Why is Congress like this?

Today in our continued exploration of why the US is the way it is, we get to Article I. Why did the framers design Congress the way they did? Why did the small states come out so far ahead? And what, potentially, would James Madison think if he saw its operation in 2026? To help us navigate the thoughts of men long-dead, we talk to Madison scholar Jack Rakove. He shares his insights on representation, the electoral college, and much more. Click here to listen to our episode on the Articles of Confederation, our shaggy dog of a first draft of government! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  I am here.

• 0:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 0:01Nick Capodice?

  I'm also here. I've been here the whole time.

• 0:07Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, I have used variations on these clips so often now that I wonder if they're even necessary.

• 0:14Hannah McCarthy?

  What clips?

• 0:15Nick Capodice?

  These ones. I'm gonna put some heart pounding cable news music under this.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  Only about 1 in 10 Americans think Congress is doing a good job.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  You know, I just want to say to Congress, stand up and applaud. You're usually hated, but usually not this hated. You're reaching, or at least tying, record highs in terms of disapproval. Hello, 86%, 86% of Americans disapprove of Congress. That is tied with November of 2013.

• 0:46Hannah McCarthy?

  The tried and true news clips of people disapproving of the way the US government is doing its job.

• 0:52Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Hannah McCarthy?

  What is the congressional approval rating right now, by the way?

• 0:57Nick Capodice?

  As of this morning, June 23rd, 2026, it is at 24%. That is, 24% of polled Americans approve of the job Congress is doing.

• 1:07Hannah McCarthy?

  And now, is that especially low?

• 1:09Nick Capodice?

  It is especially low. It's been lower, but the record low was in 2011, and the record high was in the wake of September 11th, 2001. But it's low. And it got me thinking, Hannah. It got me thinking of that historical fantasy. If, under a pale moon, the cemeteries rattled, and the specters of those that wrote the manual, the ones who designed our system of government, if they rose from the earth and looked about, what would they say?

• 1:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, we can't do that.

• 1:45Nick Capodice?

  We can't do that.

• 1:47Hannah McCarthy?

  We spend an awful lot of time in this country, maybe in this world, wondering what the dead would say, you know, if they rose from the grave, which, if history is any indication, does not seem to be on the docket.

• 1:59Nick Capodice?

  All right, so barring that, today I got the next best thing.

• 2:04Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101, the podcast refresher course on the basics of how our democracy works. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 2:09Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 2:10Nick Capodice?

  And in our series celebrating and examining our 250th anniversary as a nation, we often ask ourselves, why are we like this? And today, it's all about Article One. Why is our Congress the way it is? We're talking representation and apportionment, legislative powers, successes and failures, all of that stuff. And we're doing it through the lens of the people who created the Constitution. One person in particular, James Madison. So stick around.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  So good, so good, so good.

• 3:13Speaker 06

  Cashmere, outerwear and boots are up to 60% off at Nordstrom Rack. Save on brands like Ugg, Vince and Kohan. Join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

• 3:30Speaker 07

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting and completely delicious. Simply. Say yes to Simple.

• 3:59Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick, your rather gruesome cemetery scene, and I say that because I never got over the Thriller music video as a child. It still haunts my dreams. Being a bit of a nonstarter, how should we talk about what the framers thought?

• 4:17Nick Capodice?

  Well, I reached out to this guy. Yeah, for myself, it's Madison's alter ego, you know, in terms of my current work. This is Jack Rakoff. Hi, everyone. I'm Jack Rakoff. I am the William Robertson.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science and by courtesy of law, emeritus, meaning I'm retired, at Stanford University, the author of eight books and the editor of many others.

• 4:44Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, he's done this before, hasn't he?

• 4:45Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, he sure has. Jack's one of the OG madmen. Can I refer to James Madison scholars as madmen, or has that been done to death?

• 4:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Madmen?

• 4:54Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, because Madison men.

• 4:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, not because they're ad men.

• 5:00Nick Capodice?

  No, no, they're called-

• 5:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Have you ever watched the TV show?

• 5:02Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, but they're called madmen because the ad agencies run Madison Avenue.

• 5:06Hannah McCarthy?

