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BONUS: Leave A Message

HANNA ROSIN (HOST): Hey, this is Hanna Rosin from INVISIBILIA. We are going to bring you our regular season. As always, we're working hard on it. But in the meantime, we are trying something new. We're gonna drop these occasional bonuses in the feed - either stories we're working on or stories that we've come across that we love. And our first one is this story that we heard at a live storytelling event. It's a pop-up magazine event, and it's by writer Cord Jefferson. Here's Cord.

CORD JEFFERSON (WRITER): If the headlines of the past few years are to be believed, millennials, those of us born roughly between 1982 and 2004, will go down as the most murderous generation in American history.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JEFFERSON: Google the words millennials and killed, and you'll find dozens of articles listing our victims - including J Crew, the focus group, travel marketing, Memorial Day, hang-out sitcoms, leisure, the music industry, the golf industry, the napkin industry, department stores, the 9-to-5 workday, suits, wine corks and the concept of the corner office.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JEFFERSON: I don't have much of an opinion on travel marketing, which means that if I helped kill it, it was more a case of negligent homicide than outright murder. But there is a dying institution I was once more than glad to help usher out - voicemail. You know voicemail. It's a technology so out of date that it's icon is still an answering machine cassette tape. Patented in 1983, the service was once a must-have for businesses, allowing employees on the go to access their messages from anywhere in the world. It wasn't long before voicemail was in people's homes too. I can remember the day my dad set up a personal inbox for everyone in my family - at last ending the humiliation of them asking, so who is that? - any time they intercepted a message from a girl.

But enthusiasm for voicemail has waned over the years. Some major corporations, like Coca-Cola, don't even bother to use it anymore. And the number of voicemails individuals leave has dropped steadily with the advent of emails and text messages. We've come to hate voicemails so much that there are now apps designed just to block our phones from receiving them. I imagine many of you would be irritated to finish this podcast and discover a voicemail waiting for you - a tiny unwanted surprise. I hated voicemail as soon as I got my first cellphone. My parents and older relatives would leave me long rambling messages when I went away to college. I never told them to stop of course because old people leaving messages are like cats bringing home dead animals. It's unpleasant, but it's in their nature. The worst offender was my mother. She liked to talk on the phone a lot - to friends, her sister, colleagues, her grandchildren and me.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING, VOICEMAIL BEEP) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1 (MOTHER OF CORD JEFFERSON): Hey, babe, it's Mom. Um, uh...

JEFFERSON: I loved my mother very much. But on the phone, she had a tendency to hector me about things like my sleep habits or my inability to book holiday travel in a timely manner.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING, VOICEMAIL BEEP) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: The reason why I haven't looked any farther on Airbnb - well, it was a couple reasons. Number one was you said you were going to contact your roommates or your landlord first and see if she was going to be home during that time or not. So I didn't do anything...

JEFFERSON: Nowadays, I know she was just expressing love. But at that point in my life, most love felt like smothering. And so I tried to have the majority of our conversations with text. When she would leave a voicemail, I would speed through it - fast-forwarding past the greeting, grumbling when the message didn't yield any pertinent information.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING, VOICEMAIL BEEP) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...Because you'd have a better idea of those that were sort in your - closer to your area. And I didn't get want to get a flight and...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JEFFERSON: And then four years ago, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, she was healthy for a few months. But then the cancer came back. And by January of 2016, she was in hospice care. During the day, I would sit at her bedside and read to her, brush her teeth, hold her hand. At night, I would meet up with family and friends and try to figure out what I would do when she was gone. It was over tamales at my favorite Mexican restaurant back home that a friend of mine, Chris, posed a question. Do you have any recordings of her voice? Several years prior, Chris's father committed suicide. He'd saved a voicemail from his dad after he died. But when his phone broke a couple of years later, he lost it forever. He told me that he would listen to it all the time, that he'd rather have that than any of the other stupid that [expletive] his dad had left behind.

