Today is the 118th birthday of the oldest journalism school in the world — Mizzou's, September 14, 1908. So there was only one person to call: Sandy Davidson, my law professor from the School of Journalism, and for three decades the attorney for the Columbia Missourian.

Sandy Davidson taught me the Missouri Method’s core premise: students learn journalism by doing it, not by reading about it. That hasn’t changed since 1908 — except for everything around it.

She was blunt about the moment we’re in: “The First Amendment is taking a battery right now.”

We got into what’s actually protecting journalists today, and the honest answer might be: not much. Reporters subpoenaed within 48 hours of a leak. DOJ skipping its own guidelines. Forty states have shield laws — Missouri isn’t one of them.

Then there’s the harder question underneath all of it: who even counts as a journalist anymore?

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The Supreme Court punted on defining it back in 1972. Sandy calls what’s happened since “asymmetrical journalism” — the same shift that let cheap drones take on billion-dollar armies has let anyone with a laptop take on billion-dollar newsrooms. Wimbledon just barred influencers after chaos at the US Open. Her take: institutions can set standards, but nobody’s found a principle that actually holds up — everyone’s just making the rules up as they go, tennis courts and political conventions alike.

We talked about the New York Times’ first defamation loss in fifty years — a single anonymous source, $9.25 million — and what that should teach student reporters about single-source stories. We talked about local news deserts, and what actually disappears when nobody’s covering the city council meeting anymore. And she answered a question from one of my fellow Mizzou classmates now teaching high school journalism in South Florida — a nice full-circle moment from our pen and paper note-taking days in Gannett Hall.

Sandy and I have stayed close through the years. She’s been a teacher and adviser long after my graduation. Recently, I shared the work I’ve been doing via love, journalism. “For me, it’s love truth. Is the love of truth slipping?” she replied, setting the stage well for this episode.

Today’s entry is from my notebook, written on Sept. 11, 2001: I’m 26. A reporter covering the energy and environmental beat. That morning I was supposed to be staking out a closed-door Senate summit on pollution standards. None of that happened.

Unbelievable. Unthinkable. Astonishing. Heartbreaking.

What words can be used to explain, express, fathom the events of the last six hours? At least four US commercial planes were apparently hijacked this morning — each crashed in kamikaze style. The two World Trade Center buildings in New York City are destroyed, collapsing to the earth. The Pentagon too has been hit, and another plane was apparently ditched in rural western Pennsylvania. It is not known how many people are dead and injured.

Washington, DC looks like a city under siege. At least for now, all federal buildings are closed. The Lincoln Memorial is surrounded by white ropes, backed nearly a mile. People are wandering around with cameras. Television reporters and producers stand in large droves at important vantage points. Horses. Police. Sirens. Fire engines. The smattering romantic couple sit with legs interlocked. People in suits and ties wander obliviously — a free day off when it was not expected.

Trying to comprehend the day’s events, it’s exhausting. Why? Why now? What are the implications? Are we going to retaliate? Go to war? What does this do to everything that was happening in the world?

I’m exhausted. Today has felt like Pearl Harbor Day, Columbine, Challenger.

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Then i wrote a few poems:

Great white puffy clouds hang in the air like powder —
oblivious to the havoc below.
Sky high, arching through at sonic speed,
piercing nature to a target in the distance
like a dragon.

“This looks like a quiet place to study,”
says the man with the girl walking the dog.

Everything seems ironic, monumental, significant. The story behind the story — the human face, the emotions of a TV cameraman, what is not spoken in the moment, or maybe what is — its meaning important because it will be the memory.

another:

US flags have been lowered to half mast around the Washington Monument.
They rattle and whip in the wind.
The winding of the camera after a picture is taken —
one of thousands —
capturing the memorial immortal
on a day of vulnerability.

one more:

Motorcades, no-go zones, half-mast flags,
smoky reminders of a building —
six billion eyes on it.
Traffic, official badges, the scoop —
nothing else to even consider.

and some more descriptions:

People are walking around the Mall solo, aimlessly scratching their heads, looking about, stopping and sharing their thoughts with strangers. They look like zombies. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my life. It’s an absolutely beautiful late summer day — sunshine, breeze blowing, nearly all off work. We just experienced a terrorist attack unlike Oklahoma City or the previous World Trade Center bombing. It’s hard to fathom.

