Headway is a new multi-year initiative at the New York Times created by architecture critic Michael Kimmelman to foster “a robust and constructive conversation around some of the world’s big challenges.” In this talk, Kimmelman discusses his hopes to enlist a wide public, across political, social, and geographic spectrums, to help to define progress, how we measure and make it, and to imagine, collectively, a future we can hope to build. Journalistically, Headway aims to move beyond the 24-hour news cycle and the metabolism of social media, and to think more longitudinally about past and future, examining through hindsight how our expectations and predictions have fared in reality. At the heart of Headway is the question of what role journalism can play in achieving progress.