I don’t flatter myself to assume anyone is sitting around wondering why I’m not writing more here. We’ve had a busy family calendar over the spring and summer and I prioritized those activities over keeping up with my discretionary personal newsletter. I’m back today with a newsletter in my original format.

I’m hoping to write more now that we’re getting back into regular routines. If I fail, though, just remember: This newsletter is worth what you pay for it!

1. I remember when kindergarten was fun

School is back in Indianapolis and I’m feeling more anxiety about that than I did a year ago.

Kindergarten did not go well for my son, or at least not the first half of the year. He complained about boredom, we received near-constant disciplinary complaints from teachers and we were repeatedly told that he was lagging behind other children in learning — and, worse, holding them back by being a distraction.

These issues were new to us. Our son had thrived the previous year in pre-K and his daycare teachers adored him. We accepted the reality that something was wrong, but nothing we tried seemed to help.

After perhaps our most difficult and frustrating period of parenting, my wife and I made the only remaining change within our power. We moved our son to a different school mid-year. The problems ended literally overnight. Our son bonded with his teacher, re-engaged in learning, followed teachers’ instructions and, by the end of the year, tested well above his grade level in language arts and math.

We’ll never know exactly what went wrong at the first school. But I have a theory.

Kindergarten is just not designed for boys.

If you are an Old Millennial like me, you might remember a play-based experience in kindergarten. That is no longer the vibe. Our son’s first kindergarten class included a lot of time sitting and doing work. We could sense his teacher was working hard to prepare students for first grade — with a level of intensity that certainly didn’t exist when I was that age. My kindergarten class went half-days and my only real memories involve goofing around.

After our son switched schools, though, his new classroom spent more time on games. When kids had work to do, it seems (based on conversations with our son and his teacher) kids had more freedom to move around the room. Basically, it seems like the second classroom was a much better fit to our son’s learning style — and perhaps also the learning style of boys in general.

A recent New York Times article by Claire Cain Miller supports this theory. She writes:

Researchers at the University of Virginia compared kindergarten in 2010 and 1998. They found that in just over a decade, teachers had allocated much more time to academic subjects and desk work, and less time to art, music and activities like blocks or dramatic play. The share who said students should learn to read in kindergarten increased to 80 percent from 31 percent.

EducationWeek, which also recently took on this issue, adds:

One early norm — and measure of a child’s success in school — is whether he or she can sit still, pay attention to the teacher, and follow simple classroom rules. These are often the things that kindergarten teachers highlight and discuss in conferences with parents. And quite often, boys fall short.

That’s exactly where we were with our son a year ago. He seemed to simply lack the capacity to do what was being asked of him — and he started acting out.

So do a lot of boys.

Girls are simply better prepared than boys to adjust to modern kindergarten expectations. Executive function development, which includes attention span and impulse control, matures faster for girls. Play-based learning tends to benefit boys more than girls — and that’s what’s being cut to make room for sit-and-focus classroom tasks that used to be reserved for higher grades.

As these articles show, it’s common for parents of boys to have this experience. I’ve seen some conservatives chalk it up to cultural bias against male gender norms. It seems more likely a response to standardized testing expectations — and consequences for schools that don’t meet particular standards.

Indiana on Wednesday reported a major improvement in third-grade reading scores to 87.3% proficiency statewide, up from crisis-level scores between 81% and 82.5% in the years since the pandemic. Leaders across all levels of government issued celebratory statements, signaling these test scores are a huge deal.

The reaction to Indiana’s third-grade literacy rebound provides a taste of the pressure early elementary school teachers must be facing — and almost certainly passing onto children.

An unintended consequence of state and federal emphasis on test scores might be crowding out play-based learning and contributing to the long-term educational disadvantage that we’re seeing with boys.

2. One more thought on schools

Erika Sanzi wrote a piece that has stuck with me for the past week or so. She articulated something I’ve subconsciously noticed but haven’t really considered:

The mission creep of American schools is undeniable and if we’re being brutally honest, too many schools have become one-stop social services hubs that also teach a little reading and math on the side. Instead of maintaining a focus on academics, schools are stretched to the breaking point, in part because of federal and state mandates and in part because they have been captured by an ideology which demands that every single student need be met before any teaching or learning can occur.

Schools used to be institutions of academic instruction, designed to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to become good citizens, prepared to meaningfully participate in a free society. But somewhere along the way, we decided that schools should also become social service hubs that cater to all the needs of students and families and aspire to fix societal problems that extend far beyond education. It seems fair —and even overdue —to seriously ask if it makes sense to continue using the word “school” to describe educational institutions that are also expected (or required!) to provide breakfast, lunch and snack, host immunization clinics, offer wrap-around health services, provide counseling, address declining mental health, disrupt the “school to prison pipeline,” supervise toothbrushing, teach financial literacy and host drag queen story hour.

Putting aside the merits of the services listed for a moment — which vary widely — the question I’m asking is whether or not it’s reasonable or wise to expect a school to do all of these things.

I agree this is something we should be talking about.

3. What I wrote

I’m on a streak of writing retail takes for IndyStar during the past week:

• Wawa is an east-side spark. Don’t kill it over the Blue Line.

• Steak 'n Shake's MAGA makeover is a desperate bid to save a dying business

4. What I read

I’ve read a few books I’ve really enjoyed lately:

• “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” by Ethan Mollick is a tremendous starting point if you’re interested in experimenting with AI and want to develop baseline knowledge.

• “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen” by David Brooks and “Sorry I’m Late, I didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes” by Jessica Pan have given me a lot to think about as I make a middle-aged effort to evolve from being a self-centered, antisocial jerk.

5. Pic to go

Here’s a photo from one of my favorite nights this summer in Memphis, which led to my ongoing Elvis obsession.

I expected Graceland to be light and interesting in the same way as Detroit’s Motown Museum, which introduces visitors to a storied era of music history through a backdrop of upbeat sounds and colorful memorabilia. It’s fun. Engaging. You have a chance to sing. You leave with soaring spirits.

Graceland shares some of those elements — but you approach them under a brooding shadow of tragedy.

Your awareness of the darkness may vary. It first hit me when I realized how young Elvis was throughout Graceland’s presentation. He is frozen in time as a lean, handsome, fun-loving guy, brimming with patriotism and the world’s coolest car collection. There’s a video of Elvis diving into his swimming pool. More videos of him clowning around outside. Portraits of an idyllic family.

The more I saw, the more this idealized version of Elvis felt deeply unsettling. I knew the unacknowledged ending. It was like I had stepped into a tour of the late-1950s led by Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come. The John Stamos-narrated mansion tour provides intimate access to a calculated version of Elvis’ life — and then crash lands you into reality at the gravesites of Elvis and his family members, including daughter Lisa Marie Presley (last seen on the tour as a smiling toddler), outside in the Meditation Garden.

Please exit through the gift shop!

Visiting Graceland is supposed to be fun. I left in a melancholy daze.

Elvis shared only a fraction of his talent

I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis music since taking that tour. My overriding sense of his catalogue is that I want more.

Not more volume. Elvis recorded over 700 songs. But relatively few of them reflect a level of artistry that made him The King. There’s the early stuff everyone knows, including “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and then there’s the late stuff, including “Suspicious Minds” and “If I Can Dream.”

For an artist who changed everything, Elvis spent shockingly little time making innovative music. He peaked at age 23, staged a comeback between 33 and 35, went into steep decline and died at 42, leaving us with only a fraction of his potential — and yet it was enough to endure.

I’m obsessed with this artist who became imprisoned and isolated by unimaginable fame and lost touch with his true self — similar to other singers, from Michael Jackson to Britney Spears. Elvis altered the course of music with a career amounting to two brief bursts of greatness.

The career math is shocking

Elvis spent about 15% of his life making groundbreaking music.

It might even be an exaggeration to say he had two bursts of greatness. You could argue it was really just one — 1954 to 1958.

Elvis exploded almost overnight in 1954 by fusing gospel, blues, country and hillbilly. The resulting cocktail resembled sounds popular among Black artists and audiences, leading to appropriation criticism.

Historical accounts suggest Elvis’ musical choices were sincere, not cynical (though his first producer, Sam Phillips, was more motivated by the marketing potential of introducing Black music to White audiences). Elvis stitched together genres he loved, relying heavily on music from Black churches and nightclubs, and blending it into something unique. He cranked out hit after hit, first at Phillips’ independent Sun Records label in Memphis and then moving to RCA in 1956.

Then Elvis got drafted into the Army in 1958. He was stationed in Germany and abstained from recording music while in the military. Then he returned in 1960 and … made movies?

Look, lots of people love Elvis’ movies. But, while he is in the conversation for greatest musician of all time, approximately zero people would argue he is the greatest actor of all time.

Elvis’ Hollywood career includes 31 feature films, only two of which are critically acclaimed (“King Creole” and “Flaming Star”). The rest are formulaic musicals propped up by soundtracks engineered to satisfy commercial rather than creative interests.

Elvis walked away from movies in 1968, put on a Comeback Special that is still considered one of the greatest live performances in rock history and recorded a few more exceptional songs. “Suspicious Minds,” perhaps his best recording, was released in 1969 and became his last No. 1 hit.

Elvis launched a Las Vegas residency in July 1969 and performed more than 600 shows there through 1976. The residency started out hot but descended into monotony as he stopped challenging himself, slipped into delusion, suffered from mounting health problems and became increasingly dependent on painkillers.

By the end, Elvis was physically unable to perform full-fledged concerts. He forgot words to songs and seemed disoriented on stage. He died in 1977.

Even Elvis’ mortality couldn’t constrain his talent

Even at Elvis’ worst, you can see what might have been — if only he had kept his focus on music and stayed healthy.

Consider his last public performance. Elvis’ June 26, 1977 concert in Indianapolis is a notorious shitshow just seven weeks before his death.

I’ve heard and read about how bad it was. That’s why, when I stumbled onto this video of “Unchained Melody” from that show, it blew me away. The video starts with Elvis admitting he doesn’t know all the chords and asking some befuddled guy to hold his microphone. It ends with him singing the absolute shit out of that song.

Elvis is at death’s door. His singing transcends his frailty and shattered life. Chills.

Step into the lie

Elvis in the 1970s started singing “My Way,” made famous by Frank Sinatra. In Elvis’ version, he hits the notes with abandon, as if he’s convincing himself of its personal resonance. That guy who gave up groundbreaking music to star in mediocre films and rot away in a never-ending two-show-per-night Vegas grind?

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall

Elvis obsessed over control, over himself and others, even as he ceded his agency to fame, drugs and his exploitative manager. He projected a lie. But unlike Michael Jackson, a fellow icon who followed a similar path and became a monster, Elvis seems to have maintained a kind and generous spirit throughout his self-destructive descent. That makes his story even sadder.

Graceland invites us into the lie but can’t control it any better than Elvis did. No matter how much time you spend among smiling photos and material wealth, the grave awaits. Beyond that, the veneer of dignity is lost.

Elvis is remembered as much for inanity as for innovation. He’s become a punchline. While we speak of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other acts of his era with reverence, Elvis’ legacy has been reduced to kitschy souvenirs.

He died young, yet lived long enough to become a caricature. Consider his famous visit to the White House to meet Richard Nixon in 1970. The story is hilarious — so long as you don’t think too hard about it.

Elvis was addicted to massive quantities of prescription drugs, yet flew to Washington and asked Nixon to deputize him to combat drug abuse. He was already detached from reality at age 35, a shell of his spirited youth. Nixon humored his delusion in hopes of boosting poll numbers.

I didn’t know any of this a few weeks ago. I’ve been going down one rabbit hole after another, all because Graceland made me feel something. But … what, exactly?

Pity. Vulnerability. Helplessness. In this Dickensian tour, it’s easy to imagine an alternate history in which Elvis ignores Hollywood, escapes Vegas and receives help with his addiction. The possibilities feel tangible as you retrace the footsteps of his once-vibrant life.

Maybe that’s the psychology behind our love of “A Christmas Carol.” We like to imagine we would make the most of second chances to live richer, fuller lives if only we could see ourselves from another angle. Reality works differently. We usually reject others’ perspectives.

Elvis didn’t want some spirit to guide him toward another life. He enjoyed being The King and all that it entailed. Like Elvis, we make our choices, justify our mistakes and leave loved ones to tell our stories through rosier filters. We do it our way.

Elvis lived a life too iconic to be relatable. He suffered a death that was all too human.

Not long ago, Meredith fell asleep on me all the time. She was a baby! But, during the past year, she’s started willing herself to stay awake until the lights are out, her door is closed and all hope of staying up is lost. My lap is now for playing or reading a book. Bed is for sleeping.

It took extraordinary circumstances for her to pass out on me this time. We’d been traveling all day and she was exhausted. I picked her up and laid her on my chest, as I’d done a hundred times or more when she was younger. She closed her eyes almost immediately.

I laid there with her for as long as I reasonably could, wondering whether it would be my last time to experience this as a parent. She’s our second child (we also have a 6-year-old son, Felix). We’re probably not having another one. Speaking for myself, I’m getting old and ready to move onto a life phase beyond parenting young children.

