Author: Even that’s Odd

  • Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

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    Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

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    Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…

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  • Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

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    Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in…

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  • Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

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    The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years…

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  • The Argument Over Alex Pretti Is Bait. Don’t Take It.

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    By the time I started writing this, the videos of Alex Pretti’s last few minutes had been on my phone for three days and the argument about what they showed had hardened along the exact lines you’d predict. Half my feed saw a peaceful citizen being murdered by federal agents in his own neighborhood. The…

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  • When GPS Dog Fencing is Not Accurate: A $600 Lesson in Canine Trauma

    I bought a PetSafe Guardian GPS fence for our bernedoodle Hobbes in September 2023. Six hundred dollars. I used it for two or three months before I quit. I should have quit sooner. We live on a rural property the wrong size for an underground wireless fence — too big to bury affordably, too small…

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  • This New Old House, Part 23: Mistakes Were Made. Lessons Were Learned.

    This New Old House, Part 23: Mistakes Were Made. Lessons Were Learned. So here we are. The end of the road. Or at least the end of the story as I’ve been telling it. If you’ve read this series from the beginning, you know we built a Connor Homes kit colonial on 14 raw acres…

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  • This New Old House Part 22: Porch Upgrade (That Happened to Coincide with Lockdown)

    Our kit house came with about a dozen front-entry options. Most of them weren’t really porches at all — they were flush to the house, or very slightly recessed with some nice trim work. A couple had actual covered entryways, but those weren’t the style we chose. So we ended up with a flush entry…

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  • This New Old House, Part 21: Post and Beam Kit Barn

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    From the moment we started planning the house, we knew there would eventually be a barn. Eventually being the operative word — we were already stretching to build the house, so the barn was going on the someday list alongside retirement and peace of mind. What we knew for certain: no attached garage. I know…

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  • This New Old House, Part 20: Interior Doors, Trim, and Hardware

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    I wasn’t sure this post was needed. I thought we’d covered interior doors and trim somewhere — maybe with the windows, maybe with painting. Turns out we hadn’t. So here we are. This will be short. That’s what I always say. The doors For interior doors, we went with five-panel solid wood from Solidhardwooddoors.com, which…

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  • This New Old House, Part 19: Bathrooms

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    When we designed the bathrooms, we made one decision upfront that was purely forward-looking and, honestly, pretty smart: the first-floor powder room got a shower. The room next to it — which we were using as a playroom, game room, whatever it is on any given Tuesday — could eventually become a bedroom. Aging parents,…

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  • This New Old House — Part 18: The Kitchen

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    Layout and Flooring The kitchen is where you spend most of your waking life in a house. Jennifer did the layout and it works — the flow is right, the dining area sits just off the kitchen where you can see into it without being in it, and the whole thing makes sense in a…

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  • This New Old House — Part 17: Exterior, Siding, Roofing & Trim

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    Siding By the time we got to the exterior, the siding decision came down to two options in the Connor package: cedar or HardiePlank. Jennifer would have preferred the cedar — she always gravitates toward natural wood — but once we actually looked at what HardiePlank offered, it wasn’t a real contest. HardiePlank is fiber…

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  • This New Old House, Part 16: Chim Chimney, Chim Chimney, Chim Chim Cherooh-Noo

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    Some mistakes cost money. Some cost time. The chimney cost both, repeatedly, for years. If you’ve been following along, you know that this build had its share of “we didn’t know what we didn’t know” moments. The windows. The spray foam learning curve. The drywall saga. But the chimney — the chimney was different. Those…

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  • This New Old House Part 15: Flooring – Wide Plank Heart Pine Dreams vs. Reality

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    After painting came flooring. And I had a very specific vision: wide plank flooring with exposed face nails, just like colonial homes from the 1700s. Old growth wood with character. Reclaimed if possible. The authentic historical look. The Connor Homes kit included flooring as an option. It was beautiful — I think it was reclaimed…

