The wait is over: The Impact is back next week!

The Impact’s second season is right around the corner.

We are launching next Friday, November 2. Our new season is all about America’s most interesting policy experiments.

The Impact is a show about how policy affects people — policies that work and policies that need some work. Our first season was all about health care, and you can listen to it here.

But for season two, we’re doing something a bit different. We are hitting the road to look into how smart people are tackling big challenges in all sorts of policy areas — immigration, housing, education, and more.

I’ve been a policy reporter for about a decade. And for most of that time, Congress has been really gridlocked. There just isn’t much policymaking happening on Capitol Hill.

But this is just not true when you look at the rest of the country. The most exciting, innovative, sometimes wacky policymaking? It’s happening in cities and states, all across the country, who are trying to fix really big problems — and seeing what happens next.

So in this season, we are going to look at those places as the laboratories of democracies, and see how their policy experiments change lives.

We’re going to tell you about what happened when Seattle tried to fix campaign finance by sending every single resident $100 to donate to candidates, and how South Carolina is pioneering new technologies to prevent babies from dying. We’re headed to Oakland to learn what happened when the city started giving free lawyers to undocumented immigrants, and to Chicago to see what happened when the city started taxing soda.

Find The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and ART19.

You’ll find a trailer there with a preview of the stories we’ll tell this season — and stay tuned for our first episode, coming Friday, November 2.