The U.S. election is a week away, and tensions are running high. Polls show Harris and Trump as more or less deadlocked. America’s Electoral College means the presidency is won one state at a time — and in a country that vast, it’s hard to capture the nuances of the race in the snapshot of a poll. That’s why the Globe’s feature writer, Ian Brown, got on a Greyhound bus in downtown Los Angeles, and headed east for New York City. He and photographer Barbara Davidson traveled from the deserts of the Southwest to the dairy farms of Wisconsin to try to understand what people were thinking about the election. Ian’s on the show to talk about how taking the bus shaped his thinking about American politics, and he shares some excerpts from his feature on the trip.