When we wanted to explain how modern-day warlords coexist with otherwise consolidated states, we profiled a Mexican town run by vigilante avocado merchants. When we wanted to explain how once-hopeful democracies curdle into majoritarian extremism, Max went to Myanmar. And so on. (Yes, we know how lucky we are and, no, we don’t know how we got this job, either.)

There’s something else Mr. Seabrook does that resonated with us. His article is animated by his own curiosity about the things around him. He hits a patch of black ice and, as narrator, expresses an immediate desire to learn how it forms and why it’s so dangerous. But he follows his curiosity to the wider world, considering bigger questions like the physics of ice or how road authorities detect and prevent its spread.

But that takes a few steps when it comes to matters of hard science. It’s a winding route from asking why black ice is so slippery to quizzing a physicist on the delineation between liquid and solid.

With social science, the leap from the particular to the universal is immediate. And that’s part of what we love about it. Because what is social science if not the search for universal truths and laws governing the forces that otherwise feel particular to our own individual lives, clans or countries?

Our equivalent of getting into a car crash might be, for instance, encountering the politics of white backlash in our personal lives. It makes us curious about where that anger comes from, which eventually leads us to small-town Germany, to find a car crash through which to tell the story.

Another example might be hearing friends express fear about terrorism, though, statistically, it poses little threat to them. We get curious about how that fear works and why it’s so much more severe than fear of something deadlier such as, say, car crashes.