Hey, it's Michael. Today we have something really special for you. A blissful break from the news.

It's a new series from NYU Audio called Animal. My colleague Sam Anderson from the Times magazine traveled the world

to have encounters with animals, not to claim them or to tame them, but just to appreciate them.

Each episode is a journey to get closer to a creature that Sam loves.

A bonus, you can listen to this series with your kids.

For the next six weeks, we'll be running this limited series every Sunday here on the Daily

Feed.

But if you want to hear all the episodes right now, you can search for it wherever you get your podcasts.

Today, episode one.

Hope you like it.

Let me tell you a story about a hole. A big gaping black hole in the floor of my house upstairs.

From the time when I climbed up on a ladder to fix something in my daughter's room,

and underneath me a floorboard cracked.

It opened up this freaky looking chasm,

not the size of a burrito, but like a big burrito. A burrito but like a big burrito a burrito stuffed with pure darkness.

I'm honestly scared of this hole.

And I was supposed to fix it before something bad happened,

but I kept putting it off.

And then, something bad happened.

What happened was our dog.

What happened was our daughter's hamster, Mango, escaped from her cage and she

didn't just climb under a blanket or hide in a corner, she went down into the hole,

...