Today’s edition begins another new series from my photo archives — decades of pics from the digital and analog eras.

Long ago, after some of my first Kodak disk prints came back looking blah, my dad offered advice: Put a human in the frame.

I was no aspiring landscape photographer. But he was right to suggest getting real live people into my snapshots.

Little did he know he’s be inspiring decades of images from around the world that I’m sharing now via love, journalism.

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Welcome to the People on Benches series. Another accidental archive. Like Power Lines, this one is connected by something I noticed after the fact about the same thing running through the frame.

I’ve found these are some of the best pictures in my collection. They capture romance.

They capture humans and their animals.

OK, no people on this bench but I love the suggestion nonetheless.

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And here’s your author, captured during a moment of respite.

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And now, a special word for our paying subscribers.

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Today’s edition features a tribute, three months late.

Bali’s big coastal resort town in December 2007 had thick suffocating air, diesel exhaust, beaches pure and littered, and also more than 10,000 humans descending into rich hotels to argue about binding targets and roadmaps for saving a warming planet. Back in Washington, where I lived and prepped for my trip, I made a notebook entry about Kramerbooks selling out of Indonesia guidebooks as climate wonks prepped for trans-Pacific flights to a U.N. conference that concluded two weeks later with diplomatic dignity surrendering to a chorus of boos showered on the American delegation.

George W. Bush had been resisting anything resembling what the world wanted and I documented those moments for back home via a clunky internet and editors who were fine waiting until the Monday after the conference ended to publish my comprehensive wrap. I also had no return ticket, just a green light to pursue a complementary story of my choosing. One thing led to another and a senator’s staff connected me with a USAID officer at the embassy in Jakarta. In her office a few days later, almost as an aside, she asked me: Have you heard of Biruté Galdikas?

I hadn’t.

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We met at the airport. Local reporters, volunteers and a whirlwind of workers helped move a couple of cages off the flight out of Thailand onto a commercial plane that would take four orangutans to Borneo. Biruté supervised everything and then boarded with me, beginning to slowly answer questions from the Greenwire reporter who’d chronicle this amazing handoff.

Our convoy went from a small regional airport in Pangkalan Bun to a four-hour truck ride on a one-and-a-half lane potholed road past what used to be forest. Our itinerary was foggy and Google Maps wasn’t a thing, but I remember that early morning arrival at her Kalimantan rehabilitation center when Galdikas cradled the rescued orangutans in the night, one animal’s arm around her neck, her focused attention.

For the next two days I’d explore with Biruté, her family, her staff, volunteers and locals. They’d take me to the rehabilitation center — a zoo, veterinary hospital, nursery school all at once — we’d walk down wood-plank trails to where the wild and released orangutans lived, their daily feedings, the animals panhandling fruit through cage bars. Joining them were the four former kickboxers from a Bangkok amusement park, home at last.

“If an orangutan needs help, we’re there, no matter where the orangutan is.”

My raw interview transcripts have something else I didn’t use, but which really sticks out now: “Extinction when it comes we won’t see it coming. It’s not going to be today I get ten, tomorrow nine, next day seven. Just suddenly we’ll stop getting them.”

I took tons of photos and video, an elaborate production of the orangutan rescue operation reported from a remote tropical corner of the world I hadn’t known existed. At E&E News, my reporting turned into something even cooler for its time: a special report. My Facebook profile photo for years afterward was a shot of me with an orangutan — one the staff had named Darren. It only changed when the Cubs won the World Series.

Borneo was the best version of an instinct I’d been acting on for years — the farthest from Western civilization I’d felt in my career, the most exotic dateline, the most unexpected story. It wasn’t on my beat.

The piece ran April 1, 2008, in Greenwire. My photos — the adult female staring through teal cage bars, Galdikas holding Joy in the night — ran with my byline. The special report lived at eenews.net for a while, then E&E changed hands, and the video we produced vanished. Lost in an ownership transfer. I’ve asked. No one knows. The description survived in the Wayback Machine. The footage didn’t.

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Biruté Mary Galdikas died on March 24, 2026. She was 79. Lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis — conditions likely worsened by years of fighting the wildfires consuming the very habitat she’d spent her life protecting. She was the last surviving member of what she called “Leakey’s Angels” — the trio of primatologists Louis Leakey sent into the field alongside Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. She had been in Borneo for 55 years. She died in Los Angeles, eight thousand miles from the swamp she’d made her life’s work. She was buried in Borneo beside her late husband.

I didn’t know.

March 2026 was when I first stepped away from USA TODAY. The month I stopped checking the wire for the first time in 30 years. I had been running on the news cycle’s clock for decades and I was finally, deliberately, putting it down — not because I didn’t care, but because I had to. The fire had shrunk and I needed to let it.

Tributes and obituaries ran in The New York Times, on conservation sites, animal welfare publications and in the corners of the internet where people who’d devoted their lives to orangutans gathered to grieve. I found out in June, three months later, while pulling together material for love, journalism’s relaunch.

As I dug in, reading one of the lengthier tributes I could locate online, my 2008 Greenwire piece got cited as a primary source. The reporting I almost didn’t do, from a trip I almost didn’t take, had become part of the permanent record of her life. The story found me, I filed it, moved on, and it kept living without me for 18 years.

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She was still fighting at the end. Her last donor letters track three simultaneous emergencies: a COVID backlog of traumatized orangutans who’d never learned to climb trees, wildfires that destroyed 150,000 seedlings in a single season, illegal gold miners pushing into Tanjung Puting National Park. Eight months before she died, she was writing about looking into the eyes of two rescued infants named Kujan and Ramil and being reminded of what was at stake.

She told me in 2007: “There doesn’t seem to be any progress.” She kept going anyway.

I’ve been thinking about what she said about extinction — how it won’t announce itself, how one day you’ll just stop getting them and you won’t know it’s already happened until later. She was describing orangutans. I heard it differently when I found out she was gone.

Biruté Mary Galdikas, 1946–2026. She is buried in Borneo, in the forest she saved.

