Hey everybody. We are working on the next episode, but I came across something that I want to quickly share with you and it made me think about something fun I'm hoping we all can do together

you and me and the whole United States of Anxiety crew and I'll get to that ask in

just a minute but first I need to have a short conversation to set it up.

So I have with me here on video chat,

Sariah Nadia McDonald,

she's the culture critic for The Undefeded,

which is an awesome publication that, like us,

thinks a lot about how race intersects with culture.

So, Riah, hey, thanks for getting together with me.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

You're here in Brooklyn too, right?

I am, yes.

So there may be, you know, a siren or two in the background.

These sirens do get a bit haunting after a while. So late last week I was obsessively reading Twitter and I saw this article you wrote

about how race shaped the response to the 1918 flu.

And I want to say, dear listener, you're thinking,

I thought we were going someplace fun.

I don't think how this is going to be fun,

but bear with me, I promise we are going to get there.

But Surry, first off, what made you write this article?

What were you trying to achieve?

Well, you know, sort of at the beginning of the reporting when we first started hearing about COVID-19,

...