Hey everyone, it's Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

We are back after our little summer break, and I hope everybody has been taking it as easy as you can these last days of summer. Make Me Smart

is going to sound and look a little bit different going forward. So first of all, we're going to be

dropping three episodes per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. It's going to be fewer

episodes, but we'll have more deep dives, special guests, and some

adventures on the road. And then based on what we've heard from you, we are going to include

more people living and working in the trenches of the economy, plus, of course, some key decision

makers that are shaping policy, tech, and culture in ways you might not expect.

I'm going to be your Make Me Smart host, and you'll still hear regularly from your favorite marketplace voices, plus some of my favorite sources and surprise guests along the way.

One of them is my American public media colleague, Emily Hanford. She's a senior correspondent and producer at APM Reports.

If her name sounds familiar, that's because she's the host of the award-winning podcast

sold a story, which investigates how a debunked approach to teaching kids how to read

took over classrooms across the country, and how that's

changing. She dropped a special episode that ties into a lot of what we've been covering on

Make Me Smart this year. It's about the Trump administration's cuts to federal jobs and

research funding and how that all ties in to reading. Emily, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

So for those who haven't listened to the series, tell us a bit about sold a story and the reporting that you do.

Well, sold a story first came out in the fall of 2022, and it was actually the result of reporting

that I had been doing for years in education.

And I got really interested back in like 2017, 2018

in how children learn to read.

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