Steve Inskeep

F HE IS IN BED BY 9 P.M., STEVE INSKEEP CAN GET six hours of sleep before the alarm. He’s due at NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters at 4 a.m. for the live broadcast of that starts an hour later. It means the most intense part of his workday is over when a lot of people are just heading to the office around 7:30, and he passes the rest of the morning preparing for the next day’s broadcast. “But the afternoons are sometimes mine,” Inskeep says, over a clamshell of scrambled eggs and bacon in the NPR cafeteria. “Sometimes they’re not. Someone will say, ‘The Senator will talk to you at 4 p.m.’ And so I’m just going to have a long day, and it’s fine. But other days I can escape at noon, and I may go