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I’m Annie, one of the producers behind Wednesday’s episode.

Tuesday morning, we gathered around our laptops in a windowless conference room, affectionately named the Bunker. We wanted to make an episode with Nick Casey about the current state of turmoil in Venezuela, which had just suffered a weeklong nationwide blackout. There was immense history at work here: corruption in the government, years of economic mismanagement and sanctions that led to a crumbling infrastructure. But the question was: How would we tell such a sprawling story in a single episode?

The first step is deciding which story to tell. When we plan an episode, we look for a single narrative to drive the episode along. It could be the story of one character or family, or the story of the reporter’s journey. But we pick a story with enough plot and tension to hold the listener’s attention, and then we sneak the history and context in between plot points. The history is the medicine, the story is the spoonful of sugar. In this case, we landed on telling the story of how the blackout unfolded in one city, Maracaibo, as it deteriorated into apocalyptic horror.

To figure out how to weave this story with the historical context, I did an exercise my mentor Rebecca Skloot taught me. In one column, I wrote every beat of the story — the power goes out; it doesn’t seem like a big deal at first; but then the food rots, and the looting begins. In another column, I wrote down the context we would need: the dueling presidents, the brushfire that brought down the country’s electrical grid, etc.