This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.Tracy Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who died this week at 80, devoted his career to immersion: embedding himself for months, sometimes years, with his subjects, and turning what he saw into stories that are hard to put down. His work traversed worlds—he followed a group of computer engineers racing to build a new machine, spent nine months in a fifth-grade classroom in Massachusetts, and traveled with the legendary physician and humanitarian Paul Farmer as he cared for people across continents—but his focus was remarkably consistent. He was interested in how people work: what they care about, what they struggle through, and what makes them keep going.Kidder brought that same sensibility to his Atlantic stories about technology, work, and everyday life. His writing was, as one reviewer put it, full of “genuine love, delight and celebration of the human condition.” He wrote his first article for this magazine in 1973, and then served as a contributing editor for many years.Revisit a selection of Kidder’s Atlantic stories below.Your Reading ListSeptember 1985 (House): Cover illustration by Ralph GiguereHouseThe story of a young couple on a tight budget, an architect determined to excel, and four carpenters devoted more to craftsmanship than to profit (From 1985)Read the full story.Trouble in the StratosphereBy the end of the 1970s, news about the ozone layer had all but vanished from the popular press, but the effects of manmade chemicals on ozone are still worth worrying about. (From 1982)Read the full story.The Ultimate ToyDebugging the computer “Eagle” (From 1981)Read the full story.Flying Upside DownThe Hardy Boys and the Microkids build a computer (From 1981)Read the full story.Trains in TroubleOnce, some 20,000 trains traversed the United States, many of them elegant hotels on wheels. Now most of the great passenger railroads have withered and died, and they have been replaced by Amtrak, which has mammoth troubles of its own. Is there any hope for a rail-travel revival? (From 1976)Read the full story.Soldiers of MisfortuneA report on the veterans of Vietnam—and on the often disgraceful treatment they have received from their countrymen (From 1978)Read the full story.In QuarantineA short story by Tracy Kidder (From 1980)Read the full story.