Four Al Jazeera journalists — and three others — were killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza this month. We need to talk about that.
I usually only share reporting I’ve done, or topics where I have real expertise. International politics isn’t my beat, so I don’t pretend to have unique insight there. But this is different.
Continue reading The Committee to Protect Journalists reports Israeli forces have killed nearly 200 journalistsRead my piece in Business Insider
I’m a father who uses some of my expendable income on my kids’ after-school activities.
I worry that giving my kids unlimited access to all these expensive activities will be unfair.
I’m now not using my entire expendable income to give my kids access.
After reading a particular regional children’s board book one too many times, I decided my home of Philadelphia deserved better.
I’m a journalist who spends my days obsessed with how places develop identity and share that with people to live, work and thrive. I’m also the father of two young kids in the city’s Fishtown neighborhood. I also happen to have a close friend who is a talented illustrator and a new mother herself (Hi Sara Scholl!).
I wanted to create a simple board book that would keep young kids engaged, amuse grown-ups and actually contribute something to a region’s identity. I was working on the alphabet with my pre-schooler, who responded best to fun environments where she could tie visuals to sounds and letters.
As dead-simple as it is, the ABCs framework had been used for just a couple states and cities around the world, along with some industries and hobbies. I made a list of kids publishers that seemed to produce a similar vibe, did hours of research of contacts and processes at those firms. Then I led outreach.
On Sept. 28, 2025, my first kids book launches, and can be pre-ordered at PhillyABCs.com.
Below I share some other background, lessons and insights for later.
Continue reading PhillyABCs: my first kids bookThe singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.
That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.
I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorterIn the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.
Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.
This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.
The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.
Below find my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The CIA Book Club“Market fundamentalists aren’t wrong about everything.”
Sometimes the right solution is to do nothing until there’s more information. Some markets do resolve themselves. Prohibition was a worse cure than the very real disease of alcohol abuse.
“But competition doesn’t mean we don’t have rules.”
That’s from The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, a 2023 book from Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. They’re the journalist-researchers behind the influential 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which identified the strategy of disinformation used to defend cigarettes and then climate denial.
When they wrote their 2010 book, they assumed those blocking interventions into tobacco addiction and then climate change were motivated by greed. Later, they realized it was because of a true and ideological market fundamentalism. This new book is answering how that pathological fundamentalism came to be.
A binary choice between the market and the state, between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet central planning is a myth, they argue. The “free market” category, and spirit, was a manufactured marketing and propaganda campaign. Instead, a sensible approach balances market and government interventions.
It’s not the problem that corporations don’t do more for society, they write, it’s that they stop governments from doing so. “If efficiency were our only goal, then market fundamentalism might make sense. But efficiency is a tool not an end.”
Below notes for my future reference.
Continue reading The Big Myth of the “free market”The 20th century “hardened an artificial distinction between professional journalists and everyone else.” The 21st century has crashed that down.
That’s from “We’re all journalists now,” a book written almost 20 years ago in 2007 by lawyer and constitutional law scholar Scott Gantt. As he wrote: “In a sense, we are returning to where we started.”
Gantt’s thin volume is a valuable representation of what was changing then. Below I share notes for future reference.
Continue reading We’re all journalists now: Scott Gantt wrote in 2007
