Radiolab - Radiolab Presents: Anna in Somalia

Episode Date: September 12, 2017

This week, we are presenting a story from NPR foreign correspondent Gregory Warner and his new globe-trotting podcast Rough Translation. Mohammed was having the best six months of his life - working a job he loved, making mixtapes for his sweetheart - when the communist Somali regime perp-walked him out of his own home, and sentenced him to a lifetime of solitary confinement.  With only concrete walls and cockroaches to keep him company, Mohammed felt miserable, alone, despondent.  But then one day, eight months into his sentence, he heard a whisper, a whisper that would open up a portal to - of all places and times - 19th century Russia, and that would teach him how to live and love again.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Okay, before we get going today, just a quick prompt. So we're putting together a show of questions, questions that listeners have asked us over the years. We tend to get a lot of questions of people being like, why? Why doesn't the big cloud up there fall down? I mean, it's full of water. Right, various kinds of questions. And so we're collecting all these questions, and we're going to do a show where we're trying to answer as many as we can. So if you have a question...

It doesn't matter how dumb or how sophisticated. Any kind of question. Email us at questions atradiolab.org. Again, that's questions at radialab.org. You can also text us the word questions at 701-01-1. Why do I always have more wire hangers in my closet and never enough socks? That might be one that we would at least read. Okay, let's get on with the show.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. Se.

See? Yeah. Hello, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Radio Lab. And today we have a story from a long-time contributor of ours, who's up to something new these days, Gregory Warner. Yes. If you listen to this program, you know his work because he's been on our show so many times.

He brought us stories from upstate New York about faith healers. I think this is 12 years ago. then a story from Afghanistan about the quote Afghan Elvis, a couple of stories from Kenya, one from Ethiopia. And explored a cure to alcoholism by some quack in Moscow. In other words, he's like all over the place. Yeah, he is a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio. And recently NPR decided to give him his own podcast. It's called Rough Translation and it's killer. We're going to just begin today with sampling one of his new pieces. It again takes us to a peculiar place with an improbable result. Yeah.

Here's Greg Warner. The six months before Muhammad went to prison were the best six months of his life. He'd landed this great job managing a Pepsi plant, and he'd found true love on his first date. We went to a small restaurant near where we live. Her name was Ismahan, 20 years old, a teller at a state bank. And we were talking, and shyly, of course, you know, she was very shy. and we realized we wanted to get married.

That's it. Love at first sight, sort of. Yeah, in a sense, yeah. Muhammad said he was just so struck by how generous she was and smart, and they connected about everything from the future of their country to the music they liked. Whatever images the word Somalia calls to mind, the Somalia where Mohammed lived was in a cultural renaissance.

This was 1981. It was under communist rule. And the dictator, he was a dictator. He was a dictator, but he was also a big fan of Somali culture and music. Music was actually a big part of how Mohamed courted Isman. He made her mixtapes. This was the 80s. She was into songs and stuff like that.

Did you sing or did she sing? Oh, she's a better singer. So a few months after Mohamed and Isman got married, Mohamed got a phone call from the director of the local public hospital. Would you please help me bring some donation? from the communities. He was desperate for donations. For medicine and forbidding, in fact.

That music-loving dictator, his name was Siedbare. He'd cut off supplies to the hospital in retaliation for an independence movement in the region. The doctor had been calling all his friends in secret. Yeah, we were talking all the time. Saying, you know, you work for Pepsi, you have connections, you know people, can we raise the money discreetly ourselves?

But Mohammed wanted to go big. I suppose maybe I wanted to share my happiness. What do you mean by sharing? share your happiness. You know, contribute because there are other people who were less fortunate than us. Muhammad was in that stage of new love when you just kind of think the world is full of good feeling and if everybody knew what was going on, they would do the right thing. And he takes this bold and pretty risky move.

He writes a letter. Some kind of newsletter. About the hospital conditions. Yes. And telling the conditions of the country. Essentially implying that the dictator is not doing right by us and we got to step up ourselves. A couple weeks later, Mohamed and Isban heard a knock on their

door in the middle of the night. National Security people, they don't have no warrant or anything like that. They just said, we need to take him. And I could see her. My wife, and I remember her in her eyes. What was in her eyes?

