I write here and there about politics, and family, and whatever else preoccupies me. Here’s a selection.
"Beyond Divorce, and Even Death, A Promise Kept" — New York Times, 2005 (in the Modern Love anthology)
"Enough is Enough" — CTNewsJunkie, 2022
"Ode to a Fallen Sox Fan" — Hartford Courant 2004
On the Homefront (1999-2000)
I wrote a weekly column about life with young kids for the Southington Observer. Some of it holds up surprisingly well.
Substack
On Politics and the Press
Why I’m Writing about Politics and the Press in Gilded Age Chicago. (2023)
How an editorial cartoon of my great-great grandfather led me to eight years of research - and a story about newspapers, democracy, and a forgotten mayor (said ancestory.)
The Importance - and Duty - of Journalism to Good Government. (2025)
An 1889 op-ed in the Indianapolis Journal makes the case for a free press so clearly it could have been written this morning. It also happens to state the thesis of my book.
Why Do We Have Primaries? (2024)
The answer begins with a family feud in Chicago's Third Congressional District in 1884 — and two men who hated each other so much they accidentally invented modern politics.
Abuse(s) of Power — Gilded Age 1 Style (2025)
When Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the surviving Haymarket anarchists in 1893, the Chicago Tribune responded with a fake front page. The press, the politicians, and the panic — this is the world of Start the Presses.
Don’t Mess With Chicago (2025)
Trump is only the latest to try to tame the Windy City. Chicago's reputation for lawlessness — and its refusal to back down — goes back to the 1840s.
A Shockingly Early Defense of Free Speech (2025)
In 1737, an anonymous writer in the Pennsylvania Gazette linked threats to free speech with tyranny — nearly 30 years before the Stamp Act. The publisher? Almost certainly Benjamin Franklin. He was 31.