The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games are coming up in February. Athletes from across the globe will be performing together on the highest platform their sport can reach. It’s an exciting time not just for the athletes who have trained incredibly hard to qualify, but for all of us watching from home.

In this Winter Olympic Games we have a fellow Wisconsinite to cheer on – Staff Sargent Deedra Irwin. She’s on Team USA competing in the biathlon and currently holds the best placement for an American athlete in the event with her 7th place finish from her Olympic debut in Beijing.

Irwin is from Pulaski, Wisconsin and is also part of the Army’s World Class Athlete Program. To share more about how she got into the biathlon and her outlook on the upcoming Olympics, she joins Lake Effect's Audrey Nowakowski.

Every year, Woodland Pattern selects a Milwaukee Youth Poet Laureate through a competition. Last summer, the local non-profit crowned Angela Wang with the literary honor. She's a senior at the University School of Milwaukee and wraps up her service this upcoming May.

As Youth Poet Laureate, Wang shares her poetry across the city and helps guide other young poets through writing workshops. Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez talks with Wang about what inspires her poems and what’s she learned in the year-long role.

Starting this week, some bus riders across Milwaukee County will need to wait longer for their rides. Especially on the weekends. That’s because the Milwaukee County Transit System reduced service to some routes to help deal with a multimillion dollar budget deficit.

Regular fares also went up by 75 cents at the beginning of this year. To learn more about the changes, WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal is joined by Jesus Ochoa and Brian DeNeeve Brian with MCTS.

Massive data centers are coming to Wisconsin to help power the global boom in artificial intelligence. The data centers will add demand for electricity and water. And this comes after years of declining usage of both in Wisconsin.

So how might that impact Wisconsin’s electricity and water infrastructure? To find out, WUWM’s Maayan Silver is joined by Tyler Byrnes. He’s senior research associate for the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which recently released a report on data centers and utilities.

Lance Armstrong. Elizabeth Holmes. Jay Gatsby. Typically, we shun liars in all forms whether they are politicians, financiers or fictional characters. We tell our kids to never lie, and expect our friends to be truthful, even when it hurts.

But the Burlington Liars Club is different. Here, lies are celebrated and platformed in an annual contest for who can tell the best lie.

Truthfully, Tea Krulos is a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine, who wrote about the Burlington Liars Club for this month’s issue. He joins Lake Effect’s Sam Woods to put WUWM’s journalistic integrity to the test, and celebrate the liars among us.

Data centers are the factories that run the internet. We rely on them every day, for things like sending emails, watching videos and uploading photos. Now, even larger data centers, to help power artificial intelligence, are being proposed and built in Wisconsin. Data centers require millions of gallons of water to operate. Some can consume as much energy as a town.

Port Washington residents want to recall the city’s mayor over a 15-billion-dollar Vantage data center that’s under construction. Microsoft is building one in Mount Pleasant.

To learn more about data centers and their environmental impacts, WUWM reporter Eddie Morales is joined by Amy Barrilleaux. She’s the communications director at Clean Wisconsin, an environmental advocacy group.

91% of students in Milwaukee Public Schools cannot read at grade level. But a new literacy plan by the school district promises to change how students learn to read. The plan comes in response to new state legislation, called Act 20, that requires districts to use science-based reading instruction.

WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal is looking into literacy in her series called Turning the Page: Teaching Milwaukee to Read. She talked with Ana Gabriela Bell Jiménez, the Academic Superintendent for Literacy at MPS, and Jennifer Mims-Howell, the district’s Chief Academic Officer.

WUWM has committed to covering issues our listeners say are top priorities, including the economy. As part of that coverage, we’re exploring how the economy is impacting Wisconsinites with different financial needs and concerns.

Tom Oberhaus is the co-operator of Cozy Nook Farm in Waukesha County. Cozy Nook is primarily a dairy farm, supplying milk to Prairie Farms mainly for their cheese products. The farm supplements its dairy businesses with seasonal pumpkin and Christmas tree sales.

When Lake Effect’s Sam Woods last spoke with Oberhaus in October, pumpkin sales were going strong. This month, the two discuss how Christmas tree season went, and how Cozy Nook is preparing for 2026.