What is America?

For the last thirty years, Mari Walker has been a nurse in Northeast Pennsylvania 👩🏼‍⚕️💟

She started out working in hospitals; since then, she’s also spent time in addiction and hospice care.

When I asked her whether the US healthcare system is ready to meet the challenges it faces, her answer was simple: No.

According to Mari, the story is one of misaligned incentives. Instead of being optimized for p...

How would you define the American Dream? 🇺🇸🤔

How about this: You come up with a new way to target prescription drugs to specific kinds of cells in the human body. You apply for a PhD and get accepted. You do your research and file your patents. Then you found a series of companies that will make your idea a reality and help improve people’s health outcomes.

That's the story of Nasser Nassiri Koopaei. He’s ...

Crumbling classrooms. Plummeting SAT scores. Teachers near the poverty line. What happened? 😲

Ten years ago, Florida's education success story was the envy of the nation. Thanks to the hard work of Republicans like Jeb Bush, Florida’s fourth graders had risen from near the bottom of the charts to sixth in the nation for reading and fourth in math.

Then came the budget cuts. Under Governors Rick Scott and Ron...

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the news these days—to give up and go into your hole. 🙈

But Mikhail Mikhaylov decided to do something. He's a college senior at the University of Florida, a Russian-American student who's fighting for Ukraine.

In addition to his demanding coursework, Mikhail is a co-founder and president of URI, the Ukraine Rebuilding Initiative. It’s a group of about 40 undergraduates who are working ...

Joel Elliott has a uniquely American story 👦🏾

He grew up in Miami’s Overtown Neighborhood, which he affectionately refers to as Swamp City and Rat Town. As a kid, he was known as Lil Smurf; he loved skateboarding—he idolized Tony Hawke—and he loved to go with his mom to catch mullets in Biscayne Bay.

Then, at the age of 13, he was incarcerated. He spent most of the next 35 years in prison. I wish Joel’s story were an outlier, but i...

What if we gave America a blood test? 🩸

When you go to the doctor, they give you your numbers for cholesterol, blood pressure, body fat percentage, the whole deal. If you’re regular about getting your checkups, you can track your numbers over time.

This week, I read a book, and I think of it kind of like a blood test for America. Like...how much money do people have? How long are they living? Can they afford a home? Medical care? Co...

When we talk about politics, we tend to use the word “should.” Like, we should level the playing field. We should work to correct historical inequalities.

But we don’t do as good a job thinking about how federal policies will impact individual people—people like Owen Williams.

Owen is 66 years old. He's a retired exterminator and the quintessential dad—right down to the Dodge minivan and the Colonial Williamsburg t-shirt. He and...

Life can be confusing and difficult for a 24-year-old in America. Especially if you happen to be a queer black woman living in the South, and you’re working three jobs.

But somehow, in the midst of everything, Kaya Lewis is finding time to build community with her neighbors and cook healthy, delicious food for people who are hungry.

Kaya is the founder of Kaya's Kitchen, an organization that coordinates volunteers, as well as mo...

Ever wonder what it would be like to be a hundred years old? Or what America looks like to somebody who lived through the Second World War? 

Well, don’t wonder anymore. Peggy Jemison Bodine is turning a hundred this July. In a nation that is 248 years old, she's personally witnessed over 40% of American history.

Over the course of her life, Peggy has raised a large and prosperous family, become deeply involved with the civic lif...

America's small farmers are a resilient bunch—but they're subject to powerful forces outside their control. In the words of Jim Sayle: "We can either do death by a thousand cuts of playing the game the way it was being played—or we can do something about it."

Jim runs a small farm in Northwest Mississippi. He's growing cotton, corn, and soybeans on 2500 acres that his family has been farming for th...

In our current political climate, it can feel like the middle is drying up. It’s more and more difficult to find common ground—or even communicate with people you disagree with.

Dorcas Young Griffin is our first podcast guest; she's a senior administrator with Shelby County Government, a mother of two amazing children, and a PhD Candidate in Urban Studies at the University of Memphis.

During our conversation,...

What is America? It's a big question. Maybe we used to be able to agree on the answer—but we can't take it for granted anymore.

In this episode, meet host John Minervini and learn a bit about the podcast. Over the next year, we'll drive all around the country together and talk with people about their lives. The goal is to help rebuild our broken politics.

The road trip has only just begun, but it's already been an...