Brian Laird on WNYC.

By the way, one little addendum to the previous segment, which probably could be a segment in itself.

A listener just wrote, I felt it was a necessity to get my

pre-k student a tracking device because he took the bus and it was so inefficient and when if it was

45 minutes late and I couldn't contact the school, I caved. Sometimes phones are necessary. So maybe if you

can't have your student have a smartphone

or any kind of a phone depending on the school's policy, you're going to go for tracking devices.

So that's, you know, every solution to a problem sometimes creates another problem, right?

Or another controversy or a workaround that raises

its own questions. How about tracking devices attached to your pre-K students? But to close out the show

today, let's say you're back from vacation and you're dreading here in late July, going back to

the mundane, maybe joyless routine.

We're going to talk about finding joy in the everyday, how people are building small habits

that make ordinary life feel a little more livable and a little more special.

And the hook is when you come back from your summer vacation. Elaine Gottre

wrote in the Atlantic's Daily Newsletter about the letdown that can follow a great

vacation. You've experienced this, right? And her attempt to bring a bit of that vacation feeling

into regular life. So she swapped screen time for fiction. There's screen time as a bogeyman again.

Screen time for fiction made herself a nightly mock tale and picked up a few little things that made

her smile. She also asked her colleagues what they do to create small, joyful rituals of their own. So we're going to ask you, as well as Elaine

Godfrey, who joins us now to talk about what inspired her piece in the Atlantic, their newsletter,

and what she's learned from this experiment in everyday joy. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic.

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