We just got back from Portugal and it was fantastic. Lisbon, Porto, the hills, the pastéis de nata, the Super Bock — loved all of it. I dress for the weather. I dress for the walking.…
If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a…
I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why…
Ten years ago, right around our older son’s third birthday, a microburst tore through our road. We saw it coming — our nanny at the time, who was from the Midwest, took one look at a…
We just got back from Cooperstown, from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, for my younger son. It’s a giant 12-year-old tournament they run up there, and I figured I’d sort of jot down some of our…
It took me embarrassingly long to figure this one out. For years, I’ve been annoyed by the same thing on every car I’ve owned: headlights that go cloudy and yellow long before the rest of the…
We just got back from Cooperstown, from the Cooperstown Dreams Park tournament, for my younger son. It’s a giant 12-year-old tournament they run up there, and I figured I’d sort of jot down some of our thoughts from the stay…
I had one of those experiences the other day that was interesting and brutal and tragic and horrific all at the same time, and it left me feeling bad for a bunch of different reasons. Bad that I couldn’t figure…
I wrote a while back about my shoe philosophy completing a full lap back to toddlerhood — slip-ons, elastic laces, the whole embarrassing circle. If you missed it, Confessions of an Adult Toddler has the full account. I picked up…
Let me be clear up front: I prefer wood. I prefer natural materials, full stop. But I’ve also learned — the hard way, and more than once — that my own limitations as a builder change the math. I don’t…
We just got back from Portugal and it was fantastic. Lisbon, Porto, the hills, the pastéis de nata, the Super Bock — loved all of it. I dress for the weather. I dress for the walking. I dress to stay…
The whole thing started because my kids hate riding bikes. Every ride turned into a negotiation, and the negotiation always lost to the hills. So I did what any reasonable person does when their children won’t cooperate with an outdoor…
My wife Jennifer had to go to Paris for work and she was kind enough to buy me a plane ticket so I could come with her. I’ve done this before — tagged along to Vietnam once, Kauai another time…
If you read my Portugal post, you know how this started. Jennifer had opinions about my travel wardrobe. The citizens of Lisbon had opinions about my travel wardrobe. I came home suitably chastened and with a list of things to…
Ten years ago, right around our older son’s third birthday, a microburst tore through our road. We saw it coming — our nanny at the time, who was from the Midwest, took one look at a tail of cloud forming…
It took me embarrassingly long to figure this one out. For years, I’ve been annoyed by the same thing on every car I’ve owned: headlights that go cloudy and yellow long before the rest of the car looks old. It…
There was a window — and I think most people missed it. A few years back, the federal government and New York State were practically paying you to put solar panels on your roof. Between the federal tax credit and…
I’ll just say it upfront: the Bernedoodle is one of the most bougie dogs on the planet. Possibly the most bougie. We own one. His name is Hobbes. He’s been part of the family for three years now, and I…
We had to go to Portugal in early February for Jennifer’s AIMA residency appointment, which is the kind of thing you don’t get to schedule. They tell you the date, you show up. We figured if we had to be…
I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why should they be allowed…
I’m not a musician. I can’t read music, never learned to play, took percussion as a kid and got confused by the notation. So when I tell you I made five songs, I don’t mean I sat down at a…
Before any of the songs, there was just this — a text graphic. Enough Is Enough, and then a running list of everything that’s wrong, with those three words hammering back in between each cluster: Enough Is EnoughBoth Corrupt Political…
This is the one that cracked the whole thing open. I’d landed on “Enough Is Enough” as the phrase, and I was hunting for a hook — something already in the public domain, because there’s no money behind any of…
Once Old MacDonald existed, it was obvious one song couldn’t hold everything, so I kept going. Living the Dream came out of a single thing I saw posted — where the US actually ranks against other wealthy, developed countries. We…
Party of One is the one where I went after the machine itself — why nothing ever gets done. Start with the two-party system. It’s inherently flawed, and it was never built to handle the kind of money that’s in…
Us vs Them is about the distraction — the whole left-against-right shouting match that keeps everyone busy while the actual story goes untouched. And the actual story is wealth inequality and money in politics. That’s it. That’s the thing. But…
Look Up was supposed to be the closer, and it’s the one I thought would be easiest — just list everything that’s broken. I kept thinking about how well Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” works: it’s not really…
A new format: my unfiltered gut take on the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling and the partisan-gerrymandering racket, followed by a fact-check of every claim I made. Bias up top. The check at the bottom.