One thing lots of people tell you about parenting is that everything goes by so quickly. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly wrote a beautiful book on the topic, appropriately titled, “It. Goes. So. Fast.” Many parents describe it as waking up one day and seeing their children grown. My mom recently told me she experienced that feeling on my high-school graduation day.

That is the retrospective view. Time passes differently in between birth and graduation day.

I’m experiencing fatherhood as a series of quiet last times. My children learn to correctly say words they used to mispronounce in adorable ways. My son Felix sadly no longer says “nilk” for milk. My daughter will stop saying “lolla” when she wants a banana, “hands” when she wants napkins or “eyes” when she wants sunglasses.

Felix, who is learning to read, will soon no longer ask me to translate written words. He’ll spend a last night with his blanky. He’ll stop asking for “Margot” and “Magglio,” his stuffed cats that look like his first pets, who have died.

The last times will become more significant. Felix and Meredith will stop believing in Santa. They’ll decide they’re too old to trick-or-treat. We’ll share a final Thanksgiving as four permanent residents of the same household. We won’t always recognize these moments for what they are. Endings. Beginnings.

Raising children goes quickly in the sense that life itself is short. But it’s also a gradual journey. It can feel agonizingly slow as we try to live up to the high stakes while also grappling with our limitations and emotional vulnerabilities. Our job is to prepare children to be more independent tomorrow than they are today. Failure is nerve-racking. Success is heartbreaking.

In my frantic efforts to balance parenting among other responsibilities, I often fail to observe the developments I’m helping to cultivate. When I catch one — when I’m present and aware as one of my children grows up before my eyes — I feel privileged to share in their progress.

As my daughter breathed on me in those heavy bursts for possibly the last time, I took a photo. I put down my phone and meditated on the weight of Meredith’s head on my chest and the searching movements of her hand as she got comfortable. I burned those sensations into the corner of consciousness reserved for my most vivid memories.

It’s possible I’ve already missed some other last time since then. That’s why I’m hanging onto this one. Long after Meredith stops reaching for my hand or needing me to put her shoes on, I will visit that place and remember what it felt like to provide peaceful rest to my sweet daughter. We can’t slow down parenting. We can only reflect on day-to-day changes as our children become the people they will be when they no longer need us.

I created a Facebook account for a college class and then forgot about it for years. I skipped the early days of Twitter. I don’t remember when I signed up for LinkedIn. I finally joined MySpace just in time to watch it die.

I had zero interest in these platforms. But what I did want was a job. I spent the Great Recession unemployed in New York. Somewhere in between binging DVDs of “The Office” and “Lost” while eating frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s, I had a realization: If I ever wanted to work in media (or maybe anywhere) again, I needed to get active on social media.

So, I did.

Yep, I was a total noob. But I was trying. As annoying as it seemed to me at the time, my late adoption of social media helped put me on a long road from journalism washout to landing my dream job as a columnist. All it cost me was brain rot.

My adapt-or-die alarm bells are ringing once again with the stunning advances of AI. Except, this disruption is unfathomably greater than social media. We no longer have the luxury of debating AI’s virtues or nursing our feelings. It’s here. The framework for adoption is this: Do you want to have a future? If yes, then you need to use AI.

Axios’ Jim VandeHei put it like this:

Stop downplaying the tectonic shifts that could hit every job, starting next year. Employees need the hard truth that entire classes of jobs could be wiped away, especially if people don't quickly adapt. I recently told the Axios staff that we're done sugar-coating it, and see an urgent need for every employee to turn AI into a force multiplier for their specific work. We then gave them tools to test. My exact words to a small group of our finance, legal and talent colleagues last week: "You are committing career suicide if you're not aggressively experimenting with AI."

I encourage you to read the entire column, because VandeHei has the urgency level exactly right. Notice that his comments aren’t specific to media. VandeHei and Mike Allen followed up with another column Wednesday reporting that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years.”

Predictions are hard, as they say. But it’s undeniably, directionally true that AI platforms create efficiencies right now on a scale that eliminates the need to pay for labor or services you might otherwise use. And they’re only getting better. Just last week, Anthropic released Claude 4, and I found the advances so immediately noticeable that I retraced old problems to find new insights.

I’ve been seriously experimenting with AI for about five months now, mostly Claude, which is a large language model similar to better-known ChatGPT. I might write a separate post on how I apply AI to journalism, if there’s a demand for such a thing, but for now I want to share some broader applications:

• I created the logo for this newsletter with AI. I’m very happy with it! I should acknowledge there are ethical concerns about using AI for creative work. My wife, a designer by trade (and someone who has spent even more time with AI than I have) did not share those concerns, since hers was the (unpaid) labor being replaced. She did provide substantial input and guidance.

• I removed a wasp nest from an area where my children play. I wanted no part of this project and otherwise might have called a pest control service. I wasn’t even sure what the nest was. I uploaded a photo to Claude and it identified the nest as belonging to paper wasps, explaining the nest’s state of development (early), how to remove it and how many wasps would be there in a few weeks if I didn’t (50-plus). I hate killing anything, even insects. When I expressed mild uncertainty about removing it, hoping for a way out, Claude responded: “With young children playing in the area, this really isn't a situation where you can safely ‘live and let live.’” Notable: AI has no sympathy for lower life forms.

• I created a detailed trip itinerary. My wife and I are surprising my mom with a trip for her birthday next month. AI created a detailed, well-paced itinerary that could have been the product of a travel agent. I realize people have already been talking about the death of travel agencies for 20 years. But we actually used one in 2018 to plan a trip to Australia. In that case, we had a long list of things we wanted to do but felt overwhelmed tying them together into a practical order. We outsourced the work to a travel agent for the sake of our sanity. Now, I’m confident AI could do that for us.

• I created a home renovation plan. A tree limb went through our garage roof, which has us considering whether this is the right time to take on a larger roof/gutter/siding project that we were hoping to put off for at least a couple more years. I took photos of our house and garage, and uploaded them to Claude, which generated a project including materials, colors and price estimates. The pricing has been remarkably accurate, especially considering contractors are walking around our roof to put together numbers while all I did was take some photos. As estimates have come in, I’ve uploaded the documents to Claude, which has told me which numbers are reasonable and which ones reflect over-charging.

• Additionally, Claude created a multiphase exterior remodeling plan, suggesting architectural details that would enhance the character of our 1955 home. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to any of these things, but the AI-generated plan amounts to design work worth thousands of dollars.

These project-based examples don’t include all the other random times when I just want to learn about the evolution of Major League Baseball rules from the 1990s to present or Calvinism or the English Revolution. AI is replacing my use of search engines, which comes with a whole host of other implications for tech and media.

Yes, AI gets things wrong sometimes (like a reading list published in the Chicago Sun-Times), but I think that gets overblown. I’m not asking AI to do my work for me1, and you shouldn’t either.

I forget who said this, but I read someone describe AI as a really smart personal assistant who also likes to bullshit. That sums up my experience. We all know humans who are like that and we learn to appreciate their value without dwelling on their faults.

If you want to hate on AI, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. We need to be clear-eyed about both the risks and rewards of AI. Before we can get there, though, we also need to understand it. We can only understand it by using it.

From my career to my personal life, AI has made me faster and more efficient at a wide range of tasks and analysis. I’m confident that AI won’t replace the specific work I do, but am I 100% confident? Not really. That’s a tension we all need to wrestle with.

Robots have been taking over factory work for decades. Now, they’re coming for the white collar jobs. Some at-risk career paths are predictable (data entry, customer service, administrative roles), but others will surprise us.

We all need to be thinking about whether, or how, we create value that can’t be automated. If you’re not sure whether AI can do the work you do, start using it and find out. Pick an LLM and start feeding it prompts to help with projects.

Those of us with office jobs have a choice: You can either make AI your assistant or your replacement.

My family has lived in our current house for three years with a Nest thermostat. This week, for the first time, I figured out how to manually adjust the temperature schedule.

Yes, that means what you think it does. Until this week, our temperature schedule has been determined 100% by algorithm. Every day. Spring, summer, winter, fall. For three years.

I wish I was joking.

1. Off ramp to nowhere

The chaos of this week is summed up in one paragraph of a Wall Street Journal story:

Trump played his cards close to his vest. He told advisers that he was willing to take “pain,” a person who spoke to him on Monday said. He privately acknowledged that his trade policy could trigger a recession but said he wanted to be sure it didn’t cause a depression, according to people familiar with the conversations.

President Trump is willing to subject Americans to crashing markets, layoffs, stalled wages, price increases and supply chain shortages — but not all-out economic collapse.

We might already be in a recession. If we’re not, the best-case scenario seems to be a coin flip’s odds of entering one. The worst-case scenario is anyone’s guess.

Trump on Wednesday scrapped his nonsensical tariff formula in favor of 10% tariffs on most countries, while also raising tariffs on China to 145%. China, in turn, has slapped (the verb of choice in tariff news) a 125% tax on U.S. goods.

While many, if not most, media reports emphasized Trump’s backpedal, that’s somewhat misleading.

"Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 25.3%, the highest since 1909," the Yale Budget Lab wrote, per Reuters. "This is only slightly different from where the effective rate was before the late-April 9 announcement. Even after consumption shifts, the average tariff rate will be 18.1%, the highest since 1934."

In other words: Trump’s backpedal still amounts to a massive shock capable of wrecking the U.S. economy.

In some ways, our situation is more uncertain now than it was a week ago. My assumption was that Trump would stick with his beloved tariffs until, or unless, Congress took control of the wheel — and, even then, only after months of severe damage. That was wrong. I have no idea what happens now.

We’ve learned that Trump has a pain threshold (he reportedly reached it after watching bond markets convulse early Wednesday and then seeing JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon predict a recession on Fox Business).

Here’s what we don’t know: Trump’s objective or end game.

• Trump is not as committed to tariffs as he said he was.

• His administration repeatedly said this is not about negotiating, and it is acting like that’s true. Trump has alienated allies (now choking down 10% tariffs) who might otherwise help the U.S. isolate China in this new phase of the trade war.

• Businesses are not going to expand or onshore operations amid a likely recession and a 90-day “pause” in massive global tariffs. What happens in July? What happens 90 days after that? What happens 90 days after that?

• Trump told everyone to “BE COOL!” while he clearly was not feeling cool himself.

Trump’s Wednesday announcement was an off ramp to nowhere. His administration is exhibiting gross incompetence across the board. His economic policies are unequivocally terrible. We are captive to his senseless whims.

Our pain is a risk Trump is willing to take.

There’s one question neither Trump nor any of his superfans have answered: What is the potential reward that justifies our risk? What measurable outcome would make this chaos worthwhile?

The answer, to the extent there is one, exists only in one person’s mind and it changes as he watches bond markets, TV and anything else that captures his attention.

2. People notice when government fails

If you’re old enough to have paid attention to the Obamacare rollout in 2013, then you probably remember this: It was an utter debacle.

Here’s how CBS News described the much-anticipated launch:

Americans began shopping online Tuesday for health insurance on the new state exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.

There were major problems all over the country. Websites were slow or crashed altogether, leaving a lot of folks angry and frustrated. The president noted that by 7 a.m., more than a million people had visited the main website: www.healthcare.gov.

The millions of people flooding the system on healthcare.gov caused the website to briefly break under the strain, causing it to go from "apply now" to "please wait" to "please try again later.”

Signing up for health insurance was basically impossible because the Obama administration failed to build a functional website. It was a huge, long-running scandal, and rightfully so.

This is what DOGE is doing to the federal government now, but with existing programs. Indiscriminate budget cuts and firings are making important government products as inaccessible as Obamacare was in its early days.

Here’s what’s going on at Social Security, per The Washington Post:

The Social Security Administration — already reeling from plunging customer service following a rapid downsizing under the Trump administration — is drafting plans to begin layoffs of potentially thousands more employees as soon as next week.

The cuts have been ordered by leaders of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, the U.S. DOGE Service, which reviewed the agency’s plans to shrink its workforce last week, according to four agency officials familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans. DOGE determined that the 7,000 jobs eliminated since February under acting commissioner Leland Dudek through early retirements, buyouts, resignations and firings were not enough, the officials said.

Why do I mention this?

Also on the list is the information technology department of about 4,000 employees, which is confronting a flurry of website crashes that has shut out customers from accessing their benefit information. Up to 800 people could be laid off in that department, according to one senior official.

DOGE is creating Obamacare rollout-level problems in almost every agency it’s touching.

When you combine the economic destruction, incompetence and malevolent cuts we’re seeing now, it’s likely that almost every person in America will be negatively affected by Trump in a tangible way over the next four years.

3. What I wrote

I published one column this week for IndyStar:

• Combat Banks, Beckwith, Rokita stunts with earnestness

4. What I read

Not gonna lie, I was not being cool and I wasted most my week on doomscrolling.

But I also spent a lot of time reading smart analysis on the week’s insane economic news. Here are a few of my favorite resources to cut through the noise:

• Bloomberg’s Odd Lots newsletter

• Noahpinion

• Axios Markets and Macro newsletters

To offer a taste, here’s how Axios Macro sums up the week that was:

Treasury bonds and other U.S. dollar assets have acted as a global safe haven for generations. This week, global investors woke up to the possibility that they are not particularly safe, and not at all a haven.

The big picture: The last nine days will reverberate through economic history, as the kind of shifts in the global trade order and financial markets that usually play out over years were compressed into each news cycle.