The rumors of the day: bombs exploded at the State Department and Capitol, the National Mall. Planes crashed near Chicago and Camp David.

That’s all I wrote there that day in a spiral notebook on a bench on the Mall.

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On the night of December 12, 2021, another bar regular looked at Taylor Six and said something that changed the trajectory of her life. What was it, and why did it land the way it did?

Love, journalism readers got to meet Taylor earlier this week in our inaugural guest essay: You Are Not Alone. She’s the founder of the Journalists Recovery Network, and so it made sense to tape our podcast for National Recovery Month.

Both of us hope sharing what Taylor has built can help even one person.

It’s a powerful story: award-winning journalist by day, closing down the bar by night. Two versions of the same person coexisting, a fear of someone confronting her directly. We talked about battling addiction and the journalism identity, as well as the moment in recovery where identity starts loosening its grip.

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Taylor’s group works with journalists across the recovery spectrum - sober, sober-curious, still figuring it out. She takes solace in her views of “enmeshment” - the way the job stops being what you do and becomes who you are.

“I can't overstate just like how freeing that was to know that that was actually something that was out there that explained so much of how I was feeling for years,” she said.

Taylor built the Journalists Recovery Network out of the 2023-24 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. She described the moment she realized journalists specifically needed something different; and what she tried before finding success leading a group that doesn’t promote any single method of sobriety.

As Taylor put it near the end of our conversation: “It’s okay to share our stories to make this field better for journalists who bravely continue to come into this field.”

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I’ll never forget my first day at Politico. “Welcome to the NFL,” Mike Allen said upon spotting me.

We were soon co-bylining morning newsletters as oil spilled in the gulf, building policy credibility and my boss introducing me as the “Mike Allen of energy.”

We reported scoops together. Here’s a fun video of Mike nudging me to describe how U.N. climate conferences always made me come home sick and predicting how much the 2015 Paris talks would be remembered beyond Obama’s presidency.

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Finally, I got to interview Mike for The love, journalism Show. We covered his journey from Politico to Axios and those thousand-word-morning-inbox-stuffers that helped make him famous before launching Smart Brevity and now his new book: Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less.

Co-authored by Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, this is their attempt to apply that same “do the work for the reader” instinct to life. Confront. Delete. Amplify.

We covered a lot on the show. How he says “no” and tries to structure his Sundays. In Mike’s words, AI is “the greatest complexity generating machine in the history of humanity.” He shared his guide on how to make it work for you, instead of against you. We explored the three tectonic shifts he sees reshaping politics, technology, and reality itself. And whether the pre-9/11 version of journalism was simpler by default, or if 9/11 exposed a failure of imagination we still haven’t fixed.

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This one closes where we started. I asked Mike the question I ask everyone: has journalism loved him back? “Oh, the greatest life,” he said.

Sixteen years after “welcome to the NFL” — still true. Still in love with the game.

Taylor and I also taped an upcoming episode of The love, journalism Show. You’ll want to stay tuned for that. - Darren

Nearing the end of 2021, I was coming to the realization I wanted to do something different with my drinking and drug use. There was a constant, nagging feeling that something I kept getting away with was going to result in my name splattered across headlines announcing I died, killed someone, or ended up in jail.

And it would be one of my coworkers writing the story.

I was living a double life for years as an award-winning journalist by day, and a down-bad drunk at night. A heavy weight sat on my shoulders as I constantly looked over them with the fear of being caught. Even worse, I thought someone would try to confront me about my drinking. I worked long hours at my local newspaper, and even longer hours when I shut down the bar each night in a drunken stupor.

But on the night of December 12, 2021, another bar regular looked at me and said, “You think you are special because of what you do for work, but you are just an alcoholic and addict like the rest of us.”

