The Experiment

Host Julia Longoria is back with a new season of More Perfect, from WNYC Studios.

We’re taught the Supreme Court was designed to be above the fray of politics. But at a time when partisanship seeps into every pore of American life, are the nine justices living up to that promise? More Perfect is a guide to the current moment on the Court. The show brings the highest court of the land down to earth, telling the human dramas at the Court that shape so many aspects of American life — from our religious freedom to our artistic expression, from our reproductive choices to our voice in democracy.

In the season trailer, Julia returns to the place where she first fell in love with SCOTUS: high school.

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Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund.

Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook @moreperfectpodcast, and Twitter @moreperfect.

The Experiment is coming to an end. For our final episode, we contemplate our strange, sometimes beautiful, often frustrating country. We go back to some of the people we met and fell in love with while making the show, and ask them how their version of the American experiment is going.

A transcript of this episode is available. 

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Alyssa Edes, Gabrielle Berbey, Julia Longoria, and Tracie Hunt, with editing by Michael May and Emily Botein. Fact-check by Sam Fentress. Sound design by David Herman. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Music by Water Feature (“Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)”), Naran Ratan (“Forever time Journeys”), H Hunt (“C U Soon”), Parish Council (“Heatherside Stores” and “Durdle Door”), and Ob (“Ghyll”), provided by Tasty Morsels.

In The Atlantic’s new series How To Start Over, Olga Khazan takes listeners on a journey of reinvention. How To Start Over is your guide to navigating life’s gray areas, whether knowing it’s time to make a career switch, repairing strained family ties, or forging new connections in a post-pandemic world.  

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

Deep in Yellowstone National Park, there’s a glitch in the U.S. Constitution where, technically, you could get away with murder. Lawmakers didn’t seem interested in fixing the problem until Mike Belderrain stumbled into the “Zone of Death” while hunting the biggest elk of his life. In a world with so many preventable deaths, The Experiment documents one attempt to avert disaster.

This episode of The Experiment originally ran on February 4, 2021.

A transcript of this episode is available.

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast or write to us at [email protected]. 

This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and Alvin Melathe, with editing by Katherine Wells and sound design by David Herman.

Music by Water Feature (“In a Semicircle or a Half-Moon”), R McCarthy (“Big Game,” “She’s a Gift Giver, She’s a Giver of Gifts,” and “Melodi 2”), Ob (“Ell” and “Ere”), Parish Council (“Mopping”), H Hunt (“11e”), Column (“Quiet Song”), and Bwengo (“Première Mosrel”); catalog by Tasty Morsels. Additional audio from Montana State University Library’s Acoustic Atlas, the National Park Service’s Sound Library, C. J. Box, CNBC, C-SPAN, Vox, NPR’s All Things Considered, Idaho News 6, @ItsKeyes, and C-SPAN’s Book TV.

In June 1964, at the height of the civil-rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan burned a Black Methodist church to the ground in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and murdered three civil-rights workers in cold blood. This crime became one of the most notorious of its era, shocking the nation on the eve of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and later inspiring a Hollywood blockbuster: Mississippi Burning.

But when the reporter Ko Bragg started questioning how this history is being preserved in Philadelphia, she was confronted with a town that would much rather forget its violent past. Bragg finds a few Black residents taking it upon themselves to keep the story of this crime alive, and she asks where the burden of safeguarding history should lie. 

A transcript of this episode is available.

Further reading: “Who Will Remember the Mississippi Murders?”

 Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode of The Experiment was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, with help from Salman Ahad Khan. Editing by Michael May and Julia Longoria. Reporting by Ko Bragg. Fact-check by Naomi Sharp. Sound design by Hannis Brown with additional engineering by Jennifer Munson. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Music by Naran Ratan (“East of Somewhere Else”) provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by Hannis Brown. Additional audio from Iowa PBS, HelmerReenberg, AP Archive, MGM, CBS Evening News, NBC News, C-SPAN.

At 19 years old, Aséna Tahir Izgil feels wise beyond her years. She is Uyghur, an ethnic minority persecuted in China, and few of her people have escaped to bear witness. After narrowly securing refuge in the United States, Aséna’s now tasked with adjusting to life in a new country and fitting in with her teenage peers. 

This week on The Experiment, Aséna shares her family’s story of fleeing to the U.S., navigating newfound freedom, and raising her baby brother away from the shadows of a genocide. 

This episode’s guests include Aséna Tahir Izgil and her father, Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur poet and author.

This episode of The Experiment originally ran on August 19, 2021.

A transcript of this episode is available.

Further reading: “One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps,” “Saving Uighur Culture From Genocide,” “‘I Never Thought China Could Ever Be This Dark,’” “China’s Xinjiang Policy: Less About Births, More About Control”

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Julia Longoria, with help from Gabrielle Berbey and editing by Katherine Wells and Emily Botein. Fact-check by Yvonne Rolzhausen. Sound design by David Herman, with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Translations by Joshua L. Freeman.

Music by Keyboard (“Over the Moon,” “Mu,” “Water Decanter,” and “World View”), Laundry (“Lawn Feeling”), Water Feature (“Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)” and “Ancient Morsel”), Parish Council (“New Apt.”), and H Hunt (“C U Soon), provided by Tasty Morsels.