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  • This New Old House Part 14: Painting – Or: Why I Hope I Never Have to Use a Paint Sprayer Again

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    After drywall came painting. And by “painting,” I mean painting literally everything in the entire house. Every wall. Every ceiling. Every piece of trim. Every window interior. Every door. All 27-28 of them. Both sides. Jennifer and I decided to do all the painting ourselves to save money. This seemed like a reasonable decision at…

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  • This New Old House Part 13: Drywall – The Most Boring Post (But There Are Lessons)

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    After spray foam insulation, plumbing disasters, HVAC complications, and window decisions I’d come to regret for the next fifteen years, we finally got to something relatively straightforward: drywall. It went fine. Which, in this build, was its own kind of miracle. Hiring a Subcontractor My friend who was acting as our general contractor took one…

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  • This New Old House Part 12: Insulation and Air Sealing – When Tight Isn’t Right (Or Is It?)

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    When we decided to build our Connor Homes kit house, we had visions of a super-efficient, modern home wrapped in the latest insulation technology. We’d read all about spray foam, tight building envelopes, and energy efficiency. We were going to do this right. We sort of did. Maybe. I’m still not entirely sure. The Plan:…

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  • This New Old House Part 11: Windows – The Decision Where More Mistakes Were Made.

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    If you spend a fortune making your house air-tight with spray foam insulation, and then punch 27-29 holes in it and fill them with cheap windows, you’ve basically defeated the entire purpose of the exercise. This is the story of how we did exactly that. The Window Budget Reality By the time we got to…

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  • This New Old House Part 10: HVAC – The Radiant Floor Mistake?

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    Winter 2009-2010. After the plumbing nightmares, it was time for HVAC. We installed radiant floor heating throughout the house — hot water running through tubes in the floors, heated by our Triangle Tube boiler. It’s actually very nice to have warm floors in the winter. Walking barefoot on toasty floors is lovely. It’s also the…

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  • This New Old House Part 9: Plumbing – PEX, Paying Twice, and Poisoned Septic Tanks

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    Winter 2009-2010 After electrical was complete, it was time for plumbing and HVAC. My friend, who had been coordinating most of the work, had apprenticed to learn plumbing and HVAC. But because of all the equations for sizing units and the complexity of the systems, he suggested we hire the professional he’d worked with. Since…

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  • This New Old House Part 8: Electrical – The One Thing We Got Mostly Right

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    Winter 2009-2010 After framing was complete, it was time for electrical. This is where having a friend with an electrical engineering degree really paid off. Actually, let me rephrase: this is where we got more things right than wrong, which for this build was a massive victory. The Friend Who Actually Knew What He Was…

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  • This New Old House Part 7: Framing a Kit House (and the Ruts We Left Behind)

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    Fall – Winter 2009 With foundation complete and the Connor Homes kit ready to ship, it was time for framing. This is where our decision to act as our own general contractor would really be tested. We had a choice: our realtor’s brother was a professional builder who could have managed the entire project. He…

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  • This New Old House Part 6: Foundation, Basement, and Future Regrets

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    Fall 2009 With septic and well in place, it was time to dig a hole and pour concrete. The foundation is literally the base of everything, so naturally this was where we’d make some decisions that would haunt us for years. Jennifer had specific requirements: minimal foundation showing above grade for aesthetics. The house should…

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  • This New Old House Part 5: Water Wars – The Filter Saga

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    2010-2026 So we had a well. It produced water. The lab said the water was safe. We were good to go, right? We were not good to go. The lab test for your certificate of occupancy checks for bacteria and major contaminants. What it doesn’t test for is whether you’ll be living with hard water…

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  • This New Old House Part 4: Septic Systems and Well Disasters

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    Beginning Summer 2009 With our land purchased and our house design finalized, it was time to deal with the unglamorous but absolutely critical underground infrastructure. When you’re building off the municipal grid, you need two things before you can even think about a foundation: somewhere for water to come from (a well) and somewhere for…

