In The NoCo by rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!

Host and Producer: Erin O'Toole
Producer: Ariel Lavery
Executive Producer: Brad Turner

Theme music by Robbie Reverb
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
In The NoCo is a production of KUNC News and Community Radio for Northern Colorado.