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This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. To say that Washington State University Cougars have school spirit is a wild understatement, and if you have any in your life, you know they don't hesitate to remind you. Now, Cameron McCoy and many other members of Coug nation have reached a significant milestone in letting their flags fly. Actual flags. Cameron and his accomplices in the Ol' Crimson Booster Club have made it their business to get a Coug to a different city each week during

This episode originally aired on December 16, 2017. This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "One of Many" ... the tension between standing out and fitting in. Host Gabriel Spitzer heads to St. Francis of Assisi school in Burien to talk to kids about how they stand out when they have to wear uniforms. We meet a man who battled addiction and landed a felony conviction, only to become a lawyer after his sentence was over. Jennifer Wing introduces us to a group of women with HIV , who have found

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. At first glance it may seem like the students at St. Francis of Assisi school in Burien are dressed pretty much alike: white collar shirts, red plaid skirts for the girls, navy blue pants or shorts for the boys. But look closer, and you’ll see that many of them have brought a little something special to their outfits. “I wear a gold watch,” says Gino Morella. “I have white Adidas superstars that I’ve worn all year,” says Gabriel Hamilton. “I tend

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. To say that Washington State University Cougars have school spirit is a wild understatement, and if you have any in your life, you know they don't hesitate to remind you. Now, Cameron McCoy and many other members of Coug nation have reached a significant milestone in letting their flags fly. Actual flags. Cameron and his accomplices in the Ol' Crimson Booster Club have made it their business to get a Coug to a different city each week during

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. Sound Effect producer Kevin Kniestedt shared this essay. My earliest memory of watching the Seahawks goes back to when I was probably three or four. I remember sitting in the basement with my dad, with the game on TV, and hearing the announcer saying “there is a penalty flag down.” Since I had no understanding of the game, I imagined that somewhere in that stadium, there was a person standing by a flag pole, lowering and raising a flag that said

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. Christopher Poulos is the head of the Washington Statewide Reentry Council, dedicated to helping those who have been through the criminal justice system. It’s the kind of job that he is uniquely qualified for. As a teenager, Poulos struggled with severe substance abuse, leading him into homelessness and then incarceration. He saw the problems of the justice system firsthand, especially how it disenfranchised the poor and people of color. This

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. When Nicole Price was 25 years old, life was not going the way she had planned. She was addicted to meth, she had a hard time holding down a job and then a test revealed she was HIV positive. “I was afraid of dying. I was afraid of never being able to have kids, of never being able to get married. My family not loving me anymore. It was a really scary time,” remembers Price.

This story originally aired on December 16, 2017. Any parent of more than one child will tell you that they have no favorites. They will tell you that the well from which love is drawn has no bottom. This is what Donald Vass would say about books. "I sense a type of universal voice coming from all of these books. And often when I open a book and my eyes will land upon a set of words or a sentence, a passage that will speak to me. And sometimes, that will speak to me at a moment when I very much

When Caroline Garry first noticed she had a problem with perfection, she was in her bedroom closet scrubbing down a pair of white leather Nikes. Caroline was in seventh grade, and like a lot of kids she had gotten attached to a new pair of school shoes. But unlike a lot of kids, Caroline would come home from school every single day and clean them. In hiding. Whether they were dirty or not. "I just felt this compulsion. I needed to." After she got her first car, Caroline began to realize her

This story originally aired on November 4, 2017. The population of Concrete, Washington in 1938 was about 1,000 people. But one October evening that year, while a famous radio broadcast was frightening a good portion of the population across the country, things in Concrete got even stranger. When Orson Wells broadcast his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, you might not have realized it was a radio play, not actual terrifying news