Hanna Rosin

Hanna Rosin is a writer and the co-host of the NPR podcast Invisibilia. Follow Hanna on Twitter here. Follow Invisibilia on Twitter here.

Kindly introduce yourself!
My name is Hanna Rosin. Hi! I live in D.C. and at the moment I barely ever leave the house, because, virus apocalypse! I have lately learned that I am an extremely mediocre home school teacher and that I can build a radio studio in my closet that works well enough!

Invisibilia has such an interesting premise, and it's not one that's been replicated. How was the idea conceived?
The idea was conceived by the brilliant Alix Spiegel, my co-host. She had been a science reporter at NPR for a long time. And basically what happened is that one day she developed a long zoom lens. That is, she realized a lot of science reporting she was doing wasn’t examining some fundamental assumptions and premises, missing the forest for the trees. So she started to dream up the very first episode of Invisibilia, which was about our evolving relationship with our thoughts. That all sounds very abstract, but maybe you can think of it as the history of emotions? What it’s come to be over time, is that we subject emotions to the same intellectual rigor and historical analysis that people often reserve for ideas!

Can you walk us through how an episode is made? For example, The Confrontation (which was great) started with a broken bowl and ended up being about teens expressing rage and discomfort about racism. Where and how did this story begin?
Some stories begin with an idea or notion we want to explore. Some stories begin with an actual story. In this case, we’d heard about this summer program a long time ago and wanted to explore it. It seemed so unusual to have a summer program that gave teenagers the license to be so brutally honest with each other! Plus it allowed us to report in a way that we had less control over, because we had no idea what would happen over the course of those days. And originally we thought of it unfolding almost like a reality show, but with real consequences. But as with all Invisibilia stories, we wanted it to be about something more than itself. Every episode, we always say, has to be actually practically useful to the people who listen. So this one could give a broader picture of what you gain and lose when you confront a problem directly, to someone’s face. 

What's your favorite episode? Where should people begin?
I think my favorite episode is “The Problem with the Solution.” That one is about a town in Belgium where people house the chronically mentally ill, in their homes. But is also about Lulu Miller’s own family. And about the American addiction to solutions. And about this surprising idea that families are not always the best at taking care of you, because they can kind of poison you with their expectations. It’s a fairly simple episode and like all the others it had many challenges along the way. We didn’t have a central character. And Lulu’s family story, which was so moving, was only added very late. But I find it overall very kind and forgiving. 

As for where to begin? Season 1 is very iconic, and very removed from the news. It’s also very humane. In covid times, that’s where I might start. Also here is our Spotify top ten playlist that we made.

Which episode was the most challenging to make? 
Perhaps the most challenging was our “Emotions” episode. The idea that our basic emotions  - sad, angry, happy - are not automatic, but culturally determined, is a hard one to convey. The science behind the idea is pretty complex, which is tricky to do in radio. But the idea is also life changing so we wanted to get it right. Then on top of that, we had to weave in this fairly complex narrative about a car accident. So we were worried that listeners might not have the patience to digest all that. It’s a very rich meal! But it turned out to be a very popular episode and many people wrote us to say it changed their life!

One of my favorite episodes is The Fifth Vital Sign. I have listened to it so many times and passed it to so many people. How did this episode come about and what can we take from it?
This episode is an example of the beautiful mind meld collaboration we do sometimes. One of our producers, Abby Wendle, knew someone whose child had gone to the program. Alix had long been interested in a cultural history of pain, that is, examining how our pain tolerance as a culture has shifted so radically over a generation. And this program seemed like a perfect place to explore that. It was a mixture of a surprising and moving story with an unusual idea. The final step was getting permission from the program and a family to follow them. 

What people should take from it is an idea that pain, which seems like a fixed biological fact, sometimes has a component which is cultural. We pay more or less attention to pain at different points in history. And as with all Invisibilia episodes, this should give you a little more distance from what you are experiencing and freedom to move. We always like to say that if you don’t know what forces are acting on you, then you can’t change. 

What have you learned about people making Invisibilia?
What I’ve learned is people feel really alive when they look at the same landscape they’ve always looked at but suddenly see something different!

Thanks, Hanna!