Today’s edition launches a new series from my photo archives — decades of pics from the digital and analog eras. We’re piggybacking as well off my conversation with David Roberts and his career covering the infrastructure of energy to share what I’ve long thought of as my Power Lines series

I stumbled onto my own version of this story a long time ago without knowing it.

Every great shot I tried to take out a car window, driving through the country or across some corner of the world, there was a power line in it. My wife and I used to joke about it. We kept taking pictures and the power lines kept showing up.

Of course they would be there. They always are.

Today: the Power Lines photo essay series launches on love, journalism. An accidental archive. Many years of images from around the world. All connected by the same thing running through the frame.

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Caucus season above was cold enough to lose feeling in your hands between shots. I was out talking to college students about the race that cycle.

This one has been sitting in an album for years. I was using a basic Kodak bought in a drug store. A few weeks later I’d get my first real camera - a used Pentax K1000 purchased in Katmandu. Next came some serious photography skills.

A far more recent photo from an anniversary roadtrip near Charlottesville. What caught my eye here wasn’t the power lines. It was the fact there’s a sign urging voters to oppose changes to the state’s congressional district maps - a potent political battle that is at the center of the 2026 midterm campaign.

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On a recent Baltimore baseball trip just after July 4 I got this shot of one of the more famous sites in Charm City.

Another baseball-themed trip exploring the streets around the Marlins ballpark.

POLITICO let me loose in the spring of 2015 to report out the story of a power plant being built in Mississippi that promised “clean coal” but with a price tag that kept on growing. The technology was ambitious and opposition strong. The nation’s energy markets also didn’t cooperate. It never opened the way it was intended.

A birthday trip amid the pandemic.

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A few things percolating, for paying subscribers:

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David Roberts once tried to poach me.

It didn’t work. I stayed at E&E News, kept writing behind the paywall, kept counting votes on climate bills that were never quite going to pass. David was already at Grist by then — the scrappy Seattle-born environmental publication I’d known about since my days covering the outdoors in Olympia, Washington. I had long been a fan.

We watched each other from a distance for two decades. Occasionally in competition. Never quite in the same room. He was throwing bombs at my coverage from the environmental left. I was navigating the tunnels of the Capitol complex trying to find the one senator who knew where the climate bill was actually going.

Now he wishes some of that coverage still existed.

E&E News — the publication I spent a decade at before leaving for Politico — is being shuttered by Politico, which swallowed E&E a few years back and is now, in David’s words on tape, going to wipe the climate out of it and turn it into a DC gossip rag.

It was something to hear him say that. Because I worked at Politico too. For ten years. That part of the conversation kind of got lost in the shuffle — but it’s worth naming here. Two people who came up in the energy and environment press corps of the early 2000s, both now independent, both watching the institutions we worked amid either collapse or get absorbed into something unrecognizable.

David was at Grist when I knew him. Then Vox. Now Volts on Substack — 440 episodes deep, preaching transmission grids and batteries to a paying audience that keeps growing. He found his way into journalism with no training, no journalism school, no mentors. Just started writing the way he thought, the way he talked, for a small audience that wanted to go deep on climate solutions. Grist gave him his legs. The rest he built himself.

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A Conversation a Long Time Coming

This episode runs longer than what you normally get from me. (The opening hour or so is at the top of this page, and the final 18-minute segment is right above this paragraph). David and I had a lot to discuss. A beat that shaped both of us. A media landscape neither of us quite recognizes anymore. And a summer — as you may have noticed stepping outside — that is making the argument for everything Dave has spent twenty years covering.

We started, as I always do, with a fastball.

Do you remember trying to poach me to Grist?

David: I confess that I do not. We had many failed attempts to poach many people.

Grist was interested in me. I was tired of writing behind a paywall at E&E where serious work was only read by people paying a lot of money. What was Grist offering people like me back then?

David: Freedom and obscurity. Same thing it offered me. I mean, I think at the time we had pretensions of trying to be more of a newsy reporting place. Grist went through many different self-conceptions over the years. But it has survived. It was founded in 1999. You know the wreckage of media all around us — it’s one of the very few online publications that has been going that long. It’s kind of crazy.

And E&E News — which was fantastic right up until Politico killed it a few weeks ago?

David: R.I.P. to that and to everything that was. E&E was one of the last bastions of old school, down the middle, day to day, objective reporting of the facts of what’s happening. And now it’s been swamped by Politico, which is going to wipe all the climate out of it and turn it into a DC gossip rag. Climate had sort of a renaissance at the big papers, and now it’s getting wiped out. The desks are getting closed down. Everybody’s decamping to their own little bubbles, decamping to Substack. So it’s harder than ever to find news you can just trust.

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The Writer Who Couldn't Type Anymore

David came into journalism with no training. No journalism school. No mentors. He just wrote the way he thought, and it turned out enough people wanted that.

Did you believe the Voice of Authority when you were performing it — or were you always performing it?

David: I did not ever even generate a plausible facsimile of that voice. I never went to journalism school. I never really had journalism mentors. I just from the very beginning wrote like I talk, like I thought. At Vox you’re writing to Facebook, writing to social media, trying to get clicks. You don’t know anything about that person and they don’t know anything about you. I found myself wanting to write more and more in-depth, fairly technical stuff about solutions. And I’d have to start every article with: climate change is happening, it’s bad, it’s caused by greenhouse gases. I’m like six paragraphs in before I get to the thing I actually want to talk about. I found it like an insoluble riddle to just bang out a three to four paragraph story about what happened. The only way I know how to approach things is the way I know how to approach things.

What David didn’t say on air until I asked directly: a few years into Volts, he developed severe pain in his wrists and arms. Doctors couldn’t fully diagnose it. The long and short of it — he couldn’t type at length anymore. Which was awkward, as he put it, given that he had just launched a business whose entire income depended on typing to people.

The pivot to podcasting wasn’t a creative choice. It was a medical one. It turned out to be the right one.

You matched your Vox salary in five months. At the time you said everything beyond that was gravy. Does that still hold?

