In a time before video and streaming, I grew up in a film household.

My mother, Ruth, taught writing and critical thinking to middle schoolers in Maine, featuring hands-on filmmaking to capture her students’ imaginations. I just found one of these little movies by her 8th graders, about mummies in Egypt, with snowbanks oddly in frame. Films were the vehicle; the students were graded on the quality of their written treatments and their exploration of ideas.

Bonus for me: Mom’s teaching meant 16 mm prints of classic movies sometimes lay around the house, ready to be threaded up and projected onto a roll-up screen.

This is how I came to watch my first documentary, 1922’s “Nanook of the North,” an exploration of the lives of Indigenous people in the Canadian arctic. I marveled at how even a black-and-white silent film could transport me to a completely different way of life. Later, two docs directed by Errol Morris sealed the deal: “Gates of Heaven” (1978), a wry look at the pet cemetery industry, and “The Thin Blue Line” (1988), about a true crime in Dallas.

For four years, I’ve drawn on my love of docs for our "Econ Extra Credit" series. It's a monthly invitation to watch a documentary along with us, learning about the themes from our daily radio programs and newsletters. It’s part of the Marketplace mission to help you raise your economic intelligence.

The "Econ Extra Credit" project isn’t going anywhere, but I wanted to let you know we are streamlining this newsletter and a few other Marketplace bulletins into a single weekly email. The first issue will hit your inbox this Friday.

This change is guided by two concepts, one of them from my mother’s filmmaking-meets-writing class: A single newsletter helps us communicate clearly. The second concept is from classic economics: efficiency. It seemed a lot to ask you to poke through multiple emails in a week.

In this all-in-one newsletter, we’ll feature a film of the month under the "Econ Extra Credit" banner, alongside other great reporting from Marketplace. We’ll also continue our docs coverage on air, streamable on the podcast app of your choice if you miss it on the radio.

Of course, it’s all still free. This is public media, after all. 

As "Econ Extra Credit" continues, we are working on a doozy of a doc for this month. It’s about a shortcut to living well and living longer: just join a club, an association or a group.

Anything that gets you interacting in person with other humans will do. For instance, I am a member of a high-powered model rocket club. We members of the club may not agree on policy and politics, but as we count down to launch, we all agree that gravity is not a suggestion, it’s the law.

This newsletter was written by David Brancaccio and edited by Tony Wagner.