Season 3 of 'Invisibilia' has been a voyage of discovery for its two hosts: Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin. Spiegel is a science journalist and a founding producer of 'This American Life.' Rosin has written for publications like The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and has appeared on 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report.' Rosin is the newest co-host of 'Invisibilia,' along with Spiegel and Lulu Miller.
WPSU’s Kristine Allen recently spoke with Spiegel and Rosin about their experiences hosting Season 3 of 'Invisibilia.'
KRISTINE ALLEN: Where did the concept for 'Invisibilia' originally come from?
ALIX SPIEGEL: Well – this is Alix talking – I was a human behavior reporter for the science desk. And covering that for as long as I covered it, I just… I felt like I was seeing a world that wasn’t fully explained in the journalism that existed at the time. And I wanted to do that. And I was one of the founders of… one of the first producers of 'This American Life,' and I wanted to go back to long-form narrative work. And so I thought that I would marry these two things. And I met Lulu Miller at the time, and she had worked for 'Radio Lab.' So the idea was let’s make a show about human behavior, which is what 'Invisibilia' is about; and about all of these kind of invisible forces that kind of hold us in place, and make those things visible. So that’s kind of where it came form.
ALLEN This is the third season of 'Invisibilia. ' How did you decide on the theme for this season?
HANNA ROSIN: So the theme from this season grows a little bit out of our political situation. It’s not a political show explicitly. But we were looking around and noticing, like everyone did, that people in the same family, people in the same neighborhoods, were looking out at the world and seeing the same thing out their window but seeing something completely different.
So it’s almost as if, you know, (laughs) there is nothing real out there. It was all coming from inside their own heads. It seemed more like a psychological phenomenon than an actual phenomenon. So we decided to look at what is coloring our vision, what’s coloring our emotions, what’s coloring our feelings.
And we looked at this new, this cutting edge neuroscience and social psychology about concepts, and concepts in our head, and how they shape us. And so we just extended that idea across the season.
Now it’s not an abstract show. It’s not abstractly about science. It is primarily a show that will tell you a story about someone who you will recognize as a fellow human in the world. And then the social science is in service of that story.
So I think you’ll recognize… you’ll see for example we have a story about a guy named Max who lived in San Francisco and was an engineer, but felt that he was living in a kind of suffocating bubble. We all talk about bubbles these days. And so he submitted his life to a random algorithm, which tells him where to go, what to eat. And so you’ll recognize things from the political situation in the world we live in, only from a slightly different angle.
ALLEN: Can you give us an idea of the process behind the scenes, and how each episode of 'Invisibilia' comes together?
SPIEGEL: Oh. (Laughter.) By hook or by… (More laughter.) So we have a little chewing gum. We have a bobby pin. We just kind of put them together.
ROSIN: It either starts with the science or with the story. Sometimes someone’s really interested in a particular story. And their passion for it, you know the fact that they’re… that it’s drawing them probably means there’s an underlying phenomenon that should be examined. So sometimes it’s just… you see something really interesting. You hear about it from a friend. You read about it in the newspaper. You’re reporting, and someone tells you something you never heard before. So that’s one way.
And another way is that we read about an idea, which seems unfamiliar and tantalizing and really revelatory. So sometimes it comes from the science itself, and then we look for a story to illustrate that idea.
So that’s how it starts. And then there’s the, you know, reporting. All of our stories are original, reported stories so we do the reporting. We go out and find things. We interview the people. And then there’s the story-making, which is, you know, how do you convey this thing that you just learned to people with beautiful sound and music and voices. So it’s a three-part process.
So they can actually absorb the things that you’re saying, even if what you’re saying has a lot of complicated information.
ALLEN: Could you each describe for me a "moment" you had, in reporting for this season of 'Invisibilia' that will stay with you for a good long time: something surprising, enlightening, scary, delightful?
SPIEGEL: Hmmm. Well I really enjoyed bubble-hopping, I have to say. I’m, you know, the mother of two. And I work really hard. (Laughs.) And so my life is extremely confined, geographically. I go to work, and then I go home and work and home. And just the experience of climbing into a car and not knowing where you are gonna end up, and just being there. I felt free in a way that I hadn’t felt in a really long time. And it was really beautiful to me.
ROSIN: So I did a story about a town in Florida which was really shaken up by an incident that happened there, with a principal who was trying to help the kids. And the way he thought to help them was to hypnotize them. And then a tragedy happened at the school. And so it’s a fairly dark story. And I think what amazed me about that story is it was weird. It was as if the community had been kind of suspended and frozen in place. It was like no one was talking about the incident anymore, but it hadn’t been resolved. There wasn’t any closure. Nobody had talked about it or processed it. It was just like walking into something that had been kind of frozen in place and like trying to get it to thaw. So that was just an interesting reporting experience.
ALLEN: And in our last minute here, I want to ask you both: Why do you do what you do in life? What drives you?
ROSIN: So, Alix likes to say that you can’t change your life if you don’t know what’s holding you in place. And so I think the beauty of working on 'Invisibilia' is that you really do get to see the forces that are holding you in place, the things that are acting on you. And you can kind of shake them off, or embrace them or love them or whatever. So I think it’s a show that is liberating to work on, for that reason… for me, personally. I don’t know about Alix. Alix is just passing time. (Laughter.)
SPIEGEL: Yeah, that’s right. (Laughter.) I need something to do. Well I probably do it because I want to learn and grow. And this is the easiest way to learn and grow and be paid for it. And help other people to, to learn and grow.
ALLEN: Thank you both so much.
ROSIN: Okay, thank you.
SPIEGEL: Thank you.
If you missed any episodes of 'Invisibilia', you can hear them as podcasts from NPR.