A translation of Tahir Hamut Izgil’s poem “Aséna” is presented below. 

Aséna

By Tahir Hamut Izgil

Translation by Joshua L. Freeman

A piece of my flesh

torn away.

A piece of my bone

broken off.

A piece of my soul

remade.

A piece of my thought

set free.

In her thin hands

the lines of time grow long.

In her black eyes

float the truths of stone tablets.

Round her slender neck

a dusky hair lies knotted.

On her dark skin

the map of fruit is drawn.

She

is a raindrop on my cheek, translucent

as the future I can’t see.

She

is a knot that need not to be untied

like the formula my blood traced from the sky,

an omen trickling from history.

She

kisses the stone on my grave

that holds down my corpse

and entrusts me to it.

She

is a luckless spell

who made me a creator

and carried on my creation.

She is my daughter.

Almost 30 years ago, a fed-up Manhattan-family-court judge named Judith Sheindlin was sitting in her chambers when she got a call from a couple of television producers. They pitched her the idea for a TV show with Judy at its center. 

The result was Judge Judy, one of the most popular and influential television series ever made. Over its decades-long run, it beat out The Oprah Winfrey Show in ratings, led to the explosion of court TV, and influenced how large swaths of Americans think about crime and justice. 

The Experiment’s Peter Bresnan has been watching Judge Judy with his mom ever since he was a kid. But recently, he began to wonder how the show managed to become such a force in American culture, and what impact it’s had on the thousands of litigants who stood before Judy’s TV bench. What he found was a strange story about what happens when the line between law and entertainment starts to blur. 

A transcript of this episode is available.

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode of The Experiment was produced by Peter Bresnan with help from Salman Ahad Khan. Editing by Jenny Lawton, Julia Longoria, Emily Botein, and Michael May. Fact-check by Will Gordon. Sound design by Joe Plourde with additional engineering by Jen Munson. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Music by Naran Ratan (“East of Somewhere Else”), Ob (“Wold”), R McCarthy (“Big Game” and “Contemplation at Lon Lon”), Parish Council (“P Lachaise,” “Walled Garden 1,” and “New Apt.”), and Column (“A Year in Your Garden” and “Sensuela”) provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by Alex Overington. Additional audio from Judge Judy, CBS News, The People's Court, NBC4 News, ABC News, AP Archive, and The Roseanne Show.

The Experiment introduces WNYC colleague Nancy Solomon's new podcast: Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery

New Jersey politics is not for the faint of heart. But the brutal killing of John and Joyce Sheridan, a prominent couple with personal ties to three governors, shocks even the most cynical operatives. The mystery surrounding the crime sends their son on a quest for truth. Dead End is a story of crime and corruption at the highest levels of society in the Garden State.

There’s a common story about abortion in this country, that people have only two options to intentionally end a pregnancy: the clinic or the coat hanger. They can choose the safe route that’s protected by Roe v. Wade—a doctor in a legal clinic—or, if Roe is overturned, endure a dangerous back-alley abortion, symbolized by the coat hanger. But a close look at the history of abortion in this country shows that there’s much more to this story. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case that could overturn Roe v Wade in June, activists are once again preparing to take abortion into their own hands.

Reporter Jessica Bruder explores the abortion underground to learn about the movement’s origins, and reveals how activists today are mobilizing around effective and medically safe abortion methods that can be done at home. 

A transcript of this episode is available.

Further reading: “A Covert Network of Activists Is Preparing for the End of Roe”

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Alyssa Edes, with help from Salman Ahad Khan. Editing by Michael May and Julia Longoria. Reporting by Jessica Bruder. Fact-check by Michelle Ciarrocca. Sound design by Joe Plourde. Engineering by Jen Munson. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Music by R McCarthy (“Fine”), Ob (“Ere”), Parish Council (“Leaving the TV on at Night” and “Mopping”), Laurie Bird (“Detail Wash” and “Jussa Trip”), Safa Park (“Loose Yams”), Ceefax (“Dissolving Skull”), and Column (“｢The Art of Fun｣ (Raj)”), provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by Joe Plourde. Additional audio from CBS, Hope 2020 (Clip 1 and Clip 2), NBC News (Clip 1 and Clip 2), KCRG, WLKY, and KXAN.

The national-park system has been touted as “America’s best idea.” David Treuer, an Ojibwe historian and the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present, says we can make that idea even better—by giving national parks back to Native Americans.

This episode of The Experiment originally ran on April 15, 2021.

A transcript of this episode is available. 

Be part of The Experiment. Use the hashtag #TheExperimentPodcast, or write to us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, with editing by Matt Collette and Katherine Wells. Fact-check by Jack Segelstein. Sound design by David Herman. Additional engineering by Joe Plourde. 

Music by Laundry (“Films”), Parish Council (“Socks Before Trousers” and “Heatherside Stores”), h hunt (“11e” and “Journeys”), and naran ratan (“Trees etc.”), provided by Tasty Morsels. Additional music by John Charles Schroeder and Ross Taggart Garren (“Mournful Blues”) and Ken Anderson and Rebecca Ruth Hall (“Calliope - Underscore”). Additional audio from National Geographic, WNYC, PBS, and C-SPAN.