More:

Here is another uncomfortable combination policymakers don't like to see: Consumer sentiment fell off a cliff in April while inflation expectations skyrocketed, according to early data from the University of Michigan.

Why it matters: Trump's tariff policies crushed the economic optimism that prevailed after the presidential election. Now consumers, including Republicans, see weakening economic prospects and higher prices — expectations economists say could be self-fulfilling.

What a time to be alive.

5. I have a beard

I did a podcast this week and got a bit animated talking about the chicanery of Indiana’s statewide elected officials.

More importantly, I’m trying out a beard. It’s very gray. I’m kind of horrified. But people keep telling me to keep it. What do you think?

Here at Between the Motion, I promise even-keeled takes. I’ll try to stick to that here, even as we head into a siren-emoji kind of day.

We’re entering market crash territory with no apparent off ramp. I posted my analysis of President Trump’s tariffs Saturday. Here are nine more thoughts as we begin the week.

1. One thing I glossed over in my previous post was the question of whether Trump campaigned on the policies now wrecking the economy. He did. Kamala Harris clearly articulated the likely consequences. No one should be surprised by any of this.

2. The thing is, when voters listened to Trump talk about tariffs, they heard “economy of 2017-2019.” Trump’s first-term tariffs were a drop in the bucket compared to what he’s doing now — baseline 10% tariffs on 180-plus countries, with much higher taxes on imports from major trading partners. Even though Trump promised to do what he’s doing now, business elites supported him anyway because they didn’t believe he’d actually do it.

3. Buyer’s remorse is taking hold. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who endorsed Trump and has been a vocal supporter, posted last night that we are “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down.”

4. Folks like Ackman supported a generic, theoretical idea of a Trump presidency based on how things turned out in the first term — tax cuts, craziness held in check, etc. etc.

5. Now, they’re losing a lot of money. “Business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust,” Ackman wrote. Trump’s support from Wall Street and business leaders is faltering. The new tech right could be next to show jitters.

6. A key defense of Trump’s tariffs from the MAGA side is that we’re only seeing the first move from Trump, the master negotiator. He’s going to bring countries to the table and get a better deal for America.

7. Trump explicitly rejected that defense Sunday while talking to reporters. “I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world,” Trump said, per AP. “They’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country.” No deal. No trade deficits. Instead: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump said.

8. Even if Trump changes his mind, he has lost credibility as a good-faith negotiator. Remember the on-again-off-again tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Foreign leaders can’t trust him. Markets can’t trust him. What does a reversal even mean at this point? There is no such thing as a done deal with Trump.

9. We’re only two months into Trump’s term. Markets are tanking. Recession odds are rising. Confidence is evaporating. It’s going to be a long four years.

Many of you are probably very good and experienced runners. I am not. Feel free to skip the first section, because I likely have nothing to offer you. But, if you’re someone who’s kinda thought you might want to run and never tried it or gave up, I hope this will be some encouragement and practical advice.

1. I can run. You can run.

My fluorescent orange Nikes slapped pavers at 7:08 p.m. February 14, 20211, absorbing water on a drizzly 44-degree night along the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida.

I don’t know how far I went — I apparently hadn’t enabled location tracking on my watch — but I remember starting out in a jog, stopping to walk and picking back up into a jog. I kept going back and forth. I did that for 30 minutes. I’d guess I traveled about two miles.

The thing I remember most, aside from wet socks, is feeling surprised by how well it went. I had only tried running outside a handful of times during my adult life. I always hated it. This time felt … good.

So good that I was back out in the same spot at 8:09 the next morning. For 40 minutes. More jogging, less walking.

I thought about that after my wife asked me about my favorite part of our spring break trip to Alabama. The first answer that came to mind: running.

That was a bit of sarcastic commentary on the difficulty of traveling with two young children. This trip, like all trips, was a lot. We played all the hits: exhaustion-induced meltdowns, car vomit and too much McDonald’s.

But my answer also was a sincere reflection of how much I’ve come to love running. I ran through the University of South Alabama campus, Medal of Honor Park and some random, boring subdivision in Mobile. Not very fast, and maybe not very far, but I did it!

Running has become a highlight of most trips. Some of my clearest memories from our fall travels through Europe include running in the predawn hours through the streets of Oxford and Hyde Park in London. There are few more intimate experiences in faraway places than seeing the sights while communing with early-rising locals who are out getting their steps in.

Traveling aside, running has become one of my favorite activities in general. Stepping outside for a run marks a clear, decisive break from work, parenting and other stressors. I return less grumpy and with more patience. I feel better at times when I’m running a lot.

Getting into running has been the single best gift handed down from my 30s to my older self.

I wish I could have discovered these benefits earlier in life. I wanted to run, but I just didn’t know how to get started. It’s working for me now because, when I hit the Jacksonville riverwalk in 2021, I finally started out with a sustainable approach.

Here’s what I did:

👟 Researched good running shoes

• I’m not out to pretend to be a pro runner or anything, but I figured sore feet would be the quickest way to kill my motivation. So, I bought some good running shoes.

• There are plenty of running sites and forums, but Wirecutter is my go-to for pretty much everything, including running shoes. I have a version of the Nike Pegasus, which gets an honorable mention there.

💪 Used a (virtual) trainer

• This has made the single-biggest difference for me. When I used to try to run on my own, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I would just run hard, get tired, hate it and not do it again for a long time.

• When I started my running journey in 2021, I had Peloton’s Matt Wilpers in my ear, guiding me on a beginner run at an attainable pace with scheduled times for walks. I started out with a mix of beginner-level runs and walk-and-run workouts, and it was exactly what I needed to build stamina and confidence. (I’ve written about Peloton before — it’s been a game-changer for keeping me on track with workouts.)

• Peloton works for me, but other similar options include Apple Fitness+ and Nike Run Club. I highly recommend something like this if you’re like me and just couldn’t figure out what to do on your own. It’s like hiring a personal trainer for pennies on the dollar.

🎧 Got comfy earbuds

• If you’re going to take a coach with you on runs, you need earbuds that won’t distract you. I had one pair that would fall out of my ears during sprints. Avoid that.

• Again, I defer to Wirecutter, or your favorite review site.

🏃 Chose a pleasant path

• I started out at the Jacksonville riverwalk because it was close to where I was staying, separated from traffic and I wanted to see it anyway.

• At home, I run through neighborhood sidewalks, trails and other places I’d otherwise enjoy spending time.

• I avoid cars and busy intersections as much as possible. Running should be enjoyable, and a nice path is key.

If you take one thing from this post, it’s that you shouldn’t give up on running if you’re interested in doing it. I found joy by getting more comfortable and running with professional guidance in my ears.

I’m still extremely recreational. I’ve never participated in a 5K or any other organized race (though I could and probably will some day). But that’s not the point. The main thing is, I like doing it and it improves my mental and physical health.

2. News is heading for a traffic cliff

AI is killing search traffic — and news orgs had better pay attention.

Axios’ Sarah Fischer reports:

Traditional search traffic to the top 500 media and news websites in the U.S. dropped by more than 15% from an average of 5.3 million page referrals per publisher in May 2024 to an average of 4.5 million in February 2025, according to new data from Similarweb shared exclusively with Axios for Media Trends Executive members.

AI chatbots are getting better than search engines at delivering quick, relevant responses to queries. When I type a question into Claude, for instance, I get the precise information I want (albeit with a need for fact-checking) rather than having to click on five or six links and hunt for relevant details.

Google understands this and is offering similar AI-generated responses in its search engine, reducing the need for people to click through links. This is generally good for users — and bad for sites that rely on search traffic.

Fischer writes: “Experts believe we are at the beginning of a terminal decline in overall search traffic referrals to web publishers.”

News is heading for a search cliff. Those of us who publish #content for a living need to think about how to develop direct, personal relationships with our audiences (btw, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter!).

Pageviews from search still deliver revenue, for now, but it’s drying up.

3. What I wrote

I published three columns last week for IndyStar:

• Indiana is turning school boards into a farm system for wannabe politicians

• Micah Beckwith and his Indiana DOGE bros are livin' large

• Diego Morales is rubbing our faces in his corruption. Impeach him now.

4. What I read

I finished an advance copy of “Hate the Game” by Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather. It’s an excellent guide to applying economics concepts to life choices, including relationships, homebuying and salary negotiations. The book drops April 11. I’ll likely have more to say about it.

5. Who gets killed in “The White Lotus”?

I, like many people, am watching the third season of “The White Lotus” and wondering who dies. Here are the most likely contenders, per betting site Polymarket.

JPMorgan expects a recession this year, with unemployment rising to 5.3%, per a Friday note from chief economist Michael Feroli, making it the first major financial firm to call the R-word.

We’re getting used to recession talk, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what a stunning turn of events this is or what it means. Recessions bring misery. Millions of people lose their jobs and those fortunate to keep their jobs go without raises.

That could be an especially painful feature of this impending recession, because President Trump’s economic policies also are likely to bring back the inflation that had been tamed in recent months.

Biden-era inflation sucked, and the effects still suck, but wages rose faster than prices, so the average American came out the other side in better shape. Now, we appear headed for stagflation, a combination of rising unemployment and rising prices. That would be worse.

Pain was not inevitable

Recessions do not have to happen. The U.S. economy can go years and decades without them, as it did between the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic.

No one was predicting a recession three months ago. No one was predicting a recession two months ago. Almost no one was predicting a recession one month ago (Ball State economist and IndyStar columnist Michael Hicks called it March 6).

The reason we might have one now is unambiguous. We are hurtling toward recession because one person, Trump, has a longstanding, sincere belief that other countries are taking advantage of America and that tariffs (import taxes that get passed onto consumers) are the solution.

How Trump views tariffs

Trump is guided by a view that trade deficits are unfair to America.

Vietnam, for example, produces a lot of clothes because its workers make shirts and shoes at lower costs than American workers, while we have disposable income to buy those goods. Vietnamese citizens earn much lower wages (per the previous sentence), so they do not buy many goods from us.

Hence, we have a very large trade deficit with Vietnam.

Labor ethics aside, this arrangement works for both countries. Or, it did. Trump sees America’s trade relationship with Vietnam as egregious because the people of Vietnam are not buying goods commensurate with the Nikes and Lululemon yoga pants that adorn American consumers. They can’t afford to.

Nonetheless, Trump this week applied a 46% tax to products from Vietnam as part of his Liberation Day tariffs for every place on Earth, including uninhabited islands, yet somehow excluding Russia.

As Josh Barro wrote, “This policy is so stupid I barely even know what to say about it.”

Before Trump, most agreed tariffs are bad

The pre-Trump baseline view across the political spectrum was that tariffs are self-destructive and America did not have a trade problem. JD Vance held this view, as did virtually every other prominent conservative, including the ones now pretending Trump’s likely AI-generated tariff formula is good and smart and a revival for American manufacturing.

In order to buy Trump’s position, you have to accept two assumptions:

• Trump is a singular economic prophet who has been granted wisdom unattainable for everyone else, minus a few protectionists.

• America is in such critical condition that we must blow up the stock market and global economy to adopt Trump’s AI-designed tariff plan.

Personally, I do not think Trump is a prophet. I guess we’ll find out.

What I do know is that the U.S. economy does not have a major problem in need of a maximally invasive solution. Or, at least, it didn’t. The Friday jobs report was phenomenal, an indication that employers were still cooking up until the very moment when Trump took us to tariff town.

Zooming out, Americans have been steadily gaining wealth for decades. Look at this chart and explain how this could happen if every other country in the world is screwing us.

America is prosperous. Trump is singlehandedly making us poorer via executive action. This isn’t hypothetical. He’s already doing it. Check your retirement account. Spoiler: It’s down.

As Nate Silver points out, this week’s public company winners (such as they are) and losers reflect a recession-expectant market. Retailers that sell cheap goods are performing better than those that sell expensive goods.

That’s a forward-looking bet by traders that disposable income is about to dry up and people will be shopping more at Costco and less at Restoration Hardware (“Oh, shit,” RH CEO Gary Friedman said during an earnings call Thursday amid Liberation Day festivities, a candid reaction to the sand shifting beneath his feet).

To be clear, traders aren’t making political choices based on how they feel about Trump. They’re making high-stakes predictions with their money based on how they think the economy will change. Right now, they predict that Trump is dragging the economy to a dark place — and they’re directing resources accordingly.

I see three possible paths to a good (or not-terrible) outcome: Trump caves under pressure, Congress does its damn job and intervenes or it turns out that Trump is right and everyone else is wrong.

Trump seems to be leading a YOLO second term unconstrained by consequences, so I don’t think he’ll cave. Most congressional Republicans are not taking tariff-induced economic risks seriously yet, so I don’t expect them to act. I guess we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens.

Republicans should be taking this seriously, though, because a recession of choice — understood as such by voters — would be a political catastrophe. Americans could soon feel enough misery to reset our politics.