David: It’s all about where you draw the baseline. My wife had a real job and made most of the money in our family for almost all of my career. She quit her job of 26 years earlier this year — it’s her turn to screw around a little bit. She’s working at Mariners Stadium at baseball games, going to Zumba classes, gardening. So all of a sudden my thing is our main income, which puts it in a different light. It still always feels precarious. Everything feels precarious in media these days. It’s working, but it always feels rickety. It always feels like it could get wiped away by whatever next tsunami comes through.

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On Journalism, Glory, and Local Weeklies

I put the hardest question to David near the end. He’d closed his conversation with Paul Krugman on hope — clean energy is a mission, there’s glory to be had, do something that matters. I wanted to know if he believed the same thing about journalism.

Does the same thing hold for journalism right now?

David: That is a tough one. Good journalism is incredibly important and necessary to the proper functioning of a democracy, and it is falling apart everywhere around us. Can I promise glory to people who pursue it? I’m not sure I can. It seems like nothing but doom and misery await people who go into it. What I would say is: try to revive local journalism. Start in your town or your city. Cover city council meetings, zoning, the police union. Local journalism has died on our watch, and to the extent there is any, it’s all owned by Sinclair and is right wing propaganda. That is poisonous. It is poisoning our society. If you want to push back against that, just start in your town and do some journalism where you can make real human contacts and write things that matter for actual human beings who need to know things.

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Stay Tuned for Sunday

One more thing before you go.

David Roberts has spent twenty years covering the infrastructure of energy — the grid, the transmission lines, the systems that power everything you use. It’s what Volts is built on.

I stumbled onto my own version of that story a long time ago without knowing it. Every great shot I tried to take out a car window, driving through the country or across some corner of the world, there was a power line in it. My wife and I used to joke about it. We kept taking pictures and the power lines kept showing up.

This Sunday: the Power Lines photo essay series launches on love, journalism. An accidental archive. Many years of images from around the world. All connected by the same thing running through the frame.

Of course they would be there. They always are.

Today’s edition is about energy and environmental news - and a publication swept up in it, and my career too.

Something important is happening in Washington right now, mostly beneath the surface. E&E News - the trade publication that shaped the first quarter-century of my career - is shutting down, folded into Politico for good.

There’s more coming from me on this in the days ahead — including a conversation with David Roberts of Volts and a live tribute show with old E&E colleagues— and honestly, there’s no better time for it. We’re stepping into the heat of summer, which feels like exactly the season to be talking about energy and environmental news.

It’s not the sexiest name. Environment & Energy Publishing LLC was the name on the door when I first found a little shop at 122 C Street, down the shady street from the U.S. Capitol, nestled around the corner from a bar called Hamilton’s — which may or may not have had anything to do with the founding father — and another known as My Brother’s Place, where generations of Labor Department employees enjoyed a long lunch and good sports-bar company.

E&E bought Greenwire in the final weeks of the Clinton administration, to sit alongside its E&E Daily and Land Letter weekly edition, and they would grow into publishing juggernauts. In no small way, that purchase established the foundation of my career in Washington.

I was among the first people to have worked for E&E News, then Politico, which later bought and is now shutting E&E down, and also Axel Springer, which now owns them both. One built on the other. In some ways, that’s what this story is about.

E&E, at its start, was a couple of guys with a plan: tell one story, and tell it well. ESPN was the model then, maybe CNN too. E&E did what a lot of outlets would eventually do — Politico, Puck, Punchbowl, Axios, The Messenger — and it did it well. I wrote more stories in that decade than I can count. My climate bill coverage was probably the best example of what the job was like. The colleagues around me were specialists — in FERC, in nuclear waste, in energy policy, forestry and fish, the EPA, DOE and if I put a bunch more letters in a row like this - DHGH - you might even think that was one we covered too. Nope, kidding. But you get my drift. That’s a trade reporter joke. See, now you’re in on it too. It was quite a world, and I’m grateful I got to be part of it as long as I could.

I was the first of the E&E crowd to jump to Politico, in 2010, a decade in, right as a major oil spill devastated the gulf and blew a hole in President Obama’s climate plans. My wife and I were going through something serious of our own that year — trying to start a family, and not succeeding — and I turned Politico down. They came back. The decision became clear, and I had to jump. I’d spent a decade writing for an audience that was as sophisticated as one can get. These folks knew their stuff. It also paid really well.

But I wanted more, namely an audience beyond just the folks who could afford such a large paywall. Our work for a brief moment was picked up online in The New York Times through a short-lived partnership. That felt great, but it was weird when readers assumed you wrote for the Times. These were the early Twitter days too, when the best use of the platform was catching lawmakers spilling something they shouldn’t.

I thrived at Politico. It had an early reputation as a climate snowflake when I arrived, and I’d like to think we changed that. I was the first of what became a small army of E&E transplants — the “E&E faction.” I spent the first two years on energy as Politico launched its own paywall service named Pro and took direct competitive aim at E&E News through rapid fire white boards and a drive to drive the conversation as Politico’s founders often said. From there, I broke loose so completely that by the end, only a few people remembered I’d ever covered climate at all.

In 2020, as the pandemic hit and a president faced impeachment, I left Politico for Insider — owned by Axel Springer — to help build a new DC bureau in a world suddenly built on audience and data.

That’s where the fish comes in. While I was at Insider, Politico bought E&E. At the time, Politico’s publisher Robert Allbritton called it a bet on “the story of our generation” — energy and the environment touching “all aspects of the economy and government.” Politico’s editor-in-chief, Matt Kaminski, promised E&E’s team they were “joining a dynamic news organization committed to journalistic excellence and innovation, and to building a great publication.” I watched old friends there get folded into an organization they’d spent years competing against. I described it at the time as my two ex-girlfriends getting together. It was weird enough watching that from the outside — especially knowing Politico Europe was already an Axel Springer joint venture, years before Springer would go on to buy Politico outright. Then it got weirder: Axel Springer, my employer, paid more than $1 billion for Politico. Suddenly I worked for all three — until the day I got deposited on the side of the road.

