Hello, Glad you're with us.

Hope you had a great holiday weekend.

I'm sure some of you are back to work this week, back to the grindstone.

Others, maybe you're taking a few extra days to be with family.

But regardless, this is the time of year where we all kind of take stock of where we're

at, where we're going.

And so this year, in this kind of gray space, right before the new year, we wanted to

try something different.

A couple months ago, the start here team circled this week on the calendar and we said,

what would happen if we took these stories that we've been dreaming about covering all year

and just reported them all out?

What if we aired them this week?

What if the producers who do so much hard work on the show actually hosted these episodes?

So for the rest of the week, I'm so fired up for this.

We are doing several days worth of special episodes.

These are not remixes.

This is brand new reporting from the people who bring you breaking news every day, delving

into the stories that have been entrancing them between start here episodes.

Now, who else to get first crack at this, then our producer Kelly Torres, you probably

actually heard her filling in when I got sick earlier this year.

She loves start here, but if there's anything she loves more, it's probably American history.

And in a moment where American history itself can feel under siege, Kelly's been asking

...