My shoe philosophy has done a full lap. It started where everyone’s starts — slip-ons and Velcro, because I couldn’t tie laces yet — and it has now, decades later, returned to that exact spot. Different shoes. Same logic. The…
For most of my adult life, white soles felt like a costume. Like I was dressing as a younger version of myself. The white-soled sneaker had a specific era for me — Air Force 1s, old Puma Clydes, that whole…
We went to Belize a couple springs back — Spring Break 2024, jungle half of the trip at Sleeping Giant Rainforest Lodge — and I learned something there that I cannot unlearn. It doesn’t bother me, exactly. But it has…
A federal appeals court just ordered the FDA to require in-person dispensing of mifepristone — the pill used in roughly 60% of abortions in this country — and it applied that ruling nationwide at the request of one state. Louisiana…
Watch It A Quick Note Before You Watch This I used AI to help write these lyrics, make the music, and put together the video, as you would probably guess. I have spent countless hours making these songs and people…
A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: The first two…
The third song in the Enough Is Enough campaign. It’s not red vs. blue. It’s about the people on top who need us fighting each other so we don’t notice them.
We live right next to the rail trail — our property literally borders it — so we end up using it a lot. I walk the dog there. I ride my bike. The section closest to us is the rough…
I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production…
I am a firm believer in snow tires and I think the fact that I have to say that out loud in 2025 is genuinely one of the more baffling things about living in the Northeast — like, we all…
We are living in the Stranger Things Upside Down. Same country, wrong version of it. I used to think Trump Derangement Syndrome existed on both sides. People so blinded by their feelings about one man that they couldn’t think straight.…
I’ll start with a confession: I was part of the problem. That’s not false modesty or a rhetorical device to soften what I’m about to say about the adults who turned our town’s recreational youth sports leagues into something unrecognizable.…
I have two kids. Twelve and almost fourteen. And look — I know that whatever they are, that’s mostly on me. You are what you’re exposed to, right? I get that. But some of this is just kid behavior. And…
It started, as most things do in my house, with baseball. My kids got into it around six years old — right past the T-ball phase where everyone’s just spinning in the outfield catching dandelions — and from there it…
There I was on 87, Ubering one of my kids to a travel baseball tournament in New Jersey — kid in the back with headphones on, or asleep, which amounts to the same thing. Half-listening to NPR because it’s either…
Here’s something nobody in either party wants you to think about too hard: they cash the same checks. Not the same voters. Not the same rhetoric. Not the same culture war. But the same donors, the same bundlers, the same…
I’ve been noticing something for the past few weeks. I smell like Fritos. Not after eating Fritos. Not near Fritos. Just as a default condition of existing. I’ll be sitting somewhere, not doing anything corn-adjacent, and I’ll get this whiff…
We say it like it’s a fact. Greatest country on earth. Number one. Living the dream. But when you actually look at the data — the rankings, the numbers, the verified receipts — the scoreboard tells a different story. Living…
Like most people, I’ve been watching this story with a mix of disbelief and exhaustion that is quickly becoming the default setting for following American foreign policy. I want to be upfront. I’m not a foreign policy expert. I don’t…
If you’ve been following my ongoing clothing saga — the chore coat search, the Red Wing chronicles, the light duty boot quest — you might have noticed that I have opinions. Strong ones. Possibly unreasonably strong ones for someone who…
Our Triangle Tube Prestige SOLO 110 finally gave up the ghost. Actually, “finally” is generous — it went out on its own schedule, which was, of course, the worst possible time. The short version: indirect water heater tank with an…
There’s a moment every four to five weeks that snaps me back to reality. I load up the car, drive to our local transfer station, hand Dan a coupon, and drop off a single 44-gallon bag of trash. One bag.…
Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are. WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously… Let me set…
For years, I walked past products screaming NON-GMO! and thought… so what? I’ll be upfront: I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’m also an optimist — or maybe a pessimistic optimist? An optimistic pessimist? I’ve never quite nailed…
What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated…
I was driving to yet another baseball tournament Saturday morning, half-awake, NPR on in the background, when a story about AI disinformation in the Iran conflict completely hijacked my brain for the next forty-five minutes. The segment was trying to…
