Last Friday, I found out about a paid anthology project. An editor I respect was looking for essay submissions, due Sunday at 11:59 pm. I had an idea that would also work for another project, so if the essay wasn’t accepted, the work could be used somewhere else. I pulled together some notes and gave some thought to what it would look like.

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Then, on Sunday morning when I started to write, I realized that the idea wasn’t taking shape on the page as I hoped, and I really didn’t feel like spending the day writing. I turned off my computer and walked away.

That meant less competition for someone else and less work for the editor. That’s good.

We forget sometimes that saying no creates an opportunity for someone else to say yes.

Last night, I was reading a book by an author I really like, but I absolutely could not get into the story. It was depressing and sad, and I even looked ahead to the last few pages and saw that it would stay depressing and sad. I stopped reading.

Anyway, I have no great thoughts today except that you have permission to say no, to put the book down when it’s not holding your interest, to create new opportunities for others and for yourself in the process.

I am still looking for ideas for estate planning stories! And now I have a little more time for research.

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We had a string of rainy days here, and of course I had to take public transit to an appointment and spent the day with wet feet. I would have preferred to spend the day at home, in fuzzy slippers, watching a Broadway musical on TV.

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I do like a good play, and I’ve written about how to see them. My yoga studio has an upcoming special class on the choreography of a Chorus Line, and I might go because it should be fun! Even though I have zero coordination. (One of the reasons I love dance it fascinates me, as it is so far from my own reality.)

And today, I am going to give you three tips for finding musicals that you can watch on TV.

1. On Netflix: Search using code 55774. Netflix’s system for categorizing its movies is complicated. The shortcut is to find the code for the genre you want to see, then enter that into the search box. The code for Stage Musicals is 55774. It’s janky, sure, but it works!

2. On Disney+. Disney+ carries a handful of filmed musicals (most notably Hamilton) and movies made from some of the great old musicals like The Sound of Music.

3. On YouTube. Some theatre companies have recorded their performances. And some people have made bootleg recordings of plays. As a result, YouTube is a mishmash of fully authorized plays (interrupted by commercials, of course) and shows that get removed as soon as someone finds out about them. It’s an adventure! It’s how I saw Rent! You can search around and see what you be able to find.

On another topic, I want to write about estate planning and wills in an upcoming issue or two. What are your questions and observations? Please share in the comments!

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Finally, here is the fully authorized Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday celebration, a relic of the pandemic. Some of the biggest musical stars recorded Sondheim songs from home, and you can see just how talented these people are! It’s incredible.

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Last week, I was with a bunch of family at Geneva on the Lake, Ohio, a small resort town on Lake Erie. One of the many features of GOTL, as it is known, is that the Internet reception is terrible.

The GOTL trip is an annual family event. When we first started bringing cell phones, we discovered that one of the nearest towers was across the lake in Canada, because our carriers wanted to charge us international roaming fees. There are now local towers, but not many as the town more or less shuts down in the winter. On a summer Saturday when everyone is trying to connect, there may as well not be any Internet, which is a hassle when you’re organizing groups of people.

Also, most of the bars and restaurants prefer cash because of the lower fees, and because the slow Internet makes for slow transactions. There might be a little bit of tax avoidance going on, too.

Given that digital detox vacations are things, I think that GOTL should promote its low-tech ways. Lean into it! Bring your cash, set up a twice daily meeting spot for your family, and get off your phones! Don’t worry about keeping your phone safe and dry at the beach, because you won’t need it!

My phone was water damaged back in January, and it took about a week and a half before I got it replaced. The biggest frustration was that I couldn’t get into a lot of websites because I didn’t have two-factor authentication abilities without it. I couldn’t take Lyft, and my car’s GPS isn’t as good as Google Maps. I couldn’t go to my usual co-working space because I need my phone for access. It’s mind-boggling to me that such a critical part of modern life is so fragile.

My new phone already has a cracked screen.

Maybe we all need more than one phone, but that creates its own security issues.

Anyway, I’m very curious to know if you have been without a phone in recent years and how you survived. Please take the poll and share in the comments.

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Maybe it’s procrastination or maybe it’s summer, but I have been reading a lot lately. Maybe you will find these interesting, too:

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What to do if AI is coming for your job: This gift article from Business Insider offers an executive coach’s 30-day plan.

Charting your post-corporate life: Some ideas from the folks at Kellogg Insights.

Glazed white sweet potatoes with chipotle crema: A Frontera recipe via the Chicago Sun-Times. Might be a good one to bookmark for Thanksgiving?

How to harness stress: According to Harvard Business Review.

