On this day after Thanksgiving, enjoy some of our favorite recent conversations:

• With the "dream" of an ever-brighter economic future now stymied, David Leonhardt, senior writer for The New York Times who writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter and author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream (Random House, 2023), traces its history and offers a path to reclaiming it for future generations.

• Through the story of three North Philadelphia children and drawing on his research, Nikhil Goyal, sociologist and policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget and the author of Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty (Metropolitan Books, 2023), shows how poverty limits the lives of U.S. children and offers policy solutions.

• Jessica Gould, education reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, recounts one family's year-long battle with New York City's Department of Education to help their child receive the specialized instruction required while growing up with dyslexia.

• Naomi Klein, activist, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and her latest Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), writes about her identity being confused with Naomi Wolf's and how that reflects larger societal trends.

• Mo Rocca, host of the podcast Mobituaries, a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, talks about the new season of Mobituaries, the "death" of the mid-Atlantic accent, and things he wishes would go away.

These interviews were lightly edited for time and clarity; the original web versions are available here:

What Happened to the American Dream? (Oct 24, 2023)

Child Poverty and How to End It (Sept 26, 2023)

The Struggle to Get Proper Instruction for Students with Dyslexia in New York City (Oct 23, 2023)

Navigating the 'Mirror World' (Sept 12, 2023)

Mo Rocca's "Mobituaries" (Oct 27, 2023)