Sarah Blustain

by Sarah Blustain This column was originally published in Not Shutting Up, a newsletter about the issues facing journalism and democracy. Sign up for it here. Most of the time, my colleague Irena Hwang works with numbers. An electrical engineer by training, she wrangles impossible data sets into intelligible sentences that word-bound people like me can understand. What she does seems like a kind of intellectual alchemy, drawing solid and valuable facts out of barely visible particles of knowledge.

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal's radio stories is the audio. Al Letson: Hey, hey, hey. It's Al here and, if there was ever a year that needed investigative reporting, my friends, 2020 is it. A global pandemic, inequality, racism, and threats to the very core of our democracy.