Caitlin Mullen: If you like crime novels, Caitlin Mullen has two good ones, Please See Us from 2020 and Heather from this year. Those are both Bookshop.org affiliate links. I got my copies from the library, and you know how readable these books are? The library wait list moved fast because once you start one of these books, you will have a very hard time putting it down.

Walk-up songs: Okay, this isn’t reading, but rather, a conversation starter. During a lull at a recent ball game, my companions and I were discussing what our walk-up song. Pete Crow-Armstrong uses “Back to Chicago” by Djo. Carson Kelly has “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money. I opted for Taylor Swift’s “. . . Ready for It?”.

What would your song be? Please shae in the comments!

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Recently, I finished watching Hacks on HBO, saw Iceboy! at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, and took in John Mulaney’s Wrigley Field show. All of them got me thinking about writing, even more than usual given that writing is how I make my living.

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For those who don’t know, Hacks is a comedy series about an aging stand-up legend and the young writer brought in to freshen her act. Iceboy! is a musical that very loosely attempts to explain how Eugene O’Neill wrote The Iceman Cometh, in tryouts ahead of a planned Broadway run. And John Mulaney is a stand-up comedian and former SNL writer originally from Chicago.

On the one hand, writing is something that most literate people can do to fill out forms or text with their relatives. On the other hand, it is an art form that most people cannot master. Most of us are somewhere in the vast middle. I think I’m a better than average writer, and I regularly come across works that are so good, I could not even dare to try.

Like John Mulaney’s comedy. Comedians are writers, although at a certain level comedy stars may hire writers to work with them (hence, the premise of Hacks.) I assume that Mulaney writes his own material, but if he doesn’t, the people he works with are fantastic.

One of the stories he told at Wrigley was about going to Target to buy items to put in goodie bags for his kid’s birthday party. He decided that the goodie bag items for sale in the party goods aisle were horrible. Instead, he wandered through the store and bought metal coach’s whistles and flashlights. Then, he went to bank and got a crisp $1 bill for each kid.

For most people, this would be a matter-of-fact story. For a few, it would be a snore bogged down with extraneous details sure to keep one from getting invited to another party.

But John Mulaney? Wow. Between his writing and delivery, the story became one of the most ridiculously funny things I had heard in years. He threw in just enough details (like the reminder that he is not allowed to take out more than $200 in cash a day to help protect his sobriety, or that flashlights can be used as weapons, or that little kids get super excited about money), then paced the story perfectly. I was crying.

Also, children all over the greater Chicago metropolitan area will be getting goodie bags with flashlights and cash at birthday parties this year.

Mulaney has had issues with drugs and alcohol, and I can understand how the pressures of writing and performing could turn socializing in fast circles with a lot of money into a disaster. Eugene O’Neill long struggled with alcoholism and depression, and there’s a scene in Iceboy! about his writers’ block.

I always joke that the best cure for writers block is the mortgage payment. Give me a deadline and I will (probably) hit it. So will most professional writers. (Mostly) hitting deadlines divides professionals from wanna-bes sharper than anything else, even talent.

Consistently hitting deadlines sometimes means cutting corners. A lot of stories would benefit from another read, some stronger verbs, or varied paragraph length. It takes a lot of effort to do work that’s consistently good as well as turned in on time.

In Hacks, comedian Deborah Vance has been riding on her laurels for years. She loses her Las Vegas residency and realizes that she needs to do something different or she needs to retire. She does not want to retire. “A hack is someone who does the same thing over and over,” says one of the characters in Hacks. “Deborah is the opposite. She keeps evolving and getting better.”

That’s what I’m taking away from all these stories about writers.

What do you think? Please share in the comments.

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Here’s some more John Mulaney.

I live near some of the most illustrious families in Chicago history, because I live near Graceland Cemetery. It’s a 121-acre cemetery and nature preserve about a half mile up the road from Wrigley Field. Graceland opened in 1860, 11 years before the Great Chicago Fire, before the area had been annexed by the city. It became the cemetery where the great and good were buried, often in family plots marked by elaborate statuary.

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It’s a peaceful place. The east end is maintained as a prairie and is home to a den of coyotes. There’s a pond with an island (where city planner Daniel Burnham and his family are buried) and a sense of quiet you don’t often find in the city.

My husband loves to walk through Graceland and take photos. I ponder mortality. So many of these families are now unknown to the public, even though someone wanted to create an enduring monument. Some of these family plots have open spaces. Are there relatives who want them?

The crypts and sculptures seem excessive, even though they are beautiful and created work for artists and artisans. The green space is gorgeous and open to anyone during the day, but it also seems wasteful to have so much land for the dead in a city with a housing shortage.