I went into Alcoholics Anonymous the next day and later discovered I had an identity problem. Instead of journalism being my job and something I was passionate about, it was my entire identity. Trying to grapple with the idea that I was just a human being that also struggled with addiction was hard and took me years to actually confront and accept about myself. Even more personal, it was easier to let people get to know me as “the journalist” than it was for them to actually know me as a person (yuck). But truth be told, I didn’t know myself as a person.

As I was going through my program, I felt alone and isolated with misguided thoughts that no other journalist ever dealt with something like this before. Man, what a false idea that was.

In 2024, I launched the Journalists Recovery Network, now a non-profit that supports journalists struggling with alcohol and substances or are in recovery. My initial idea was to let other people know that they weren’t alone if they decided they wanted to get help.

What was wonderful about my expectation, was that it only scratched the surface of what I would learn; including how many journalists and media workers live with addiction everyday and navigate this industry.

As part of creating the Journalists Recovery Network I’ve had the incredible opportunity to meet other journalists in recovery who are essential to my support system in the industry and staying sober.

As a group we have attended conferences, spoken on panels, and we offer a community of like-minded individuals as a means of support. We do not promote any form or method of sobriety, and some of our group’s members are not sober. Simply put: The group is there for you if you want support and can connect you with existing resources.

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I’ve learned that other journalists struggle with the same problems I did. They think they are alone or they don’t know how to have boundaries with work to the point it’s enmeshed in their life. This industry itself can be like an addiction – all consuming and detrimental to our wellbeing.

But I have been taught there are other journalists who struggle with experiences that I didn’t. Some don’t know how to interact with sources after getting sober. Some are weary of booze-heavy conferences. Many of us don’t possess positive coping mechanisms that promote a good work-life balance.

We hope other journalists know about our group so if they, or a coworker, need support, they can certainly reach out. Even if they don’t, I just hope that other journalists who may be struggling with alcohol or substances know that they aren’t alone.

Today, I am defined by much more than my job. I am defined by more than my addiction. I am a fiancé, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mentor and friend. I love to cook, bake, read, sew, and garden.

Above all else, I have learned I am a human being, too.

Taylor Six is founder of the Journalists Recovery Network and a crime and courts reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader.

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Featured today: airplane delays and sloppy handwriting. From my new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy.

Hard rock, ‘cause there wasn’t much else but Chick-fil-A or expensive Chinese food. Delayed American, again, two hours, then canceled and redirected without asking, to Miami. Okay, bar fajitas. A hundred dollar tab for two Negronis, too. Tatted fed waiting for daughter. She disses the bartender for reccing the original Hooters. Not much else in Clearwater — I mention it’s home of Hulk Hogan and the Scientologist. She rolls her eyes. I know. I got stuck there during concrete snow this February. Helping mom — the Mom Express, kids helping parents. Then two guys see my journal, ask me to move my bags. Excited. Who still does this, one of them asks? The other, smack, at the sight: “What’s that chicken scratch?” #30#

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August has always been slow — the news goes quiet, vacations, kids head back to school, and for a few weeks the whole country seems to exhale. This month I wanted to hand you something different during that lull: poems. A palate cleanser, one a day, pulled straight from the new book. I’ll admit sharing them felt a little scary — this isn’t the beat you signed up for. But that was sort of the point.

In between poems, I stood outside the National Archives and watched the Indy cars buzz past — self-appointed sentinel duty, making sure no one crashed into the Constitution or the Declaration. A strange, good way to spend a loud weekend.

Wednesday night was the National Press Club’s journalism awards dinner, in a building marking 100 years in 2027. Watching this year’s honorees do the kind of work I once strove to do myself — it’s the reason I keep showing up for this Substack, and for the Press Club board chair role too.

Coming this September:

It’s National Recovery Month, and we’ll spend some of it on journalists who struggle with substance abuse — building the kind of support network our industry doesn’t talk about enough. Mike Allen joins to talk about his new book on work-life balance. And with Labor Day here, the politics hat goes back on: a groundbreaking former Senate chair, journalism educators, and more, all looking ahead to the midterms.