  No, I know, I-

• 5:07Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I know that, Nick. But in addition to his books, mostly on Madison, Jack has contributed to myriad briefs for the United States Supreme Court, notably in Trump v. US, the presidential immunity case, and the recent Arizona redistricting case. So Hannah, let us start with what the Constitution was born out of. Give us a quick primer on the Articles of Confederation.

• 5:31Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, absolutely. We have a link to an entire episode on this in the show notes, but in brief, the Articles were our first Constitution. They outlined our government initially. So, right after the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five to write the Declaration of Independence, they also appointed a committee of 13 to draft the Articles.

• 5:55Nick Capodice?

  And?

• 5:57Hannah McCarthy?

  And they were a diestu. Every state for itself, barely any centralized government whatsoever, no executive power to speak of, and they were nigh impossible to amend. So, when we were creating a new Constitution, our goal was in part to fix our mistakes.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  For starters-

• 6:23Speaker 05

  One has to assume, particularly if you look at things from James Madison's vantage point, what you wanted to do in the wake of the effective collapse, the framers would have said the imbecility of the Continental Congress under the Art of the Confederation was, you wanted to create a national government that would be fully empowered to enact, execute, and adjudicate its own laws. And once you get to the matter of legislation, the conventional wisdom was, you need to have a bicameral legislature.

• 6:55Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, why was a bicameral legislature conventional wisdom?

• 7:00Nick Capodice?

  Well, first off, the vast majority of colonies, now states, they already operated under a bicameral legislature, which by the way, is two chambers of Congress. Not to mention, it's what we did in the old place, the Parliament of Great Britain, where we had the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  That raises interesting questions about, if you have two houses, what is each one going to represent? And Madison in particular, and along with his allies, people like James Wilson and Robert Morris, Governor Morrison, Pennsylvania, Rufus King of Massachusetts, and so on, they were committed to the idea that you needed to have some form of proportional representation in both houses of Congress, that you had to absolutely get rid of the one state, one vote rule, which had been the model of decision-making in the Continental Congress, going back to 1774. So that absolutely had to be abandoned. But that leaves open the question of, what rule of proportion of representatives across the states, or among

• 8:04Speaker 05

  the states in two houses, would you apply? Would it be strictly population? Would it be population plus property? And Madison felt that legislative power by itself was very difficult to define, defined in the sense of limiting. There was this phrase he uses later in life, is the plastic faculty of legislation.

• 8:26Hannah McCarthy?

  The plastic faculty of legislation.

• 8:30Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, plastic is in bendy, changeable. Madison talks about this in Federalist 48 and in other places later in his life. The thing is, when you constitute a government, especially a national government, you want to be really specific about who has what powers.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  But theoretically, Madison felt that was actually quite difficult to do because legislative powers by its nature is so supple and so complex that legislatures could always, in a sense, manipulate or mask their sort of their more, you know, their ambitions through devising complicated techniques of developing laws.

• 9:08Hannah McCarthy?

  So basically, the legislative branch is the most difficult to pin down because that branch makes the laws and those laws can be complex and technical. And the legislature can nudge the rules one way or another, potentially to grant themselves more power.

• 9:26Nick Capodice?

  Exactly. So now, we're gonna talk about some plans, Hannah. Two famous plans come out of the arguments to determine how our Congress is gonna be constructed. The Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. So Madison drafted the Virginia Plan, which has in it a bicameral legislature, and it is determinate on population. And representatives from smaller states are like, "Aw, man, no way. That means we're not gonna have any people in there." And so, small states back the New Jersey Plan, which says we should have one chamber of Congress, and every state gets the same amount of representatives regardless of population.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  The decision of July 16th to give each state an equal vote in the Senate. We call it either the Great Compromise, or for reasons, I don't really agree with the Connecticut Compromise, because I don't think Connecticut played any special role here, although the Connecticutists were quite active, but they weren't the decision makers. But, you know, that vote, that vote was not a compromise in its own name, as I say. The vote of July 16th, which is when it gets the equal state vote in the Senate, was five states to four states with one state, Massachusetts, divided. So, they said, "Look, you know, we, you know, we support most of the legislative outcomes you want." But we're not gonna, we're not gonna agree to this without preserving the equal

• 10:49Speaker 05

  vote in at least one house. So it was always about the second house. It was always about what would happen in the senate. And Madison's position was, no, we're just gonna use a placeholder.

