Joyce Hackel
Senior Radio Producer
The WorldJoyce Hackel is a producer at The World who aims to find the right voice for stories that will make you stop and listen.
Joyce Hackel spends much of her day tracking down the right person to tell the nuanced stories that help explain today’s world. Joyce started writing deadline copies from a DC sweatshop called States News Service. 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 headed to the University of Michigan as a journalism fellow. Since then, Joyce has been a senior editor at Living on Earth and edited WBUR’s Morning Edition.
Remembering Jesse Jackson, who pushed to globalize the US civil rights movement
The American civil rights icon, Reverend Jesse Jackson, died on Feb. 17 at the age of 84. His advisor, James Zogby, a pollster and co-founder of the Arab American Institute, traveled with Jackson throughout the Middle East. Zogby tells The World’s Host Marco Werman that Jackson broke political taboos by mainstreaming dialogue with Palestinian leaders and engaging with Arab Americans as a political constituency, rather than treating them as marginal or politically risky.
Starving and surrounded: el-Fasher residents plead for aid
Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher, cut off by 19 miles of earthen berms built by rebel forces now attacking the town. Katharine Houreld and her Washington Post colleagues have been speaking with some of those behind the dirt walls. She tells The World’s Marco Werman what she learned.
‘It wasn’t designed to work’: A firsthand account of aid distribution in Gaza
The World’s Host Marco Werman discusses the controversies at aid distribution sites in Gaza with Retired Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar. He served in the US Army for 25 years, and worked for a GHF subcontractor this spring, and says violence at food distribution sites is part of a deeper problem.
Examining the question: What is and isn’t antisemitic?
Antisemitism is being amplified globally by the war in Gaza and the rise of political movements with antisemitic platforms. So, it’s challenging and painful for many Jews to discuss what truly constitutes antisemitism, especially when it intersects with criticism of Israel. The World’s Host Marco Werman broaches the complex debate and the potential for productive conversation with commentator Peter Beinart.
PEPFAR and the future of the global fight against HIV
PEPFAR was launched in 2003 to stop the spread of HIV in Africa. Now, although some funding remains for the program, many of PEPFAR’s prevention and support services have stalled, as Dr. Atul Gawande, who led global health at USAID during the Biden administration, explains to The World’s Host Marco Werman.