Morning edition, personal edition

Moving to NPR, and finally feeling excited about change.

New job, new commute.

Hi! Greetings from the middle of an, um, eventful summer. Amid all the history-making political upheaval, I’ve been taking a personal leap into something new. 

Earlier this year, as I found myself writing a lot about how powerful people react to change, I was contemplating some of my own. I decided to actively seek it, and now I’m so glad I embraced it: After almost five years at Fortune, I’ve started a new job at National Public Radio, as an on-air correspondent covering business, finance, and all things money. 

I am, it bears repeating, RIDICULOUSLY excited about this. Joining NPR after a lifetime of daily listening; contributing to its fantastic coverage and joining a team of business journalists whose work I’ve long admired; getting to take over this important beat, centered on covering and explaining how the world of money affects all of us; learning how to report on-air, while continuing to write for NPR’s website; getting to report and discuss my stories on Morning Edition and All Things Considered and Planet Money and Up First and the NPR Newscast and more … it’s a thrill.

It’s also been a little overwhelming, thanks to those aforementioned history-making global events. I’ve been on the radio almost every day in the past two weeks, discussing how financial markets have reacted to an attempted assassination of one presidential candidate … and then to his rival’s decision to drop his re-election campaign and to endorse the first female vice president in her campaign to become the first female president. (You know, slow summer stuff.) I also went on All Things Considered this week to talk about how the U.S. economy is playing into this presidential election. 

Among the many reasons I am so excited about this change: It’s a rare opportunity to really learn something new. Actually, many things new: Broadcasting, writing for audio, reporting for radio, and how to wield the technology and equipment that make all the stories come together. I recently returned from a week of hands-on training in all of these skills at NPR’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, and am now the proud owner of a toolbox-sized “reporter’s kit,” full of microphones and recording equipment and the cords that connect and power all of it. 

That week was the first time in my entire career that an employer had dedicated so many resources to my professional development. It was also the first time in memory where I’ve had the opportunity to expand my professional skills so broadly. Having the opportunity to learn so much at once can be humbling, but it’s also incredibly precious and rare, especially a couple of decades into my career. 

Still, change is never without loss. That became painfully apparent in the last few years, when most of the change I experienced was unwelcome to wrenching, and completely out of my control. 

So it’s a real privilege to be able to choose this change—and to feel ready to embrace all of the short-term instability it causes. To upend my daily routines and plan new ones. To figure out a new commute, and a new (hybrid) office culture, and an entirely different set of internal systems and procedures (and how to navigate their inevitable quirks). To get to know new colleagues and get to work with new editors and managers. To take everything that I know and the professional expertise that I’ve accumulated over decades, and to deploy it to tell stories and break news for a new journalism organization’s audience and needs. 

It’s all reminding me how exciting and positive change can also be, when we are ready to seek it. It’s gratifying to feel that again—to stop dreading the unknown, and to start anticipating it instead.  

Lady Bits

• Lady Business may be a little more sporadic in the immediate future as I figure out those aforementioned new routines, but it will continue!

• “I thought about the question I asked Jack earlier, about whether he would change what happened to him if he could. He hadn’t misinterpreted it. He had known something I didn’t, which is that it’s a bad question — that the thing not happening to you is never one of the options. It happened. It will never not have happened.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner. 

• “If even big chains cannot survive—and even CVS and Walgreens are hurting—what do you expect for the small pharmacies?” I’m pretty happy with my final magazine feature for Fortune, about the slow demise of a beloved Seattle drugstore and the national death of the American pharmacy. (Since Fortune published my story about this widespread problem last month, both the New York Times and the Federal Trade Commission have published investigations into some of the underlying causes.)

• Suffs is so good! And so much better than its marketing made me expect. The ads (and to be fair, some of the reviews) made it seem worthy, and tedious—yet the actual show is incredibly fun! Also wonderfully performed, dramatically well-constructed, and full of the most memorable songs I’ve heard from a new musical in years. It’s been inevitably compared to Hamilton, with reason (and New York’s Sara Holdren is particularly incisive about how the first show lets its male heroes off the hook for slavery, while Suffs turns the white suffragists’ failures towards Black women into one of its central tensions). But one commonality I really appreciated about both Hamilton and Suffs is how delighted they are to be telling their stories. Both shows find entertaining drama in the lives of imperfect people shaping history—and creating change whose effects we still feel today.