TO THE READER: Most often, the blog posts that correspond to an episode are a faithful summary of the episode. This time, listening to the episode is really a different experience. In the episode, three news stories are dissected from three news sources, and comparisons are made. Doing this in a blog post would have turned it into a novel. This post attempts to summarize the takeaways from the experiment in the episode. -YNOTL Most of us like to believe we know when we are

There is no single cure for everything breaking around us. Climate change will not be solved with the same tool as loneliness. Artificial intelligence will not be managed with the same policy that fixes housing. War, poverty, public health, political violence, democratic decay, and the collapse of community all have their own causes, their own machinery, and their own demands. But every one of those crises runs into the same wall if we cannot agree that reality exists in the

We spend a lot of time arguing about the media in this country. Too liberal. Too conservative. Too biased. Too sensational. Sure—some of that criticism is fair. Cable news, in particular, can feel like a never-ending shouting match with better graphics. But underneath all of that noise, there’s a more fundamental question that almost never gets asked: Who actually owns the news you’re watching? Do you really have choices in local news? Because before you even get to bias, you