Twenty compliments and one criticism, and somehow the account is overdrawn. On where the deciding vote actually lives — and the woman who sewed her poems into booklets nobody would see.

Somebody asks how your weekend was, and you apologize. Nobody asked for a defense. On the one day your ledger can't read.

A man stands at the end of his lawn at night, staring across the water at a light on somebody's dock. He ran the whole week's worth of patterns — the record, the horizon, the ruler, the running — and Fitzgerald wrote down exactly what it cost. An episode about the light you keep burning across the water.

"How are you?" "Busy." That's not an answer to the question — the question was about you, and "busy" is a status report from your calendar. An episode about how exhaustion became a status symbol, and what "crazy busy" is actually announcing.

I know one fact about a man I went to college with: he has a lake house. From one photograph, I've built his entire biography — and I keep losing to it. An episode about the instrument you've been measuring your life with, and where you got it.

Hikers have a name for the summit that turns out to have another summit behind it. Careers have them too. An episode about the number that moves every time you reach it — and about finding out who's been moving it.

Somewhere around fourth grade, someone threatened you with a file that would follow you forever. Nobody has ever seen that file — but there is one permanent record in your life, and you're the one keeping it. An episode about what's in it, and about its very strange editorial policy.

A play with no scenery, a girl who gets one ordinary day back, and the discovery that the town was never in the props. Friday pulls the week's four threads into a single question — the one underneath the one we keep asking.

A job title does a lot of work in a day — it introduces you, ranks you, and answers for you. Today: what a title holds without your noticing, what happens on the first Monday it's gone, and a man who left an office carrying a goldfish.

The email is finished. It's been finished for twelve days. So what, exactly, is still being worked on? A story about Brahms, a moving comma, and the greatest phone call in the history of the telephone.