We all have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and 16 great-great grandparents. How many of yours did you know? I knew three grandparents and one great-grandmother. The rest died before I was born. If any of them had a family plot, which one would I choose? Would I want to be buried somewhere in Ireland or England or Pennsylvania where they lived but I never have?

And if I did, would I have to arm-wrestle third or fourth cousins to see who gets one of the remaining burial plots?

I’ve written in the past about family businesses, and one issue that comes up again and again is that the next generation often doesn’t want to take over. They want to make their own path instead of taking over the business that their parents or grandparents founded. Likewise, the United States had a culture that resisted generational wealth creation as something profoundly Unamerican. The thought was that future generations had to make their own way to sustain the economic and cultural dynamism that distinguished this nation.

Anymore, it seems like nepo babies all the way down creating dynasties that reach further than cemetery plots.

What do you think? Please share in the comments.

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Movie tickets have gotten expensive. Live theatre is expensive, too, but not as expensive as you might think.

I am fortunate to live in a city with a deep theatre culture, second only to New York, and currently enriched by the Chicago Fire/Justice/Med/PD universe that helps support area actors. But even in a city with Tony-award winning theatres featuring celebrity ensembles or backed by a “Friends” sitcom fortune, there are ways to save money. Such as:

• Preview shows. Most theatres run preview performances a week or two before the official opening. The actors and crew may still be working out kinks before a live audience, so tickets are usually cheaper than during later weeks. And, it’s fun to get a little bit behind the scenes as the show develops.

• Rush tickets and lotteries. A lot of theatres have different last-minute ticket discount options for people who show up at the box office on the day of the show. New York and London have discount ticket booths in their theatre districts selling tickets to seemingly everything. Sometimes you can only buy single tickets; my husband and have occasionally sat in different rows to see a show this way, but we have been married for almost 33 years and do not need to sit next to each other. Almost every play I have seen in New York, and every play I have seen in London, has been with a same-day discount ticket. Also, buying at the box office usually lets you skip Ticketmaster fees.

• Season tickets. If you can commit to a whole season, tickets can be a lot cheaper than face value. If you have friends who have season tickets to a local theatre company, offer to be their understudy: if they can’t use their tickets, you will buy them at face value and go in their place.

But what if you don’t live in a city with a strong professional theatre scene and a regular roster of touring Broadway shows? Or what if you do, but you still find the cost of a ticket and parking downtown to be a little out of your budget?

Then check out community theatre, college theatre, and even high-school performances. You’ll get a great night of live theatre at a relatively low price, and you’ll be supporting the art form.

The quality of the acting may be a little uneven at these shows, and you are unlikely to be wowed by the sets. But you will see people working on their craft, developing their skills, and bringing a script to life. It’s so much better than going to the latest overblown Hollywood blockbuster. And who knows? You might see someone perform before they become famous.

Do you have a great story of seeing a play with a discount ticket or watching a community theatre performance? Please share in the comments!

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Pennies are everywhere.

Money flows in and out of our lives in strange and unusual ways. It is everywhere, and it will show up when you least expect it if you pay attention.

I tracked money that came may way in the last few weeks. I included the value of things that I would have bought anyway (like blueberries) and excluded freebies that are nice but that I would not have paid for (like tote bags). Here’s what I found:

• $7.20 as a residual payment from a Facebook privacy class action suit.

• A $2.00 coupon on a CVS receipt that the person before me left in the self-checkout machine.

• Four pints of blueberries left over from my church’s food pantry. They were in danger of going bad, and another shipment was coming for the next week’s pantry distribution, so I got to take some home. I made scones and blueberry bread, then froze the rest. This time of year, I’ll value this at $0.99 per pint, or $3.96

• A can of Liquid Death given away at a grocery store sampling event. The branding is ridiculous, but Killer Cola and Dead Billionaire have helped me kick my diet Coke addiction. Retail value, $2.29.

• A penny on the sidewalk.

All in all, this worked out to $15.26, tax free, that was just waiting there for me to claim it.

Obviously, $15.26 isn’t going to change my standard of living, but there are people who will go to bed hungry tonight for whom that $15.26 would matter. Likewise, if I had debt that I was trying to pay off, or was trying to build an emergency fund, adding $15.26 would make a small but powerful contribution to the cause.

Do I feel guilty? No, because I firmly believe that what goes around comes around. I give money to food pantries, contribute groceries to food drives, and vote for candidates who support programs that feed hungry people. It’s way better to take a food pantry’s surplus blueberries than to have them rot in the storeroom.

I used to track the change that I found on Twitter, but given the rise in electronic payments, people have fewer coins to lose. Also, Twitter became X and X became toxic. The last time I tracked my found money, it was about $14 a year. Not much, but not nothing.

