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| Hello, Goodbye to Yowei Shaw, Co-host & Editorial Lead |
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Expecting… to say goodbye soon. Photographer: Marcus Branch |
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| You can find me on Twitter and Instagram. I also have a newsletter and linktr.ee, but no website because I let my web hosting payment expire in the midst of a deadline. Don’t make the same mistake! |
Invisibilia Origin Story: I remember listening to Season 1 in 2015 as just a fan. I was painting my living room a regrettable shade of purple, and I was so engrossed in the story that I started brushing over the decorative trim I was supposed to be cutting around. Later that year, I got an email asking if I’d apply for a producer job, and I was gobsmacked. Sure, I’d been freelance producing and reporting on hard-hitting stories for 5 years. But little ole’ me join Invisibilia? Get out.
Then I cried during my interview at the NPR office. Former host and Invisibilia creator Alix Spiegel was describing her vision for the show and I think I was moved to tears? I remember thinking I blew it. And all of a sudden, Alix started crying too! I think because she was moved by me being so moved? For a show about feelings, I should have known tears wouldn’t be a liability. They probably cinched the deal.
Looking back at my Invisibilia ride - going from fan in Season 1 to producer in Season 2 to Senior Producer/Reporter in Season 5 to Co-Host/Editorial Lead in Season 7 (to now laid off, ha) - the dominant emotion is gratitude. I feel so damn lucky to have gotten to make this beautiful show for so many years with so many talented, genius weirdos. |
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Photo Slideshow:
1) The Invisibilia team getting dazzled by supervising editor Neena Pathak’s juggling skills in 2022
2) Our first Invisibilia 2.0 team retreat in 2021
3)The Invisibilia team after a rare live event in 2018
4) Yowei and former Invisibilia host/creator Lulu Miller on Bring Your Jumpsuit to Work Day in 2016 |
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BTS moments seared into brain: - One of my pandemic work-from-home hacks is taking showers to bribe myself across the finish line on stories. Like, if I work one more hour, I get to spend 5 minutes luxuriating in a blast of hot water… repeat. A few years ago, I was taking one of these shower breaks from my final production pass on The Friendly Ghost Story when I managed to dump half a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap into my eye. Did you know that emergency eye hospitals are a thing? I did not, until I had to go to one. Luckily, it was just a minor chemical burn. Unfortunately, I still had to edit audio in ProTools – I did it with one working eye for a few weeks while crashing on the Friendship season.
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| Repurposing a mask into an eye patch after the accident |
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- Chasing down potential former spies from Taiwan’s martial law era is still the most James-Bond-level reporting I’ve done. My fixer Kwangyi Liu and I knocked on doors, talked to former political prisoners, and even tried to rendezvous with current security officials...all in vain. We didn’t succeed in getting any former government informants to talk. But we did manage to find and interview the family of the mysterious Mr. Zhu, the suspected spy at the center of our story - a big win!
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| My fixer Kwangyin Liu and I enjoying a meal after a hard day of chasing down spies in Taipei in 2018 |
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- I’m also proud to say that, while producing The Callout and reporting on the Richmond hardcore scene, I protected our former host Hanna Rosin from getting knocked around in a moshpit. Or, maybe more accurately, I watched anxiously from the sidelines for Hanna to emerge and begged her to not rush back into the tangle of arms and legs. What kind of producer would I be if I let our host break her arm under my watch?
- And then, while producing me on my first big story for the show, Alix may or may not have made me feed nuts to black bears for the sake of good tape. Maybe made is too strong a word? Let’s go with encourage!
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| Me trying to not get bitten on the job in Eaglesnest Township, Minnesota in 2017 |
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- Finally, I once peed my pants during an interview that ran long. I won’t say which interview, but I will say that it was during remote work times, in my personal recording booth. Not NPR property! In my defense, the guest only had 20 more minutes and I wanted to make the most of my time and thought I could hold it… Anyway, bless Ariana Gharib Lee for being such a kind, game, and skilled producer. When I told her, she promised to keep my secret and only made fun of me a little.
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Favorite Invisibilia stories you’ve worked on: - A Very Offensive Rom Com was a doozy to report. But even though it was scary taking on the entrenched, emotionally-charged topic of racial sexual preferences, I feel like I was able to find new ways of thinking about an old fight and how to move through it? And I loved getting to burrow into the science of attraction and will forever shout from the rooftops, “Attraction is iterative so stop saying, ‘it’s just my preference!’” Also, thanks to my research, the image of rats having sex while wearing leather vests now lives rent-free in my brain. Finally, getting Harry Shum Jr. to make a cameo and read a history of how U.S. policies systematically sexualized Asian women and emasculated men might just be the peak of my career.
- Also: I didn’t report The Great Narrative Escape; our incredibly talented lead producer/reporter Abby Wendle did. But co-hosting this episode and launching Abby on her quest to challenge our narrative habits changed the way I think about stories. The tugging between us even inspired an entire talk that, in the words of one Columbia Journalism School student, “broke [his] brain on what kinds of stories are possible.” Basically, I could nerd out about story structure and the tyranny of plot for a long time. You should hire Abby and me to do this talk together! We won’t disappoint.
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| Lead producer/reporter Abby Wendle and me accidentally twinning in early 2020 at the NPR office |
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Invisibilia insights you’ve actually used in real life: There are too many! But, some recent ones that come to mind: - Vanessa Bohn’s research about how we consistently underestimate how hard it is for other people to say “no” to us and her tip about never letting people answer her requests in the moment - especially when those people have less power than her. I reported on this just last season for The P-Word and a producer had to remind me to follow my own research the other week! It’s now sharpied on a post-it note above my desk.
- The idea of feedback loops, which I learned about while reporting the Chaos Machine series. I was talking to the founder of Outlier Media, Sara Alvarez, about the loss of trust in mainstream media. And she was like, as long as you’re being USEFUL to your audience, giving them what they actually need, the trust will follow. And don’t just assume you know what your audience needs and wants! Build as many feedback loops into the system as possible, so that you’re getting real data to inform your choices and constant feedback on how you’re doing. I know Sarah was making a very specific media critique, but I think it’s a useful practice for moving through the world in general. To think about which feedback loops you’re consciously or unconsciously using to shape your behavior and whether you need to build new loops, oriented towards different people, systems, or stories. For example, my best friend and I started having regular check-ins about our friendship - what’s going well, whether we need more support - which to me is a kind of feedback loop. A necessary one to keep us from drifting apart and ending up in a podcast episode with Esther Perel.
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