• 11:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, do the small states come out ahead here? The senate is an extremely powerful body, and each state gets two senators, no matter how many people live there.

• 11:14Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, they kind of did. And Madison thought so too. And to that point, Jack asked me a very interesting question.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  I used to ask my students, and you could ask whoever your listeners are. And this is a trick question, Nick, so pay attention. Do we ever vote on the basis of the size of the state in which we live?

• 11:37Nick Capodice?

  So do we, Hannah?

• 11:39Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't know if I know what that means. Can you repeat that?

• 11:42Nick Capodice?

  Do we ever vote for a candidate because of the size of our state?

• 11:47Hannah McCarthy?

  I comprehend the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I do not understand their meaning.

• 11:51Nick Capodice?

  This exact same thing happened to me when Jack asked me, and I was like, uh, no, I don't think so. But think of it this way. The main reason people are gonna vote for one candidate or another is based on where they stand on certain topics, big ones, right? Speech, immigration, war, taxes, healthcare, et cetera. What on earth does the size of the state have to do with it?

• 12:18Speaker 05

  The way we vote is based on the issues we care about. And, you know, they have nothing at all. You know, if you, it matters a lot if you live in a city, if you live in the countryside. If you're, you know, if you're for, if you're farming corn or soybeans on the west bank of the Mississippi in Iowa, or on the east bank in my native state of Illinois. Farm subsidies or whatever will define what your interests are. And Madison's argument is, you know, against this, and he felt he could wear the small states down by force of argument, because basically, he's right. If you want to say that the states have, should have, and should have an equal vote on the basis of the interests they represent or they possess, then you have to be able

• 13:03Speaker 05

  to identify what those interests are. But the large states don't have common interests. So you compare Massachusetts with Pennsylvania and Virginia, they have very different kinds of economies. They have very different populations. If you guys could ever tell me what will bring the small states together on the one end, or the large states on the other end, you might have a good argument. The small states can never do it.

• 13:26Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. This is a famous small state versus big state battle. The small states are like, if we don't have equal representation with the big states, we'll lose out on the small state issues, but there aren't any small state issues.

• 13:39Nick Capodice?

  Precisely. But the small states hold out, and Madison didn't want to toss the whole thing in the midden and start over with a new convention and a new constitution. So this is just something the guy had to swallow.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  When Madison came to the equal state vote, he said, you can't defend it on its merits. We just have to accept it was a necessary compromise at the convention. And so we're stuck with it. We got to defend it on principle. It's part of the package. The overall goodness will be served by ratifying the new constitution, not by rejecting or modifying it. So there we are.

• 14:15Hannah McCarthy?

  There we are. But did Jack have any thoughts in terms of how we're doing 250 years later? Does anything stick out as being opposed to Madison's intentions?

• 14:28Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely, Hannah, and I have a few proposed remedies to the congressional malaise. But first, we got to take a quick break.

• 14:41Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 15:26Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 15:47Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money, prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something, to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one-stop-shop platform for making a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

• 16:31Nick Capodice?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first...

• 16:52Hannah McCarthy?

  The older I get, the more I am looking for truly lovable closet staples that I know I will reach for just as often next year as I do right now. I want a closet that doesn't need constant updates or replacements, just high-quality clothes that last, especially the kind with tags that say 100%. As in, 100% Mongolian cashmere, 100% mulberry silk, 100% organic cotton, just like the Quince Fisherman Cropped Cartier I am wearing right this very second. This sweater has kept its shape, color, and softness for years now. I reach for it every single fall, every time I want a warm and elevated look. Quince gives you the quality you expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. Find

• 17:37Hannah McCarthy?

  the fall pieces you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's a great way to support the show.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold-weather gear at Nordstrom Rack. Save on cashmere, outerwear, boots, and more from brands like Ugg, Vince, Kohan, and Hunter. Join the Nordy Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts, shop clearance and new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 18:31Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. And Nick, you were just about to tell me about what things today, congress-wise, are at odds with how James Madison envisioned our great American experiment.

• 18:45Nick Capodice?