Three and a half weeks in. Twenty-four days of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, oil at $112 a barrel, thirteen American soldiers dead, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, and the administration now scrambling to lift sanctions on the…
Something happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene and I’m still not sure how to file it. Six months ago she was the most reliably deranged member of Congress. She’d stalked a teenage school shooting survivor through the Capitol on video. She’d…
Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting…
It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add…
When I was a kid, we started learning the metric system in school. There was an actual plan. America was going to join the rest of the world and switch from the imperial system — the one built on the…
Part 1 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. A few years ago I started keeping a list. It began with a conversation at the field after one of Henry’s games. A…
A 15-part series on how costs got shifted off corporations and government and onto individual workers — and what it would take to reverse it. Start here.
Part 2 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Part 1 I walked through the math on one specific case — a nurse making $77,000 a year, doing everything right, with…
Part 3 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Parts 1 and 2 I walked through the picture: the math on a typical American household has tightened over fifty years even…
Part 4 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. Part 3 looked at the overdraft side of consumer banking. This one looks at the other side of the same relationship — the…
Part 5 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The first four installments traced cost shifts inside relatively well-defined transactions — wages versus productivity, employer-to-worker benefit transfers, overdraft fees, credit card interest.…
Part 6 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has been working its way through the categories of household spending where the cost has been quietly shifted away from corporate…
Part 7 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about phone and internet service, which has become the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a…
Part 8 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. On the morning of December 4, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan…
Part 9 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about all the other fees: the ones below the line on the bills I have already written about, the surcharges…
Part 10 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has spent nine installments going category by category through the structural changes that have shifted costs from corporate balance sheets onto…
Part 11 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The ten installments before this one traced where the money goes — the categories where household spending has grown, the mechanisms by which…
Part 12 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous installment looked at where the money goes. This one looks at why the political system has not redirected it, which is…
Part 13 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The structural picture this series has been building was assembled over roughly fifty years, through a sequence of policy changes that, taken individually,…
Part 14 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous thirteen installments have been an attempt to describe the structure of cost-shifting in American economic life and to trace how that…
Part 15 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This is the final installment. The last fourteen installments have been an attempt to describe a structural problem. This one is supposed to…
I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this…
The setup, briefly: we have a 2016 Audi Allroad my wife loves, somewhere past 100,000 miles and probably pushing 125k by the time we replace it. Comfortable, capable, hauls everything. The brief for its replacement is simple — she wants…
I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see…
January 9, 2026 Looking back, I think the well tank bladder had been broken since at least summer 2024. It might have been failing for a year or two before that. What I was noticing: the water pressure would drop…
March-April 2025 If you read my previous post about the emergency boiler replacement, you know that Company PPH didn’t exactly shine during that crisis, while Company NCS stepped up and saved Thanksgiving. You also know that I felt guilty about…
November 2024 Our Triangle Tube Prestige Solo 110 boiler had been breaking down occasionally, and each service call was costing a minimum of $1,200. I got so frustrated with service companies that I learned to fix minor issues myself. But…
Part 1 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → The way I’d planned to start this was with a list of names. Then I tried it and it read like an indictment, which isn’t what…
Part 2 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In the New York Times interview published January 8, 2026, Trump was asked whether anything constrained his power on the global stage. He answered: “Yeah, there…
Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting…
Even that's Odd 