Silver sums up the situation like this:

If Wall Street is right and we get to the point where Americans are stocking up on booze and cigarettes but avoiding buying new toys or taking their kids to Six Flags — and don’t even dream of upgrading their cars or their homes — and all of this is because of some back-office employee who used ChatGPT to upend the global trade system … look I don’t know what the bottom is in Trump’s approval ratings. But it will be tested in a way it probably never was during the first term. There’s no constituency for this, and the excuses you’re seeing from Silicon Valley are transparent cope. Trump just basically has to hope that Wall Street is wrong, or that the economy, which was pretty good when he took office, has enough gas in the tank to ride it out.

Trump was a bad choice for president

Conor Sen, a former hedge fund analyst who writes for Bloomberg, says if Trump’s current tariff policies stand for two months without the president caving or Congress intervening, “we’re talking about stocks down 50% and a credit liquidity crisis.”

Do you know how we could have avoided a recession, a 50% market drop and a credit liquidity crisis? By electing Kamala Harris president.

I didn’t love Harris as a candidate, but I am 100% confident neither she nor any other plausible presidential candidate from any party would be causing so much damage. I know everyone claims their political opponents hate America and will ruin the country, but we’re experiencing a historically rare level of self-sabotage.

Trump didn’t run on some dubious promise of short-term pain for long-term gain. If he did, he might have lost the election. Instead, he ran on fixing an economy that was supposedly awful under Biden.

I launched this newsletter with a note of optimism that the economy was strong and I thought Trump would just let it ride and take credit for it. We can now say unequivocally he is breaking it. Prominent conservatives, from Mike Pence to Erick Erickson, are saying as much.

The MAGA figures most committed to the bit are spinning how, actually, you crybabies don’t need to buy stuff; you shouldn’t have expected Biden-era market gains forever; it’s fine because markets have dropped in the past; retirement accounts don’t matter and traders are only selling off to turn you against Trump.

This is the pro-Trump message now: Yes, things are bad, but you have to trust that Trump is going into Hulk Smash mode in order to make America better in the long run.

I do not buy that case. Trump has a long record in real estate development, casinos, TV and politics. The one constant is that Trump destroys things and somehow ends up personally better off, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces of his failure.

Trump is treating the U.S. economy like one of his bankrupt casinos. Republicans in Congress can do something about it if they want to. All the rest of us can do is hope things somehow turn out better than they did in Atlantic City.

I can say nice things about Mobile and Birmingham, but Huntsville has a level of energy usually reserved for much larger cities. I was downtown Saturday and saw sidewalks bustling with pedestrians going to coffee shops and bakeries; Big Springs International Park so full of people you’d think it was a slice of New York’s Central Park; and a wonderful children’s museum packed with kids, including mine.

Huntsville isn’t just busy. It’s clean, well maintained and thoughtfully designed. It feels like a nice place to spend time.

The federal government built Huntsville

I’ve been noticing Huntsville’s vibrancy for years. I finally got curious about it Sunday, as we were eating dinner in one of Montgomery’s high-end areas, which nonetheless had plenty of vacant lots and high weeds. Something clearly sets Huntsville apart from its peer cities. What is it?

The unequivocal answer is the federal government.1

Huntsville became what it is today out of sheer luck. Here’s how it happened:

• The U.S. Army established Redstone Arsenal for chemical weapons production in the 1940s.

• The Army relocated Wernher von Braun (a Nazi Party member, for what it’s worth) and his team of German rocket scientists to Huntsville in the 1950s.

• The Marshall Space Flight Center opened at Redstone Arsenal in 1960, just before the Apollo program launched.

• These developments led to the creation of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an expansion of Alabama A&M.

The government has been flooding Huntsville with money and jobs ever since. A paper by Christopher M. Young sums up the improbable trajectory:

In North America, the defense industry would come to supersede Big Ag, with missiles replacing cotton as its chief unit of economic output. The late 1940s still saw cotton fields come up to within a few blocks of Huntsville’s main street; by the late 1950s, “King cotton had retreated before long rows of housing projects and factories.” By decade’s end, the space industry would also join the Huntsville community with the dedication of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960. Huntsville had become Rocket City, USA.

Huntsville is a federal juggernaut

The rocket is a perfect symbol for Huntsville.

The city has a federal workforce of more than 17,000 people, the most in Alabama by far. That includes many highly skilled workers who are doing jobs in science and technology.

The benefits go way beyond the employees themselves. Federal operations have turned Huntsville into a microcosm of the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, with a base of contractors and downstream effects that touch every facet of the economy.

Consider:

• Huntsville isn’t the fastest-growing city in Alabama — but Athens, one of its suburbs, is.

• In Madison County, which includes Huntsville, GDP grew 14.5% from 2015 to 2020, second in the state to Baldwin County (17%), a tourism hotspot that includes Gulf Shores.

• Huntsville is Alabama’s most educated city, with about 46.2% of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 28% for the state.

Huntsville is not just a great place to live; it’s also an economic engine for Alabama.

Make Wichita the next Huntsville

The Trump administration is fighting the courts to obliterate large swaths of the federal government. But, since Trump’s project of destroying the so-called deep state relies solely on executive action, there’s a strong chance it will either fail or succeed just long enough for a Democratic president to rebuild the bureaucracy later on.

There’s a better way to own the libs. Don’t just dismantle the federal government. Take pieces of it away from D.C., Maryland and Virginia and move them to red states.

The Trump administration has floated this possibility and Republicans, including Sen. Jim Banks, have expressed support for the idea. But I suspect Banks et al. are just trolling and will be content to watch the government burn without leaving a lasting legacy for their efforts.

That would be a missed opportunity. A much better and more politically advantageous troll would be for Trump to follow through and redistribute wealth from the East Coast to Republican-voting areas.

Trump could, for example, move at least a portion of the Federal Aviation Administration to Wichita, Kansas, a conservative city with an existing aerospace ecosystem. The FAA has about 45,000 employees. Moving even a couple thousand of them to Wichita could make a huge difference for the economy.

Let’s make Wichita the next Huntsville!

This isn’t quite apples to apples, since Huntsville’s capitalization on a world war and space race seems like a one-time deal. But there is a surplus of federal agencies clustered in and around D.C. Trump has the power to move those agencies, as well as their jobs, to smaller red-state cities where people could see tangible benefits before he is out of office.

This approach would even enable Trump to functionally (and legally!) fire a lot of people. Many federal workers would not leave D.C. and move to Wichita. They would quit, and the government could just replace them.

As many people have noted, a mass purge of federal workers will not result in substantial budget cuts, even if allowed by the courts. It is merely an ideological exercise.

To the extent that Trump and Republicans want to hurt liberals and help conservatives, they should take the power of the federal government and use it to supercharge red-state economies at the expense of one of America’s bluest regions.

Americans don’t remember leaders who break things. They remember builders.

Thank you for reading this edition of What I Did On Spring Break.

I caught a norovirus from my daughter and have been down for a few days, which is the story of 2025 for my family. Today has been my first day back to feeling like myself.

I’ve had a lot of ideas for what to write about here. But the only thing I’m thinking about now is how glad I am to do basic things like drink coffee and read books to my son without feeling nauseous (for the record, we read seven today, including two Christmas books and one Halloween book).

I don’t know about you, but whenever I get sick beyond a cold (flu, covid, migraines, stomach bug, etc.), I always go through the same pattern: plowing through normal activities, assuming it’ll clear up soon; giving up and lying down “just for a bit”; panicking at the realization my to-do list is cooked; and feeling cloudy existential dread as I wonder how I’ll ever even get out of bed again.

Then something profound happens. I turn a corner, lose the brain fog and become functional. More than functional. I feel like a damn superhero. One day, I can barely walk down the stairs to grab a blanket. The next, I can live life at 1.5x speed, high on the adrenaline of being up and unrestrained. I’m alive!

That’s how I’ve felt today.

I’ve experienced this cycle many times in recent months, a consequence of parenting young children in school and daycare.1 It’s led me to be hyper-aware of my health — particularly how fortunate I am to have it.

I have no chronic conditions or disabilities. I have no physical limitations. These are easy things to overlook most of the time, unless you’ve already overcome a major health scare. But it really is an incredible blessing just to wake up with all the options of a person who has full mobility and stamina.

I’ve felt miserable often enough lately to appreciate my general good health more than the average person. There’s nothing like sickness, no matter how routine, to reset Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The other topics I had in mind for this newsletter were downers. I’ll either get to them later or replace them with other ones. Today I did all the things I could hope to do on a random Sunday in March. Nothing else matters.

I’ve reached a couple conclusions since then: I like doing it and I want to define what this is a little better. So, I’ve finally named my newsletter: Between the Motion.

Why Between the Motion?

Between the Motion comes from a T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men”:

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”

If that seems overly pretentious, well, let me also offer a key pragmatic reason why I chose Between the Motion: The URL was available!

Really, though, I like the name a lot, which is rare for me. I’m bad at naming things and I generally don’t like other people’s ideas.

I settled on this one after two days of back-and-forth with Claude, an AI chatbot. This name immediately resonated and I stopped thinking about other options (after looking up the URL, that is).

Between the Motion fits the vision I keep landing on for this newsletter: an exploration of the tensions, complexities and, well, dreariness, of life through the lenses of politics, business, parenting and spirituality.

We’re living in a moment of maximum chaos. Much like in 1925, when Eliot published the above stanza, “hollow men” are mired in paralysis while “stuffed men” peddle artificial meaning.

I want this newsletter to occupy the space between, earnestly seeking truth while acknowledging there are no easy answers.

The market for earnestness

I launched this newsletter a few days after President Trump’s election last year. As I’ve reflected on where I might offer value, I see earnestness as a starting point.

It feels like nihilism is winning as the dominant framework for American life. Trump, for example, determined during his first term that the presidency didn’t afford him the power to suppress elite institutions, so he’s set to work on a second-term project of burning them down.

Conservative leaders working alongside Trump are herding people along with this project not by appealing to any particular values, but by surrendering their values altogether and adopting a posture of performative trolling.

Amoralism is ascendant. The antidotes are sincerity, integrity and dignity.

Those qualities are, in part, what I hope to bring here. But there is often a gap between my intentions and the things I do. That is the gap Eliot wrote about. We all live in it, to some extent.

We don’t have to settle there. We have the ability to keep trying, to keep doing better, to keep seeking meaning.

Some housekeeping

A rebrand offers an opportunity to reconsider the cadence of the newsletter.

I’m open to continuing to write the Saturday newsletter in more or less the same form as I’ve been doing so far, while also adding some deeper standalone pieces along the way. The Saturday newsletter is easy and enjoyable to write and I’m happy to keep doing it.

But, if I’m being honest, my ideas aren’t always good and there’s a case to be made for trying to write fewer, better newsletters, as well as breaking from the format I’ve been using so far. I’m very open to feedback on this. I don’t want to clutter your inbox with crap.

This remains a side project and an experiment for me (and, of course, free). Your feedback so far has motivated me to put more thought and effort into it and try to turn it into something that might appeal to even more people.

Thank you for your support — I plan to keep doing this for as long as you keep reading it.

I feel like I say this every year now, but this has been the most relentlessly brutal season I’ve ever experienced in terms of constant illness. But better, warmer and healthier days are coming!

🏀 1. Let kids be kids

Today is the last day of basketball season for my 5-year-old son. I have two takeaways: Basketball is probably not his sport, and youth sports are much more awful than I realized.

I knew youth sports would be annoying. I’ve read takes and books on the subject. I recommend Timothy Carney’s book, “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be,” for criticism of youth sports and other facets of culture that put too much pressure on parents.

I’ve entered this phase of parenting with a pretty good understanding of what I’m getting into. But I still wasn’t prepared to see the lengths to which fully grown adults will go in order to instill hyper-competitiveness into children who are still young enough to wear pullups at night.

Here are some things I’ve seen this season:

• A coach’s wife recording video of a full game for the purpose of film review (complete with some snarky commentary from me sitting behind her).

• A maniacal coach prowling the court like he’s in the NCAA Tournament, shouting, among other things, “I need three (passes)! I need three!”

• My son’s team ran up against another team full of players so absurdly tall and physically advanced — allegedly because its coaches had the league’s best players scouted and put them all together by claiming they were close friends and should be on the same team — that my son’s team failed to make a single basket against them.

It hasn’t been all bad. There’ve been some games in which the teams were equally matched and the kids spent more time goofing off than playing serious basketball. Those were fun!

But, already at the 5-year-old level, I’m seeing coaches and parents put pressure on kids to take a single sport seriously. Some kids at this age are already bouncing from league to league during the same season, including travel basketball.

That will not be our family’s journey. I don’t really know what to do about this other than to keep searching for leagues that let kids be kids.

We had good luck with a baseball league last year. My son started out not understanding how to swing a bat or throw — and progressed to the point that he went on a long hitting streak, developing a clear sense of pride over his improvement.

But, in between those hits, what he really loved to do was lay down on the field, kick up dirt and toss his glove around when he was supposed to be fielding. Which is totally fine! He’s 5!

I fear having him wind up on some team with a lunatic coach like the ones I’ve seen this basketball season. Fortunately, his coach now is a friend’s dad who has treated basketball as more of a game than a competition.

Other coaches seem to be in it for different reasons. By the looks of things, these overbearing grownups are treating 5-year-old basketball as a chance to satisfy their own childhood dreams.

💸 2. Bettors take the under on DOGE

This was a really bad week for the U.S. economy. Economist Michael Hicks is already predicting recession based in large part on the uncertainty President Trump has unleashed.