I’m a proud alum of all of them. I’d like to see them thrive, and I’m sad to watch E&E get put to rest — even as those 2020 promises about “building a great publication” sit strangely next to it now being in its final days. In the coming weeks, I’ll do here what I already did for The Messenger — pay tribute to the family: Greenwire, E&E Daily, E&E News PM edition, ClimateWire, EnergyWire, LandLetter, OnPoint and the Rolling Blackouts. I promise you this much: there’s a lot of good stories coming that you’re going to love — cabinet secretaries, presidents, even Supreme Court justices among them.

Today’s edition is about the day a climate bill collapsed — and the toll of always being reachable, even mid-hike.

The first thing I think of when I think of Lindsey Graham is the worst Appalachian Trail hike I’ve ever been on.

It was a gorgeous April day in 2010. My wife and I were mushroom hunting, searching for fungi on paths only a few people know about — one of her most sacred rituals of the year, and for me, the tagalong, always a good time. We set off early that morning. It takes about an hour to climb, and then once you’re up there, you go foraging. We were most of the way up the mountain.

It was a weekend. I’d been working, working, working — a trade publication reporter for E&E News, covering climate. My BlackBerry stayed at home but I had one of the earliest 2010 iterations of the iPhone with me, the keypad a clumpety-clump-clump monster under your thumbs.

We were climbing up, up, up, when the breaking news hit. A phone call from a source telling me something huge was happening: Lindsey Graham was backing out of the climate negotiations.

Why was that a big deal? Because Lindsey Graham was a vital player in the climate talks of 2010 — a Republican willing to deal at a moment when almost none were. His decision to walk away was basically the beginning of the end of the climate bill. He would argue otherwise. We’ll get to that.

Six months earlier, on October 10, 2009, Graham and John Kerry had sent a shockwave across the climate debate with a joint op-ed in The New York Times — “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation)” — laying out a path forward on a bill President Barack Obama wanted, or at least seemed to want. Three days after it ran, I profiled Graham. He’d spent that summer testing his pitch at South Carolina town halls, and it wasn’t really a climate pitch at all. “You don’t have to be a true believer of drilling offshore or that climate change is real,” he told me. “You’ve just got to be willing to give and take.” He talked about trips to the North Pole and Norway and Alaska with his old friend John McCain. “I’ve been to every cold place that’s not as cold as it used to be,” he said.

McCain was really the one who had mattered here, and McCain was gone. He’d been the Senate’s climate champion for a decade, but after losing to Obama in 2008 and facing his own brutal primary back home in 2010, he’d gone silent on the issue entirely — left it to “two of his closest friends in Washington,” as I wrote at the time, Graham and Joe Lieberman. “He’s like a son to me,” McCain told me that October, happy to cede the spotlight. What that really meant was he wasn’t walking point on climate anymore, and the Republican who was — Graham — was carrying it almost alone.

I was the vote counter, keeping tabs on where senators stood on climate for years by then, going back to the early aughts. Come April 2010, we were publishing my spreadsheet with regular updates, behind the paywall, that I walked around the Capitol marking up and handing to colleagues.

Then the oil spill happened. BP started spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, upending everything Graham had been trying to trade for — more offshore drilling — in the negotiations.

This is the place to explain how it works to be a trade reporter on Capitol Hill. You work inside a pack — mine was the climate pack, and I’d been in it since late 2000. You’re writing forecast story after forecast story, all of it behind a paywall, trying to tell people where a bill is going next, assuming it even has some momentum. You spend your days navigating the tunnels and hallways of the legislative complex searching for the lawmakers who know what is going on and are also game to tell you about it. For climate change, nobody in the Senate — which runs less on rules than the House — actually had that answer for climate change.

Then, right around Earth Day, Harry Reid made some kind of move on immigration. To this day I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. I don’t think Reid’s own staff could have told you. And I know Joe Lieberman, observing the Sabbath, was not spending his Friday night bracing for Harry Reid to throw a grenade into the weekend.

But that’s what Lindsey Graham said happened. He started raging about immigration and insisting the bill was coming because Reid wanted to take it up. And then, on a Saturday, a tip came in via phone from a staffer for another senator while I was half way up a mountain.

I worked the phones while coming down the trail, trying to get confirmation. I remember tromping back down through the woods toward the car, and letting my wife keep going up without me — I felt awful about that, peeling off from her sacred morning to go write a story on a 2010 iPhone with no real keyboard, just clumpety-clump-clump under my thumbs, cutting and pasting sentences together while positioned sitting on a rock, not entirely sure our systems back then were built for breaking news like this.

My full dispatch ran that Monday morning under the headline “Senate sponsors scramble to save energy bill after lost weekend.” Graham had promised, I wrote, to leave President Obama and Senate Democrats standing at the altar — his own words for it were that Reid and the White House were running “nothing more than a cynical political ploy.” Reid tried to intervene by phone Saturday; the call went badly. Kerry and Lieberman scrapped a Monday press conference they’d had planned with business, religious, and military leaders standing behind them. “Am I supposed to write every bill for the whole country?” Graham had said back on Thursday, the day his concerns started boiling over.

The reaction came in fast and unsparing. Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change put it plainly when I asked what it meant if Graham really walked: “Then you’re totally out of it.” Tom Friedman went on CBS that Sunday and didn’t hold back either — Graham had gotten isolated on his own side and “freaked out a little bit here in the end,” he said, and the only winner was Beijing: “they are high-fiving each other.” Obama himself said nothing. He was on a brief weekend holiday in North Carolina, and it was Larry Summers and Carol Browner who spoke for the White House instead.

Weeks later, once he’d fully walked away, I asked Graham about it directly, and he didn’t dress it up. “I really don’t care what people think,” he told me. “I know what I’m capable of doing. I’m not going to do a deal for the hell of it. Why wouldn’t I reevaluate my position after the oil spill?” He was blunter still about the people on the other side of the table: “The problem is the people I did business with, climate change is a religion to them. This has been a business deal for me.” And he was clear-eyed about why Kerry and Lieberman had wanted him in the first place. “If they could have done it without me, they would have,” he said. “The only reason they were dealing with me, there was no one else to deal with. I saw that.”

