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1 month ago | 
wng.org | Lynn Vincent |Anna Brown |Grace Snell
SOUND: [NEW YORK CITY] ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, HOST: It’s business as usual in America’s largest city. Skyscrapers overshadow teeming sidewalks. Yellow taxis zip by. Neon headlines crawl across billboards. Top story: The death of a brain-injured woman in Florida. Camera crews prowl the New York City streets, stopping passersby for reactions. BYSTANDER 1: She died? Yeah. Whoa, that they should have put the feeding tube in her. So she could live like a human being like you would be supposed to.
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1 month ago | 
wng.org | Lynn Vincent |Anna Brown |Grace Snell
LYNN VINCENT: It’s March 28, 2005. The Monday after Easter. CARRIE: This afternoon, it’ll mark a full ten days since Terri Schiavo has had any food or water. VINCENT: A white stretch limousine cruises within a block or so of the hospice…then parks. A tall, distinguished-looking man climbs out—an icon of the Civil Rights era and a lightning rod of contemporary politics: The Reverend Jesse Jackson.
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1 month ago | 
wng.org | Lynn Vincent |Anna Brown |Grace Snell
ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, HOST: Terri’s time is running out. And the battle for her life consumes the Schindlers. They’ve quit their jobs to become full-time advocates. Bobby leads the charge—juggling phone calls from senators and celebrities. Suzanne fights to stay cheerful for her family. SUZANNE: We had to stay strong for each other. We also had to stay strong for Terri. I mean, we had a fight ahead of us. And all of us had to suck it up and fight for her.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
Raphael Samuel rocketed to sudden worldwide fame when he filed a lawsuit against his parents—for bringing him into the world without his consent. That was six years ago. Today, the 32-year-old martial arts trainer from India admits the move was mostly a publicity stunt. Samuel wasn’t at all surprised when a judge tossed the case less than a year after he filed it. But the ideas behind the lawsuit—the ones he wanted to call attention to—are perfectly serious. Samuel is an antinatalist.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
Jonathan Lubecky lay in a hospital bed and stared at the ceiling as two attendants hooked him up to a medical monitor. One of them handed him a dish that held a single green capsule. The pill contained MDMA, an illegal party drug known as “molly” or “ecstasy.” But Lubecky wasn’t looking for a good time. He was hoping for a cure. For eight years he had battled severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, ever since coming back from a deployment to Iraq.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
Blue smoke rises from smoldering heaps of rubble in a tiny neighborhood about 12 miles southeast of Asheville, N.C. Workmen are burning fallen trees and mounds of tangled debris. This is Craigtown—or what remains of it. On Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene’s heavy rainfall triggered a landslide that crushed a cluster of homes on land owned by the Craig family since the mid-1900s. The disaster claimed the lives of 13 people. Now, a jagged scar in the earth splits the landscape as far as the eye can see.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
The Fanning family remembers 2010 as the “simple Christmas year.” At the time, Lora Lynn Fanning had five kids at home, all under the age of 5. She and her husband also felt God tugging at their hearts to adopt. So, by the time the holiday season rolled around, they were pinching pennies—trying to scrape together enough money to bring their new daughter home from Uganda. Fanning sat her little ones down and told them they wouldn’t be dashing off to the lot for a Christmas tree that year.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
wng.org | Addie Offereins |Grace Snell
DAVID STONER REMEMBERS THE FEELING OF SMOKING MARIJUANA for the first time as a self-conscious 11-year-old. Soon after, he tried liquor. He relished the instant confidence boost even as it burned the back of his throat. “That sense of doubt in myself melted away,” Stoner recalled. For the first time, he felt comfortable in his own skin. The more he tried, the more he felt accepted by his peers. Alcohol and marijuana laid the groundwork for experimenting with cocaine and pills. Then, he met a girl.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
SARAH STONE KICKED HER DRUG HABIT cold turkey after spending 16 years addicted to opioids. But she takes a very different approach when it comes to helping other drug users. Stone lives in Charleston, W.Va.—a city gutted by the opioid epidemic. In 2019, she and some of her friends decided to start helping addicts use drugs more safely by handing out clean needles and naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. Stone’s message to addicts is simple: Just don’t die.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
wng.org | Grace Snell
Ginny Barker’s boots stuck fast in a thick layer of mud as she surveyed the wreckage of her daughter’s home in Swannanoa, N.C., in early October. Sticky brown muck coated everything—sidewalk, yard, walls, and windows—all the way up to the watermark high above her head. Just a few days after the Swannanoa River burst its banks and swept through the neighborhood, Barker and her family started sorting through ruined belongings—saving what they could and dragging the rest to the curb.
