Lewis Simon's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, in collaboration with colleagues, helped spark an international scandal and topple a corrupt dictator; he tells us in this episode how they did it. Lew also gives us remarkable insight into how he could do his work - taking notes as people got beaten to death and blown up in front of him - and survive emotionally. And finally, a roving correspondent talks honestly about the toll that constant traveling took on his spouse. After hearing Lew, you might think differently about what reporters face when they tell you the latest from Ukraine and the Middle East.

Next time you hear details of the horrific wars in Ukraine and Gaza, think about how you're learning them: journalists are risking their lives to report from the front lines. Lewis Simons won the Pulitzer Prize during decades of reporting on the Vietnam war and other conflicts across Asia. He lived by a motto: "Whatever the threat or danger, I had to be there."

Now Trump and the Republican party are following their autocratic playbooks, whether by design or by instinct: pack courts and agencies with their cronies, slander and intimidate the media, and denigrate their opponents as "evil" and vermin. Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, tells us why it could take many years to rescue America's democracy - even if Trump loses the next election.

When you learned about the American explorers who claimed to discover the North Pole, the answer seems to be, "Yes." In fact, the fabled drama of Robert E. Peary and Frederick Cook was an early example of how powerful newspapers - in this case The New York Times and New York Herald - spread fake news (although critics still debate whether the newspaper owners knew it was fake or didn't bother to corroborate the explorers' stories). Journalist Darrell Hartman tells us life and death tales from his recent book, Battle of Ink and Ice, that shed light on the perils of vanity and competition for fame and profit.

It could happen to you: police mistakenly suspect or arrest you, because an app's location data show you were near the scene of a crime. The ACLU's Nathan Wessler returns to explain how geolocation, voice recognition and other high-tech tracking methods - including the way you walk! - could disrupt your life in ways you hardly expect.

America's surveillance network is nowhere near as pervasive and chilling as China's, but U.S. companies and government agencies are already using high-tech tools like facial recognition to track you more than you might think. As the ACLU's Nathan Wessler tells us, the facial recognition software sometimes goofs - and ordinary, innocent people like you end up in jail.

Presidents have drawn up plans to wield sweeping emergency powers - and some of those plans are so secret that even Congress has never seen them. Elizabeth Goitein, of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, has unearthed dozens of emergency presidential powers. Voters should understand the potential powers they could give any president, before they cast their ballot.

David K. Shipler (aka "Dave," our podcast co-host) is not only a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist: He's a poet, and just published his debut volume of poems, The Wind is Invisible. Given the grim news in the world, Dave's lovely poetry - glimpses of nature, reflections on family, moving insights about love - is a refreshing antidote. It's also (according to Danny) a surprising change from Dave's tough-minded journalism. Dave reads some of his poems and explains what influences his work - including his mother, who taught English, and Robert Frost, the legendary poet whom Dave actually met.