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  • This New Old House Part 3: Land, Surveys, and Driveway Drama

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    Spring-Summer 2008 With our house design settled, we needed the actual, you know, land to put it on. The Land Hunt Finding land was actually easier than finding an existing house, probably because land doesn’t have a leaky roof that sellers are trying to hide with strategic bucket placement. We found a property that checked…

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  • This New Old House Part 2: Kit House Dreams – Discovering Connor Homes

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    Spring 2008 After deciding to build, I went down the research rabbit hole. This was 2008, so the internet existed but wasn’t quite the resource it is today. There was no YouTube showing you every possible mistake you could make. There were forums, sure, but they were mostly people arguing about whether PT lumber would…

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  • This New Old House Part 1: The Impossible House Hunt

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    Late 2007 – Early 2008 My wife Jennifer and I had been living in NYC apartments for years—the kind where you develop an intimate relationship with your neighbors’ arguments and learn to sleep through sirens like they’re lullabies. We were ready for the opposite: space, quiet, land, maybe even a garage or barn. Jennifer is…

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  • Divided We Fall: The Complete 10-Part Series

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    A 10-part series on the culture war as a business model — and what the data actually shows on the issues it sells you. Start here.

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  • Divided We Fall Part 1: The Culture War

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    This is going to be a ten-part series. Part 1 is the framing post — the thing about the culture war machine that explains the rest. Let me start where I live. I write this blog from a town in the Hudson Valley with a population under six thousand. I spent twenty-five years working in…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 2: What Happens After the Laws Change

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    I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from on this one. I thought about abortion the way a lot of people think about it — abstractly — until I didn’t. I had pregnancy scares as a young person, the kind that focus your attention in a hurry. Later I watched my wife actually carry our…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 3: What the Data Actually Shows About Guns

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    I have two boys in school. I coach travel baseball through Crooked Number, which means I spend a lot of weekends at fields full of other people’s kids. Both of those facts mean I have done, more than once, the thing parents in this country now do: walked into a school or a stadium or…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 4: CRT, DEI, and Trans Rights

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    I spent most of my career inside the cable TV business, including a stretch at LOGO — Viacom’s LGBTQ-focused network, which launched in 2005 — and then at Bravo, whose audience and programming have skewed heavily LGBTQ for a long time. I later ran creative operations at Universal Kids. So I’ve watched the corporate diversity…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 5: Public Media

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    I’m an NPR listener. Have been for years. Morning Edition while I make coffee. All Things Considered if I’m in the truck at five. WNYC out of New York carries it most days for me up here in the Hudson Valley. The voices are familiar in a way commercial radio voices never quite are, because…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 6: Immigration

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    I live in Gardiner, New York — population under six thousand, surrounded on every side by Hudson Valley farms. If you’ve spent any time up here in late summer or early fall, you’ve eaten an apple, drunk a wine, or watched a sunset over a hayfield that exists because of immigrant labor. Some of it…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 7: Climate Change

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    I put a heat pump in my house last year. Bosch 5-ton, replaced an oil-fired system that came with the place. I’m not telling you that to flex green credentials — I’m telling you that because the math finally penciled out, the technology has gotten genuinely good, and the federal tax credits at the time…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 8: Voter Fraud

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    I’ve voted in every election I’ve been eligible to vote in since I turned 18. That’s a stretch of decades that covers multiple states — I spent most of my adult life voting in New York City before moving up to Gardiner — and a fair number of polling places, school gyms, library basements, and…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 9: Cancel Culture

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    I spent twenty-five years inside cable television. Bravo, Oxygen, Universal Kids, LOGO, VH1, Sci-Fi, Viacom Brand, R/GA’s broadcast division. I sat through a lot of internal conversations about what we could put on the air, what advertisers would tolerate, what affiliates would carry, what regulators might object to, and what the actual audience would respond…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 10: When Freedom Means Control

