Simone Popperl
Simone Popperl is an editor for NPR's Morning Edition and Up First. She joined the network in March 2019, and since then has pitched and edited stories on everything from the legacy of burn pits in Iraq, to never-ending "infrastructure week," to California towns grappling with climate change, to American alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin's ascendance to the top of her sport. She led Noel King's reporting on the early days of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Steve Inskeep's reporting from swing states in the lead up to the 2020 Presidential Election, and Leila Fadel's field reporting from Kentucky on the end of Roe v. Wade.
In the first months of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, she helped edit NPR's evening live show "The National Conversation" that brought experts on air to answer listeners' urgent questions about the major disruptions to American life wrought by the novel pathogen.
Popperl received a Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine for research about how sinkholes in the Dead Sea basin are changing the lives of geologists, environmentalists, tourists, industrialists and local residents in Jordan, the West Bank and Israel. She's a founding member of the Middle East Environmental Worlds Working Group, and has edited and published ethnographic research in a variety of university presses.
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NPR's Noel King checks in with John J. Lennon, an inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about the impact COVID-19 has had on prison life six months into the pandemic. -
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns are competing for voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania. But is either of the major parties trying to engage Black voters in cities like Pittsburgh? -
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, says the Trump administration is creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the U.S. -
Alisha Morris, a Kansas theater teacher, created a database of COVID-19 cases in schools. Now maintained by the National Education Association, it shares data that some schools prefer to keep quiet. -
The documentary A Thousand Cuts focuses on how Ressa and her Rappler news organization navigate Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's attacks on the press. It will be released in the U.S. Aug. 8. -
Ashtabula County, Ohio, voted for Barack Obama in 2012, then for Donald Trump. New political leaders there hope a younger generation of voters will help decide the 2020 presidential election. -
Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. Today, she says, it's still playing out as the U.S. reckons with racial injustice.
