What Becomes of Second Chances?
Does erring toward leniency for first-time criminals amount to wisdom or wishful thinking?
May 24th, 2026
work
May 23rd, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Custom Harvester
Harvesting five million bushels of wheat and corn from Texas to Montana, outrunning hailstorms that decimate a year’s income in 20 minutes, and running a multimillion-dollar convoy of equipment down the highway with Josh Beckley, a third-generation custom harvester from Kansas.
May 03rd, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Funeral Director
Guiding grieving families through arrangement meetings, orchestrating meaningful memorial services within days, and preparing bodies for viewing with Heather Hill, a funeral director in North Carolina.
April 19th, 2026
The ‘Busy’ Trap
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
April 13th, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…an Aerospace Engineer
Landing the Perseverance rover on Mars, working in clean rooms to minimize the microbial bug count, and slogging through hundreds of engineering trade-offs with Swati Mohan, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
April 01st, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Diplomat
Defusing a crisis after an ambassador hinted at a preemptive strike on Russia, delivering demarches in multiple languages, and surviving the frantic evacuation of the Kabul embassy with John Johnson, a retired diplomat who spent more than twenty years in the US Foreign Service.
March 22nd, 2026
‘Looking Backward’ to the Future
When American author Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 in 1888, he didn’t know that it would be one of the best-selling books of the era; that it would inspire a political groups around the world; or that some of the most prominent intellectuals of the time would count it as an influence on their thinking.
March 16th, 2026
Facts and the Fight for Moral High Ground
How science can get it right and still miss the point.
What It’s Like to Be…a Lineman
Wiring a neighborhood back to life after a tornado, coveting the work of helicopter linemen in Faraday suits, and surviving the collapse of a rotten utility pole with Elden Rivas, a journeyman lineman in Houston, Texas.
March 01st, 2026
What It’s Like to Be…a Health Inspector
Suspending the licenses of unsafe restaurant operators, hunting down the origins of foodborne illness outbreaks, and eliciting truthful answers from anxious managers with Justin Dwyer, a health inspector in Peoria, Illinois.