You know, love, but also terror. Muhammad is accused of treason and sentenced the life in solitary confinement. Blindfold, handcuffed, and sent to a cell. And this is where the story really begins.

Muhammad's cell is tiny, maybe six feet by six feet, concrete walls, hole in the floor for a toilet, and a window high up that lets in just a little bit of light. It's very dark, and cockroach come from the toilet.

Cockroaches? Cockroach. And they will fly off the wall. towards you and excrement with their feet. On their feet would be excrement from the toilet. Yeah, yes, yes. After the cockroaches come the rats and the mice and the mosquitoes. The noise of the mosquitoes.

Like an engine, you know, a jet engine. But even worse than that sound, is the buzzing in his own mind. Because in this prison, there is one rule. It was strictly forbidden to talk to your neighbors. he's forbidden to speak to the other inmates. So you walk forward and backward. Just pacing back and forth.

And this is a tiny place to walk back and forth. Three short steps. So like three short steps forward, three short steps backward, three short steps forward. Yes. So that is his life now. Until one day, he hears a knock on the wall. And that knock becomes words from another time. and another place.

All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This is Rough Translation. It's the show from NPR bringing you... Greg, are you there? Yeah. Hey, hey guys. Hey, Alyssa, do you want to just tell us

what Rough Translation is? Yeah, so I've been making a podcast this year. Basically, the idea is that in every episode, we follow a conversation we're having in the United States, hear how that's playing out in a different place. One episode we might hear about how fake news is playing out in Ukraine, which has been getting fake news for longer and higher doses than anything Americans can imagine. We're hearing about a trend that's happening more and more now where Chinese women

are hiring American surrogates to have their babies. So basically every episode we're trying to do the same thing is just sort of see something we have. See what the other folks see, which is not like what we see. And I guess in this one we have a guy. locked away in a Somali prison. Should we just hit play and see what happens? Yeah. Yeah.

It's eight months into Mohammed's prison sentence, and he's in his cell, as always, he's alone. Not quite, though. There were so many different types of ants as well. Ants, you know, tiny ones, really. Just like watching a film, great film. The way they look around for food, the way they treat each other.

when you give them time, it's another world. I would have loved to go see at their hill, their holes, where they were staying. But I couldn't because it was all concrete. And then one evening, when the guard is at the other end of the line of cells, just out of earshot, the guy in the cell next to Mohammed whispers. Through the door saying, learn ABC through the wall. Learn ABC through the wall. Learn ABC.

see through the wall. That's what he remembers. And does that make any sense to Muhammad at that moment? It's zero sense. I look at the wall between us, but then he knocked on the wall. He did this. And when Muhammad leaned over it to the wall,

he could hear this sound. That's sharp and that. So you have a sharp sound and a kind of more dull sound. And with those two sounds, it immediately clicks. Oh, this is the alphabet. Oh, so the guy's saying,

learn this code. Yeah, this code. You say, yes, I understand now. And he started this, A, B, C, D, E, F. First in alphabet, and then, words. And what was the first sentence

that you heard? So, NABAT, which means peace in Somali, and it means how are you also. Yeah, Nabat. I could repeat that was all that day for all that day without doing anything else. And so, Muhammad can now spend most of a day tapping back and forth

to talk with the guy in the next cell about politics, to share a childhood memory. But at night, when he can't sleep, he turns again to the concrete. And then again, and then again. I was only sleeping for you maybe half an hour, then wake about half an hour. Muhammad would wake up from a nightmare, sweaty and in a panic. I lost my sleep. Are you awake, Yatap? I can't sleep.

I need to talk. When I try to sleep, when I'm falling asleep, suddenly my heart raised so fast. So I was thinking those days that this is the smell of death. What is the smell of death? I think fear. had a lot of fearful thoughts in that prison cell, especially about his wife. I could not imagine how she is, because there are no news from the world, from the outside world. It's really difficult to imagine where she is, even whether she is alive.

And there was a meaner thought as well. The government was encouraging wives to divorce their husbands. The government was saying you should divorce. Yes, because they are three streets, these people who are in prison. Even some sheikhs found Quranic verses to support that. Divorce in Somali society in Islam is usually the husband's exclusive right. But there are these Quranic verses that can allow a wife to choose to divorce her husband if the husband's absent for some time.

