[Copyright 2024 NPR]

Rob Schmitz is NPR's international correspondent based in Berlin, where he covers the human stories of a vast region reckoning with its past while it tries to guide the world toward a brighter future. From his base in the heart of Europe, Schmitz has covered Germany's levelheaded management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of right-wing nationalist politics in Poland and creeping Chinese government influence inside the Czech Republic.

Barrie Hardymon is the Senior Editor at NPR's Weekend Edition, and the lead editor for books. You can hear her on the radio talking everything from Middlemarch to middle grade novels, and she's also a frequent panelist on NPR's podcasts It's Been A Minute and Pop Culture Happy Hour. She went to Juilliard to study viola, ended up a cashier at the Strand, and finally got a degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars which qualified her solely for work in public radio. She lives and reads in Washington, DC.

Andrew Sussman is supervising editor for national security at NPR. Prior to joining the network in 2020, Sussman was executive producer for public radio's The World. He was a producer and reporter on the original team that launched the show in partnership with the BBC. Before that, Sussman oversaw a joint-venture newspaper collaboration with Komsomolskaya Pravda in Russia and then was an editor at The Moscow Times. He's also worked as a reporter with Radio France International in Paris. Sussman was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Originally from Colorado, Sussman also grew up in Montreal, which will forever be home.