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Is it okay to feel joy while the world is burning?

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High anxiety: meet huge, phenomenal, amazing joy. Personalized love notes to Jeff Bezos at the Amazon shareholders meeting, and a check in about Amtrak. Lastly, the notes and the silence in the Fremont bridge.

Listen to the full show by clicking the play button above, or check out one of the show’s segments below. You can also subscribe to The Record on your favorite podcast app.

R. Eric Thomas, High Anxiety

R. Eric Thomas is a senior staff writer at ELLE.com; you might know him from The Internet. He also host The Moth Mainstage, and is in Seattle for a show tonight with the theme High Anxiety. Eric is no stranger to anxiety, but says that to find balance as a public personality, the secret is that you have to tell on yourself a little bit.

Tonya Mosley, Truth Be Told

KQED’s new advice podcast Truth Be Told is unapologetically by and for people of color. Its first episode begins with a big question: Is it okay to feel huge, phenomenal, amazing joy… when it seems like the rest of the world is burning? In the podcast, host Tonya Mosley traveled to Detroit to ask pleasure activist adrienne maree brown – as well as her own grandma. On our show, she spoke to Eric about the anxiety of joy and the idea that we owe it to our ancestors.

Carolyn Adolph, Amazon shareholder meeting

Amazon just had their fourth record-breaking quarter in a row – so you might assume investors would be pleased. Not everyone at yesterday’s shareholders meeting shared in that particular joy, though; KUOW’s Carolyn Adolph tells us why.

NTSB Amtrak derailment

Yesterday the National Transportation Safety Board announced that human error was to blame for the 2017 Amtrak derailment south of Tacoma. Now some lawmakers are calling for change. Keith Millhouse is a transportation and rail safety expert based in California; he explains.

Paurl Walsh, Fremont Bridge Resident

If you’ve been stuck in Fremont when the bridge is opening, it’s noisy – boat horns, alarms, traffic. But from inside the tower, at the heart of the drawbridge: that can be the most silent place of all. Paurl Walsh is a composer and the City of Seattle’s 2018 Fremont Bridge Resident; he took Record producer Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong inside the tower during his last weekend in residence. His final concert, Bascule, is tonight.

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