And Sheikhs loyal to the dictator use those verses to pressure the wives of political prisoners. Quite a number of people were divorced from their wives. I was thinking sometimes that she could. She was only 20 years old. They had only been married for three months. And he was sentenced to life. You think she's probably enjoying herself. She's living her life.

And I am in this place. At first, it's just a little twinge of resentment. And then the feeling comes back, stronger and sharper. He thinks she should be visiting me. But wait, she can't visit me. Nobody can visit this prison. Nobody can get in touch. And still you blame her for not getting in.

touch with you. And what do you think about her in those moments when you're blaming her for not visiting you? Very far from love, he probably hate her at that particular time. Every time that Muhammad tapped one of these dark thoughts onto the wall, someone was listening and the someone on the other side of the wall was a doctor. Dr. Adon Abacor, is also an inmate in this prison. And is the doctor listening to these taps on the wall, he's also diagnosing them. Acute anxiety had. He was telling me these symptoms through the wall. I should tell you that Dr. Adin and Mohammed were actually friends before prison. Yeah, yeah. The doctor was the director of the public hospital, the one who called him up and asked him for donations.

He did not ask Muhammad to write that letter, complaining about the hospital conditions. Because there were no press allowed, no newspapers, no free press. And that's the moment the government decided that they should do something. about us. But if the doctor blamed Mohammed for writing the letter that got them both thrown in prison, he didn't show it. Every time that Mohammed knocked, whatever the hour, the doctor would knock back.

He used to have these nightmares. So he jumps. He has a nightmare. And then he knocks on the wall again. So I have to wake up. And then again start conversation, you know, so that he can fall asleep again. Just like a baby, you know, taking

a baby to bed and making him sleep, you know. If Dr. Adden seems fairly unsentimental about some of the more dramatic aspects of Muhammad's life. Just like a baby. It's partly that these two men are such different personalities. While Mohammed described that nighttime arrest

as a moment of shock and terror, Dr. Adden seems to have met those same secret police with a bag, packed and ready for prison, a bag of clothes and lots and lots of books. Why books? Books is the best friend in a prison. But then when you got to the prison, it was taken away,

Everything was taken away. Even our glasses were taken away. Tell me about the day you learned the language. Well, it was the most exciting day in our life. It was the most exciting and we couldn't sleep. Wait, so Greg, let me ask, this knocking, this was something that they all were doing together? Yeah, there was a particular line of eight prisoners.

So these eight prisoners, there was a particular guy in the middle there who had once heard of Morse code and just lying there in prison, one day thought, hey, what if I had into language and we can talk? Oh, so this was actually a homespun? Yeah, he did not know Morse code. He just knew of it.

And the guards couldn't hear that. That was their own. Right. I mean, literally, this was kind of the magic of it. They could be just tapping on the wall. They could be having a whole conversation. And the guard would have no idea what they were saying. We started practicing it the whole day and the whole night.

And if there is a joke and somebody laughs, everybody starts knocking on the wall and asking that friend, what's that joke about? And that guy starts sending the message, the joke. It could take an hour to send a tiny joke from one cell to the next cell to the next. There were eight of them in this prison. The guards, of course they don't know that we are knocking on the wall because they can't hear.

And then when they see us all laughing, they just say, all these guys are also losing their sanity. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall, Mohammed really was worried that his mind was slipping. I was frightening of going to a certain area in my mind when I would commit suicide without knowing, without wanting to. Is it almost like the fear of going crazy?

Yes, the fear. The fear was, you know, you could imagine people who were crazy and you could imagine that maybe going crazy was a point of more than. So you were frightened of that. While the doctor on his side of the wall... And I was trying to counsel him and explain to him through the wall that he's not going to go mad and that he's not going to die.

But you can't counsel a person through a wall. Months go by, then a whole year. Finally, it's two years into their prison sentence, and something happens. Dr. Aden is summoned to the office of the warden to get a change of clothes. The room was empty, and there was a bench, and they asked you to sit on the bench. And then he asked one of the guys to go and bring your bag. Just the whole bag, with all your clothes, your books, everything. Yeah.

