Howdy, thanks for stopping by. I’m a writer who started as a numbers guy. With an education in economics, I first found work as a data analyst. But words were what really turned me on. So in my analyst jobs I gravitated more and more to writing, until it became a career.
Narrative has a unique power to mend brokenness. I especially love journalism, and have written stories and opinion for The Daily Economy, The Dispatch, National Affairs, D Magazine, Dappled Things, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, Plough.com, World Magazine, JStor Daily, Narratively, Arkansas Life, Arkansas Money & Politics, The Christian Science Monitor, The Epoch Times, The Baltimore Sun and a few others.
An Ark-La-Tex boy, I’m currently based in southwest Arkansas and the Dallas area. Explore my work below and through the menu above.
FEATURED ARTICLES
The Daily Economy | In his new book, John O. McGinnis makes the case for why the wealthy matter for democracy, and why attacking them may backfire…
Reflections on Saturday Morning TV
The Daily Economy | My childhood, metaphorically speaking, ended when traditional, kid-focused Saturday morning broadcast television was fading away…
Conservative Economic Thought is Having an Identity Crisis
The Dispatch | Shortly before launching the think tank American Compass in 2020, Oren Cass…
The Daily Economy | In 1988, when Robert Lawson was a first-year economics graduate student at Florida State University, he was surprised one day…
The Daily Economy | If all goes as supporters intend, a measure to raise the minimum wage in the nation’s capital to $25 per hour by 2029 will appear…
The Daily Economy | W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as…
The Daily Economy | Democratic Socialism is, at least recently, a growth brand. According to The Nation, between 2016 and 2020 membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew…
The Daily Economy | Despite having brains that weigh less than a paperclip, bees seem to understand Economics 101…
D Magazine | Between 15th Street and Plano Parkway, the lush course of Pittman Creek meanders through the city of Plano like a landscape trapped in time…
Can Latin America’s Superwoman Save Venezuela?
The Daily Economy | Life is busy for twenty-first century women, and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado is no exception…
The Prescience of The Exorcist
Dappled Things | At the 1974 Academy Awards, tuxedoed host David Niven prepared to introduce Elizabeth Taylor to announce the Best Picture award…
The Spiritual Battle Between Communism and Capitalism
The Daily Economy | In the Biblical book of First Kings, Yahweh’s prophet Elijah challenged 450 pagans to a spiritual showdown…
The Problem With Wellbeing Economics
The Daily Economy | This May in Reykjavic, Iceland, the elegantly modern Harpa Concert Hall will host a meeting of academics…
In the Changing Suburb of Richardson, Del’s Stands Still
Texas Monthly | At the nearly 70-year-old burger palace, owner Hossein “Hoss” Taherzadeh keeps the charcoal flame alive…
Fighting Poverty in Rural America
National Affairs | In September 1967, a commission tasked by LBJ with studying the state of rural America released a report…
Censorship Attacks the Pursuit of Truth
The Daily Economy | To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, when a bad idea appears in the world, you may know it by this sign…
Reclaiming Sovereignty in Financial Regulation
National Affairs | Christmas of 1989 was a good one for me. I had just secured my first adult job as a credit analyst with a community bank in Klein, Texas…
Techno Tyranny of Brazil is “1984” for 2024
The Daily Economy | When I first saw the film Brazil (1985) a decade after its release, I was decidedly underwhelmed…
How the West won the Money Race
The Daily Economy | When Marco Polo arrived in Yuan Dynasty China, among the wonders he found was that money grew on trees…
Where Have You Gone, Alex P. Keaton?
