The Empty Chair

Things we’ve lost in the past year — since the first American coronavirus case — that we haven’t talked about so much. Gossip. The chance to make new friends. And much larger stuff. Prologue: A woman’s dog has an unexpected reaction to the pandemic, and a mother has to re-think how to teach her son to drive. (11 minutes) Cops and Mobbers: Reporter Emmanuel Felton called up several Black Capitol Police officers in the days after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to find out what it was like for them to face off with this mostly white mob. (13 minutes) You can find more of Emmanuel's reporting on race and inequality at BuzzFeed. The video of Eugene Goodman was filmed by Igor Bobic of HuffPost. 50 Shades of Shade: Producer Lilly Sullivan talks trash with writer Rachel Connolly about people neither of them know. (11 minutes) Rachel wrote "The Year in Gossip" for Hazlitt. There’s a German Word for That: Ira Glass talks to journalist Jochen Bittner about a political lie from 1920s Germany and the lessons it holds for 2020s America. His op-ed about this ran in the New York Times. Bittner’s one of the people who runs the Opinion section of the German newspaper Die Zeit. (7 minutes) Quarantweening: Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a seventh grader who doesn’t have a seventh grade, or an eighth grade. (11 minutes)