Understand SC

For avid birders, the eastern black rail is the holy grail of bird sightings. Searching for this mysterious and threatened bird reveals a tale of mystery and obsession. Listen to this special episode from reporter Tony Bartelme on how few will ever see SC's elusive black rail. Will climate change make it vanish forever?

Charleston is in the process of considering plans to build an eight-mile sea wall around the peninsula. We know the goal — to protect the city from life-threatening storm surge during hurricanes — but we still had a lot of questions. Reporter Chloe Johnson joined us on the podcast to discuss what's known and what's still unclear about the proposal.

More than 1,000 students at the University of South Carolina have tested positive for COVID-19. This week on the podcast, we talk about how the university prepared to bring students back and what issues arose when they did. Listen now for more.

What will the "new normal" look like for live music in South Carolina? This week on the show, we talked with arts and entertainment reporter Kalyn Oyer about how musicians, venues and fans have been coping during the pandemic. She also shared some memories from her last pre-pandemic concert and played us clips from three of her favorite albums recently released by South Carolina artists. Listen now for more.

This week marked 100 years since the 19th amendment was ratified. Today on the podcast, we're joined by managing editor Autumn Phillips to share some highlights from "We the Women," our series of 19 interviews with South Carolina women, celebrating this milestone in history. Listen now to hear some of our favorite moments.

Hurricane Isaias may have turned out to be a close call for much of the South Carolina coastline, but there are months of hurricane season still left to go. We talked with senior projects reporter Tony Bartelme and reporter Chloe Johnson, who writes about the coastal environment and climate change, about what could be ahead and how climate change factors into the storm season.

In South Carolina, renters facing removal from their homes have to be armed with cash to fight it. We talked to reporter Thad Moore about how South Carolina handles eviction appeals and why some tenants see their cases thrown out if they can't come up with thousands of dollars in a matter of days.

This year, the traditional back-to-school period has become a ticking clock on major decisions facing school boards, teachers and parents about how and when to bring students back to the classroom amid the coronavirus pandemic. Education reporter Jenna Schiferl and projects reporter Avery Wilks shared some insight on what parents, politicians, schools officials and educators are thinking.

"Dark money" groups are becoming more common in the U.S. politics, but the situation is particularly bad here in South Carolina. This week, we talked with political reporter Jamie Lovegrove and business reporter Andrew Brown who followed the money with a recent state election to show how anonymous donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on political ads.

Racial disparities in who contracts coronavirus have played out across the U.S., and South Carolina is no different. For this week's episode, reporters Mary Katherine Wildeman and Greg Yee share what they learned in reporting a recent piece on the pandemic's effects in South Carolina's Hispanic community.