Public policy, told through the people it touches
Ways & Means, produced at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and hosted by Lauren Rosenthal, reports on policy through the people it affects. A typo on a North Carolina voter roll, a shuttered Chicago coal plant and solar pumps for Ethiopian farmers all get clear, step-by-step explanation.
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Ways & Means is a reported narrative show produced at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and hosted by Lauren Rosenthal. Its subject is public policy, yet most episodes open somewhere concrete, often with tape recorded on location. A contributor, Jackson Roach, walks along Pulaski in an industrial stretch of Chicago, looking for what is left of the Crawford coal plant. Duke student Bella Larson stops shoppers in a grocery store to ask what the label on a rotisserie chicken really means. In Chiquimula, Guatemala, women farmers in an organization called COCOE fill two-liter bottles from the bottom of a pit to water their crops when the rain fails. Only then does the show widen out to the machinery of the problem. In 'Missing Votes', Duke student Hannah McKnight joins a team that phones young North Carolina voters who had trouble with their ballots, and what they hear changes her view of why young people do not vote. One of those voters, Mikaela, found her name missing from the rolls because of a typo, and the narration walks through each step of provisional voting that should have caught the error and did not. That kind of plain explanation recurs. In the food-waste episode, the narration pauses to repeat a finding from Norbert's experiments, that people waste 20 to 50 percent of the food they buy, because it is a big deal. Energy and water keep coming back. 'Goodbye, Cloud Factory' tells how Kim Wasserman's neighborhood group took on a fossil fuel company and won; Crawford closed in 2012, one of three Chicago-area coal plants shut within six months. In Ethiopia's East Shawa region, farmers run diesel pumps whose fuel prices spike, and a Duke team calculates that shared solar pumps drawing deep-well water could let some of them double or triple their profits. In Busia County, Kenya, Duke professor Sabrendu Patanayak and a research team travel to a remote site, and the episode explains how smoke from cook fires adds black carbon, or soot, to the warming picture alongside carbon dioxide. The climate migration episode ranges across Central America and Mexico. ProPublica reporter Abram Lustgarten, whose beat is climate change, meets Delmira in San Salvador, a widow who left rural El Salvador for lack of work and whose husband was murdered in a town troubled by gang violence. Another voice recounts a long chain of van rides north through Mexico that ended in getting caught. Throughout, the figures stay attached to someone's kitchen, field or ballot. One season is dedicated to Duke University's centennial. The show suits a listener who wants to see how a policy question plays out for the people living inside it.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants issues like voting access, food waste, energy and climate migration explained through reported stories about specific people and places, with the research laid out plainly.
What sets it apart: It pairs tape recorded in places like rural Kenya, an Ethiopian farming village and industrial Chicago with research from Duke, so stories tend to arrive with both a person on the ground and the evidence behind the problem.
Ways and Means features bright ideas for how to improve human society. The show is produced by the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
A voter stalled by a typo, sheep beneath solar panels: your appetite for policy gets scenery.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful look at how clerical errors can make repeated voting attempts look like apathy.
Young voters are often cast as checked out, but Ways & Means looks at Hannah McKnight's research into North Carolina college students who tried to vote and still ran into ballot trouble.
A Chicago coal plant's closure becomes a grounded story of community power and the health questions that follow an environmental win.
Goodbye, Cloud Factory looks at Chicago's Crawford Generating Station, a coal plant built in 1924 and shut down in 2012 after more than 80 years beside a neighborhood with churches and schools.
It follows climate migration from failing crops to dangerous towns, and the public support that could help farmers stay.
Climate migration comes through as a set of pressures that build inside ordinary work and family life. Drought strains crops in eastern Guatemala, gang violence narrows a widow's choices in El Salvador, and a warming-linked coffee fungus cuts into a family's income.
A grocery-store label opens onto the climate costs of America's food waste.
Ways and Means turns food waste into a climate story by following Duke student Bella Larson through a grocery store, where a food date label shifts an ordinary shopping trip toward the question of what gets thrown away.
Sheep, solar panels, and pasture-raised meat make climate-friendly agriculture feel like a question of systems, markets, and scale.
Climate-friendly meat is framed as a systems problem, beginning with sheep grazing under solar panels in rural North Carolina as portable solar-powered fences guide them across the field.
A season-long narrative reconstruction of the 2012 Benghazi attack and its political fallout.
Politics after the headline breaks open.
Ways & Means's "Missing Votes" follows Duke professor Gunther Peck and student researchers Hannah McKnight, Amaya Rao, and Catherine Thomas as they investigate why North Carolina college students' provisional ballots were rejected.
Ways & Means' "Goodbye, Cloud Factory" follows Little Village organizer Kim Wasserman, who linked her son's asthma attack to the Crawford coal plant beside her Chicago neighborhood.
Ways and Means from Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy follows climate migration in eastern Guatemala, where Marisol has tried three times to reach the United States at a cost of $18,000 per attempt.
Ways and Means examines how confusing food date labels contribute to American food waste, with Duke researchers linking the issue to billions of discarded pounds and climate impacts.
Ways & Means follows Ethiopia's DREAM Project, which plans to replace diesel irrigation pumps with shared solar-powered pumps in nine villages.
On Ways & Means, Lauren Rosenthal follows Duke professor Sabrendu Patanayak in Busia County, Kenya, where families cook over open fires.
Ways and Means opens in rural North Carolina with sheep grazing between solar panels, using that scene to frame climate-friendly animal agriculture.
Bob Sullivan’s Ways & Means episode “Begged and Borrowed” examines whether big-tech accountability can borrow tools from banking, environmental regulation, food inspections, and drug approval.
This episode explores the history of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, and the subsequent challenges in getting young people to register and vote.
Hubertine Scott recounts her journey to attend college despite gender barriers during the Great Depression and the passage of a law that changed women's destinies.
This episode explores the ease of access to guns in Chicago's housing projects through the personal story of Samuel, who grew up in the Henry Horner Homes.