Will all this chaos result in long-term benefits?

Betting markets, which is to say people who are willing to put their own money on the line to back their predictions, say no. Elon Musk’s DOGE will cut less than $1 billion from the federal budget, bettors say, reflecting plunging expectations.

As you can see, just a few weeks ago, the expectation was about $300 billion in cuts. Bettors have not been impressed with what they’ve seen in recent weeks.

🏘️ 3. What I wrote

I published two columns this week for IndyStar:

• Mailbag: Todd Young might need to sacrifice himself for his principles

• Fishers’ attack on investor-owned homes will lock out families

📰 4. What I read

David Shoemaker on John Cena’s incredible, long-awaited heel turn:

There is a certain irony in Cena’s turn coming at a time when even the most jaded fans were willing to root for him because of all he’s given to the industry over the years. Even the “Cena sucks” contingent seemed on board for a rote valedictory tour. There was always an accidental genius to WWE’s reluctance to make Cena a heel—staying the course allowed him to be the company’s biggest hero and villain at the same time. When Cena talked about turning heel, he talked about doing a reversal on his core principles—hustle, loyalty, and respect—but the truth of the matter is that those cereal box paradigms were exactly what was so grating about him in the first place. His earnestness, his prepackaged heroism, is what made him so loathsome. Now, fans were grateful above all else. Or maybe they were just happy to wave him goodbye.

In the end, just like Hulk Hogan in 1996, and just like Andre the Giant in 1987, the only thing Cena could do to make the fans happy was to turn on them. It took him long enough.

Monica Hesse on her employer’s ill-defined new mission for the opinion section:

My return to work coincides with Jeff Bezos, owner of The Post, announcing that the Opinions section will now support and defend two pillars: “personal liberties” and “free markets.”

I was writing about how couples’ abilities to plan their own families, and women’s abilities to control their own pregnancies, are essential personal liberties.

How the right of women to move through the world without being harassed is a vital personal liberty, how the right of men to escape the confines of traditional masculinity, if they want to, is imperative.

How the right to free speech protects you from the punishment of law but not the consequences of society. Other people are free to think you’re a jerk, to boycott your products or revoke your dinner invite if you say racist, sexist, homophobic things.

How it hurts exactly nobody if a transgender teenager wants to use different pronouns than the ones they were born with, and how you don’t get to yell “parents’ rights!” when a parent’s goal is to prohibit their kid’s gender expression but yell “child abuse!” when a parent’s goal is to support their kid’s gender expression.

I believe that there are books in the library I have no interest in ever reading myself, but I would be mortified to demand their removal, because you never know what kind of book is going to save someone’s life.

I believe that vaccines should be mandated. Because “my body, my choice” is a good rallying cry when we’re talking about an event that occurs within one woman’s body, and a bad rallying cry when you’re talking about a communicable disease in which the cough coming from your body can send a dozen other people’s personal liberties to the hospital.

I believe that if we’re interested in preserving the personal liberty of, say, reproductive choice, then we should also be interested in the policies that can help women and families have truly good options: subsidized child care, paid parental leave, rock-solid public education.

Am I still standing firmly on the pillars? No idea. Does anyone else see the pillars? Are the pillars talking to you right now?

But I don’t know where else to stand. Because above all else, I believe that we live in relationship with one another, and with our government, and with our country. And I don’t know if that belief is about free markets, but it’s definitely about priceless communities. About the tax I’m happy to pay to be here with you all.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

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1. Remote work is stabilizing

I don’t know how I’d make it into an office five days a week. I guess I’d figure it out if I had to, but I’d probably also think hard about a career change.

It turns out I’m in the demographic that feels most strongly about this — a 40-something with young children — and you’ll pry WFM from our cold, dead fingers.

Or, just lay us off.

Some employers and governments (including the federal government and Indiana state government) are doing just that by curtailing or ending remote work and telling employees they can go elsewhere if they don’t like it. Despite those efforts, though, remote work is finding a post-pandemic equilibrium — and flexible work seems likely to outlast traditionalist boomer managers.

A new paper by Stanford University researchers finds that work-from-home has stabilized, with age groups adopting it unevenly in some surprising ways.

The authors write:

Young workers in their early 20s are starting out their careers, so they might WFH less often to benefit from the professional development and mentoring opportunities provided by face-to-face meetings in the workplace. Older workers, in their late 40s, 50s, or 60s, likely have other reasons to limit WFH. They might be less comfortable with remote-work technologies, or they might be managers who prefer in-person monitoring. That leaves workers in their 30s and 40s, who are more likely to have young children and appreciate the flexibility of remote work. The biggest predictor of WFH is education, however. Highly educated knowledge workers disproportionately work in jobs that are suitable for some remote work. College and graduate degree-holders have WFH rates that 15 percentage points greater than that of otherwise similar workers with no post-secondary education.

Some other key points:

• 25% of all work days by U.S. workers 20-64 years old have been remote since 2023.

• Remote work saves two hours of commute time per worker, per week.

• Women work from home at slightly higher rates (2%-3%) than men.

• “Desired WFH rates exceed actual rates in every major demographic group — more so for women, workers with young children, and less educated workers.”

People really, really like remote work.

Children are the biggest drivers of pro-WFH preferences — and I can relate. Parenting is exactly why I value the flexibility.

My wife and I juggle dropoffs and pickups for two children to school and daycare, with our son’s school day not quite lasting the length of a typical workday. That means at least one of us starts work late and ends early (at least, until getting back to work again later) every day.

Plus, at least someone in our family has been sick almost every day this year, which, along with snow days, has made this a difficult couple months.

The headlines on work-from-home are noisy. It’s clicky content, because everyone has an opinion and people love reading about it (which may or may not be why I chose it as a newsletter topic). If you regularly read the news on remote work, you might think it’s in retreat.

Work-from-home is obviously not universal among knowledge workers anymore, as it was during the pandemic, but it is persisting at higher rates than we saw before 2020. It is also clear people want to work remotely even more than they already do, which suggests employers who take hard lines are going to struggle to recruit talent.

Meanwhile, the hardliners aren’t gaining many benefits by chaining people to desks. Research measuring productivity among remote workers does not support the idea that productivity gets lost at home. Everyone except managers of a certain age seems to know this.

In addition to helping individual workers, remote work also is good for society because it is a family-friendly policy. Anyone who thinks Americans should be having more babies should also support letting the parents of those babies spend more of their work hours at home.

2. An ‘X-Files’-esque TV rec

I just finished Jordan Peele’s two-season reboot of “The Twilight Zone” on Amazon Prime. It’s good!

I want to recommend one episode, in particular: “A Traveler,” the fourth installment of the first reboot season. It stars Steven Yeun, who shows up as a mysterious visitor to a small Alaskan town, where a police captain (Greg Kinnear) is in the middle of hosting an annual self-indulgent office Christmas party.

The episode is written by Glen Morgan, an “X-Files” alum, who is also an executive producer on the show. Morgan brings a decidedly “X-Files” vibe, which I love as a big fan of the show (although, Morgan seems to have recycled one of his “X-Files” scripts, “Ice,” for a later episode, “8,” which is arguably the worst of the “Twilight Zone” reboot.)

Overall, Peele’s reboot is a lot of fun and extremely underrated. The episode ratings are shockingly low to me. It’s very likely you didn’t know the reboot existed, which is a shame.

If you’re intrigued, “A Traveler,” is a good place to start.

3. What I wrote

I published two columns this week for IndyStar:

Warm up the Mayflower trucks. MLS is coming to Indy.

Mailbag: Don’t leave Indianapolis for suburban schools

4. What I read

Brian Phillips on Gene Hackman:

Hollywood is full of little guys who act big; Gene Hackman was a big guy who knew how to be small. When the moment called for it, when he was playing a bullying cop or a football player turned private eye, he could bludgeon you with physicality every bit as much as Sean Connery could, but Connery was always larger-than-life, and Hackman was a genius at playing life-sized. With Connery, the essence of his charisma was that he always seemed two inches taller than anyone else on the screen. When he played a hapless professor, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the effect was giddily comic, because you sensed deep down that Henry Jones could take Indiana, and probably all the Nazis, in a fight. When Hackman played a timid egghead—say, the surveillance expert in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller from 1974—there was nothing funny about it unless Hackman wanted it to be. He knew how to pull back the boundaries of his own presence, like someone turning the dimmer on a light.

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Thank you to everyone who read and responded to last week’s post on why I believe in God. That post’s reach far exceeded the number of subscribers to this newsletter, so I really appreciate everyone who shared it. I’m not doing hardly any promotion. Your word of mouth is how this newsletter spreads!

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‘I must be looking for something’

My belief in God started with a search. For … something. Wherever you’re at, and whatever you think about the rest of what I have to say, we likely have this feeling of searching in common.

The whole of humanity is searching for a higher power. That was true in primitive societies. It’s true today amid advancing AI.

While you can argue with my diagnosis of what’s behind our yearnings, humans are, and always have been, uniquely wired to find purpose beyond ourselves. I wrote about that after visiting Stonehenge last year and feeling awed by my sense of connection to those who came before me:

The famous circle does not exist in isolation. The surrounding area includes other stone structures and about 350 burial mounds, which collectively are thousands of years older than the main attraction. Humans have been laboring around Stonehenge for an unfathomably long time.

I'll admit the rocks don't present an obviously magnificent site to the modern eye. Full appreciation takes imagination. But you're not there to look at the rocks, per se. You're witnessing a monument to humanity's search for meaning, a quest underway since time immemorial.

From the prehistoric people who built Stonehenge to the sophisticated modern thinkers who've left us their writing, art and architecture at nearby Oxford, the entire recorded work product of our species amounts to a thirst to make sense of what we're all doing here.

I would argue that our hearts are oriented toward God, specifically. Now, of course, there’s an immense delta between acknowledging human longing and proving the existence of a deity. But I think normalizing our perception of something more is an important place to begin.

This sentiment really is normal — and we can either push it away or take it one step further. While I’ve been thinking through this post during the past week, I’ve encountered two examples of public figures confronting their own subconscious searches for meaning within their work while also resisting the ideas of God and religion.

First, as I’ve been on a big Billy Joel kick, I stumbled upon a video in which Joel talks about his song, “River of Dreams.”

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the jungle of doubt
To a river so deep
I know I'm searching for something
Something so undefined
That it can only be seen
By the eyes of the blind

This 1993 song was a departure for Joel in style and substance. As he explains it, the words and melody came to him and got stuck in his head, even while taking a shower, until he submitted to the song’s will and recorded it.

“It was kind of like a gospel song. I said, ‘I can’t write this. I’m not a gospel artist.’ I tried to shake it off,” Joel said. “It’s got all these biblical references. I still don’t know what it means. … I’m not a biblical person. I’m not a religious guy. But these images were very strong and it was the reason I wrote it. I haven’t figured it out, but it became a hit record.”

Science writer Mary Roach, another nonreligious person, spent a year reporting on evidence of the afterlife for her book, “Spook.” Roach fills her book with witty skepticism as she encounters a wide range of (often silly) sources who are all in on the supernatural.

At the end, Roach grapples with how her reporting shaped her views:

I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It’s not much, but it’s more than I believed a year ago.

Perhaps I’m confusing knowledge and belief. When I say I believe something, I mean I know it. But maybe belief is more subtle. A leaning, not a knowing. Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people who’ll tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know that the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing.

I put myself in Roach’s latter category.

I’ve continuously believed in God to some extent since my late-teens. But, when I tell you I believe in God today, what I mean is that I think there’s a 60% chance God exists and knows me and cares about my life. That percentage has been higher at times and lower at others.

My certainty is great enough to drive me to seek God and to teach my children about him. My family goes to church. My wife and I participate in Bible studies. I read Bible stories to my son.

Meanwhile, my uncertainty is great enough, if I’m being honest, to cause me to live like a functional atheist much of the time. I don’t pray often. I make major decisions through a framework of American consumerism. That tension is for another post, but I didn’t want to move forward without defining what belief in God means for me in a practical sense.

Faith without reason didn’t work for me

When I was in my early 20s and still trying to sharpen my worldview, I asked a nondenominational Christian pastor about the problem of evil — you know, the question of why a loving God enables horrific things to happen. This is pretty close to God Belief 101.

The pastor looked at me with empathy in his eyes and said, “You know, that’s just one of the things we’re going to have to ask God when we get to heaven.”

I’m sorry, but that’s incredibly stupid.1

If you are working in professional ministry and you have to punt on one of the world’s most common questions instead of engaging with its underlying doubt, you should either ask someone else or resign rather than subjecting another person to a repellant version of faith without reason.

The pastor’s answer set me back, at least a little. So did other bad answers to questions by other faith leaders who did not have particularly solid grasps on their own beliefs. As Coolio sang, “If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?”

My search for meaning had brought me to a somewhat generic belief in God — and I needed a deeper understanding in order to keep going. Not everyone needs that. Some people have dramatic experiences and trust deeply in God without needing a logical argument.

I needed to think (and, more specifically, read) my way to faith. I am not particularly emotional. I never had a tearful conversion experience or responded to an altar call or rushed to some baptismal font. I perceived that what I was looking for was probably God and set out to determine what exactly that meant.