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    I was raised on a fairly standard American small-government instinct. Don’t tread on me. The government that governs least governs best. Local control. Keep Washington out of your business. I grew up with that as background music, and a lot of it I still mostly agree with. I prefer that decisions about my kid’s school…

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  • Oh My Goodness, I really like some of these G-Rated Burns

    For those of you that like to argue on social media Ankles.(I had to dig to find what this one means) Thanks for helping. It was like doing it by myself, but harder. Cootie queen, lint licker As per my last email… Hope your pillow is always warm on both sides. Who ties your shoes…

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  • I Hate Our Pella Architect Series Windows. They Look Good and that’s where It Stops.

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    I have to admit something before any of the rest of this will land. Our Pella Architect Series windows look beautiful. The proportions are right. The wood interiors took paint cleanly. The aluminum-clad exteriors have held up for sixteen winters. From across the room, from the road, in any photograph, they are the windows I…

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  • Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

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    Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…

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  • Mamdani Madness

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    So Zohran Mamdani was sworn in on January 1st as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and first democratic socialist mayor, and the outrage machine on both sides has been in full swing. Michael Rapaport, less than a week into Mamdani’s tenure, posted an Instagram announcement that he’s running for mayor in 2029 to save…

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  • 450′ Gravel Driveway: A 15-Year Journey of Expensive Mistakes

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    Plus an Ariens Sno-Thro 926053 Hydro Pro 28 Review The last few days of snow and clearing the driveway stirred up this memory… We built our new old house back in 2009 and, in what seemed like a great idea at the time, set it at the back edge of a small hay field. This…

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  • In Defense of Smart People (And Against Shopping Cart Abandoners)

    I’m not the smartest person. Not even close. But I’m also not the dumbest person. I think. Maybe. The jury’s still out, and frankly, I’m not smart enough to serve on that jury. I do, however, really like smart people. I like people who understand quantum physics even though there’s absolutely no way they could…

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  • Big Tech Is Making Everything Harder on Purpose

    It has always amazed me how complex Big Tech has become and how poor their UI and UX are, given how much money they make. A simple task can take hours to slog through if you aren’t an IT person and only update certain things occasionally. If you’re stupid-smart like me — intelligent enough to…

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  • The Gable Epidemic: A Plea to Modern Home Designers

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    What is going on with all the gables being added to homes over the last 10 years? Seriously, are there tax breaks for the more gables you have that I don’t know about? Or have architects and builders just gotten too lazy to figure out a coherent design plan? The logic seems to be: design…

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  • Tub Resurfacing: Many Mistakes Were Made.

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    Mistakes were made. Back in 2009, when we were building our house, we decided we were going to do The Right Thing™: reclaimed bathroom fixtures for two of our three bathrooms. Reuse. Character. History. Surely the planet would send us a handwritten thank-you note. Except for the toilets. Those had to be modern low-flush versions, because…

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  • Make America Great Again — Compared To When?

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    I want to put this one in my own words because I had it backwards for a while. The first time I really thought about the slogan, I assumed the argument was about the again part — what year are we trying to get back to, what did “great” mean then, who was it great…

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  • BrokeCon By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

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    A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts.

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 1: USA! USA! USA!

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    The first time I really clocked the USA chant in the wild was at a NASCAR race. Flags everywhere — not just flying, but as bandanas, t-shirts, full Stars-and-Stripes jeans, patches sewn onto things that did not previously have patches. (Aside: the U.S. Flag Code technically prohibits using the flag as clothing, bedding, or drapery.…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking: How Language is Weaponized to Keep Us Fighting Each Other Instead of Those in Power

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    The Words That Switch Off Your Brain BrokeCon by Design, Part 2. Part 1 showed where America actually ranks. This one is the inoculation before we follow the money. How this post came about I was working on the next piece in the series — the one that traces who profits from America’s failures —…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 3: Follow the Money: How the System is Rigged Against 90% of Us.