In the end, Lindsey Graham was the guy who pulled the pin and tossed it. Lieberman groused about getting called back in on the Sabbath. And I got pulled off the Appalachian Trail — which that same season everyone was talking about for an entirely different reason, an entirely different South Carolina politician — to file a story from a mountainside on a phone that could barely keep up with my thumbs.

My wife kept going up. I never did catch up with her that morning.

Today’s edition comes from a recent road trip.

The fireworks had already happened. I came four days later.

Not the Fourth. July 8th and 9th. The bunting is still up, pyros popping in the distance, but otherwise hard to tell anything happened. Steam and humidity. The party's over.

Baltimore is a baseball cathedral.

It also makes a mean breakfast. Bravo to The Blue Moon Cafe. The cinnamon roll French toast arrives like a dare. Icing running, turkey sausage, eggs, coffee. I got through half of it. No Cap’n Crunch — the thing Guy Fieri made famous here almost twenty years ago stayed on the menu, not on my plate. Glad I listened to my server’s recommendation.

I’d travelled my favorite way: off the highway. Route 1, the old road, the one Washington and Jefferson would have gone back and forth on. Google AI narrated. It flagged a vital pitstop of the 18th century. I busted a left on the way home to get the shot.

Fort Look-Out is a different kind of marker. I didn’t go to Fort McHenry. I went to the place built for looking at it — the same rise where a painter stood in 1829 and put the bombardment on canvas, working from memory of a fight he wasn’t old enough to have seen.

The pavilion was empty when I got there. Victorian, overcast, nobody around.

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About a mile-and-a-half from that hill to the ballpark. Two games in under 48 hours. PCA went deep more than once. First pitch got moved to 1:30 p.m. on account of rain. France and Morocco needed the afternoon too.

History everywhere, the trickle of Chicago fans that makes day games special.

Declaring independence 250 years ago started the country’s clock. Now, it feels like any other day in America.

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Manu Raju didn’t want to be the next Anthony Fauci. He was also sure he didn’t want to channel his inner Michael Jordan.

Not where he was standing: On the mound at Wrigley Field, tossing out the first pitch recently before his beloved Chicago Cubs played under the lights against the Colorado Rockies.

“Don’t skip it in front of home plate. That was it,” Manu told The love, journalism Show as the adrenaline had subsided back in Washington.

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I can vouch for Manu’s competitive streak. Back in the George W. Bush era, we used to chase each other for scoops on the environmental beat — long before he was known for his TV interviews on CNN and award-winning reporting from the U.S. Congress.

At POLITICO, we were teammates and I got to see up close his intensity. After publishing one of our first stories together, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry complained about the reporting over his flailing efforts to address climate change. The bill died a month later.

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Manu’s work never slows down. He doesn’t count steps, but he guesses he gets a good seven or eight miles of walking in each day traversing the Capitol grounds and its endless hallways in search of lawmakers.

“The thing about journalism is it always wants more,” Manu said. “No matter how much you give, it wants more and more and more.”

When I asked Manu if journalism loved him back, he said yes — at times. And no more so than when he got to walk out on Wrigley Field, tip his cap and toss a bucket list pitch. Over home plate.

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Two hundred and fifty years ago, America sent a message to the British crown: we’re done.

And for the last seven decades, one woman had a front-row seat to what happened next.

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Queen Elizabeth II met thirteen American presidents — from Harry Truman to Donald Trump. She watched us stumble and recover, overreach and pull back, lead the world and lose the thread. She never said much publicly. But Susan Page spent years finding out what she really thought.

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Susan is the Washington bureau chief of USA TODAY, a former colleague of mine, someone who has covered eight presidential administrations and twelve elections, interviewed ten presidents from Nixon through Trump, and written four New York Times bestselling biographies — Barbara Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Walters, and now The Queen and Her Presidents, which lands just in time for America’s 250th birthday.

On the anniversary of the divorce, I wanted to ask her: what did she see in us?

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July 4, 1996. America turned 220. Somewhere in a server room, Hotmail launched.

I’m pretty sure I was there from the start.

You picked a handle the way you picked a nickname — combining your name, some important numbers, and a silly word from school. Nobody was thinking about professional identity. Nobody was thinking about anything except: is this thing on?

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The first messages were what you’d expect. Mom and dad. A girlfriend. Friends from school checking to see if it worked. Short. Declarative. Slightly amazed. No stamps. It was free.

It wasn’t actually my first email. In the earliest days of the internet, universities gave you a student number and a terminal and something that looked like email if you squinted. Those accounts are gone now, consumed by time and server migrations and general entropy of early digital life.

But Hotmail felt different. Hotmail was yours. You named it. You owned it. And if you were like me, you took it on the road.

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I was in Japan by the fall of 1997, covering my first Olympics for the New York Times. I was filing dispatches back home — to editors, yes, but also to my parents, to friends, to anyone who wanted to know what it was like to be a 22-year-old reporter in a country where he didn’t speak the language and the story was bigger than anything he’d covered before. I was Substacking before Substack.

(You can read more about those dispatches in the Father’s Day essay I published last month — my father kept every one.)

Thirty years later, Hotmail is Outlook. Which is fine. Outlook works. But it’s also where I go to find out if I’m being hacked, or to delete coupons from a restaurant I ate at in 2004.

My first and original Hotmail address is gone, too. Same for the emails that went through it — or most of them. What’s left is the habit it built: the idea that you could write to people, directly, about what you were seeing, and they would read it.

That’s still the whole game.

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There was a stretch when I wasn’t writing much. The journalism industry was unraveling around me - institutions shifting, jobs disappearing, the ground moving under everyone’s feet including mine. I wasn’t sure where I fit in any of it anymore.

And then I came across a book title: Old Friend From Far Away.

Natalie Goldberg. Of course.

I didn’t go looking for her. The title just found me - the way her work always has. And that book became part of how I found my way back to the page. Back to the journals. Back to the practice. And eventually, to this whole thing you’re reading now.