I separate found money from side hustles and passive income, two related concepts that get regular traction on social media. A side hustle is a part-time job. Selling clothes online is work. Influencing is work. Playing games or taking surveys for cash is work and involves sharing some of your personal information. Some people like their side hustles, others just need the money. And for people who are self-employed like me, it’s all one hustle.

Passive income is payment for work that you did in the past and may still be doing now. I don’t like the term, because it isn’t really passive. Twice a year, I receive royalty payments for my books. I did a lot of active work to write those books, and my publisher and I continue to promote them. I never know how much money I am going to get until it arrives in my checking account, so I don’t spend it until I have it. I don’t put it in the same category as a $2.00 off coupon left in the self-checkout machine.

Also, if you don’t use your coupons, leave them for someone else! Make their day! It’s an easy way to put a little goodness into the world.

The best way to start a budget is the start tracking all of your spending. I still do that, in part because my income is so variable. As you track your spending, add back the money that comes into your life. It’s likely to surprise you and make you feel better about the whole budgeting exercise.

In the meantime, here are a few web sites to help you find money:

• MissingMoney.com, organized by a coalition of state and provincial treasurers. Search your name and see if someone owes you anything.

• TopClassActions.com, a list of class action lawsuits that you may be eligible for.

• Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database, the Department of Labor’s database of unclaimed retirement accounts. It’s possible that you received retirement benefits from a job, then forgot all about it. It’s also possible that a previous spouse hid something.

Money is a resource that should flow throughout the economy, not a collectible to be hoarded. See if you can get some pennies flowing your way.

Got any thoughts? Please share in the comments.

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Recently, I was walking home from yoga and had a thought that this was something that my grandmother could never have imagined doing, especially not at the age of 60.

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I can picture my grandmother and some other old ladies, maybe her sisters, maybe her cousins, sitting at a family picnic. I was young and could never keep straight how all these ladies known as “Aunt” were related. It didn’t help that they all had snow-white hair set into tight curls and wore cotton print dresses with sensible black shoes.

They weren’t much older then than I am now, yet I cannot imagine any of them putting on leggings and a T-shirt, then contorting themselves to pop music in a room full of other people.

I’m not a natural athlete. Yoga is one of the few athletic activities I’ve ever done where I feel good immediately after, and not from relief that I’m done, either. Middle America learned about yoga when Lilias Folan launched her PBS show in 1970, so it’s still a relatively new thing in Middle American circles. It was not on the radar of my elderly relatives

Even professional athletes didn’t exercise. The Chicago Bears were founded in 1920 but didn’t start a strength training program until 1962. I know this because that early program was based at the Irving Park YMCA, where my kid’s swim team was, until 1971, and there’s now a little Bears museum at that Y.

The Y! Swimming lessons, pickup basketball, and training for the Chicago Bears! It’s just the weirdest thing, given that professional sports teams now have massive training facilities.

People have always exercised for fun, but the health benefits were not identified until 1958 when researchers in the London Transport Medical Service investigated an interesting phenomenon: London bus drivers had a much higher heart attack right than bus conductors did, despite being almost identical in every other way (age, salary, ethnic background, etc.) The conclusion was that the conductors spent most of their days standing, walking around the buses, and stepping on an off to help passengers. In other words, they got exercise while the drivers sat, and that’s why the drivers were more likely to have heart attacks.

In other words, it’s been less than 70 years since researchers knew that exercise was good for our health. My grandmother and the other ladies in her circle were not interested in exercising for fun, because that wasn’t something that people in their set did.

I’ve written before about how old age has become meaningless, and I cringe when I see someone on social media brag about how they aren’t old because they still run marathons at age 70 or whatever. They are still old, but old people exercise now.

And, in fact, old people should exercise! We all should exercise more, no matter what our age. The beautiful part is that you don’t need to get much exercise to receive health benefits. The Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology has some handy guidelines for people of all ages in multiple languages. Accept your age, but also, revel in the fact that you can and do exercise.

What do you think? Please share in the comments.

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And now, some shameless self promotion:

• Buy signed copies of my books!

• Read my interview with The Midst!

• Listen to me on the Follow the Leighder podcast!

Institutions are only as good as the people who run them, and people are fundamentally flawed.

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Private equity is an institution like any other.

Yes, PE firms ran companies like Sears and Toys R Us into the ground while making money off the parts, but neither company was thriving before, and neither is missed. Local newspapers were already dying before PE firms started snapping them up. Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist effectively destroyed the traditional news business, bootstrapped his company. He didn’t take PE or venture capital, and he never intended to destroy local newspapers. Possibly out of guilt, he has gone on to fund a graduate school of journalism. Alden Global Capital is just picking at the carcasses left by technological change.