  I certainly was. And here is the first thing that nobody in the 1780s would have expected: the notion of career politicians. Here again is Madison scholar Jack Rakoff.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Okay, now here's Madison's position, though. If you're a political scientist today, you would say the independent variable that drives political behavior today is the desire to be re-elected. Right, that, you know, we assume that politics has been professionalized. That once you're elected to Congress, getting reelected is your dominant personal ambition. You know, they, you know, they, they just, they just want to stay on forever. Maslow and Nero, when holding office, was thought really to be avocational in nature. It wasn't your profession, wasn't your career. You could be a planter, you could be a merchant, you could be a lawyer, and so on.

• 19:42Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so you're a professional first and a politician second.

• 19:46Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and this is good, because you'd come to Congress with a unique expertise. You were a wheat farmer, you sold felt hats, you made boats, whatever.

• 19:55Hannah McCarthy?

  And often, you were a lawyer.

• 19:57Nick Capodice?

  Yes, that was and is true, Hannah. About 40% of members of Congress right now have a law degree. But do you know the number one prior occupation for somebody who is sitting in the House of Representatives?

• 20:11Hannah McCarthy?

  Like, right now?

• 20:11Nick Capodice?

  Right now.

• 20:12Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm gonna guess, given that 40% of them have law degrees, lawyer?

• 20:17Nick Capodice?

  Something beats it out, something they did since they were a lawyer and before they came to the House of Representatives. And that is, they worked in politics already. And I gotta add, this is really new.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  The mean term of service in the House of Representatives, from 1789 down to about 1900, you know, plus or minus, but 1900 is the turning point, was three years. Meaning, if you do the arithmetic, the vast majority of members served one or two terms. And then very, very few senators, I mean, a few did, but very few senators served two terms until the late 19th century.

• 20:56Nick Capodice?

  And look, it's understandable that our first few Congresses in the 1800s were absent-career politicians, because we were a fresh new country. But in 1979, a very lucky year for me, only 29 members of the House were former politicians. But in 2019, 171.

• 21:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Huh. Is there a repercussion for that?

• 21:21Nick Capodice?

  Well, I am not going to put words in Jack's mouth, but to me, it seems like the career politician is something that could lead to the much bigger problem. So Hannah, what skills would you say somebody who has worked in politics for a long time has?

• 21:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Uh...

• 21:44Hannah McCarthy?

  I mean, I would say foremost, they are politic. They know how to negotiate. They understand the system ostensibly and how to maneuver it to benefit their constituents ostensibly or themselves, you know? And frankly, I think a lot of them are pretty good at getting reelected.

• 22:06Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And that last one, Hannah, that leads to Jack's primary concern.

• 22:12Speaker 05

  So Nick, I'm doing a lot of work on constitutional failure. So from a Madisonian perspective, so I've been giving a lot of thought to this, but Madison's standard assumption, this is Federalist 51, you may or may not know this text, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, the interest of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place. And so the very famous passage from the Federalists, I mean, almost as famous as the stuff from Federalist 10. Party loyalty is much stronger than, you know, kind of strict loyalty to one's institution.

• 22:51Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. So this is it. And we have talked about this on the show before, partisanship, and that includes loyalty to the party, to party leadership, resulting in Congress not necessarily acting in the best interests of their constituents of the people.

• 23:15Nick Capodice?

  Yes, an utter devotion to your party has swung back and forth between the two parties over the centuries, but there is a marked rise in partisanship, full stop, party over everything else in the 1990s, and it hasn't gone down.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  unique test of partisanship, we are finding out that Democrats and Republicans are not just deeply divided on the facts, they may be actually seeing two completely different worlds.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  unrest, violence. What is causing the polarization of the United States of America?

• 23:52Speaker 05

  It's more profound for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats because if you're a Republican politician, your principal fear in life is the fear of being primaried. And particularly if you cross Trump, it doesn't work in every case, but it has worked in a number of cases.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  I'm gonna be making an endorsement today in Texas.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  President Trump's tease early this morning turned into a truth heard round Texas. Trump picking Paxton over Cornyn, calling the Texas Attorney General a true MAGA warrior, while ripping the incumbent senator for failing to endorse him fast enough. And in another age before we lived in an era of hyper-partisanship, you know, you'd find legislators who worked together would, you know, would learn how to collaborate. If you want great examples of this, just think about the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and those were collaborative efforts.

• 24:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, one way to eradicate partisanship is to get rid of parties entirely. We have had so many listener emails over the years asking, why don't we or can't we get rid of the two-party system? And yes, there are a bunch of democracies in the world that have multi-party systems, but the way our elections are set up, there seems to be no way to stop being a two-party system.