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    This is Part 3 in a series. Part 1 ran the numbers — America comes out near the bottom of every developed-world ranking that matters and near the top of every one that doesn’t. Part 2 walked through how language gets weaponized to keep you from noticing. This one is just accounting. Now That You…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get (And Why That Matters)

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    This is Part 4 of BrokeCon by Design. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money Back in Part 3 we ran the receipts: Americans pay around $13,500 per person for healthcare and rank 36th in the world on life expectancy. First…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom

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    This is Part 5 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get Imagine your…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 6A: Healthcare Solutions That Actually Work (And Why We’re Told They Won’t)

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    This is Part 6A in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap | Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom Part…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 6B: How Universal Healthcare Would Save American Business (And Why Some Fight It Anyway)

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    Part 6A laid out the three honest paths to fixing this — Medicare for All, a public option, or a Swiss-style regulated multi-payer — and closed by pointing out who else is paying for the current setup besides you and your family: American business. This is that post. For about twenty-five years I worked at…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 7: The Housing Trap: How Zoning Laws and Investment Firms Stole the American Dream

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    This is Part 7 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4–6: Healthcare Series The median first-time homebuyer in the 1980s was 29 years old. In 2025 it’s 40 — a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 8: The Education and Childcare Cliff: $1.8 Trillion in Debt + The Childcare Crisis That Starts It All

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    The story we still tell about student debt is wrong. It’s not a young person’s problem. The fastest-growing segment of borrowers is over 60, and roughly 452,000 of them are in default and receiving Social Security checks — checks that can be garnished by up to 15%, leaving a $750 monthly floor that was set…

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  • Why I Started Writing About Politics

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    We’ve gotten a little off track from what we normally write about here — travel adventures, home projects where mistakes are inevitably made, the odd obsessions. So I figured I should explain what happened. I’ve been concerned about the direction and polarization of this country for a while. I consider myself open-minded and not on…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 9: Immobility Nightmare: How Three Failed Systems Killed the American Dream

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    The Door Is Already Locked Say you’re thirty-two. You have an idea for a business. Maybe a good one, maybe not, but you want to find out. So you sit down and run the numbers. The first thing that kills it is the healthcare math. Your employer pays most of your premium right now. Walk…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 10: The Incarceration Industry: How We Built a System That Profits From Failure

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    You Don’t Get Out Say you did eighteen months. Drug offense, low-level, the kind that gets you four years in some states and twenty in others depending on which side of which line you were on when the cops showed up. You served your time. Today is the day you get out. Now find an…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex: $968 Billion in Wealth Extraction

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    There’s a food pantry on a base near you. There’s a food pantry on most of them. Operation Homefront, the Armed Services YMCA, the local Feeding America affiliate, sometimes the chaplain’s office running a closet out of a side room. The volunteers know which weeks are bad — paydays, PCS moves, deployment gaps that didn’t…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice

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    Watch the floor of either chamber on a December afternoon when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote. The bill is 1,800 pages long and nobody has read all of it. The members who will speak against it are mostly junior, mostly from safe districts, and mostly not on Armed Services. The…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It

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    Two Yeas A senator from Wyoming and a senator from California vote yes on the same bill. Roll call vote. Two yeas. The clerk records them as equivalent. Nobody on the floor notes the difference. Nobody is supposed to. The Wyoming senator represents about 588,000 people — somewhere between the populations of Milwaukee and El…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team – How Culture Wars Keep Us Fighting While They Rob Us Blind

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    Two days after the killing, in the second week of September 2025, an X account with more than half a million followers reposted a screenshot of a private Facebook post written by a woman who had taken a new job earlier that month. The post was about the killing. The account’s followers contacted her employer.…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 15: In Whose God Do We Trust?