If you look at the very long Wikipedia list of PE-owned companies, you’ll find a lot of companies that are perfectly fine, that you might not have realized were PE owned.

Some PE firms are better than others, of course, and many of them have too much money and are chasing too few deals. Some overpromised returns in order to bring in investors. They had to overpay business sellers to put the investments to work, and then they must start raising prices and slashing costs to generate a return on investment.

A lot of people had no opinion about private equity until their dentist and veterinarian sold their practices, possibly at very high prices, and now they are dealing with the rising prices and slashed costs.

But there’s no business ownership structure that always guarantees reasonable prices and excellent quality. The forces of capitalism in a competitive market usually lead to fair pricing and quality. Usually, but not always, because inefficiencies are inevitable. Mangers at public companies and sole proprietorships will raise prices and cut quality if they think they can get away with it.

I really miss a big morning newspaper, but those days are gone. The Chicago Tribune was declining for years before Alden Global Capital acquired it. Instead, I subscribe to the New York Times for national news, the BBC for world news, and several hyperlocal sites covering Chicago. If you don’t like your PE-owned newspaper, or dental practice, or shoe brand, you can go elsewhere. Capitalism works because people can walk away from businesses that don’t deliver.

What do you think? Please share in the comments:

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And now, some shameless self promotion:

• Buy signed copies of my books!

• Read my interview with The Midst!

• Listen to me on the Follow the Leighder podcast!

Private equity is good. I know, I know, that’s fighting the zeitgeist, but it’s true!

Here’s why I say that.

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First, institutions need to invest money to get a return. And sure, some of these investors are rich people looking to get richer, but most private equity investors are pensions, foundations, and endowments. In particular, state and local government pension plans invest heavily in private equity to get a higher risk-adjusted return than they could get in the public markets.

The Tenth Amendment to the constitution says that any powers not listed in the constitution are given to states and to the people. One of the implications of this is that state and local government employers are not required to pay into Social Security. (Some opted to do so anyway.) Instead, most state and local government employers and employees pay into their own pension plans.

The employers get their funds from the taxpayers. The better the investment returns, the less the taxpayers have to pay. Maybe you would be willing to pay more in taxes so that government pensions don’t have to rely on private equity, but most people would not. And that’s why 89% of public pensions allocate at least some money to private equity.

Investors are also turning to private equity because there are fewer public companies out there. There were 8,090 public companies in the US in 1996, which was the peak year. At the end of 2025, there were just 3,908. One reason that stock valuations are so high is that so much money (especially retirement savings) is chasing so few names.

Being a public company is a drag. To begin with, CEOs do not like it when junior analysts fresh out of undergrad ask pesky questions about compensation and company aircraft. I say this as someone who once was this junior analyst. In addition to annoyances like that, there are very real costs to stock exchange listings, managing investor relations, and preparing quarterly financial statements. A lot of companies have decided that going public is not worth the trouble. These businesses still need capital to grow, so the management turns to private equity funds instead of doing an initial public offering.

There’s another reason that private equity is good: it keeps businesses in business. A lot of small businesses are acquired by private equity firms because no one else wants to buy them. The alternative is shutting down. Take a look at BizBuySell, the Zillow of business listings. In many case, the founders planned to turn the businesses over to their kids, but their kids aren’t interested, nor is another local buyer. Private equity firms have been buying up a lot of these local companies, rolling them up into national chains but otherwise keeping them in business.

So those are some arguments in favor of private equity. What do you think? Please share in the comments:

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Know someone who might like a signed copy of Day Trading for Dummies, Hedge Funds for Dummies, or Options Trading? I’m now taking orders for signed copies! Click the button below, select your quantities, and tell me who to make them out to.

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I’m working on a new book, Private Equity for Dummies (Wiley, 2027), which should be released in February. Whenever I tell people about this, they tend to say one of two things:

• “That’s a sign of a market top.”

• “Are you going to write about how terrible PE is?”

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I have no idea if this is a market top or not, and if I did, I would be retired instead of writing another book. That takes care of the first remark.

The second is more complicated, so I am going to cover it in a few different issues of The Whatever Years so that you don’t get bored and disappear. There are a lot of layers here, so stick around!

There are a few reasons why private equity gets singled out.

First, PE firms often break up companies. Sears, for example, was run into the ground by Eddie Lampert, a hedge fund manager. His ESL Holdings purchased the retailer, stripped its parts, and turned the largest American retailer into a shadow of its former self. The brand limps along, with a total of five stores.

He made money, but the company was destroyed.

However, did we really need Sears? Does anyone really miss it? The company was already in deep decline when ESL acquired its shares.