Eventually, I found the confidence I was looking for in Jesus. Many people can, and do, come to belief in God through other religions. I am not here to discredit anyone’s views.2 I can only talk about the reasons for my faith.3

My belief in God is belief in Jesus

I’ve done a lot of throat clearing to get to a very simple point: My faith in God is actually faith in Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth is a historical person who claimed to be divine. Early Christians believed so deeply in Jesus’ death and resurrection that they joyfully accepted torturous deaths to advance his selfless, nonviolent mission. Jesus’ teachings inverted earthly power structures, affirming the “poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” “the meek,” “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” “the pure in heart,” “the peacemakers” and “those who are persecuted because of righteousness.”

There is no analogous figure to Jesus in world history. But it’s the divinity claim that commands our attention. The endurance of Jesus’ story, the documentation supporting his life, the audacity of his teachings and the rapid growth of a religion fueled by early witnesses who gave up everything to follow a king who washed people’s feet forces us to acknowledge Jesus and decide who he was.

I’m not making a novel observation. C.S. Lewis put it like this in “Mere Christianity”:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I won’t go down a rabbit hole of apologetics here. Suffice to say for this post, I became satisfied with scholarly evidence supporting the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and his identity as God incarnate. That is the foundation of my belief.

Jesus is my framework for considering all other problems and questions of faith. I don’t know why Psalm 137:9 says, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock,” but I do know that is mutually exclusive from Jesus’ who-is-blessed column.

When you accept Jesus as the full and perfect manifestation of God, then you can view all other texts and matters through the prism of who Jesus was. Every conflicting idea (like that it’s good to kill infants) is subordinate to what we know about Jesus, which informs our view of God.

This framework does not provide an all-encompassing guide to knowledge. Jesus did not answer all of our questions4 and, in fact, refuted the premises of seemingly reasonable questions asked of him.

After more than two decades of adhering to a Christian worldview, I confess that I can’t offer anything close to a perfect answer to my own problem-of-evil question that I asked of the poor, beleaguered pastor mentioned above. But, because I accept Jesus’ claim to divinity and because Jesus’ nature is known to us, I see no contradiction between believing in a loving God and also believing that horrific things happen within God’s kingdom that are outside of God’s will.

Greg Boyd addresses these issues in the book, “Is God to Blame?”:

We ordinarily can’t know why particular individuals suffer the way they do. But in light of God’s revelation in Christ, our assumption should be that their suffering is something we should oppose in the name of God rather than accepting it as coming from God. Hence, the only relevant question disciples of Jesus should consider is, What can we do to bring God’s redemptive will into the situation, to alleviate suffering and to glorify God? How can we respond in such a way that God’s will is further accomplished “on earth as it is in heaven”?

Depending on your perspective, this explanation might range from reassuring to mere cope for simpletons struggling to accept mortality. Perhaps all of faith exists somewhere on this spectrum. Regardless of what we believe, on some level, we’re all like the pastor just making stuff up as we go5, or like Billy Joel singing, “I'm not sure about a life after this/God knows I've never been a spiritual man.”

Wherever we land, we’re united in a quest for understanding. If God exists, and if he loves us, as I believe, he is not hiding. He is here for us to find.

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Today’s newsletter is sort of a cross between Trump and my insidery journalism thoughts, with a sweet Billy Joel tune at the end.

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1. How not to run your press operation

The Trump administration is sanctioning the Associated Press because of its policy of calling the Gulf of Mexico the … Gulf of Mexico.

President Trump, as you probably know, sought to rename it the Gulf of America via executive order. The AP determines style standards for many, if not most, news organizations, and it’s sticking with the pre-Trump name, robbing the Gulf of America of some legitimacy.

The Trump administration is not taking it well!

Axios reports:

The White House on Friday said it will bar the Associated Press from future events in the Oval Office and Air Force One, over the AP's refusal to obey President Trump's executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. … The decision will be met with fury from press advocates, who have argued over the past week, during which the White House barred the AP from three previous events, that penalizing the news organization for its editorial standards sets a dangerous precedent for press freedoms.

I understand why the AP and news trade groups are protesting the move. But, on a practical level, I generally think journalists should relish losing official access to newsmakers and events — and that those revoking access are almost always making a mistake.

My earliest journalism mentor gave me some advice on this topic that I’ve always remembered. He was a sports writer engaged in a public feud with a hall-of-fame coach, who was refusing to talk to him. When I asked my mentor about the situation, he shrugged, and said, “I can cover the team without talking to the coach. Eventually, he’s going to want credit for something and he’ll come to me.”

I’ve found the spirit of this advice to be universally correct.

While AP reporters might miss some news-of-the-day items while locked out of the Oval Office and Air Force One, where the Trump administration controls the narrative, reporters can also view their loss of access as a license to spend time doing more interesting and aggressive reporting on topics of their choosing. This trade-off usually results in a better service for the audience.

I don’t begrudge journalists who value access and fight to retain it. It’s obviously good for someone to be watching the president and other leaders as much as possible. Eliciting newsworthy answers to questions from people in power is a special and valuable part of journalism.

But it’s also laborious and time-intensive, with big payoffs coming somewhat rarely. That’s why the absolute best communications staffers for government officials take the opposite approach to the Trump administration, keeping reporters occupied with boring press conferences, background chats and events as much as humanly possible. That way, the flacks not only get to choose topics, but also reduce the discretionary time journalists have to do enterprise work that might turn out unfavorably for the bosses.

The Trump administration’s gambit to hold access over the heads of journalists is a self-own, a losing game played by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

The AP obviously can protest the decision — while simultaneously looking into much juicier stories than they’d find aboard Air Force One.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is eventually going to want to plant some fluffy, self-congratulatory story in the AP or some other mainstream outlet it’s restricting — and Trump’s press people might look around and find no one there to run with it.

2. Reckless indifference

The DOGE squad is operating with a business consultant’s mindset that it can inflict deeper cuts to government staff than necessary and then put agencies back together like Humpty Dumpty.

Except, we all remember how Humpty Dumpty ended.

This reckless approach to cutting a tiny fraction of the nation’s budget is opening up risks that we can’t yet fathom.

For example, CNN reports:

Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

I know, I know. You can’t believe the mainstream media.

But DOGE would do well to Google some mainstream media articles because many of the waste, fraud and abuse revelations it’s announcing happen to have already been reported a long time ago.

Not only is DOGE unlikely to find novel fraud or make more than marginal budget cuts, but also it’s trashing entire agencies without taking the time to learn what they do. A lot of government agencies do important things! Like … nuclear weapons.

DOGE also is moving to lay off thousands of employees from the Internal Revenue Service, aka the tax police, an agency where employees out-earn their salaries by bringing in revenue to the government from people who are trying to hide it.

There’s no doubt many parts of the federal government are broken, but DOGE’s wrecking ball approach seems more likely to bring new, impossible-to-anticipate consequences than to fix anything.

3. What I wrote

I published three columns this week for IndyStar:

• The Braun-Beckwith plan to abolish Carmel

• Mailbag: Our alleys are hopeless, but at least we have sports

• Indy council Democrats booted Jesse Brown because he’s a terrible co-worker

4. What I read

Max Read on the soy boys of the right:

We’re now three weeks into the second Trump administration, and it seems clear that something has changed from the first go-round. The MAGA populist fraction of the Trumpist coalition has been relatively marginalized in favor of the austerian-accelerationist Silicon Valley right. The archetypal article about Trump voters in rural diners has been replaced with magazine stories about obnoxious arrivistes comparing Trump to Beyoncé and the inauguration to Comic-Con. Even Trump himself seems oddly sidelined, his threats about tariffs and treasuries effectively ignored by both heads of state and the stock market, his striking and creative Truth social postings left mostly unread--while Elon Musk attracts all resistance energy simply by tweeting “🤣” at some of the worst jokes on the planet.

The end beneficiaries of Trumpist upward redistribution haven’t changed much. But the affect of the second Trump administration is, so far, wholly different. Gone is the apocalyptic malevolence of “American carnage,” supplanted by the unctuous corniness of “DOGE.” Gone is the sense of a lasting political realignment, succeeded by an inescapable minoritarian whine. Gone are Steve Bannon, the alt-right, and the “forgotten man and woman” Trump celebrated in his 2016 victory speech. In their place: Elon Musk and the Soy Right.

David Weigel interviewing former Anheuser-Busch InBev executive Anson Frericks on how Bud Light killed DEI:

I think that it was Kid Rock lighting up a case of Bud Light, and the broader social media reaction. I think that exemplified the feelings of a lot of people in middle America. “Man, you know, the last couple years, I kept my mouth shut when the NFL allowed players to kneel on the ground, because I want to watch the game. When Disney got involved in the parental rights issues in Florida – well, there’s only one Disney World, and my kids really want to go.” All of a sudden, you do this with a working class man’s beer.

5. ‘You can get what you want or you can just get old’

I saw Billy Joel, one of my all-time favorite artists, last weekend in Indianapolis. I’ve been playing his music nonstop since then, especially the song “Vienna,” which he played during the show.

If you haven’t heard it, or don’t remember, it’s worth a listen!

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Thanks for reading! I promise to make next week’s newsletter less Trumpy and political.

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1. An incredibly stupid news cycle

The past decade has been incredibly stupid. Yet, somehow, this week stands out as one of the stupidest weeks of our stupid era.

We just had a two-day news cycle in which conservatives noticed USAID spent money on Politico Pro, jumped to the wrong conclusions and went off to the races.

The Washington Post reports:

Conservative attacks on the embattled U.S. Agency for International Development landed on an unexpected target Wednesday when Elon Musk, right-wing influencers, elected Republicans and the White House zeroed in on subscription money that federal government agencies paid for Politico Pro and other specialty subscription publications aimed at corporations and government entities.

By the afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced during the daily press briefing that she had been “made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico. I can confirm that more than $8 million that has gone to subsidizing subscriptions will no longer be happening.”

In fact, records from USAspending.gov show Politico payments totaling only $44,000 from USAID during fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

Here’s a key piece:

Last year, Republicans and committee offices paid for Politico’s products including $9,060 from the Office of the Speaker of the House, $84,000 from the House Committee on Agriculture, and $58,000 from the House Committee on Energy, according to government records.

In total, 38 Republicans in the House spent over $300,000 on Politico subscriptions in the first nine months of 2024, and committees led by Republicans expensed almost $500,000 of Politico subscriptions in the same time period, a Washington Post analysis shows.

Naturally, when Republicans realized their own office-holders were spending money on Politico Pro in exchange for a legitimate business service, they walked back their criticism and acknowledged their misunderstanding.

Oh, sorry, no, that’s not what happened.

Instead, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado posted: “NEWS FLASH: No one trusts media funded by the deep state!!”

Yes, Politico Pro is funded by the deep state … and also by Boebert.

Boebert’s office has an active Politico Pro subscription that cost $7,150. Nonetheless, Boebert ignored all the people pointing this out and “falsely claimed in an oversight hearing that Politico was laying people off because it had been cut off from USAID funds,” per WaPo.

Welcome to Fake News 2.0.

The new playbook for conservatives:

• Post a blatantly false assertion. It can be borne of genuine misunderstanding or ill intentions. Doesn’t matter.

• Ignore everyone who proves the assertion wrong.

• Post through it and let the tribe embrace your manufactured scandal.

It is 100% the case that USAID and many other government offices, including those run by Republicans, purchased Politico Pro subscriptions in exchange for a service. Yet, here’s conservative Indianapolis radio host Tony Katz carrying water for his tribe:

“Millions went to Politico from USAID and other govt organizations for a ‘subscription,’” he posted to X. “We don’t believe that was in good faith. We do not believe @politico.”

What does he believe? He doesn’t say.

He doesn’t have to. Rumors of wrongdoing are all conservatives need. What comes next is predictable: Rational people attempt to correct the error. People like Katz hold their ground. The rational people’s heads explode. Conservatives point and say, “Ha! Look at the hysterical libs!”

Checkmate.

I don’t know what the effective counter-strategy is when the political party in power deploys willful, gleeful lies with the confidence that everyone on their side has agreed on an emotional level to accept lies as essential truths in the culture war.

Those of us dedicated to living in reality need to understand the terms of this rigged game, though, and also realize that fact-checking fake scandals is a fool’s errand. Ask yourself: Why are members of a supposedly ascendant political party so eager to debase themselves in public over legitimate Politico Pro subscriptions?

It seems like they might consider those conversations more advantageous than talking about the real-life, observable effects of President Trump’s actions.

2. Kindness will win

Elon Musk is rehiring Marko Elez, a DOGE employee who was found by The Wall Street Journal to have said some pretty racist things last year.

Here are examples:

• “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

• “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

• “Normalize Indian hate.”

See? Pretty racist. Again, all these comments were made last year.

I don’t know where the anti-woke, anti-DEI movement is heading, but I have a prediction: A political movement that harbors explicit racism will not prevail in the long run.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I’ll make a more crude, yet similar, observation: People like being around other people who are kind. People do not like being around jerks. The MAGA movement is of, and for, jerks.

Call it woke, or whatever else you want, but saying racist things is bad and I am confident we will eventually agree on that as a society again.