Chris got me thinking that night about the power of the human voice and what we lose when a voice goes away. And it turns out that a small group of scientists has begun chipping away at this question. A few years ago, Leslie Seltzer, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, wanted to study the hormone oxytocin, sometimes called the love hormone that's released when we have orgasms or when women breastfeed or when we hug someone we care about. In the study a group of girls were asked to take a stressful test. Once the girls were sufficiently rattled, some called their mothers for comfort while the others instant messaged them. What's Seltzer found was that for the girls who spoke to their moms on the phone, their stress hormones decreased while their oxytocin levels increased. But the girls who simply messaged their moms had no change in stress or oxytocin levels at all. It wasn't just soothing words they wanted. It was the soothing voice.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JEFFERSON: In a variation on the same study, Seltzer had some moms hug their daughters for comfort. What she discovered is that the girls who talked to their moms on the phone and the girls who hugged them had essentially the same brain reaction. In other words, when we hear someone's voice, the physiological effect we feel is similar to what we'd experience if we actually touched them.

Another researcher, Dr. Theresa Pape at Northwestern, found that coma patients who hear recordings of familiar stories told by family and friends regain consciousness faster than patients who don't. She says the loved ones' voices help create a, quote, "healthier neural environment" so our brains can repair themselves quicker.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) JEFFERSON: To be clear, I'm a man of the 21st century, and I don't expect everyone to start talking on the phone all the time. But at present, Americans spend about 26 minutes a day texting and just six minutes on voice calls. We delete people's voicemails before we even listen to them or we read typo-ridden transcripts instead.

It seems increasingly worth considering what we're missing out on when we neglect the voices of the people we love. By the time my friend Chris asked me if I had a recording of my mother's voice, she was too far gone to really speak. If I want to hear her talk now, I'm left only with a voicemail she sent me a month before the cancer came back.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: And I didn't want to get a place, secure it and then, you know, I'd - either I didn't need it or it was way out of the way.

JEFFERSON: It's exactly a minute long, and it's the only possession I have that I really care about. In the moments when I miss her most, I play it over and over again, always trying to forgive myself for fast-forwarding it the first time I heard it.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So give me a call when you get a chance, really looking forward to you coming into town. And I'd like to talk to you for a minute about that also. OK. Love you. Bye.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) ROSIN: That was writer Cord Jefferson. After the break, a special voicemail surprise.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) ROSIN: All right. So we took Cord's message to heart that there are certain voicemails that are worth hanging onto. And we asked you listeners to send us your favorites, and here they are.

(SOUNDBITE OF VOICEMAIL MONTAGE) UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hello, Becca (ph). I know you're probably not going to listen to this because you're so anti-voicemail. But I'm leaving you one anyway because I need to let you know that I don't know how much flour to add to this pie crust here.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Hey, call your grandmother.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Hey. It's me.

ELENA (VOICEMAIL CALLER): It's Elena (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Good morning, honey. Good morning. Good morning. Hi, honey, it's mama.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Mac and cheese - we should have that tonight.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Oh, we just wanted to wish you a very happy birthday. But maybe you're out celebrating.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: (Singing) Happy birthday to you. (Unintelligible). Happy birthday dear Caitlyn (ph). Happy birthday to you.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: I have never heard your voicemail message. It's so chipper and professional-sounding.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: And I guess you're asleep already. I'm sorry about today.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: I love you.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12: I love you much.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #13: You're our baby.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #14: Bye-bye.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #15: We're all...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #16: Bye.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #17: Much love.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #18: OK. Bye.

(SOUNDBITE OF VOICEMAIL BEEP) ROSIN: INVISIBILIA is hosted by me, Hanna Rosin, and Alix Spiegel. Our show is edited by Anne Gudenkauf, and our executive producer is Cara Tallo. INVISIBILIA is produced by Meghan Keane, Yowei Shaw and Abby Wendle. Our project manager is Liana Simstrom. This bonus episode was produced by Jake Arlow, fact-checking by Barclay Walsh (ph). Our technical director is Andy Huether. And our vice president of programming is Anya Grundmann. Special thanks to Jonathan Barlow for his songs "Fadeless" and "I Remember This Place."

You can find all things INVISIBILIA at our website - npr.org/invisibilia. We'll be back in your feed soon with more bonuses. Bye. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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