The Funny Times is a newspaper full of comics. It’s about forty years old, and it’s all in print. The newspaper is in print, but until about a year ago, so were all their files. They lived in one well-protected filing cabinet. So when it was time to pass the reins to a new generation, who lived in Bloomington, Indiana, rather than Cleveland, one of the co-founders suggested they print out the cartoons that came in by email and send them by overnight courier to Bloomington.

Luckily, the new editor came up with an innovation: a “digital” filing cabinet.

This week, the Funny Times’ new publishers and editor talk about why the paper continues to thrive as so many newspapers fold, the kind of comfort you can get from political cartoons, and more.

Then, a story that started in the fall of 2016. My friend and colleague, Kayte Young, host of WFIU’s Earth Eats, was taking her cat Rita to the vet, and Rita escaped. What followed, in the months Kayte and her husband and friends and community spent searching, had more twists and turns than I could have imagined. So many, that, as I put the story together, it turned into a four-chapter saga. This week, The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 1: Losing Rita, in which Kayte decides, in the midst of an emergency, to foster a monarch chrysalis.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Violet Baron, Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, Avi Forrest, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Most of the music in the Rita story is by Ramón Monrás-Sender. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music and Backward Collective.