Introducing ‘The Longest Year,’ a podcast about life during the pandemic

It’s been almost a year since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic — a moment that we’ve come to see as a dividing line between the “before” and the “after.”

How do you even begin to describe what’s happened since? If someone asked what the last 12 months have been like, what would you say?

It was a challenging year. An unprecedented year. A year of loss, isolation; uncertainty, but also discovery.

The last 365 days have brought new challenges to all parts of our lives. Loneliness, fear and misinformation have all spread rapidly alongside the virus, altering our lives in ways we can’t yet completely understand.

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In the “The Longest Year,” a new miniseries of our podcast “America, Interrupted,” we hear the stories of people across America as they’ve tried to get their arms around the staggering toll the coronavirus has taken.

New episodes drop every Friday in March. Find new episodes in the list below as they publish. Subscribe to ‘America Interrupted’ to listen to this series and all of our special pandemic coverage.

Episode 1: Fighting the ‘invisible enemy’

A healthcare worker takes a break outside the emergency center at Maimonides Medical Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., April 13, 2020. Photo by: Andrew Kelly/REUTERS

When the coronavirus first hit the U.S., it was up to scientists and medical workers to figure out how to control a virus moving more quickly than data and testing and resources could. In this episode, we focus on the people on the front lines. A journalist who built a data resource the government couldn’t. Two scientists-turned-Reddit moderators fighting misinformation. An ICU nurse in New York who was the first to fight the devastating effects of the virus — and the first to receive a vaccination against it — and a public health director navigating a deeply politicized health crisis and wondering what it will take to reach the end

Listen here.

Episode 2: How COVID-19 has reshaped our lives

NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 12: A person wearing a protective mask rides a bike down the middle of an empty street amid the coronavirus pandemic in New York City. Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/ Getty Images

Take a second to remember what your life was like one year ago. For most of us, it all feels like a distant memory. From how we work to how we learn, who we see and where we can go, our day-to-day has changed drastically. And some of those changes have lasting consequences. In the second episode of our series “The Longest Year,” we hear the stories of people across the country about how they’ve survived the last year: a woman who contracted COVID-19 and now lives with its physical and mental scars, a recent college grad who lost his job and, because of the financial strain, almost lost his marriage, and a mother and her third-grader trying to figure out how to manage work and school from home.

Listen here.