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Thirty years ago, a creative writing teacher handed me another book by Natalie. I’ve never stopped reading it.

Writing Down the Bones turns 40 this year. I’ve given away a couple of my own dog-eared copies over the decades — and I’m apparently not alone, because she has sold millions and gone on to write 16 additional books.

I’ve reached for them at all kinds of moments — when the writing is going well, when it isn’t. When life is going well, when it isn’t. I journaled through love, lost love, new love, looking for love.

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Recently, I sent emails to the contacts listed on her website. A couple bounced. One got through. And a few days later, sitting in my neighborhood at the old Heller’s Bakery location — my phone lit up. Maybe Natalie Goldberg.

The shop was closing around me. I had a beaming smile I couldn’t explain to anyone in the room.

That’s what this episode is. An old friend from far away — finally, in the same room.

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Natalie has popped into my life through the years, though never in person until now. A bridge. I pulled out a journal at the end of our first full conversation. I had to.

It was a hardbound notebook, one I started filling in the mid-90s — a Jack Kerouac illustration on the cover, the kind of object that feels like it was made for a certain version of yourself. I read her the very first lines:

“Take it all in and do it slowly. Now listen up, stupid — look up!”

She didn’t hesitate. “Sweet,” she said. “Especially slow. Have that slowness inside you. That dreamer.”

A few hours later, alone with the journal again, I kept reading. The pages were full of Kerouac and the Dharma Bums, the Beatles, Uncle Tupelo, Jerry Garcia, Chicago. A 20-year-old taking it all in, doing it slowly, looking up.

And then, tucked into that same section, I found it. Lines where I’m trying to make sense of things, scribbling about books and music and whatever was coming next:

“Advice comes in one word bumps... extreme desire to be superlative... very heartwarming and comforting and well written. Why am I so descriptive? It does help.”

It. The book. Her book. Written on those pages 30 years before I ever thought to reach out.

She was always in there. I just didn’t know it yet.

Today’s edition exists because of Writing Down the Bones - a book that’s been with me for 30 years. BONUS: My new conversation with Natalie Goldberg on The love, journalism Show — the author who published this seminal writing guide 40 years ago.

June 27, 2001: Washington — Unusually down. The car needs expensive repairs just to pass DC safety and emissions standards.

Buddhism creeping in.

Friday night. Two gin and tonics. Isolated in the back room of an empty café in Cleveland Park.

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“This is actually not a drill. This is a full fledged loneliness attack.”

“Is my life everything I want it to be? No. I am thrilled with my work. But it ends when I leave the office.”

“Should I give up then? No. Should I rest? Yes. End of fire drill. Feeling much better.”

Twenty-five years ago yesterday. The woman I’d marry was out there somewhere. I had no idea.

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When my dad was around my age, he did something that didn’t have a name yet.

I was fresh out of college, somewhere between lost and launched, and I had pointed myself at Japan. Every few days or weeks I’d fire off an email dispatch to anyone who wanted it — family, friends, whoever gave me their address. It was Substack before Substack. A newsletter before I knew what a newsletter was.

He didn’t just read them. He printed every one. Saved the handwritten letters too — the ones I’d sent airmail from Saitama, Japanese stamps. He put it all in a binder and had it waiting for me when I came home.

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The notebook sits on my desk now. The spine is labeled DARREN, in all caps.

He was keeping the archive before there was anything to archive.

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That’s the thing about my dad. He’s always been a few steps ahead of where I thought I was. As a kid, he waved me away from professional sports like football or golf - my persistent broken bones and wicked slice the evidence he was right. When I wanted to quit in journalism school, he didn’t let me — not with a speech, just with a stubbornness and steadiness that made quitting feel like the wrong option. When I was broke and circling the globe and firing off panicked emails from Bangkok at midnight, he ran the bank balance, sorted out the Japanese check, handled it — and then signed off luv / pops. When I finally landed somewhere and started building something real, he became my most faithful reader.

He reads everything. He always has.

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To the dads out there who pushed their kids toward the dream even when the dream looked like a bad idea. Who showed up quiet when the kid needed loud and loud when the kid needed a lifeline. Who kept the record when the kid was too busy living it to look back.

My dad did all of that. He did it before I knew to say thank you.

Happy Father’s Day.

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When Byron Tau came up through Politico, I was part of his mentorship program. I want to say, for the record, that I’m fairly certain he needed it a lot less than the program assumed he did.

Byron was one of the most confident young reporters I have ever been around. He just seemed to know how to get whatever he needed. And if he couldn’t get it directly, he’d talk his way around it until he did. Young, brash, funny — and with Jennifer Epstein beside him on the White House team, the two of them bickered like siblings and produced like veterans. Being part of that newsroom dynamic was genuinely one of the pleasures of my life on that beat.

I’ve always felt a sense of pride watching him go from that Politico desk to the Wall Street Journal, to NOTUS, and now published author and investigative reporter for the Associated Press. This spring, Byron was part of an AP team that collected the Pulitzer Prize for a global investigation into surveillance tools built in Silicon Valley, refined in China, and quietly brought back home for secret use by the U.S. Border Patrol. The citation called it astonishing. It was.

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Before all of that, Byron waited tables at the Cheesecake Factory on Wisconsin Avenue for nearly two years — getting his master’s degree, collecting internships at Roll Call, the New Republic, the National Journal’s Hotline — working his way toward a job that didn’t exist yet in a city that wasn’t ready to hire him. That’s the origin story. He got to Politico, got under Ben Smith’s wing, learned to be fast, learned to monitor everything, learned how a well-regarded reporter manages sources without getting spun. And then he was off.

In this episode, we talk about what it was like to cover Barack Obama as a 26-year-old with a White House credential and the nerve to use it. We talk about the surveillance reporting — how it started with a tip about the border region, how it built through litigation records and a motorist from Houston who’d filed a lawsuit, how the Border Patrol all but confirmed the story before it ran. We talk about mentorship, and Byron is honest about it: the stubborn streak, the self-made impulse, the things he might have taken more of if he hadn’t been so determined to figure it out alone. “You were always there as a resource,” he told me. “I probably could have just used you a little bit more.”

