A couple of years back, around the time he was turning 50, Michael Precker was in his prime as a journalist. He'd never imagined himself doing anything else: "I knew in seventh grade I wanted to be a newspaperman."

A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, he was a foreign correspondent for 11 years in the Middle East and wrote feature articles on countless subjects for the Dallas Morning News. One year, the paper nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize.

Now...