I think what people resent is that Lampert made money while destroying Sears, the second problem with private equity. As a culture, we’re okay with people who make money by building things and not as much with people who make money by destroying them or even just betting against growth.

People lose their jobs when companies are destroyed, and that’s hard to accept. Unemployment sucks, and not everyone will be able to find a job as good as the one that they lost.

A third phenomenon is that PE firms restructure business so that they can scale into larger companies. For example, they buy up a bunch of HVAC companies, rebrand them, and standardize their practices. In the process, a lot of the niceties and quirks that made customers and employees loyal to an independent local company go away. Or, a PE firm buys a clothing brand that developed a cult following. To grow the brand, it cuts corners on quality and stops taking risks on design.

Sure, PE firms make these businesses bigger and more profitable, but only by destroying what made them special.

And all of this happens with the added bonus of carried interest: the bonuses that PE firm partners receive is considered to be a gain on investment instead of earned income, so it is taxed at a lower rate. It’s a ridiculous loophole, but it makes working in PE more lucrative than working for an operating business.

So that’s my take on why PE is evil. Next week, I’ll write about why it’s good; the week after, about why it’s neutral.

What do you think? Please share in the comments!

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When in doubt, make brownies.

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This is my mantra. Brownies are perfect for a potluck, make a fine apology, and freeze up well for school lunches. The payoff for the time to make them is huge, because each brownie is relatively small.

And given the current state of the world, don’t we all need some good brownies?

Yes, yes we do.

Here are three different recipes that I swear by:

• Crinkle Top-Sourdough Brownies: If your pandemic-era sourdough starter is still going, use the discard in these. It gives the brownies a nice tang that complements the chocolate perfectly.

• Supernatural Brownies: These have relatively little flour and a lot of chocolate. I’ve had good luck using the Pound Plus bars from Trader Joe’s. Let the chocolate mixture cool before adding the eggs so that they don’t scramble on you. I’m told that these are valuable currency in grammar school lunchrooms.

• Brownie mix, zhuzhed up: Brownie mix often goes on sale at the grocery sale, and I like to keep a few boxes on hand to make brownies when I am too busy to be doing a lot of melting and measuring. The secret is to replace the water called for on the box with either milk, milk with a little coffee, or a canned coffee drink. Then, throw in a cup or so of chocolate chips. The result:

  

Do you have a go-to cookie recipe? Advice on getting through the world right now? Please share in the comments.

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Last week, I saw a story on the BBC about a German tourist who was awarded €900 by the courts because a vacation tour operator that failed to enforce a ban on people reserving pool loungers, thus diminishing the value of his trip. A followup story discussed how hotels were trying to prevent people from reserving loungers, in part because guests hate it (or at least I do) and in part because no one wants to be sued.

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The most effective technique: “Once when in Ibiza, holidaymakers were putting towels on beds in the middle of the night. It soon stopped when some lads were going down in the middle of the night and throwing all the towels into the pool.”

This German tourist who sued is the hero we all need for today. Also, next time I run into a hotel that allows this, I will set my alarm for 4:00 am to throw towels in the pool. You’re welcome.

I’ve found a lot of other interesting things to read these days, including:

• Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke (Bookshop.org affiliate link): This is the story about a tradwife influencer, and there are a couple twists to it that make this one of the best books I have read in a long time.

• How to deal with your fear of messing up (Kellogg Insights): Life is all about risk! And it’s better if you take risk, at least some of the time.

• Negotiating when there is no plan B (Harvard Business Review): In a good negotiation, you go in knowing your BATNA: best alternative to negotiated agreement. But what if you really, really need the deal to go through? Here’s advice on how to negotiate when you don’t have a BATNA.

• Diet Coke parties (Reuters): The Iran War has created shortages of aluminum in India, which is also creating shortages of diet Coke. When bars in India get a supply, they make it an event. I love it, even though I have (mostly) given up diet Coke.

• Aging parents who won’t plan (NY Times gift link): It’s a universal problem!

• The best free restaurant bread in America (Atlantic gift link): Caity Weaver is a fantastic writer, and her pursuit of the best free restaurant bread is a joy to read. For non-European breads, I would argue for El Milagro Taqueria in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. It’s the cafe connected to a commercial bakery that produces tortillas and chips for use throughout the Midwest.

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I’m a Northwestern alumna, so I am well immersed in all things purple. It’s a great color, regal yet funky. And it’s what you get when you mix red, white, and blue.

Years ago, TV broadcasters doing presidential election reporting started coloring their maps red and blue to show who carried which states. It seemed clever: we’ll call Republicans red and Democrats blue! It’s shorthand that has carried forward for about two decades, and it is very bad.

Please, stop doing this.

