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 Nerd Ed. I'm Greta Johnson. We did it. We made it to another weekend. Coming up, we will hear a roundup of some of the best cookbooks coming out this fall. She seems to have a voice in her head that's like, I'm thinking of making shrimp lasagna with habanero oil.

And the voice is like, fucking go for it.

But first, it's our chance to sit back, relax, and unwind from another slog of a week.

With us this week, we have two delightful humans.

Lauren Chulgin is a senior producer at New Hampshire Public Radio.

Lauren, welcome back.

Thanks, Greta.

We also have John Glenn Hill. She's a senior producer at Vox and is also hosting the Weeds podcast through the midterms. JQ. Glad to have you back to. Hello. It's so good to be back. Okay. So I think we should start this week in peak autumnal fashion by talking about pumpkins. In this case, it is very large, very heavy pumpkins.

The world champion pumpkin weigh off was held earlier this week in California and a Minnesota horticulture teacher won with a pumpkin that weighed over 2,500 pounds. It is massive. And it's also

actually just a couple hundred pounds off from like the world record, which happened in Italy last year. I have a lot of questions about this, including how on earth this dude in Minnesota got the pumpkin from Minnesota to California for the way off. That was my first thought, Greta. All this morning, I've been, like, going all around the internet.

Like, someone needs to explain to me.

How did no one think of that?

So what I learned from, of course, the local reporters from Minnesota was that he had to wrap it in saran wrap.

That's so much saran wrap.

It's so much saran wrap.

So the guy wraps the thing in saran wrap. Okay. Then he puts like warm towels around it. I don't have any idea why. There was something, some local anchor said about how like you don't want it to like age any further. This is all used to me. Well, like maybe if it dries out too much, it's lighter or something. Potentially. And we certainly wouldn't want that, wouldn't we?

...