The Daily Economy | One of the most popular sitcoms of the 1980s, Family Ties, featured two ex-hippies raising a family in the era of Ronald Reagan…
Why Adam Smith Would Have Been a Baseball Fan
The Daily Economy | There is no evidence, as far as I know, that Adam Smith ever heard of the game of baseball…
In Hurst, A Family Built Around Whirlyball
D Magazine | A winter sun shines on Hurst as the athletes begin arriving, their faces relaxed but determined…
Calculus and Christ in Denton, Texas
Dappled Things | At the town of Centreville, Highway 7 and Interstate 45 intersect perpendicularly, like geometric number lines drawn on Texas in cement…
The Spirit of Diamond Bessie Lives on in New Novel
Texas Highways | In downtown Grapevine, novelist Jody Hadlock breezes into a busy coffee shop to talk about her new book, The Lives of Diamond Bessie…
Plough | In 1983, the Commodore Vic-20 went platinum, the first computer ever to sell a million units…
World Magazine | Harry Hines Boulevard in northwest Dallas is a “track,” a place where prostitution is, at least in normal times, visible and available. It’s a wide, treeless expanse of concrete, low-slung buildings, and neon signs…
Diary of a Department Store Dick
D Magazine | Days and Nights Fighting Crime at a Plano Mall.
The New London Museum Recalls the Most Deadly School Tragedy in US History
Texas Highways | Newsman Walter Cronkite would, in his later years, recall it as one of the worst stories he ever covered. Morning dawned over New London on March 18, 1937, with clear skies and mild temperatures…
Jefferson’s ‘Diamond Bessie Murder Trial’ Plumbs Nineteenth Century Mystery
Texas Highways | It was the O.J. Simpson trial of its day. Reporters descended on the northeast Texas town of Jefferson to chronicle the tragic tale of Diamond Bessie with black ink and purple prose…
In Waldo they started young, with pick-up games on the outdoor court near the white, wood-sided building that housed first grade classes. Kids, mostly black, often in street clothes, yelled and dribbled and shot. The chain nets jangled whenever a ball dropped through…
East Texas’ Jucy’s Hamburgers Aims for the Win
Texas Highways | Walking into Jucy’s Hamburgers, at the corner of McCann and US 80 in Longview, the first thing I notice is the vibe, or lack thereof…
Come Looking for me if I’m not Back
Arkansas Life | It was not called a funeral, and there was no coffin, no grave. But the mourners still came, filling Magnolia’s Central Baptist Church on an unseasonably cool day in July 2014…
Stop and smell the roses in the Rose Capitol, Tyler
Texas Highways | With a waggle of his pen, U.S. President John Tyler signed a bill to bring Texas into the United States in 1845. The following year, the state legislature approved a town in his honor in upper East Texas. Since then, Tyler has grown into a thriving city of more than 100,000 souls.
Texas Highways | The Audie Murphy/American Cotton Museum in Greenville could just as easily be called the Hunt County Historical Museum. But why not lead with your best stuff? Murphy, the war hero turned actor, and cotton both grew from Hunt County’s rich black soil…
Arkansas Money & Politics | In the northwestern shadow of the state Capitol’s dome stands a low-slung building that is all squares and rectangles, an architectural celebration of the straight line. Inside, a government agency named the Bureau of Legislative Research…
Are Regulations Killing the Small Community Bank in America
JStor Daily | Stamps, Arkansas is a town of some 1,500 people in the southwest corner of the state. Its sole claim to fame—other than being the only town in the U.S. named Stamps—is as the childhood home of Maya Angelou, the Presidential-Medal-of-Freedom-winning author and poet…
Healthcare Relief in the Information Desert
Arkansas Money & Politics | The Arkansas Delta is a place of contradictions. Rainfall from a vast middle swath of North America makes its way there as part of the Mississippi River system. This has left the region culturally and agriculturally rich. But in the information-age economy, the delta is more like a desert — disconnected from the pathways along which wealth and opportunities normally flow…
Arkansas Money & Politics | What does a campus in the cloud look like? As it turns out, surprisingly old-fashioned. We’re not talking large, stately buildings of ivy-covered brick, either. Picture something even more old-fashioned. Picture a rambling, beautifully restored 19th century log cabin, in this case the one in the 40-acre wood at the corner of North University and Hawthorne…
Changing the State from the Grassroots Up
