Alix Spiegel, Hanna Rosin, and Lulu Miller co-host the popular NPR radio show and podcast “Invisibilia,” which has grown more ambitious in its second season. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN POOLE / NPR

When I first listened to “The New Norm,” the première episode of the second season of the NPR radio show “Invisibilia,” I had to turn it off for my own safety. “Invisibilia” is about the unseen forces that shape our lives; this unseen force, a podcast, was shaping mine. I was walking down East Seventh Street—construction, bright sunshine, skateboarders, traffic cones, TV-shoot electrical cords, more construction—and listening to a story about an oil rig so harrowing that I had to pause it. I needed my wits. I didn’t want to fall down a sidewalk hatch while listening to a man gently describing an industrial accident.

“Invisibilia” has always been compelling to listen to; in its second season, it has grown more ambitious. That piece, which shocks us at first with violence and then with the efficacy of a program in which, for safety’s sake, macho oil-rig workers examine their fears, open up to one another, and cry, was the first by the show’s new co-host, the veteran author and journalist Hanna Rosin, who joins the founding hosts, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, who were founding producers of, respectively, “This American Life” and “Radiolab.” In addition to hiring Rosin, they’ve broadened their focus.

I’d been surprised to learn that Spiegel and Miller had wanted to change anything about “Invisibilia.” For one thing, the outstanding first season, released on the heels of the first season of “Serial,” was a blockbuster. On a panel last February, David Carr erupted with excitement when Spiegel said that “Invisibilia” had about twelve million downloads. (“Holy shit!” he said. “You’re like a czar!”) It now has more than fifty million downloads. Also, it was already plenty ambitious. Season 1 used interviews with exceptional people to explore themes that you could extrapolate in many directions: how expectations affect performance, for example, or the power of how we think about our own thoughts. We would have been content if the czars had kept doing what they were doing. If I could have had them adjust anything, it might have been the tone; to my ears, the first season suffered a bit from an excess of “Radiolab”-ian sound wizardry and an excess of whimsy. Perhaps in part because I’ve been listening to some shaggier podcasts lately, the confidence and sophistication of “Invisibilia” now feel refreshing, and either the whimsy-wizardry levels have improved or I’ve just about made peace with them. (I’m still undecided about the episode-ending dance parties, which tend to follow moments of wrenching insight and can be tonally jarring. And I love a dance party.)

I recently spoke to Spiegel and Rosin on the phone. (They’re based in Washington, D.C. Miller was travelling.) “Last season, we had a lot of stories about neurological extremes,” Spiegel told me. “What we wanted to do this season is take the frame and show how it operates in more ordinary settings, in the world you actually inhabit. And take on bigger, more mainstream stuff.” Adding Rosin has helped enable that shift. One episode is about terrorism; one questions the premise of solutions; one is about frames of reference; one is about the first all-girls debate team in Rwanda. “The New Norm,” Spiegel said, with the oil rig, “is obviously about masculinity and norms in the workplace.”

“But also it’s about Shell and McDonald’s,” Rosin said.

The McDonald’s story is about the first McDonald’s in Russia, which opened in 1990, and what happened when its workers were trained to smile, violating a cultural norm. (“We have a lot of proverbs,” Yuri, an interviewee, says. One is “If you smile without a reason, it’s a sign of idiocy.”) The segment looks at Russian and American norms, exploring the relationship between the server and the served: in the Soviet Union, service providers weren’t in the business of pleasing customers. The notion that that would change was emblematic of a much bigger cultural shift.

As before, the episodes this season encourage a sense of possibility. “The Personality Myth” discusses Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow test (sweets, kids, delayed gratification, fate), gets us to consider the idea that personality is a construct, and explains that the marshmallow test does not determine one’s future but highlights an idea—self-control—that can teach people to change their future. Much of the episode centers on prisoners who have been convicted of violent crimes. “The Problem with the Solution” explores the role of solution-finding in caring for people with mental illness. Its segments range from a personal story about Miller’s sister to an examination of a town in Belgium in which households board a person with mental illness, accepting the person without judgment, anxiety, or the desire to change him. These households often board the person for decades—happily, it seems. One host whose boarder twists buttons off his clothing every day sews them back on so he can do it again tomorrow; the show implies that this acceptance is the main “solution” he needs. (I liked this, but found myself wondering about cases of mental illness more severe than button-twisting.) The terrorism episode will consider “non-complementarity”: behavior that forces a change in perspective and thus a change in behavior. “If you’re warm to me when I’m cold to you, it’s inherently unstable,” Spiegel told me. “It acts as a forcing mechanism.” Last week’s episode, which very effectively used a story about Asperger’s to address frames of reference, was so fascinating that I nearly pulled off a dirt road to text my friend that she needed to listen to it immediately. (More perils of podcasts in motion.)

But in considering “Invisibilia” itself, I wonder, as I often have in the past few years, whether we’ve come to expect the encouraging and the counterintuitive from entertaining long-form journalism. I very much want to live in a world in which opening up to one another allows men on oil rigs to improve their safety record to a staggering degree, and in which warmly acknowledging the humanity of terrorists forces a change in their behavior. Yet being encouraged by journalism to expect the unexpected, or to expect practical, ingenious, warmhearted solutions to seemingly intractable problems—what Miller has called “when duct tape solves the ethereal sadness”—makes me a little skeptical. The refreshing look-at-it-this-way! approach that we associate with Malcolm Gladwell, Freakonomics, popular-science writing, and NPR can be unnervingly pleasurable to read or listen to: it can feel like more sugar than we need to make the medicine go down. I brought this up to Spiegel and Rosin.

“Let me challenge the premise of your question,” Spiegel said. “Or could we flip it and say that journalism has a bias toward darkness. And the world is actually a much more diverse place than that.”

“But does radio have that bias, do you think?” Rosin asked her.

“I think journalism has that bias,” Spiegel said. When she first heard the Dave Isay-produced StoryCorps pieces on “Morning Edition,” she said, “I was like, these are so sweet. But at a certain point I began to see it as a corrective to the rest of journalism. Because there is so much love in the world. But it’s really hard to do a story about fuckin’ love. It just is. Or, you know, normal interaction. There is lightness and darkness in all things, and I feel like both are reflected in our show.” I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“This is interesting, because we don’t set out to do this, so why is it happening?” Rosin asked.