Hey, it's Anna. This week we're sharing an episode of a new podcast called The Experiment

with You. It's produced by our colleagues at WNYC Studios and The Atlantic. It's a show

about America, and it's good. One recent episode looked at the high rates of deaths among

Filipino American healthcare workers from COVID and how that connects to US immigration

policy. Another included a long interview with a historian, a white guy from Virginia, who

was in his 40s when he reconsidered what he'd been taught about Confederate General Robert

Lee and Southern gentleman more generally. I think death sex and money listeners especially

will appreciate this episode that we're sharing today. It's about a man in Indiana who got

an email that he could have ignored, but he didn't. It's a story about faith and duty

and the death penalty. My colleague Julia Lungoria hosts the experiment. Here she is.

Alvin, I don't think I've ever said your last name out loud. How do I say it? It's

Meleth. Meleth? Meleth. Am I doing that right?

Mm-hmm. So, Alvin Meleth, why are we here today? Why? Why are you using my government name

like that? Alvin Meleth is a producer at the experiment. We started talking about something

he's been thinking about for a while now. So this summer in July, I saw that the federal

government had executed someone. And I remember reading about it in the news at the time and

being a little surprised by it because there are states that do executions regularly,

but the federal government hasn't actually executed someone in 17 years. If the last time

was 2003, there were none in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. It's just not a thing that

we do very often. I didn't fully realize it had been that long.

Yeah, I hadn't either. I think I was actually trying to make sense of how to feel about

it. Then two days later, they executed someone else. Then a day after they executed someone

...