Sonia Nazario, a projects reporter for The Los Angeles Times , has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her dozens of national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series, "Enrique's Journey," about the experiences of Latin American children who immigrate to join their parents in the United States. Expanding on the series, Nazario has written the book, Enrique's Journey, fully recounting the unforgettable odyssey of one Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. The story is now being turned into a miniseries by HBO.

Is more really better? This is the main question that January Series speaker Bill McKibben asked in his talk titled “Deep Economy.” He began by talking about global warming and his experience in Vermont leading awareness campaigns urging Congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, but that was only his introduction. What McKibben really wanted to get to was the way in which Americans have become accustomed to living in the past fifty years—with increasing amounts of material wealth. Promising to return to global warming and environmental awareness later, he plunged into a talk that explored more existential matters.