2% With Michael Easter

Modern work has a giant problem: It keeps us stressed enough to be miserable, but never stressed enough to quit. Cal Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown University, says that's not an accident: When work switched from factories and farms to offices, we never figured out how to measure the productivity of knowledge workers. Looking busy became our flawed metric, even t...

Hotshot firefighting is one of the most physically demanding and dangerous jobs in the United States. River Selby spent seven years as a wildland firefighter, four of them on elite hotshot crews, the teams that jump into the worst blazes in the country.

Michael sits down with Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, about what the job costs and what it teaches. They ...

There are billions of animals living inside America's factory farms right now. Most live terrible, painful lives. Dan Shannon runs the Humane League, one of the largest and most effective animal welfare organizations in the world.

Most organizations like his push people to go vegan—but Dan says that’s a critical error. Meat-eaters might be the most important people in...

Americans spend more on healthcare than any other wealthy nation and have the worst outcomes to show for it. Dr. Lucy McBride, a Harvard-trained physician who has practiced for more than two decades, says the problem is baked into the system.

The modern medical system is built to manage disease after it appears, not to treat the whole patient well. What’s more, doctor...

Everybody wants to live longer, and for two decades the Blue Zones, places with the highest percentage of people 100+ years old, have promised to show us how with nine tidy behaviors we can all copy. According to Saul Newman, a demographer at the University of Oxford, almost none of it holds up.

Michael sits down with Newman, author of Morbid: Debunking Modern Long...