I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. This is a weekend special.

Well, a year into Zooming when we've all had birthdays with no parties and there have been so many deaths with no funerals,

we could all use a check-in from a friend or loved one even if it's overdue, right?

And that's why WNYC's death, sex, and money team has come up with a new holiday,

and they're calling it, pick up the phone and call day.

It'll be next Friday, a week from today, March 26th, and with me now to

explain is death, sex, and money host, Anna Sail. Hi, Anna. Hi, Brian. So what is pick up the phone

and call day? Pick up the phone and call day is a holiday that we have declared full disclosure

with the help of some expertise from

your team, the Brian Lear Show team, because we were kind of casting about for a way to kind of

help our listeners get out of that funk of isolation. And we were trying to figure out, should

we pair up people to call? What should we do? And we just decided, you know what, let's just all together make the

commitment that that person that's in the back of your head that you've been thinking about

making a phone call to, but just haven't gotten around to it because you don't have the

energy or you're not sure what to say. We're declaring a holiday where we're all going to make

that call together.

You brought a relevant clip from your latest episode.

Want to set this up for us?

Yeah, this latest episode is really beautiful.

Producer Yasmin Khan is a reporter in the WNYC Newsroom, and she was reporting a year ago as New York City was shutting down. And she met a woman

named Donna Perry who lives in Mill Basin, who had just recovered from COVID and who had just

lost her best friend to COVID. And when Yasmin called her up a year ago, she was out delivering

...