I’ve lived in three states: Ohio, Illinois, and California. All three have had Democratic and Republican governors and senators. California sent two presidents to Washington, both Republican. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was from Illinois. The heir to his legacy, Barack Obama, is a Democrat.

Are Ohio, Illinois, and California red states, or blue states? Or just states where people vote for the candidates they think best represent them at a particular point in time?

I live in a city that has been under Democratic control practically from the beginning. But here’s the thing: Chicago has several factions within the Democratic party. When it’s time to elect a mayor or an alderperson, people don’t think about the candidate’s party; they think about the candidate. In Illinois, municipal elections are nonpartisan; many Republicans had hoped that nonpartisan local elections would help their party in Chicago, but that hasn’t happened. The last four Chicago mayors represent wildly different demographics: an Irish-Catholic nepo baby; an Orthodox Jewish former danseur; a lesbian lawyer raised in Ohio; a former public school teacher from the West Side. They’ve all been Democrats, but Rahm Emanuel and Brandon Johnson do not view the world the same way.

Here’s the other problem with the red versus blue formula: most Americans are unhappy with both parties. The latest data from the Pew Research Center found that both the Democratic and the Republican parties have disapproval ratings of about 60%.

Most of us are more purple than anything, maybe not at this particular moment but over our lives. And yet, too much discourse is about “red” states and “blue” states. That’s hardening divides when we need to be coming together.

So that’s my rant for today. What do you think? Please share in the comments.

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I like a good thrift store bargain, although I don’t have a lot of patience for the physical stores so I rely on ThredUp, Poshmark, and Goodwill Books. This month, ThredUp released its annual resale report. It shows that the market is growing, which is a mixed bag: you can’t have consistent thrifting without a constant supply of clothes that are made to last for more than at least a season.

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Shein doesn’t make clothes designed to last more than a few wears, let alone a few seasons.

Thrifted clothes from the US have long been a staple in medium- and low-income countries. When I was staying in Guadalajara, there was a big street market right outside my apartment every Monday morning. I could get the best produce and best tortillas! One end of the market was dedicated to clothing, mostly thrifted from the US, sorted by brand and size category. If you were looking for men’s clothes from the Gap (or Banana Republic, or Macy’s, or Abercrombie), you could find tables full of shirts, shorts, and jeans. All of it was good quality, first worn by someone in the US a year or two earlier.

The ThredUp report reveals that people are not willing to pay much for used clothing. (For that matter, they aren’t willing to pay much for new clothing. Witness the success of Shein.) That should be obvious: that’s why people simply donated it for years and years. The problem is that ThredUp, Poshmark, and other resellers are set up around the idea that anyone can sell the things in their closet and make good money. And they can’t. You either do the hard work of merchandising, albeit with used merchandise, or you get a small profit. You can get a tax deduction for donating to a bona fide charity’s resale shop, but only a few people qualify for that given the big standard deduction in the tax code. If you don’t itemize your taxes, you can’t deduct.

Tl;dr: the demand for second-hand merchandise is there, but the profits are not.

I found out about another study on secondhand shopping, from no less a journal than Nature. Nature’s editors care about the issue because of the environmental effect of textile production. What they found is that thrift shoppers didn’t stop buying new clothes; buying secondhand clothes was correlated with buying new clothes. The authors suspect that people who buy secondhand clothes feel that they have permission to also buy a lot of new clothes.

In other words, secondhand shopping can save money, but it can also give you permission to spend money on new items, so maybe it’s not so great.

I like to think that I don’t spend more on new clothes because I spend money on secondhand clothes, but maybe I do. I like clothes. That’s probably because of too many years wearing school uniforms.

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I just finished reading London Falling, by Patrick Raddon Keefe (Bookshop.org affiliate link), an incredible story about people leading double lives, people who live in denial, and people who can’t tell everything that they know. The reporting is awesome, in that it fills this writer with awe.

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I was already thinking about the nature of truth thanks to London Falling when I received an email from the University of Chicago Booth School about research showing that people like leaders who are liars when the liars are on their side.

Everyone lies. Research shows that most people lie one or two times a day. Not all lies are the same, of course. If someone you really don’t know asks how you are doing, and you say “fine” even though you are going through some really terrible stuff, is that a lie or a pleasantry?

Once, my employer got a resume from someone I had worked with before. I told my boss that I liked the job candidate as a person, but the experience she described on her resume was not at all what she did. “Oh, everyone lies on their resume,” he said, and that really pissed me off because I didn’t lie on mine. Maybe I should have lied, and then I would be CEO of something other than my own business.