• 25:19Nick Capodice?

  That's absolutely right. And I asked Jack, do you think there are any remedies to all of this? And he said, right now, we are having a reckoning with gerrymandering in particular, states drawing legislative districts to ensure one party wins over the other, and that creates voter apathy, and that creates a lack of faith in Congress. Anyways, here is one of Jack's potential solutions.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  You know, is one way to solve the gerrymandering probably, probably is let's get rid of districts. And, you know, I have to write more about this. I mean, there's a big part of this if you have access to Max Farron's Records of the Federal Convention, 1787. It's available online. Go to Volume 2, Page 240, 241, and read Madison's long speech. It's a seminal speech because it illustrates two things. One is, there's no obvious idea of exactly how should you elect the House of Representatives. You know, kind of figure, you know, remember, then, the decision about how you do that is left under the Elections Clause, Article 1, Section 4, not Section 8, but Section 4,

• 26:26Speaker 05

  is left to the states, state legislatures, to resolve. Madison did not trust the state legislatures to do anything, right? Always he was deeply distrustful of the state legislatures. But then also, you might decide that there is one optimal way to elect representatives. So if you want to solve the gerrymandering problem, you say, okay, constituents, you know, congressmen representing their constituents, it's valuable, but, you know, a whole delegation can set up mechanisms to do that. You know, you could, I mean, they could create staffs with responsive individuals and, you know, from, coming from different communities, you could kind of allocate telephone calls on that basis or whatever, and you could, you could get rid of the gerrymandering problem because you're not going to have districts.

• 27:14Nick Capodice?

  And the very last potential remedy that Jack talked to me about wasn't about Congress specifically, but I think it's important to include it here. Something that has been argued about as long as I've been a sentient being, our unique system of electing a president.

• 27:31Hannah McCarthy?

  The Electoral College.

• 27:33Nick Capodice?

  The Electoral College.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Well, I think, I think the most relevant point is the presidency. And Nick, it's important to know that all the critical decisions about the presidency... Really came, we're taken to the very end. In Madison's language, tedious and reiterated discussions, or something like that. It's a letter to Jefferson of October 24, 1787. I mean, basically, what about the presidency is, it's not that the Electoral College was the most attractive alternative, it's that it was the least unattractive. So long as Washington wants to be president, it doesn't matter what the rules are, you'll get the same result. So, but, you know, they decided on the seven at the end, but, you know, if you get to 1796, if you had a popular election, it would be quite effective.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  You have two, you have two big name candidates, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both, both by that time quite well known, you know, quite eminent, and, you know, you could have decided between them.

• 28:31Hannah McCarthy?

  It is interesting to me that the things that still, to this day, cause a lot of consternation, equal representation in the Senate and the Electoral College, one was a tough pill for Madison to swallow, and the other was a, ugh, let's just get this done, we'll fix it in post, kind of thing.

• 28:52Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. And it points to the fact that our system is not, nor was it ever, perfect. But more perfect is what we reach for, isn't it?

• 29:04Hannah McCarthy?

  Supposed to be.

• 29:23Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is it for this episode of Civics 101. I'm sorry we couldn't sneak the cemetery in there.

• 29:27Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, what did you mean? Were you saying?

• 29:29Nick Capodice?

  Well, the beginning, we talk about a cemetery. Ghosts coming out. I'll skip it. That is it for this episode of Civics 101. It was written and produced by me, Nick Capodice, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.

• 29:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Thank you.

• 29:40Nick Capodice?

  Our staff includes Dana Cataldo, Rebecca Lavoy, and Marina Henke. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and the wondrous Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 30:02Speaker 06

  Looking for a horror podcast that isn't murder to get through? Then check out another effing horror podcast. Our show, where paranormal and true crime stories collide with unfiltered commentary. I'm Monique Sanchez. And I'm Amy Trainor. Each week, Monique and I share one paranormal story. And one true crime case. From unexplained phenomena to true tales of murder and mayhem. We find the stories you haven't heard before and research them obsessively to bring them to life.

• 30:31Speaker 07

  Follow or watch another effing horror podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:41Speaker 07

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting, and completely delicious. Simply. Say yes to Simple.

• 31:10Speaker 06

  Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/specialoffer.