And then you open that bag, and then he tells you to choose something in here to wear. And you don't choose anything else. He says, don't choose anything else. No, that was the regulations. The doctor's getting his first change of clothes since he arrived in. prison. So then you showed back two years later to choose your next t-shirt. Yes.

But then the doctor turns to the warden. He looks him right in the eye. Can I have one book? I said, that's all. Even I did not expect that he would agree to give me. So I just tried, you know. And he said, yes, you can, but choose one of your books. So then I started thinking of the biggest book I can take with me.

A few minutes later, the doctor is walking back to his cell with the fat, this book in his bag under his arm. You can picture him fantasizing about just getting to lie down and read. But when he returns to his cell, there's that sound at the wall. It occurred to me the thought that, why don't I read this book for him to the wall? And distract the negative thoughts. Meanwhile, Muhammad on his side of the wall, here's a new set of taps. I have a book, a book, and I'll read it to you, chapter by chapter.

Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina, the famous novel by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1878. The English translation that they're using is 800 pages, 350,000 words, nearly 2 million letters. Each letter, a set of taps.

So the doctor prepares himself. So to start, I took a piece of my bed sheet, and I put it around my wrist. Like, he's prepping for a medical procedure. wrapping the sheet around his wrist and knuckle. Because it will damage my wrist if I continued like that. So then I started knocking, and he started listening. All happy families are alike.

Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonski's house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on her. The effect that those taps in that book had on Muhammad's mind, is after the break. This is Michael Burles from Portland, Oregon. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Okay, we're back. This is Radio Lab. And we now return to The Tale, told by Gregory Warner from his new podcast. Rough translation. The day that the novel Anna Karenina entered their lives, marked a new phase for Mohamed and the doctor. Each morning, Dr. Adon would carefully wrap his hand and open the novel.

Mohamed, on his side of the wall, would listen. When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevich sprinkled some scent on himself. Although it was only mocking, but it brought the whole story to me. A cigarette pocketbook matches and watch with its double chain and seals and shaking out his handkerchief,

feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease in spite of his unhappiness. He walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining room where coffee was already waiting. If it's been a while since you cracked open Anna Karenina, here's what you need to know. Anna is a noble woman in 19th century Russia. She's married to a man much older than herself. She goes to a ball in a black velvet dress lined with lace and falls in love with a soldier, Count Franzi. He's kind of a rich boy, careless in love.

Mohammed immediately hates him. also in uniform, and I was hating anything in uniform. Actually, this is very important, real. I really felt that. Right, he's in the military, and you were in a military prison. Yeah, I was a military prison. So you really didn't like Vronsky? No.

So anyway, the soldier, Vronsky, he steals Anna's heart, he gets her pregnant, even though she's still married to the other guy, and then Anna makes a choice that really changes everything. Because instead of having a secret affair, like all the others in her social set, She makes her love public. She leaves her husband. And society, the Russian nobility, cut her off. They isolate her.

Vronsky is a man, so he's pretty much able to go on with his life as before. But Anna is realizing how alone she is. She's staying in a room wondering what Vronsky's up to when he's not with her. Okay. Just the same as Mohammed was wondering what his wife was doing, outside the prison walls. Mohammed reads me this one sentence from the book. If you love it hard, sorry. If he loved with her, he would understand all the difficulty of her situation,

and he would rescue her from it. If he loved her, he would rescue her from her situation. It's interesting because Anna is trapped by reviews about women and maybe desire, but you were trapped by real walls. He says it didn't matter how different their lives seemed on the outside. Inside... She was suffering all the time. He felt exactly like Ghana.

He also was jealous, crazily jealous, and also hating himself for being jealous. And all of a sudden, he meets this fictional character who is suffering in exactly the same way. And this suffering is driving her into a state that Mohammed most feared for himself. Going to a certain area in my mind when I would commit suicide without knowing, without wanting to. So it's now 750 pages into the book. and two months have passed since the doctor first started tapping the book letter by letter. Anna and Vronsky are now living in Moscow, and it's summer, so it's hot and suffocating. And on this particular day, Vronsky is off visiting his mom, which Anna hates because she thinks she's trying to set him up with a young princess.