Employers lie, all the time, and maybe they have to, at least through lies of omission. The biggest lie bosses tell is “We’re just like family here!” Why? Because you do not fire family. People might go no contact with their parents or skip Thanksgiving dinner to avoid an uncle’s political rants, but your family is your family. Your cousin with a heroin problem: still your cousin. Employees, meanwhile, are fired all the time for reasons as large as heroin problems and as small as the company missing quarterly earnings estimates by a penny.

Tell your employees that they are just like family, and they immediately know that you are lying. Tell your employees that everything is fine and bonuses are on track, and they will want to believe you even if you aren’t telling the truth.

Here’s Sufjan Stevens, and I want to believe he’s telling the truth.

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On Monday, I went downtown to my co-working space. When I was packing up to head home, the space manager told me that the front entrance to the building was closed because of a protest. Apparently Amazon has office space in the building, and people were protesting the fact that the company pays very little in taxes—about 1.3% of income —in advance of April 15, in which I (and probably you) paid more than 1.3% of income in taxes.

I didn’t know about Amazon’s office space, but the building used to have an Amazon Go convenience store. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, a magical store where they calculated your purchases automatically and you could just walk out. It turned out that the magic technology was just people in India watching videos of shoppers, so I decided to stop going there and eventually, Amazon shut the whole venture down.

So many technological wonders prove to be letdowns.

I was thinking about this a lot, because the New York Times just ran a profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos (gift link), who just wants everyone to be happy. She has a life that involves flying her own helicopter, holding a lavish wedding in Venice, and wearing a bra as a top to a presidential inauguration.

I’m actually happy that she’s spending money and putting that fortune back into the economy. One of the things weighing on the US economy right now is that there is a lot of money chasing relatively few investments, forcing valuations up. By spending money, especially on services, Sánchez Bezos is putting money in the hands of actual people.

Of course, she is very much in contrast with Jeff Bezos’s previous wife, MacKenzie Scott, who just gave millions to Meals on Wheels and a tribal college.

I think that the biggest lie in politics is the notion that tax cuts to the wealthy “trickle down” to help the overall economy, to the point where tax cuts always pay for themselves. They don’t. They never have. Economist Steve Kaplan has tried to argue that it would have been a tragedy if Jeff Bezos had had to sell half of Amazon in 2000 to cover taxes, but I think he’s stretching the case.

My point is this: in a world where we can’t get our elected officials to overhaul our tax code, we must encourage the richest to either spend their money or give it away. Those are both sure-fire ways of getting money into the economy without increasing the systemic risk of overvalued assets.

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I’ve been doing some work on the economic history of my hometown, Youngstown, Ohio. It used to have a steel industry that was second only to Pittsburgh’s. The Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company was the largest steelmaker in Youngstown, and its management published a glossy overview of the company’s history in 1950, its 50^th anniversary of operation. I found “50 Years in Steel” at the Chicago Public Library, a reminder of how significant the company once was.

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Three things struck me about the introduction to the book, pictured above:

1. The Constitution only works if people are willing to defend the rights in it. For example, in 1950, the Constitution said that Black people had the right to vote. In too many places and times, though, that right was denied them. It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the right to vote, granted by the Constitution, would be reliably protected. We can’t just venerate the Constitution; we have to do the work to make it work.

2. About “another fifty years, and then another, ad infinitum”: In 1969, nineteen years after this boast, the Sheet and Tube was sold to New Orleans hot dog and shipping conglomerate Lykes Brothers (which, naturally, has scrubbed Sheet and Tube from its web site). Although it was thought to be a bad idea at the time (Lykes was much smaller than Sheet and Tube and had no large manufacturing experience), the deal still went through. Eight years after that, in 1977, Lykes shut down the Sheet and Tube’s Campbell Works, laying off 5,000 employees with no notice. In 1978, just a tad more than halfway through the first “another fifty years”, Lykes Corporation shut down the remainder of the Sheet and Tube and sold the assets to LTV Steel. Remnants of the old Sheet and Tube are now operated by Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. You can still buy Lykes hot dogs in New Orleans, although the processed meats business was sold to Smithfield Foods in 1996.

3. Humans are lousy at predicting the future. We’re also not great at understanding the present, partly because we are just too busy. “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” as Soren Kierkegaard wrote. We will inevitably make mistakes.

Tuesday, I was convinced that a nuclear bomb was going to be dropped. Wednesday, I woke up, and it was sunny, and I got to work. Who knows what will be happening when you read this,

Mann tracht, un Gott lacht (man plans and God laughs), is a delightfully rhyming, painfully true Yiddish saying. I love to make plans. I like to think that I know what I will be doing five years from now. But I also know that it is all folly. I will be living forwards, God will be laughing, and the past will show that He is right to do so.

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