With the 2026 Men's World Cup right around the corner, we're thinking about soccer and sports: What does it feel like to play? And what does it take to play at a high level? We're thinking about not only the playing of sports, but also the business and the politics of sports, and about how sports—played, watched, and worked at—affect our bodies, our attention, and our communities. We talk first with Georgia Cloepfil, author of "The Striker and the Clock," on being in the game, and then with Jules Boykoff, author of "Kicking" and "Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine." Both Georgia and Jules have played at a professional level, and both speak and write thoughtfully and beautifully about the game and what it might mean in and for our lives.

Summary for Labor.In celebration of International Workers' Day and in conjunction with the "Labor" issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, this episode of The Detour explores how work shapes our lives. What is work for? Are work and labor the same thing? And what, if anything, makes work meaningful? To get at these questions, we talk with three people who spend a lot of time thinking about labor and work. First, we speak with Lydia Kiesling, author of the novels "The Golden State" and "Mobility." Next, we talk to Nicholas Hengen Fox and Jorge Herrera Caro about Working Class Literature, the only class explicitly about class at Portland Community College.

In this episode we hear from Colum McCann, a National Book Award–winning novelist and cofounder of Narrative 4, a nonprofit organization that uses personal storytelling to build empathy between young people. Colum is Irish and lives in New York, and he joined us in February 2026 for a conversation about stories, national character, identity, and the 250th anniversary, of the Declaration of Independence. You'll also hear from Beyti, Jaylen, Uliana, Malaki, and Steve—five students at Adrienne C. Nelson High School in Happy Valley who participated in a storytelling workshop led by Narrative 4.

In this episode we talk about public service and elected office with CM Hall, a city councilor in Newport, Oregon and the executive director of emerge Oregon, an organization that identifies, trains, and inspires women to run for office.

Meg Wade rarely drives. There are, in Meg's view, so many other ways to move about in the world, and most or all of these other modes—walking, taking the bus, taking the train, and more, have a lot to offer to us, our communities, and our world. Through Meg's writing with Oregon Humanities and other outlets, Meg provokes us to pay a lot more attention to where we are, what it means to move about in the ways that we do, and who and what we're sharing space with as we do so.

This year, in observation of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we're exploring the core values and ideas our nation claims to be committed to. We're calling this yearlong effort Beyond 250. For our first episode, we're focusing on equality: what we mean by it, where we live up to our hopes related to equality and where we fall short, and how understandings on equality have changed throughout our nation's history. To that end we'll hear from Akhil Reed Amar, author of "Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840 to 1920," "The Words That Made Us," and many other books in articles on the Declaration, the Constitution, and other key aspects of the United States. We'll also hear from many Oregon high school students who gathered at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland in October 2025 to hear Akhil speak.

In this episode, we talk with Oregon architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works. Brad grew up in Tigard and has designed beautiful buildings all over our state and the world: art museums, private homes, a sports stadium expansion, and even a US embassy. Brad is someone who thinks about and then dreams into being the spaces where we live our lives—especially the parts of our lives that include silence, listening, and a sense of the transcendent. We asked him to explain what he thinks about and notices, as a person who designs buildings. What do our built spaces open up for us, and what do they say about us?

This week we talk with Paul Susi, a theater artist, a social services professional, an educator, and a writer who is also so much more than any blurb could say. He's a person who's trying to live in the world and be fully open to its suffering and darkness as well as to the beauty that it holds. He's trying to reckon clearly with our past and to move toward a more gentle, patient and just future. He's also trying to connect and to trust the power of connection. And in everything he does, he's working to bring more light.

In 2022, on the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, Aleksander Chernousov left Russia for Oregon. He was headed here to study Russian-speaking communities in the Pacific Northwest through the University of Oregon. (Russian is the fourth most common language in Oregon.) Aleks didn't know then that Oregon would become his long-term home. Since getting here, Aleks has talked to hundreds of people from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other Russian-speaking countries about their departures, their reasons for coming here, and especially their experiences in this part of the world. From recent Ukrainian and earlier Soviet refugees to an insulated sect of Russian Orthodox Christians called Old Believers or starovery, these varied stories are steeped in religion, war, family, geography, art and work.

In this episode, we talk with kids at the Gilbert House Children's Museum, in Salem, and and at Grace Art Camp, in Portland, about learning, creativity, and joy, and also about school and the summer.