And Anna is in this state of mind where she both thinks that she's a burden to Vronsky, and she thinks he'd be better off without her. But also, she wants him to suffer her absence the way she's suffering. It's in this state that Anna finds herself walking down a train platform. The train is hurtling down the tracks, and this thought possesses her. She knew what she had to do. With a rapid, light step, she went down the steps that led from the tank to the rails and stopped quite near the approaching train. As Mohammed is listening to this, and he's thinking about what she is about to do...

I really cried. I felt for her. But he realizes his tears are not just for Anna. That's all I remember my wife. He's remembering Ismahan, his wife. How much she's suffering. Yes, the book, the one that brought me back to think about her a lot. And he finds himself asking a question that in two years in prison, he has not asked himself before.

Did I do well? In those few months, we were together. Had he been a good husband? Yeah. Did I treat her? as she deserved. And instead of thinking she's left him and also hating himself

for thinking that she's left him, he's thinking, why did he take himself away from her by writing that stupid newsletter? Maybe we could have done it in a different way. That letter that got them all thrown in prison. Maybe we could have talked to them.

And putting himself in his wife's shoes like that, it kind of took him out of his own misery. He could think of thought like... She suffered worse than me. because I was only in prison, but she was in the outside well. He goes from self-pity to pity for her. Oh, I think that's related to the book. Tolstoy's actually famous for that.

That's like his magic crazy talent. Can you say more about that magic crazy talent? Because, like, when I was rereading... I told Elf Botchaman about Muhammad's story. You've heard her reading the Tolstoy passages for us. She's also a writer, novelist herself, and totally obsessed with Anna Kuretina. I like it a lot. When I told her about Muhammad's experience, she had this idea.

about why that book in particular might have helped Muhammad make this mental leap from hating his wife to imagining everything through her eyes. Tolstoy gives a lot of weight to all of the characters, like even to just like a newlywed young girl, you spend a lot of time in her thoughts, and there's like a scene where she's trying to eat a mushroom on a plate and it keeps slipping from under her fork. Trying in vain to spear a disobedient, slippery mushroom with her fork and shaking the lace through which her shoulder white. It's a book that takes the subjectivity of young women seriously,

and not just young women, everyone, the servants and the dog. There's a hunting scene in this that actually goes to the perspective of the dog, and everything just seems so true. You read that, and you're like, that's definitely what that dog was thinking. And so she says the experience of reading Tolstoy is the experience of being constantly confronted with... How differently the same thing can look from a slightly different perspective. He never gets bored of showing that.

And in the book, the characters themselves, actually, judge each other and then are able to expand that and to see each other a little bit more generously. That's what Elif thinks that Tolstoy's book gave to Muhammad. It definitely held that. Definitely, definitely. In a place like that person, people become very selfish.

You think everybody has forgotten about me. At the beginning, forgotten about me. And nobody cares about me. But when you think about other people's situation, then you understand. It helped me survive. It helped me even sleep better. Tolstoy actually had one more role to play in Muhammad's life, eight years after his arrest. The Somali political winds had shifted, and the dictator was trying to appease his enemies.

Mohamed and the others were suddenly released. He discovered his region of Somalia was flattened by civil war. But Muhammad also discovered something else. his wife, his mom. She was still his wife. She had not given up on him. And she had suffered in his absence. Working at the state bank,

she'd been pressured by her boss to divorce the traitor, Mohammed. When she refused, she was relocated. And by the time Mohammed was released, she was living in a refugee camp in Germany. She couldn't even make it back to Somalia to see him. So I wait to another, that was for another, say, about 10 months, I think.

to see each other. Finally, they figure out a way that they can reunite in a neighboring country. And though it's been almost a decade since they've seen each other, he recognized her immediately

from a distance. And as they drew closer, Ismahan opens her arms to give her husband a hug and he reaches out. And all that he could do in that moment is shake her hand.

Yeah. Do I not feel as, I felt, even in prison I was feeling so much in love with her. And yet when we met, it wasn't the same. She was like a... You know, as a stranger, something like that.

