I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, this is NERNET.

I'm Greta Johnson.

And you've probably noticed, I mean,

especially over the last couple of years, more and more people have been drawing attention to the achievements of women in history, right? Which is great. It's super awesome. I am like

definitely highly stoked about it. But there's one thing that might be even more exciting. And that is highlighting the achievements of girls.

People who have helped change the world before they even turned 20. That means they're like doing good stuff before they can rent a car or buy a bottle of champagne or whatever.

And that is what Rad Girls Can is all about. It's the third book by Kate Shots and Miriam Kleinstall. They are our guests this week. And they said the inspiration for this book in particular literally came from a bunch of kids who just kept asking for it. Over and over, we heard kids asking if we could do a book

about girls and people of their age. And it kind of intimidated us at first because it's a really

different kind of research. Our two other books have been focusing on women from history whose

stories are, you know, a little fuller and more developed and there's scholarly

research about them. But this book tells 50 stories of girls and teenagers under 20 who've done

great things. And they don't even have like a whole lifetime to show for those accomplishments

yet. Like that's crazy. Yeah. They've already done such cool stuff. And I think that in like the

way that I ended up thinking about telling the stories and framing them was again less about their whole biography because some of them are 11, you know, but more about the story of what they did, how they did it, what they were trying to do.

And then also with each story, I tried to connect it to, you know, a larger movement or moment that readers could recognize.

You know, part of me thinks it's really easy to flip through a book like this and think, man, these girls aren't even 20 and they've done so much cool stuff.

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