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    Caring Well In October 2019, the man who ran the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm sat on stage at a conference his agency had organized about how Christian institutions handle credible allegations of sexual abuse. The conference was called Caring Well. The man was Russell Moore, president since 2013 of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 16: In Our Greed We Trust

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    Every June for the better part of two decades, nearly eight hundred people have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a four-day conference called Acton University. They are not, mostly, the people you would picture. They are seminarians and parish priests, evangelical pastors and Catholic deacons, divinity students, a scattering of business owners, and a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 17: The Systemic Theft Of Our Retirement

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    On December 9, 1963, the Studebaker Corporation announced it was closing its main automobile plant in South Bend, Indiana. The company had been building things to ride in since before there were engines to put in them — wagons, in the 1850s — and for the people on the line the pension was not a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 18: The Rigged Tax Code

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    On October 22, 1986, Ronald Reagan stood on the South Lawn of the White House and signed a tax bill that did something the United States had not done before and has not done since. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 took the top rate on money you make by owning things — long-term capital…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 19: The Corporate Tax Dodge

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    One morning in late January, Tesla released its annual report, and up where the shareholders look was the number the company wanted them to see. Almost $5.7 billion of income earned in the United States in 2025. Roughly double what it had earned here the year before. A very good year, told the way a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 20: Corporate Socialism

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    On a Friday in March 2023, the California banking regulator closed Silicon Valley Bank and handed it to the FDIC. By then most of the money was already moving out the door, pulled by the kind of customers the bank had: startups, venture funds, companies that kept all of payroll in one account. The accounts…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 21: Coordinated Sabotage—How They Break Public Services Then Blame Government

    In December 2006 a postal bill sat on the President’s desk, and most of it was the kind of housekeeping nobody reads. Rate rules. An oversight commission with a new name. Ninety pages of it. Buried in there was one provision that didn’t belong with the rest. The Postal Service would have to start setting…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 22: Media Consolidation and Capitulation – Why You Don’t Know Any Of This

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    On a Sunday night in April 2025, 60 Minutes ended the way it always does, and then it didn’t. The stories had run. The stopwatch had ticked. And instead of the credits, Scott Pelley was still on camera, talking to the audience about the show itself. He said the company that owns CBS was trying…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 23: The Efficiency Lie – How Technology Could Make Public Services Better Than Private (And Why They Don’t Want You To Know)

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    At one in the morning on Saturday, March 1, 2025, the federal office whose entire job was making the government work better got an email telling it that it was over. The notices had gone out the day before. The message came from a former Tesla engineer who had just been put in charge of…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 24A: The Environmental Extraction – They Profit Today, We All Pay Forever

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    On August 3, 2015, Alpha Natural Resources filed for bankruptcy. In January 2016, Arch Coal did the same. On April 13, 2016, Peabody Energy — the largest coal company in the country, founded in 1883 selling coal off a cart in Chicago — filed too. Between them, the three had promised to clean up their…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 24B: Rebuilding Worker Power – Why Unions Are the Key to Everything

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    At seven in the morning on August 3, 1981, the air traffic controllers walked off the job. Almost thirteen thousand of them, out of a union of roughly seventeen thousand five hundred, went out over pay, hours, and the kind of working conditions you do not want the people watching the planes to have. Seven…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 25: The Bottom 90% Agenda – How We Fix This

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    On September 3, 2025, a bunch of people who do not agree with each other about anything stood on a stage in the Capitol and unveiled a bill. The lineup was the tell. A Texas Republican from the hard right. A Rhode Island Democrat. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fist-bumped a Tennessee Republican from the Freedom Caucus on…

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  • Who Actually Is a Patriot?

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    There’s a flag the size of a tablecloth on the back of a pickup that parks at the field where my kid plays baseball. The truck has a “Patriots Don’t Comply” sticker on it. The guy who owns it is probably very nice. But I find myself thinking, every time I see it: comply with…

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    Even that’s Odd