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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…








