Each week I speak to people about ideas, mostly. The ones that return in different moments of our lives. The ones that shift their shape as we grow. Or the ones that get reinterpreted as the world changes around us.
Many of them refuse to settle into a single meaning and instead keep unfolding over time. In that way, I think, ideas are a little like stories. They’re told and retold, revisited and reimagined.
Few stories have been revisited quite as many times as the story of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Nearly 90 years after her plane went down, Earhart remains strangely alive in our imagination. Her life has been written about and debated, mythologized and investigated, again and again and again. New evidence appears, old theories resurface, and the question of what really happened to her continues to draw people back.
My guest this week is Rachel Hartigan, a writer and a journalist who spent more than a decade at the National Geographic and previously worked at the Washington Post’s book section.
Rachel’s new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths, and One Extraordinary Life, explores both the woman herself and the enduring mystery of her disappearance. But what makes the book so interesting is that it isn’t only about Amelia Earhart. It’s about the people who have spent years trying to find her, the theories they follow, the questions that keep returning, and that very human pull towards stories that never quite resolve.
In our conversation, we talk about curiosity and myth and uncertainty and that gap between a public story of a person and the life that they actually lived.
And we ask a question that I think sits under all of it. Why do some stories stay with us for so long? And the question that sits under this podcast: Why do we keep returning to some ideas?
So today’s thought we’re keeping begins with a Earhart, but it opens into something bigger about the stories we return to, the meanings we keep making from them and the thoughts that stay, even as we’re writing, and maybe because we’re writing, new chapters.
This is a conversation very much about curiosity, courage, self-trust, and what it means to follow the things that call to us, even when we can’t fully explain why
Let me know what this week’s thought kept means to you.
x Claire
P.S. The video of our conversation will go out to paid subscribers tomorrow.
Rachel Hartigan is a writer and journalist who spent more than a decade at National Geographic and previously worked for The Washington Post Book Review. Her latest book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, explores both the enduring mystery of Earhart’s disappearance and the people who continue searching for answers nearly ninety years later.
Lost | Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you’re curious about other historical figures that somehow interweave themselves into our current lives, you’ll enjoy Cathy Rentzenbrink talking about Agatha Christie
And what would happen if you allowed yourself to get a little lost?
