859: Chaos Graph
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2025
⏱️ 67 minutes
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Summary
People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to.
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- Prologue: A scientist who is used to organizing data starts tracking scientific meetings that seem to exist only on paper—meetings that might decide the fate of years of research. The NIH website shows one reality; the empty conference rooms tell another story. She graphs the chaos. (9 minutes)
- Act One: American doctors returning from Gaza compare notes and start to see a pattern. (28 minutes)
- Act Two: A woman watches her partner get taken in handcuffs with no explanation. Days later, she spots him in the most unexpected place. The coordinates of her life suddenly don't make sense as she navigates the bewildering map of the US immigration system. (23 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's This American Life. I'm Hannah Jaffe Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. |
| 0:05.8 | I've been talking to someone here and there over the last couple of months about a situation she's in. |
| 0:11.1 | And I think she typifies the thing we're going to try to do in this episode, so I'd like you to meet her. |
| 0:16.8 | Her name is Annika Barber. She's a scientist, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, a runner. |
| 0:23.3 | She's got purple hair and a particular way of organizing the world around her. |
| 0:29.0 | Her books, organized topically and then by height, her lab, color-coded labels. |
| 0:35.1 | I also tracked how many days of the year my husband eats pizza and I make a chart |
| 0:39.1 | of it. He's really into pizza. So sometimes I just like to have... Wait, wait, wait. Why? Why do you do that? |
| 0:44.8 | So my husband really can't go 24 hours without talking about pizza. So last year, I accused him of talking |
| 0:51.6 | about pizza every day and he swore he didn't. And I was like, I really think you do. And so starting in January of this year, I accused him of talking about pizza every day, and he swore he didn't. And I was like, I really think you do. |
| 0:55.5 | And so starting in January of this year, I said that for 2025, I was going to log every day that I heard him say the word pizza, as well as every time he ate pizza for the year. |
| 1:05.5 | He actually eats less pizza than I would expect for the amount he talks about pizza. |
| 1:09.5 | Like the consumption to discussion ratio is not what I expected it would be. |
| 1:13.7 | She's only had pizza 14 times this year. |
| 1:16.5 | Lately, Anika has been trying to get her mind around a new situation that is deeply confusing for her and lots of people. |
| 1:25.6 | She's tracking scientific meetings that are not happening. |
| 1:30.1 | When President Trump was inaugurated, he put a freeze on research grants. |
| 1:34.9 | This meant the meetings where scientists like Annika get together at the National Institutes of Health |
| 1:39.9 | to assess new research. |
| 1:41.8 | They're called NIH study sections. |
| 1:44.4 | Those meetings were off. |
| 1:46.8 | But then, a judge said the administration couldn't pause all research grants, so the meetings |
... |
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