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I’ll take it.

And then I asked him what a Pulitzer actually changes.

“The work is still the work,” he said. “Prizes are nice, but it’s not the reason we do this. The reason we do this is to tell stories that are important to the public and to hold powerful institutions accountable when they let down the people they’re supposed to serve.”

I didn’t teach him that. But I’m glad he knows it.

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We close with Current Events — the segment where guests quiz me on the week’s news, knowing full well I’ve gone from consuming everything to reading the print Washington Post and whatever I overhear during the day. Seth Kaplan got me. Neetzan got me. Byron had the decency to go local.

Guests lead, three to nothing.

Press play.

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This is one of those journalism stories that feels like magic. Spoilers: it wasn’t. But it does involve Disney World.

Cut to December 2025. My wife and I are on a Florida vacation, and Disney World is a must. I hadn’t been to Orlando in 32 years since my high school senior year, back when the Sunshine State had a weird tradition of letting graduating seniors roam the Magic Kingdom overnight. Now, as childless Gen X politics and policy nerds, we were genuinely pumped for the Hall of Presidents. Bonus: there was no line.

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Inside the dark, air-conditioned theater, I felt a wave of patriotism watching the historical film before the curtains rose on the animatronic, Chuck E. Cheese-style presidential robots. But my patriotism turned into professional pride when I heard one specific line - a quote I had a direct hand in making happen.

If you aren’t paying close attention, you might miss it. Right before the robot roll call, a montage of recent presidents’ voices echoes through the theater with their most famous soundbites. You hear JFK’s “ask not,” Reagan’s “tear down this wall,” and George W. Bush’s post-9/11 bullhorn speech.

Last is Barack Obama, whose entire eight-year term boiled down to this:

“Loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America.”

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The nation’s first Black president didn’t just pull those words out of thin air when he delivered his historic Selma speech marking 50 years since Bloody Sunday. And that is where I come in.

Let’s rewind to February 2015 on a brisk Ash Wednesday in New York City. I was on assignment for Politico Magazine, writing a profile on conservative economist Stephen Moore. My editors wanted a piece on the policy wonks trying to land jobs with the emerging 2016 GOP presidential candidates.

That night, I tagged along with Moore to an exclusive dinner at the 21 Club that he was co-hosting. About 60 right-leaning executives and conservative media types packed the room to hear from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker - then a GOP frontrunner. But the night took a wildly dramatic turn thanks to a late-minute addition: Rudy Giuliani.

Without warning, the former New York mayor crashed the private second-floor room and took the mic. My tape recorder was running as he meandered through topics before taking a sharp turn into Obama’s patriotism.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

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Remember, this was early 2015. Donald Trump hadn’t even ridden his golden escalator yet. Outright questioning a sitting president’s love for his country was a massive story. My 593-word scoop went viral overnight. By morning, Giuliani was defending himself on Fox News, and literally everyone in politics was weighing in. Saturday Night Live even used it for their Cold Open.

I thought that was the end of it.

Fast forward to 2023. An Obama spokesperson told me I needed to read Grace, a memoir by former White House speechwriter Cody Keenan. In it, I finally learned what happened behind the scenes six weeks after my scoop dropped.

Keenan was struggling to find the right emotional anchor for Obama’s upcoming speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When a late-winter snowstorm shut down D.C., Keenan found himself trapped in the White House with rare, unfettered access to the president.

In a 2023 interview on The love, journalism Show, Keenan explained his secret weapon for inspiring the boss: “I always found that a good way to kind of shake loose some emotion from him is to get him all hopped up on, you know, whatever the political idiocy of the day was.”

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Enter my Politico article.

According to the book, Obama initially brushed it off: “Who gives a fuck what Rudy Giuliani has to say?” But then, the bait clicked. “But it does offer an idea worth taking on,” Obama added.

Which brings us right back to Disney World.

Obama’s Selma speech lasted over 30 minutes, and he later called it one of the most important addresses of his presidency. It’s so big, in fact, that the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago that opens on Friday has other pieces of that massive Selma speech engraved in stone on the building’s facade overlooking the Windy City and Lake Michigan.

Back in central Florida, out of all the words Obama spoke in Selma, Disney’s curators chose the exact line he wrote to rebuke Rudy Giuliani and the conservative media machine. It’s been playing on loop in the attraction through Trump 1.0, Joe Biden, and now Trump 2.0. A long-forgotten news cycle lives on.

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The first thing I heard was a garbled bark. I couldn't tell if he was yelling at a source, a colleague or his computer. I walked through the glass doors on Day 1 at USA TODAY and there he was — hunched behind his desk, head so low I could only see the top of his white hair over the monitor. That was my introduction to DJ.

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He was on everything after that. He wanted to be the lead reporter on every story. We had to give other people opportunities — that was the job — but he was there on the Trump guilty verdict, there on the Saturday when Trump was shot, shouting to our newsroom before most people had even picked their phones up. “Somethiung has happened in Pa …. shots maybe.” That was DJ — first, fast, and fully himself.

A few weeks in, I had him and a couple of other reporters over to our house for a barbecue. We hit it off over his South Carolina connection with my wife. That was when I started to see him past the bark. The person underneath it.

My job after that was often trying to get him to slow down. Stop filing into the evening. He didn’t need to cover every rally. He’d seen his share, more than his share, every president from Clinton to Trump. He sometimes heard me. He’d go home. Sometimes he’d just walk around the block, perhaps waiting me out.

When he retired in January 2025, he told me we’d see each other down the roads. I wrote back that I was sure we would. And we did — drinks at PJ Clarke’s, a Christmas party, him telling me about the travels he was finally getting to take.

Last September, I checked in and got a reply back: “OK - waiting for the rain to stop at Nats Park.”

December 2, 2025. 11:25 p.m. I texted him: “Great to see you last night! We missed you for the Cheney funeral. Enjoy your next trip.” He read it the next morning.

It was our last exchange.