Arkansas Money & Politics | In the U.S. Navy, Little Rock political consultant Laurie Lee was among the first women to complete explosive ordnance disposal training. She laughed when asked if that experience prepared her for the professional world she now inhabits. “There are a lot of things out there [in politics],” she said, “landmines, if you will…
Narratively | Head football coach Randy Phillips slept in the office his first week at Lafayette County High School. Spring 2012 practice was underway, and Phillips had driven down from Lonoke High near Little Rock, where he was finishing out the year as an assistant coach. A mattress in the field house wasn’t exactly four-star accommodations, but you couldn’t beat the commute…
Arkansas Life | South of Wright Avenue, Little Rock’s Thayer Street takes on a primitive appearance. Tall trees block out the surrounding city. The loudest sounds are bird calls. Old warehouses stand like relics, rust spreading along their seams. Occupying one of them is the Arkansas Geological Survey’s Learning Center…
Arkansas Life | Families are about relationships, and this is a story about a family, an exceptional one, one you would like to know. Their beginnings trace to a small town, Montevallo, set in a valley in the heart of Alabama…
Texas Highways | Something about the boxy shape of the building first catches the eye. It’s broader and taller than the 1960s-era Texarkana shopping center that surrounds it. A modest sign over the entrance reads: Oaklawn Opry, Country Music Theater. It looks like something past its time, an old civic auditorium, maybe, where Elvis once gyrated. But this is no relic. There will be a show tonight…
In Search of the Fouke Monster
Arkansas Life | The farm fields of the Red River floodplain were table-flat all the way to the horizon. For nearly half-an-hour out of Garland City I saw no other cars, and just one tractor. It was a late morning in autumn, and clouds with rain-swollen underbellies hung in the distance. The fields were cut by shallow swales where water gathered, heavy and rushing during storms, but today just disconnected puddles…
Predicting the Next Financial Collapse
Texas Monthly | J. Kyle Bass has a knack for forecasting economic trouble. Back in 2006 the Dallas-based investor observed that there was a seemingly unstoppable market for sub-prime mortgages. But research convinced him the market was wildly overvalued, that it was a quasi-pyramid scheme built on low interest rates, inflated home prices and bundles of shaky loans made to people who couldn’t really afford the payments…
Arkansas Life | In the heat of June, Christmas decorations went up in downtown Texarkana. Wreaths adorned the poles of streetlights in front of the old Hotel Grim, where tattered curtains waved from missing windows in the upper stories. Semi-trailers filled with movie-making equipment rolled into town and film crews from MGM appeared. They set up base in the Four States Auto Museum and ventured out to shooting locations across the city…
Tom Cotton’s Bright GOP Future
Arkansas Life | Imagine a Republican mad scientist designing an ideal candidate. He might combine the youth of Marco Rubio, the down-home style of George W. Bush, the brains of William F. Buckley and the bravery of John McCain. The result might be something like Tom Cotton, the new congressman from Arkansas’ fourth district…
Dear Recession, You’re Not So Bad
Christian Science Monitor | Dear Recession, There has been quite a bit of commentary about you recently, nearly all of it bad. Just about everyone wants to see you gone. But I believe that where the business cycle is concerned, if you cannot be with the one you love, you should love the one you’re with. I want to talk about your good qualities…
Christian Science Monitor | Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind – bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies…
The cheap stimulus option: Stop hyping bad economic news
Christian Science Monitor | The mother of all government stimulus packages is headed for passage – and sporting a 12-figure price tag. Since a recession is supposed to be a time for reining in extravagant habits, I wondered if there were any bargain basement stimulus plans available…
A heartless way of inspiring aid
Christian Science Monitor | We’ve seen enough pictures to become desensitized – vast slums crawling with rats, emaciated dogs, and starving children, creeks of sewage trickling through the streets…
The only way to kick our oil habit
Christian Science Monitor | At the risk of becoming the most unpopular person in the suburbs, I have to admit that my feelings about the recent discovery of a vast new oil deposit beneath the Gulf of Mexico are mixed…
Christian Science Monitor | Like roughly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35, I had never voted. So recently I decided to give it a shot.
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