3. What I wrote

I published four columns since my last newsletter:

• Jim Banks wants to defund the police

• WWE gave Indy one of the best Royal Rumbles ever

• Vop Osili is raising money like he’s running for Indy mayor

• Indy can’t just be for convention visitors

4. What I read

Kevin Erdmann on why investor-owned housing is good, actually, and we shouldn’t legislate them out of existence:

The typical young family with, say, a 720 credit score can’t buy a home today. We won’t build more apartments as a substitute. I recently watched a large apartment building get blocked in the Phoenix area, and one of the big complaints was that if they allowed it, families would live there. This all happens quite explicitly. In every case, the obstructors just imagine that someone, somewhere, will be allowed to build something.

The sponsors of these bills think the same thing. If we ban corporations, surely there is some mysterious figure on the sidelines who will build the new homes instead.

No! They won’t! The rest of them have already been banned! About a million homes are built for the portion of Americans still allowed to buy them. Another 500,000 apartments are built for tenants. That’s not enough! It’s not nearly enough!

So, where is that family going to live? They aren’t allowed to buy a home, live in a new apartment, and now, potentially, they won’t be able to rent a single-family home.

None of those are personal choices. They all should be very easy and normal things for a family with a 720 credit score in 2025 America to do. But government at all levels blocks it. On the margin, that next new 720 score family has to live somewhere. Where?!

Ross Douthat on his favorite argument for the existence of God:

Suppose that as a child you developed a private language to use with your siblings or your friends — a simple set of codes, slightly more sophisticated than pig Latin, with the eminently practical purpose of enabling private communication that grown-ups wouldn’t understand. Let that stand for the survival-driven tool kit of our primeval ancestors.

Now suppose that much later in life you discovered that this childish system enabled members of your circle of friends to read and understand a set of ancient texts, as complex as Shakespeare and Aristotle put together, that contained all the secrets of Mayan astronomy, Greek philosophy and Egyptian mysticism, and that you happened to discover hidden in the attic of your childhood home.

Would you just assume, “Well, I was a bright kid and putting one over on grown-ups really builds linguistic skills; no wonder I was able to read the Ancient Book of Esoteric Knowledge that just happened to be hanging around in my vicinity”?

Or would you accept the more obvious conclusion — that you and your friends were characters in a larger story and that the book was in some sense placed there for you?

5. The best, most terrifying show

My wife and I recently caught up through season 3 of the TV show “From” on MGM+ (a streaming channel with which I was previously unfamiliar).

This show is haunting me in (I think) the best possible ways.

“From” creates a universe with many similarities to “Lost” (the lead actor, Harold Perrineau, is a “Lost” alum) — a group of people stuck seemingly at random in a place they didn’t travel to on purpose and can’t figure out how to leave. Chaos ensues.

It is a horror show, probably the most terrifying I’ve ever seen, and it is not for everyone. It was genuinely difficult to sleep some nights after watching it. But, if you can deal with that genre and if you enjoyed “Lost” at its best, there’s a good chance you’ll dig “From.”

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1. Take your tip screen and shove it

Wokeness isn’t the only cultural norm in retreat. Americans have had enough of tip creep.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

People are tipping less at restaurants than they have in at least six years, driven by fatigue over rising prices and growing prompts for tips at places where gratuities haven’t historically been expected.

The average tip at full-service restaurants dropped to 19.3% for the three months that ended Sept. 30 and hasn’t budged much since, according to Toast, which operates restaurant payment systems. The decline highlights a bind restaurants find themselves in, as they face rising costs of ingredients and labor amid customer frustration over spiraling bills.

Tipping at U.S. sit-down restaurants in the past six years peaked at 19.9% in early 2021, when Americans were likely to express gratitude as Covid-19 lockdowns eased.

I’ve been whining for years about the invasion of tip screens into businesses that provide minimal service. This isn’t tipping in the traditional sense. It’s fast-food owners inducing customers to subsidize historically low-wage jobs.

That’s also why it’s catching on. Employees receive more money in restaurants with tip screens, so adding them became a competitive advantage and, later, a necessity for establishments competing for workers in a tight labor market.

As WSJ notes, the pandemic accelerated this trend. Customers were happy to throw extra money at workers who were taking risks to do public-facing jobs, so more businesses adopted tip screens to facilitate generosity.

Now, we’re stuck with them. Everywhere. The result is price shock on top of price shock.

Menu prices have risen more than 27% since 2020 and we’re being asked to tip in places where we didn’t have to in the Before Times. It’s a combination of factors so onerous that Americans are consuming more food at home — something we generally did not want to do.

I’m part of that trend. Despite higher prices, more tipping and a 33% increase in mouths to feed, my household is spending substantially less money on dining out than we did in 2020 and 2021 — some months, we’re spending less than half of what we used to.

That’s, in part, due to intentional budget cuts across all our discretionary spending (our family grew and parenting ain’t cheap). But it’s also a response to how expensive everything is. Our habits are changing.

Yesterday morning, for example, I bought a latte and a muffin at a downtown Indianapolis coffee shop. The price was $13. Naturally, the barista flipped over a tip screen. Naturally, the final price rose above $15.

That’s fine a couple times a month. But I make very few personal trips to coffee shops these days (work-related meetings are more common).

It would be much better if America adopted a system like, say, Australia, where no one tips and restaurants set higher base menu prices to accommodate good wages for staff. The prices are transparent, service is better and everyone is happy.

I don’t expect that to happen here anytime soon. But, in the meantime, restaurants are unintentionally nudging Americans to make their own coffee and bring lunch to work.

2. $Trump

I want to point out that the U.S. president and his wife both just created their own currencies, generating billions of dollars in wealth for themselves at the expense of Trump supporters who stand to lose the money they dumped into a worthless meme coin under the guise of an investment.

This is a thing that actually happened last week.

I know a lot of other things happened, too, and we can waste a lot of time debating whether they’re good or bad. But this very simple story is indicative of Trump’s uniquely flagrant abuse of power. It’s heinous, predatory behavior that would warrant universal condemnation for any public figure operating outside the context of partisan tribalism.

I’m not too worked up about Donald Trump being president again in the context of my own life. I’m fortunate to be doing well and I expect to be even better off in four years than I am now. But a lot of people’s lives will get worse during Trump’s term. Many of them will be the people who trust him most.

3. What I wrote

Just one column this week for me at IndyStar. I’m still not over Indianapolis’ terrible snowplowing:

• The City-County Council is finally showing Hogsett a spine over snowplowing

4. What I read

I finished two books:

• The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida and Felony by Annabelle Tometich

• Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart

Some other stuff:

Ben Dreyfuss on shutting up about Trump:

It seems to me that the story of American politics for the last few decades is one of thermostatic backlash. There is a backlash, and then a backlash to the backlash, and then a backlash to the backlash to the backlash, and then one day, you look back on your life and wonder where the time went? The smartest thing anyone can do politically is be as quiet as a mouse and wait for everyone to get mad at the other guy, as they invariably will if you don’t get in the way.

Many MSNBC-types are eager to make the case against Trump, but people don’t like them either. It seems like the better thing to do is for Democrats to wait for Trump to do something bad and unpopular. Then, they should say, “That was bad.” In a few years, they should run against all the bad things. Throughout this process, they should do their best not to act hysterical.

Nate Silver on whether conservatives won the war for the long run:

The conclusion from studying history is that American politics is quite unpredictable at medium-to-long time scales. And the start of a new presidential term is often when we have the least perspective on the trends.

This post offers important context because, while Dems are indeed in disarray and conservatives are walking around like they just took over America for the next 100 years, history shows that political winds change direction very quickly and we really have no idea what’s going to happen next. This is no time to get confident or smug in our assumptions.

5. Wake me up when February comes

January is the absolute worst month of parenting for people with young children. I thought about writing a whole post about that, but I’ve already been kind of whiny about parenting lately and then I saw Melinda Wenner Moyer write her own post on this exact topic.

Anyway, I’m always about at the end of my rope this time of year. After holiday break, there are sick kids and weather-related school closings and then you get sick and then kids get sick again and sometimes daycare sends your kid home even when they’re not all that sick just because they’re on high alert.

To top it off, we’re moving our 5-year-old to a new school next week. Nothing horrible happened. The school just turned out to be a bad fit for our son and we’re hoping to put him in a more suitable environment for the rest of the year. But he’s sad to leave his friends, and that has been emotionally crushing.

Anyway, this month sucks. If you’re parenting young children, I see you. You’re doing great. Spring is coming.

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1. Plowmageddon

This is what my neighborhood looked like last night as I took my son to basketball practice. The streets have been filled with snow, ice and slush (likely returning to ice when temperatures drop back below freezing) since Jan. 5.

I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I grew up in snowy northern Michigan and have a lot of experience in winter weather. It has been genuinely unsafe to drive on Indianapolis streets for way too long. Yet, for some reason, city officials are indignant over criticism of their recent snowplowing efforts.

The city isn’t thrilled with my column arguing snowplowing is a basic service that Indianapolis should offer if it wants people to live here. Officials contend I’m in league with some misinformation agenda, sowing confusion over their snowplowing strategy. They took particular issue with my characterization of past and current snowplowing protocols.

They’re missing the point. No one cares about the technicalities of their policy. People are mad because unplowed streets — you know, the ones the city chose not to plow — are turning our cars into 4,000-pound hunks of metal on ice skates.

Snowplowing is very simple. You either move snow out of the way, or you don’t. Indianapolis this month left snow on neighborhood streets as a matter of policy. As I wrote in my column: “Indianapolis' solar removal program — aka waiting for snow to melt on its own — worked for years without notice thanks to easy winters. Until now.”

This time, Indianapolis’ snow removal policy objectively, unequivocally failed residents who depend on safe passage through streets they live on. There is no disputing this. It is observable fact.

Indianapolis officials would do well to stop yammering about snowplowing strategies from previous years, DPW overtime hours, private contractors, inch counts and a bunch of other peripheral matters. Instead, they should acknowledge they failed and start thinking about how to plow the damn streets next time we get a big snowstorm.

FFS.

The city is acting like people are being unreasonable for pointing out that icy streets are making it hard to commute to work or school, causing crashes and who-knows-what other problems. Sorry, but these are perfectly reasonable things to get worked up over. It’s bad enough that these conditions exist. It’s worse that the city is trying to talk us out of believing what we see with our eyes and feel under our feet and tires.

Most of us who live in Indianapolis accept that botched services are part of the deal from time to time. We’re willing to forgive, if the city will let us. Just apologize and move on.

2. An essential MLK text

This weekend is a great time to read with fresh eyes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. It’s one of the most powerful American texts, period.

3. What I wrote

I published three columns this week for IndyStar:

• How Mike Braun can be a good governor (in spite of Micah Beckwith)

• 35 predictions for 2025

• Indianapolis' snowy, icy streets are why people move to suburbs (referenced above)

4. What I read

Noah Smith on why TikTok is a nefarious tool used by China to weaken America:

First and foremost, the TikTok fight will tell us a lot about whether modern liberal democracies have enough cohesiveness, determination, and state capacity to protect their citizens from foreign governments’ efforts at thought suppression. The America of the World War 2 era and the Cold War era would have certainly been up to the task. And today, India was perfectly willing to ban TikTok. But it’s possible that the U.S. has grown so divided and partisan, and its political class so spineless and passive, that it will be unable to follow through even on this one weak, belated defensive effort.

If TikTok does shut down, we’ll be able to see whether that has any beneficial effect in terms of combatting the misinformation that seems to have pervaded every facet of American thought. I’ve spent much of my adult life wading through misinformation and bullshit on Twitter, blogs, and other text-based media. But I’ve never seen anything like the pure, concentrated, weapons-grade bullshit that regularly goes viral on TikTok.

This isn’t just my casual impression, either; a bunch of studies have found that TikTok is rife with false information. How much of this is due to the design of the app itself, and how much is due to China and other players intentionally injecting misinformation into the platform, isn’t clear. But if TikTok shuts down, we should be able to observe whether Gen Z becomes better-informed about health, economics, and so on.

Michelle Goldberg on why Democrats will regret helping Republicans pass the Laken Riley Act:

This sweeping bill would upend our immigration system in ways that would outlast Donald Trump’s presidency, ruining lives and handcuffing future Democratic administrations. Democrats who vote for it may dodge right-wing attacks in the next election, but once its true scope becomes clear, they’ll be answering for it for years to come.

The bill is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by Jose Ibarra, an undocumented migrant from Venezuela who had previously been apprehended for crimes including shoplifting and child endangerment. Due in part to Ibarra’s arrest history, the case became a cause célèbre on the right. “The more they get away with and the more we let these criminals go, it just emboldens them, and they step it up,” said Mike Collins, the Georgia Republican who introduced the measure in the House.

If all the bill did was mandate the deportation of migrants convicted of petty theft, it would make sense for many Democrats to back it, if only because there’s so little political upside in defending the rights of undocumented shoplifters. But the bill goes much further than that. It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are merely arrested for any theft-related crimes, with no provision to free them if the charges are later dropped.

5. Fox!

We’re seeing a ton of fox activity outside our house. Here’s a bad, blurry photo!

As you can also see in this photo, the city did plow snow. Thankfully, we live on a “connector” street, which means the pavement directly in front of our house is clear. The problem is, we have to turn onto streets (see above) still filled with snow and ice.

