You follow your favorite bakery on Facebook. You'll probably never see a word they post. Facebook quietly stands between local businesses and the customers who asked to hear from them, and then charges them to get through. B.T. Clark pulls back the curtain on how Facebook really works, what it did to Main Street and local news, and the Harvard dorm room where it all began. Facebook built the machine. But the most uncomfortable part of this story is who kept it running.

Nobody thinks tipping started with an iPad at a sandwich shop. So where did it start? B.T. Clark follows the money from the Post Civil-War era to the Pullman car to the $2.13 wage that's still legal today. And the principle underneath it is older than the country: pay the worker his wages.

Flock cameras can help police find stolen cars and solve crimes. They can also create a remarkably detailed record of where ordinary people go. B.T. Clark looks at the tradeoff between safety and privacy, what happens when surveillance tools are misused, and why the boring local government story in the news you skipped six months ago may have been the warning you were looking for.

Before there was a book, a podcast or an alarming amount of branding involving pants, there was one column about integrity.

In this episode, B.T. Clark goes back to the piece that started it all — and asks when doing the right thing became negotiable. Along the way: drunk driving, school-zone speed cameras, prison guards running what amounts to inmate DoorDash, and one simple rule for life:

Principles are like pants. You ought to have some.

Twenty-five years after September 11, B.T. Clark looks at the time the victims never got — and what the rest of us have done with ours.

Drawing on the deaths of his mother and his stillborn daughter, Eliza, Clark reflects on grief, ordinary days, political outrage, wasted time, and the uncomfortable question of whether we’re treating the years we’ve been given like the gift they are.