This week’s episode: Emission Control 

If we want to quickly combat climate change, we need to deal with “the other” greenhouse gas: methane. Methane leaks are heating up the planet and harming people who live where gas drilling takes place. In this week’s episode, reporter Elizabeth Shogren takes us to Arlington, Texas, a community that bet heavily on drilling for methane. Arlington’s children have unwittingly been part of an experiment to see what happens when gas wells and people mix. There are wells all over Arlington – next to homes, shopping centers, day cares and schools. Last year, the City Council voted to block new natural gas wells near one preschool’s playground, then reversed its vote. After protests, gas drilling has been blocked once again – if only for a year. This is an update on the original episode, which aired in June 2021. 

Listen to the episode: Emission Control
Read the follow-up story: A Texas Town Stopped an Energy Giant from Drilling Next to a Day Care. Then It Changed Its Mind.

After Ayotzinapa Featured on ‘All Things Considered’ and ‘In The Thick’

Our new three-part series After Ayotzinapa has been getting a lot of attention.

This week, Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela interviewed the team behind the project on their podcast “In The Thick.” Hinojosa praised the “incredible” reporting that our Anyansi Diaz-Cortes and National Security Archives analyst Kate Doyle poured into the series, which shines a light on Mexico’s infamous case of the forced disappearance of 43 students – and the Mexican government’s cover-up. “The disappearance of the 43 has this deep residual impact that we can’t even measure – and both of you are a part of that,” Hinojosa and.

Varela noted the power of After Ayotzinapa to keep the story in the news, seven years after the tragedy took place. “You brought something back that, in the scheme of everything, could have disappeared in our consciousness,” Varela said. “It was a really good gut check as a journalist. It wasn’t the 10th anniversary or 20th anniversary, it was like, ‘We want to do this.’ ” 

Diaz-Cortes also appeared this week on “All Things Considered,” where host Tamara Keith asked how the case is a crucial test of Mexico’s justice system. Diaz-Cortes replied: 

If you cannot solve a case that has so much global attention, that has so many resources right now with this new government, if you cannot indict the mastermind of the cover-up – Tomás Zerón, who's now in Israel – if you cannot do that, if you cannot indict without torture, then you do kind of have a failing state.

• Listen to the ‘All Things Considered’ interview: 7 years later, parents of missing Ayotzinapa students are still searching for answers

• Listen to the ‘In the Thick’ episode: Machinery of Corruption and Impunity 

• Listen to the whole series: After Ayotzinapa

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Al Letson on Changing the Culture Around True Crime

In an interview this week about our series Mississippi Goddam: The Ballad of Billey Joe, Reveal host Al Letson explained why true-crime-style media coverage often feels exploitative. In the first episode of the series, which investigates the suspicious death of Mississippi teenager Billey Joe Johnson, Letson tells listeners that the series will definitely not be a true crime thriller. 

As he explained this week to producer Rob Rosenthal of the podcast “HowSound”:

We tend to take people's lives who are complex and reduce them down to either the way they died or reduce it down to who killed them and the mystery around that. For me, there's these lines between what I can be totally good for with fiction, and not crazy about when it comes to real life. So for me, it's that. … I didn't want Billey Joe to be a character.

Letson said he started rethinking how he approached true crime podcasts when listening to the first season of “Serial” in 2014: 

I realized halfway through “Serial” that I was consuming it like I would consume an episode of “Law & Order.” Consuming it like it’s fiction. And I have problems with that. I have big problems with consuming this real person’s life like it’s fiction.

• Listen to the interview on ‘HowSound’: Al Letson’s Covenant with Listeners About True Crime Stories