Thank you for indulging the poems. Back to the regular beat soon.

Today’s day four from my new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy. Yes, it does feel strange sharing poems.

A brain empty already by five thirty AM. Bugs aren’t even yet buzzing. The mosquitoes leave no change. Here I show off what’s happening. No idea tomorrow what I said today. This never ever happened. I can say I won’t remember, and nor should you — like a dream, like a road on vacation. Maybe this is what they say it is.

#30#

Today’s day three from the new book: Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven — Subscribe now for a limited edition analog copy. Now get ready for some shim-shimmying.

Little Laughs of Recognition

When the words suddenly come and know too where they’ll land, you can do tight leg tucks and shimmy, shimmy, bang, bang. Because the freedom comes in these kinds of moves where form rewards tightness. Mind over matter and promises of firsts ahead. Little layers of success, little layers of certainty. When the landing is right there in sight, hunger in the morning gut, hunger in the head when birds, morning, sing, and I delight in the little laughs of recognition.

#30#

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Paid subscribers: I need your mailing address to get your signed, numbered copy of Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven on its way. Reply to this email with it and it goes out with the next batch.

Not paid yet? Copies are still left from this 100-copy run. 35% off through Labor Day if you want in.

I wrote this series one morning not long after helping my mom deal with some life stuff.

Everywhere, Moms Sigh, So Heavenly

Pinch deep down in the side of your ankle, above the bone, in the muscle. Squeeze carefully both sides. Hold tight and feel — oof. Good oozes of sunrise. Blue day starting. Those joyous first birds wake and sing songs of great days to come. Move the feet and start to shake free. Eat breakfast. You deserve ground coffee. Moms take care of such things. Moms look out for their kids. I love my mom, I love so much. Everywhere, moms sigh, so heavenly.

#30#

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Paid subscribers: I need your mailing address to get your signed, numbered copy of Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven on its way. Reply to this email with it and it goes out with the next batch.

Not paid yet? Copies are still left from this 100-copy run. 35% off through end of August if you want in.

My first book arrived last week. This poem is where it started — the one that gave the whole collection its name.

One page, one sitting. The title’s chosen before you start writing. The trick is finding where it actually belongs in the piece.

Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven

Declarations of donut independence. Rise up and do justice to the doughy compartments of endless fudge and life and grins into a rhyme of cereals and commercials. I’m so sorry childhood ever ends. And please, god, let there be a bowling alley in heaven.

#30#

Paid subscribers: I need your mailing address to get your signed, numbered copy on its way. Reply to this email with it and it goes out with the next batch.

Not paid yet? Copies are still left from this 100-copy run. 35% off through Labor Day if you want in.

Paid subscribers will receive a copy of Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven - sign up now to get yours from the first printing before they are gone.

Three-plus years ago, journalism fired me. I named this thing love, journalism anyway. I knew I was being defiant. Now I think I was also being accurate.

Some news first: I’ve just been appointed chairman of the National Press Club’s Board of Governors. And my first-ever book — a small collection called Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven— has arrived. We launched Valentine’s Day 2023 and didn’t really mark the three-year point when it passed. So let’s mark this one.

If you’re a paid subscriber, a copy’s coming your way. I have a limited edition of 100. Be among them: subscribe soon, and if enough of you want one and we run out, we’ll see about getting another batch.

This isn’t the first thing I’ve ever published. Readers of Season One already know “The Alaskan Chocolate Oil Spill” — one in a series of stories I wrote in eighth grade, 1989, complete with a UPC barcode I drew on myself in magic marker. There’s another batch or two of stories from around that same era I’m still deciding whether the world needs to see. Probably not. Some things can stay in the notebook.

Because that’s where all of this actually started, in notebooks. I’ve been a writer since before I can remember. One has drawings of NFL quarterbacks I did as a kid. Some are from Japan. I wrote to impress my family. I ran for prom king by scribbling the first drafts of my column in them. I wrote to get things out, the way Natalie Goldberg taught a generation of us to. Going back to it with love, journalism wasn’t reinvention. It was a logical place to land again.