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1. Flight of the young libs

One of the secondary arguments against abortion bans is they’ll cause people to leave states that enact them — health care professionals, in particular, but also other people who want to live in states that reflect their values.

A new paper from Georgia Institute of Technology researchers, entitled, “Are People Fleeing States with Abortion Bans?” presents empirical evidence in support of that claim — and also a rare affirmative answer to a question mark headline.

The authors analyzed change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service and determined the 13 states that banned abortion immediately after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision are losing residents at a combined pace of 144,000 per year because of those policies.

They find:

State-level abortion bans following the Dobbs decision increased net migration outflows, highlighting that reproductive healthcare access has a measurable effect on residential decisions. The effects are particularly large and growing over time for single-person households, suggesting an outsized influence of reproductive rights on younger, more mobile populations.

This tracks with survey results in which most young professionals say they do not want to live in states with abortion bans. At least some are apparently acting on their preferences.

Indiana is not included in the paper’s main data set because the state’s abortion ban was held up in court before taking effect in August 2023. Even if Indiana were included, 144,000 people per year spread across 13 states is a fairly small number.

But it seems directionally true that Indiana has made itself less appealing to well-educated young workers and that at least some are choosing to leave here or not move here at all because of the state’s abortion ban, among other policies. I’ve heard anecdotal concerns from women who do not want to become pregnant while living here, and I can understand why based on how abortion bans hamstring doctors’ choices in treating medical complications during pregnancy.

To many of the Republican lawmakers who voted to ban abortion in Indiana, I’m sure pushing away the young libs is a feature and not a bug. But even people who oppose abortion on moral grounds should be able see how that mindset is going to leave Indiana less educated, with fewer skilled workers and a weaker economy.

On top of all that, abortions are increasing nationally, so Indiana and other states are hurting themselves by banning the procedure without achieving their overarching policy objectives.

2. Maybe these numbered sections are dumb

I got some feedback this week that my newsletter numbering is onerous and I should just focus on the main item up top. That’s possibly good advice. I’m ignoring it, for now.

I’ve adopted the numbered sections because they’re similar to the format I used (and liked) at Axios, and I’ve also enjoyed seeing it elsewhere, including in Jonathan V. Last’s newsletter for the Bulwark. Also, I’m only sending this newsletter once a week, so I feel like I need to include more than one thing. Maybe I don’t!

I’m still not really sure what I want this newsletter to be, so I’ve started out in a comfort zone in hopes of making it just good enough while I figure things out. I’m not married to anything I’m doing here — or even to continuing to do it at all if the newsletter turns out not to offer value.

I am enjoying the process, though, and I feel like I’m learning new things. For example, I’ve gravitated toward a more bloggy-style voice here, which has been different and fun for me.

I might drop the numbers and change the format. I’m going to keep thinking about it. I love getting feedback on what’s working, or isn’t, and I promise to seriously consider it even if I don’t act on it right away (or ever)!

3. What I wrote

I published one column this week for IndyStar:

• Biden glorifies American-made steel while Gary rots in ruins

4. What I read

Back to work, back to my book slump. But I’m still reading other stuff. Such as:

Derek Thompson on our self-imposed solitude

The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

Matthew Yglesias on the differences between men and women

The idea of separating men and women in certain spheres of life is not just an arbitrary tradition, it reflects real differences and a considered judgment that the best way to secure equal rights and equal opportunities for women is, in some cases, through separation. The sports issue is probably the most broadly obvious of these, not least because feminists invested a lot of time and energy over the years specifically into building up women’s sports programs.

5. Flight of the manufacturing jobs

If Indiana can’t keep skilled workers, it’s also going to have a problem keeping jobs for unskilled workers. This snapshot of our manufacturing sector isn’t pretty.

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1. Content lockdown

It’s getting hard to read articles on the internet.

Legacy news outlets keep tightening paywalls and writers you love keep establishing new independent subscription newsletters on Substack and similar platforms. Ben Lindbergh describes the landscape in the (paywall-free) Ringer:

Reading the internet now calls for careful budgeting. Shell out for every well-regarded online newspaper, newsletter, and magazine, and your monthly bill for subscription-based news, analysis, and text entertainment would rival what Dril drops on candles. Even the special deals designed to entice nonsubscribers—“$1 for 1 year,” the Union-Tribune offers, dangling Odor for a dollar in a pop-up “flash sale”—spur difficult questions. Will I use this enough to justify sharing my payment information? (I’m nowhere near San Diego.) Will I remember to cancel before the subscription auto-renews at a far higher rate? (That’s $3.50 per week, in the U-T’s case.) How big of a hassle will canceling be? (All evidence suggests: huge hassle.) How many marketing emails will I get? (I can’t put a price on Inbox Zero.)

To Lindbergh’s point, my January budget includes about $80 for news content after I just went on one of my periodic subscription sprees. Big legacy outlets represent a minority of that budget line (I spend $4 per month for The New York Times and $4.17 for The Washington Post, for instance), because of my inherent price sensitivity and stamina for renegotiating subs.

I’m increasingly turning over subscription money to individual authors with newsletters. I choose some because they’re essential to my work and others because I find personal value in them (or, in some cases, both). I also having a growing number of friends launching subscription newsletters. I stopped in the middle of this paragraph to throw down for Sam Robinson’s Detroit one million, which I’ve been meaning to do.

This is certainly a more annoying way to consume news than the old days when you’d just subscribe to one, or a few, big publications. But also, I love it.

For one thing, I’m not sure I’m spending more money now than I would be under an older news distribution model. The New York Times charges about $80 per month for a seven-day print subscription, or about the same amount I’m paying for all my digital news subscriptions combined, including NYT.

Also, while it was great when large publications bundled a bunch of great writers together1, subscribing to newsletters a la carte gives me more value on net. I enjoy most editions of the newsletters I pay for. Meanwhile, I’ve likely never read an entire Sunday New York Times print issue, because they include a lot of articles I don’t care about.

I’d argue paywalls are good for consumers because they create more options for high-quality journalism and analysis. They’re even better for the writers who provide that work.

While many people clamor for newspaper-like bundling of newsletters, Josh Barro explains why that probably won’t happen:

The theory of the bundle is that there are a lot of readers who aren’t willing to pay $6 per month to read me, but who would be willing to pay for a larger subscription bundle of whose price I would get, say, $0.75. And at least in my case, I don’t think that math pencils.

I don’t know exactly who would be enticed into a bundle because of my presence in it, but Sara and I do have one bit of clear market research: We know that 24% of the people who receive this newsletter at all are currently paying $6 per month or $60 per year to get past the paywall. That suggests the market of people who are interested in receiving a subset of my newsletters at a price of $0 per month is only about four times larger than the subset who have shown the willingness to pay $6 (or $60 per year). Some of them won’t be willing to go up to $0.75. And if I joined a bundle, we wouldn’t be getting $6 from the existing readers anymore — we’d be getting $0.75. All of which is to say, if you throw this newsletter into a bundle, I’m pretty confident it will generate less revenue than it does as a standalone product.

And this is the rub for readers: Like in many industries, heavy newsletter users are a small fraction of the customer base but a large fraction of the revenue generation. Most people who go to Las Vegas aren’t willing to lose $5,000 at blackjack, but some people are, and they’re essential to the business model. Similarly, most people won’t pay for 12 different Substack newsletters — but some of you will, and we writers appreciate you in the way a casino appreciates a gambling addict. These heavy users are of course the readers who are most interested in bundling, because it would save them personally a lot of money. But — you see where this is going, right? That a bundle would save you money and cost us money are just two sides of the same coin.

My experience with paywalls has been on the legacy media side — and that’s where I’ve come to appreciate them.

It’s clear now that the likes of Jeff Jarvis were disastrously wrong in the aughts when they encouraged news executives to publish their products for free.2

Here’s an example of Jarvis finger-wagging at NYT’s porous metered paywall in 2011:

Value should be encouraged, not taxed. Readers bring value to sites if the sites are smart enough to have the mechanisms to recognize, exploit, and reward that value, which comes in many forms: responding to (highly targeted and relevant) ads; buying merchandise; contributing information, content, and ideas; promoting the site…..

The key strategic opportunity for news sites is relationships — deeper, more valuable relationships with more (but not too many) people. Engagement.

Fortunately for NYT, it ignored Jarvis’ insane view of subscriptions as taxes. Now, NYT is an unparalleled juggernaut fueled by paying subscribers.

No other news site has been nearly as successful as NYT. But Jarvis’ last word there — engagement — is why I love paywalls as a writer for IndyStar.

Consider the incentive structure for publishing free news in a for-profit business model. The whole ballgame is to mine pennies from digital ads by piling up clicks. That necessarily steers executives, editors and, thus, writers toward producing low-hanging internet fruit that may or may not provide value to people doing the clicking.

When thought leaders like Jarvis assured us that news wanted to be free, they seemed to assume news companies would crank out high-quality journalism and give it away while magically sustaining themselves by selling merch or whatever. Instead, the free-news era ushered in a golden age for hot takes and clickbait headlines. That set the table for a doomed generation of boom-and-bust news sites.3

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this period of widely accessible free news coincided with the public’s erosion of trust for outlets. News consumers got what they paid for: free, shitty products. They weren’t satisfied.

When you put up a paywall, though, value is no longer optional. A paid subscription model incentivizes articles that build trust with loyal readers who know they can expect some combination of useful information, thought-provoking ideas and entertainment in exchange for money.

Most columns I’ve written for IndyStar have been behind the paywall. That constrains my potential audience, of course, but it also gives me space to prioritize a subset of paying readers and their preferences over algorithms that drive clicks via Google, Facebook and other platforms I can’t control.

The paywall gives me freedom from base instincts, it gives readers well considered columns targeted to their interests and it gives my employer money. That’s a good deal for everyone.

I think many journalists bought into the news-wants-to-be free philosophy, in part, because the news business operates with a public service ethos. Journalists want to make the world a little better, even for people who can’t afford to subscribe to a half-dozen publications.

The Bulwark, for example, has a paywall yet keeps its content accessible. Jonathan V. Last explains why:

I’ve heard people say, “Oh, the Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.” No. Democracy needs its own Joe Rogan. And that’s what we’re doing. Instead of criticizing the media, we’re building the media platform this country needs.

That’s why we’ve pushed so hard into YouTube. YouTube is television now. If you want to reach new people, you have to be there. So we are.

It’s why more than 90 percent of everything we publish is free, without any ads, even. Because you can’t reach people if you’re sequestered behind a paywall.

If you can give away your content and turn a profit by selling subscriptions, more power to you. I applaud the Bulwark’s clarity of mission.4

I’m skeptical, though, that you can apply their outlook more broadly. Reality-based media outlets don’t have much juice left to move needles beyond their relatively small audiences.

I spent substantial time in 2022 writing columns about why Republican Diego Morales was one of the worst statewide candidates in Indiana history. Morales easily won his secretary of state contest that year anyway.

My columns were behind the paywall. But I’m confident that I could have written a free column about Morales’ awfulness every day during that cycle and let every Indiana outlet publish it, too, without making any difference in the outcome.

Audiences are fragmenting. Media literacy is in decline. Those of us working to increase the supply of illuminating news and analysis must grapple with our diminishing roles. But any conversation about how “the media” can collectively improve civic engagement won’t matter if we can’t hang around.

Paywalls are bolstering legacy media while also expanding opportunities for high-quality independent journalism and analysis. That trade-off is worth annoying consumers as both sides figure out some semblance of a sustainable news ecosystem.

2. Journalists can’t ignore the business side

One more point on paywalls.5

When I moved from IndyStar to Axios, it was disconcerting to realize I didn’t understand the connection between my day-to-day work and revenue. I once asked a company executive about that. He basically said, don’t worry about that, it was my job to write good stuff and let the company figure out how to make money.

I appreciated the well-intentioned guidance to detach myself from business concerns. But I disagreed with it (which I said at the time). In my view, ignoring the relationship between your work product and money is a recipe for personal obsolescence. Even if you work for a nonprofit, you need some theory of the case for how you’re helping to keep the lights on.

I know journalists are wary of metrics. But, to state the obvious, journalists who are experiencing success with independent projects are the ones who have a clear vision for how to create a salable product. You might as well start figuring that out now, even if you work for an institutional employer.

Online metrics can warp our instincts, as I noted above. They also can help us tailor even the most service-minded work to an audience — and guide it toward monetization.

You don’t have to obsess over money. But anyone who writes for public consumption should consider: Who might want to read this, and why? If no one would want to read it, how can I alter my idea to make it more appealing?

If you work in media, or hope to, you probably should be thinking about how to find an intersection between your passions and audience demand.

3. What I wrote

I published one (paywalled!) column this week for IndyStar:

• I was totally wrong about Todd Rokita (but not much else) in 2024

4. What I read

So far so good in following up last week’s post on reading more. I finished two books this week (fwiw, I give four stars to both):

• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

• Yellowface by R. F Kuang (via recommendation from Ryan Martin)

Also worth your time:

• Sam Ro on how the stock market usually goes up (no paywall!).

5. Rolling into 2025 like …

I’ve been mostly off work the past two weeks. Now, back to real life!

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