Joyce Hackel
Producer
Joyce Hackel spends much of her day tracking down the right person to tell the nuanced stories that help explain the world today.
Joyce started out writing deadline copy from a DC sweatshop called States News Service in the mid-80s. After reporting one story too many about Congressional dysfunction (it was bad even then) , she ditched the Capitol Hill press pass and bought a one-way ticket to El Salvador. There she wrote for The Christian Science Monitor and filed freelance radio pieces from a closet lined with egg cartons. (She also met a British guy she’d eventually marry, but that’s another story…) Eventually she became a staff correspondent for Monitor Radio and was dispatched to Africa for four years. She filed from more than a dozen African countries, reporting on clan warfare in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, and Nelson Mandela's landmark election. She won a few awards for her Africa radio pieces, and in 1996 headed to the University of Michigan as a journalism fellow. Since then, Joyce has worked as a Senior Editor at Living on Earth, and has edited WBUR’s Morning Edition. Some day she and her journalist hubby vow they'll get back on the road.
Recent Stories
COVID-19
The World
March 29, 2021
For UK photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley, the COVID-19 crisis brought home the need to rebuild a connection with the natural world. She began the "The Nature of Care" project 10 months ago to help nurses and doctors in London cope with pandemic-induced stress and anxiety by teaching them nature photography skills.
Environment
The World
March 22, 2021
A new book describes how environmental activists in El Salvador brought conservatives and progressives together to institute a nationwide ban on metal mining in 2017. The World’s Marco Werman spoke with attorney Luis Parada, who led El Salvador’s defense team in a mining lawsuit at the World Bank, and Robin Broad, a co-author of the book, "The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved A Country from Corporate Greed."
The World
March 15, 2021
Europe is facing a dangerous, new surge of COVID-19 cases, just as Italy, France and Germany suspend use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Dr. Barry Bloom, former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, talks with The World’s Marco Werman about what lessons the surge might offer US scientists and public health officials devising strategies to beat the new variants.
Books
The World
March 12, 2021
"How Beautiful We Were" tells the fictional story of West African villagers who stand up to an imagined American oil company that is poisoning their land and water.
Fukushima 10 Years Later
The World
March 08, 2021
Yoichi Funabashi, one of Japan’s most imminent journalists and author of a new book titled "Meltdown: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis," told The World that there was a lack of emergency training for that critical scenario faced on March 11, 2011.
COVID-19
The World
February 05, 2021
Almost a year into the pandemic, societies are faced with immense contradictions: processing shocking death tolls while finding hope in promising vaccine rollouts. Surgeon, writer and researcher Dr. Atul Gawande speaks with The World’s Marco Werman about what it means to be human in this precarious moment.
COVID-19
The World
February 04, 2021
Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a co-chair of an independent panel reviewing the WHO's response to COVID-19, expressed concerns about COVID-19 vaccine roll-out plans. She tells The World's Marco Werman that vaccine inequities could delay rollouts in poorer countries.
Extremism
The World
January 13, 2021
J.M. Berger, author of the book, "Extremism," says his most urgent question is how and where the large and radicalized community of extremists in the US will act next, pointing out that 15%-30% of Americans identify as white nationalists.
Trump administration
The World
January 11, 2021
Fiona Hill was a key witness in the previous impeachment proceedings. Hill was Trump’s top Russia adviser from 2017 to 2019 and also served on the National Security Council. She told The World's host Marco Werman that the idea to storm the Capitol didn't come out of the blue.
Foreign policy
The World
December 18, 2020
Though historians debate whether Washington could have been more assertive in responding to Middle East uprisings a decade ago, some observers believe former President Barack Obama let down the revolutionaries.
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