David Jackson died April 22, 2026. He was 66. He covered the White House for USA TODAY for more than two decades. He was curmudgeonly and rumpled and relentless, and once he trusted you, all of that melted. I was his last editor. I didn’t try to change him. I just tried to keep up.

Godspeed, my friend. We’ll see each other down the roads.

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I kept a journal through most of my year in Japan. 1997 into 1998. Teaching English for NOVA, living in Urawa, commuting twelve stations each way to Kumagaya.

Some entries are about the work. Some are about a girlfriend back in the States. Some are just — watching. A park. A Saturday. The wind.

This one is from July 18, 1998. I was 23. I’d been trying to quit smoking.

—

July 18, 1998 · Kita Urawa Park

The heavy wind blew sand in the air and caused mild havoc for several of the picnickers. As beverages added new flavors to the earth’s surface and moms chased runaway napkins instead of children, one mommy and daughter walked through the park on an easy late Saturday stroll.

They had been shopping, you’d imagine, because the young girl — maybe six, judging by height — carried two department store bags slung in her right arm behind her neck. As if she was trying a new triceps weight exercise or scratching the back of her left shoulder.

Her mom, a seasoned veteran in such maneuvers, walked in the same manner with her orange leather purse in her right hand. Daughter had watched mom do this. Emulating her seemed second nature.

Many more folks crossed the same path. The wind died down. A young twenties man sat against a tree contemplating everything in the midst of his 16th hour without a cigarette.

— Darren Samuelsohn, Japan, 1998

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love, journalism runs on passion. It always has. But if these dispatches mean something to you — if you want to keep the archive coming, keep the show going, keep the whole thing alive — there’s a paid tier. I’m not asking for a lot. Just enough to know this matters to more than just me.

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Neetzan Zimmerman stayed on camera for another 30 minutes after we wrapped the main episode — and said something a lot of people in journalism know but won’t say out loud: “People like to read low as much as they like to read high. The answer is to have both.”

The former editor of the internet argues the media industry didn’t fail because audiences wanted trash. It failed because the people who took over stopped believing in the high entirely. “We’ve done away with the high completely, because the people who have taken over are only interested in the low. And that’s where we ended up.”

He also reflects on what it means now to traffic in paperbacks, vinyl, and VHS at The Newsagent’s after years of engineering virality online.

“Spending time with something means developing a relationship with it, developing feelings towards it,” he said. “I think we are losing something when we can’t spend the time to really appreciate the culture we’re consuming these days.”

The paid section of our chat is where it gets personal — what it meant to be genuinely great at a job that eventually breaks you, and what he said when I asked if journalism loved him back.

The first 15 minutes are free. The rest is for paid subscribers. It’s worth it.

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Neetzan Zimmerman — for paid subscribers

What it cost him, and what he said when I asked if journalism loved him back

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The last time Neetzan Zimmerman was on The love, journalism Show, The Messenger was collapsing around us in real time. That was February 2024. He was one of the last guests I had before the show went quiet for two years.

A lot has happened since then.

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Neetzan was once known as the Editor of the Internet — literally, that was his title at Gawker. He had a gift for understanding what people would click on before they knew it themselves. In November 2013, his posts alone drove 17.3 million unique visitors to Gawker. More than every other writer on staff combined.

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Today he and his wife Yulia Shamis run The Newsagent’s — a bookshop, coffee bar, and event space at 228 Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Used paperbacks. Vinyl. VHS tapes. Vintage magazines. No Wi-Fi. No Google. No notifications. Just artifacts and the people who love them.

He put it this way: “The internet is everything now. The goal is to log off. Where is the exit?”

The Newsagent’s is his answer.

We talked about The Messenger’s collapse, the move to Raleigh, his store’s quirks, what he misses about journalism, and whether he’d ever come back. We also played a game — I’ll let you find that part yourself.

This is exactly the kind of love, journalism story this show was built for.

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My workstation at the end looked like this: three monitors including my laptop. Inside each monitor, more tabs than I could count. Teams active at all hours. Email loaded with Reuters alerts on every Trump mention. A five-column TweetDeck. A four-screen Google TV live news feed on my iPad. My phone for when the computers slowed down.

Then it all stopped.

I never had a job like my last one. As my role expanded — ultimately to include the White House — so did everything that came with it. The screens weren’t vanity. They were the job. Managing a team chasing the biggest story in the country means you need the full view, all the time. Pirate ship. Flying the Millennium Falcon. Offensive coordinator. I’ve used all three metaphors to describe what it felt like from the inside.

White House editor is one of the hardest jobs in Washington. The next deadline never stops. The competition never sleeps. The algorithms don’t care how tired you are. I’d done versions of it before as a reporter — at Politico, during the 2012 campaign, the Mueller investigation, the first impeachment. That stretch put me in the hospital. I came back. I got better. Then I did it again.

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I found the right help. I wish I’d asked for it sooner.

Still — the fire shrunk. That’s the only way I know how to say it. The fire to chase the story, to be in the middle of it all, every day, all the time. It got quieter. My body said park it. Get off the screens. Get off the news. And this time I listened.

The detox was real. Twitter gone. Facebook gone. News intake reduced to something that would have looked familiar to a person from 1995 — reading the actual print newspaper. A newsman going back to newsprint.

What followed was something I’m still taking stock of. Daily journaling. Naps. Rest. Untangling the garden hose, which is what I call the slow work of getting your head and body back. A family cruise with more than two dozen people — three generations, custom shirts and hats. Then Scotland. Thirteen rounds of golf at twelve courses over three weeks. I learned about the shooting at the White House correspondents dinner the following morning, from a friend in Missouri.

Japan is coming. The first time back since 1998.

I’ve been reading old journals. Decades of them. Young Darren moves in the right directions but doesn’t know so many things yet. The value of rest. How to maintain health. How to nurture the relationships that matter. Reading him now, knowing how it all turned out, is something I don’t have all the words for yet.

What I do have is this: three years ago, journalism fired me. And I named this thing love, journalism anyway. At the time I thought I was being defiant. Now I think I was being accurate.

Journalism loved me back. Like any relationship though — it was on its own terms.