Wow. I mean, I was asking myself, why are you not as in love with her as before? This was a moment that we found really interesting. And, you know, as we were talking about it with Greg in the studio, Greg said that it was really in this moment. Greg said that it was really in this moment, this period of doubt. He was overcome by a momentary doubt of the possibility of setting up that new life he had dreamed of on the way.

That the book came back to Muhammad again. Except this time he didn't think of the main character, Anna Karenina. He thought of a different character in the book, a guy by the name of Levin. This is a character who is also in love, also has strong emotions. And like Muhammad in that one moment with his wife, Levin spends the importance. entire book, just racked by doubts. Doubts. About everything.

An eternal dissatisfaction with yourself. Vane attempts to improve in failures and an eternal expectation of the happiness. And standing there with his wife, just weirded out by his own lack of feeling, Muhammad had two thoughts. Like, oh, I'm like Levin in this moment. And what happens to Levin at the end? And what's really cool about Levin's conclusion at the end of the book is he finally just decides, it's like, I'm not going to worry about how weird my feelings are.

Like, he doesn't actually come, he doesn't make himself whole as he wants to be. He wants to, the whole book, he wants to be fully in love with Kitty and not just with his heart, but with his mind and his soul, and he wants to be a good Christian, and everything has to sort of make sense to him. But, you know, but he's just a complicated sort of guy and he's got many different feelings. But at the end of the book, he kind of feels like, you know, I'm going to stop just thinking obsessively about how awkward I am in this situation and I'm just going to do what I'm supposed to

I'm going to be the dad, I'm going to be the husband. And Muhammad thought to himself, like maybe I need to do that too because like who knows where I'm at right now? I was in a cell for eight years. In the prison, in a way you are not living. You are still inside yourself. You have to open. And he figured like opening back up.

it's probably going to take some time and some work. We had to learn to love each other again. And that, he says, is what they did. Tolstoy had a lot to do with it. You think Tolstoy helped you fall in love again? Yeah, I mean, the feeling of love, you know, it wasn't so easy to become in love again. This man has been experienced and she was living her real life.

It's difficult for people to probably to live with someone who has been in solitary confinement for so long. I was probably very difficult to live with that particular time. And you're saying that knowing that you were hard to live with, knowing... Yes, yes, it made it easier for us to talk to each other, to learn to live with each other. Because you knew that your heart was not quite working yet. Yeah. I should build a monument for that book. Hey, one last thing.

There is someone else to give credit to here, besides the great Russian author. Every detail that Tolstoy wrote into that book, every perspective shift that helped Muhammad escape his prison cell. All of those sentences had to be tapped out on a concrete wall. By a friend? No, I could imagine him, you know, getting tired because he was working hard, really working hard. Dr. Adin said that Muhammad was his last patient. After their release, he was just too out of practice to return to medicine.

And after prison, the doctor did try to read the novel, Anna Karenina again. I went to a bookshop, and when I tried to read, I couldn't read it. Too many bad memories. But he knew someone who could use it. Somebody, a friend who was imprisoned here in Somal and a journalist, a friend. And I took that book to him. And I told him that the best present you can have in a prison is a book. Greg Warner.

Thank you, guys. You want to check out more episodes of Rough Translation. We'll link you to it at RadioLab.org, or you can go to npr.org slash rough translation. This episode of Rough Translation was edited by Marian McKeown and was produced by Jess Jang. Thank you to Elizabeth Senja Spackman, who introduced Greg to Dr. Adon. She interviewed Dr. Adon at the Hargasa International Book Fair in Somaliland. The Rough Translation team had editorial help from Jacob Goldstein, Noel King, Nick Fountain, Robert Spackman. Smith, Brian Erstadt, Luke Okowski, and Sana Krasikov.

Elif Botman is the author of The Possessed Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Her new novel is The Idiot. The music by John Ellis, more music from Blue Dot Sessions, and our Dylan Keef threw in some music as well. All right, well, we should go. I'm Jad Ibram Ruhn. I'm Robert Fulwich, and thank you very much for listening. This is Susanna calling from Sunny Beirut in Lebanon. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by. by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler,

Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel-Habty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nassar, Al-Wak, and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aroncic, Shimo Lai, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.