On New Year’s Day time 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck each day, month, and year from a hat. That day-chosen totally at random-turned out to end up being Sunday, Dec 28, 1986, by any standard measure a most normal day time. Weingarten spent another six years proving that there surely is no such issue.

That Sunday between Xmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, about One Day: The Outstanding Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in the us kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling occasions of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to arrive. Lives were dropped. Lives were preserved. Lives were modified in overwhelming methods. Several events never made it into the news; they were personal dramas in the lives of private people. These were utterly compelling.

1 DAY asks and answers the issue of whether there is even any such thing as “regular” when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our method through the daily, daunting challenge to be human.