I didn’t know, back then, that I’d bounce in and out of this three separate times. This has been the longest stretch I’ve managed to keep the Substack going. The original intention was always that this could also become memoir material, and that’s further along now than when I first said it out loud. “Love, journalism” gave me a theme I didn’t know I was looking for.

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Here’s the sharper version of it, three and a half years on: I launched this to find out whether journalism was ever going to love me back. But I think the real answer is that this whole thing has been journalism's love letter to me — quietly telling me I was alright, even in the moments it had just dumped me.

As this latest relaunch took form, I started thinking of my lifelong passion for writing as something that’s been happening just beneath the surface. A visit to New Lanark in Scotland illustrated it better than I could imagine- always there, moving, doing work. Time now to build some infrastructure.

Hemingway said it better than I can: “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.” That’s the whole operating principle of this publication named out loud.

Finding great joy in trying to live in Hemingway time instead of daily journalism time — mornings for writing, afternoons for living. Minus the boxing. Open to some of the fishing.

Message Darren Samuelsohn

Love, journalism has been catching people’s attention, too. The National Press Club Journalism Institute ran a piece on burnout a while back and quoted me saying it plainly: “Anything but journalism is going to make you a better journalist.” And: “Mental health is health.” Those are my own words, coming back around.

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And here’s one I’m genuinely proud of. I’ve been a member of the National Press Club for most of my time in Washington — busy enough, most of those years, that volunteering wasn’t really an option. That changed coming out of 2022-2023, when I took on a leadership role with the professional development team, launched a mentorship program, and ran for the board last fall. Nine months after that, I’m chairman — and chairman of the ethics committee too. I’m excited to represent independent journalists and Substackers there — a whole group who’s been trying, for a long time, to be seen and heard. Though let’s not pretend the medium itself is new. I.F. Stone was doing this decades before any of us — a one-man newsletter, no institution behind him, just the work. Substack didn’t invent this. It just gave it a new name and a mailing list.

David Allen — a Season One guest — told me once: “The muse is fickle. She comes in and then goes out. If you don’t grab it while it’s there, good luck. She’ll go find somebody else to give that to.”

There’s more coming. Thirty-plus years of notebooks. One memoir taking shape in public. Get in early.

#30#

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Back in 2013, fresh off covering the Obama reelection race, I got a new beat at Politico. My bosses let me tap one of my strengths. I got into the guts of politics by reporting and writing how campaigns were using technology, data, and messaging to reach voters in totally new ways.

That beat gave me some of my favorite stories. “They Like Me, They Really Like Me,“ about Ed Gillespie’s near-upset of Sen. Mark Warner, built around Facebook and Virginia voters’ preference for Buffalo Wild Wings. And The Viagra vote? — political campaigns wanting to know absolutely everything about the people they were targeting, supplements included.

In 2016, that same beat led me to a different story: a nephew and an uncle who stopped speaking to each other over Facebook. Brent Blackaby and Phillip Mullard had survived decades of political disagreement until Donald Trump broke something. A year later their online fight became the basis for a national Sprint commercial.

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Somewhere inside the building where all that arguing lived, Katie Harbath was trying to figure out what to do about people like Brent and Phil. She’d joined Facebook in 2011, built the team that ran elections work across the globe, and stayed through the decade the company spent reckoning with what it had built. Rising through the ranks, Katie rubbed elbows with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and many world leaders eager to use the latest tools to win or hold onto political power.

I finally got her on The love, journalism Show this week, and it did not disappoint. We opened with a line from her new book: when people leave jobs, we don’t talk enough about the loss of community that comes with it, especially when the departure is sudden.

We also talked about the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign in 2008, before “social media strategist” was even a job title. She recounted a night at a Ritz-Carlton bar in January 2020 where she started mapping out the scale of what 2024 was going to look like — and about January 6th, watching two institutions that shaped her life come apart in the same afternoon. We talked about burnout, about companies not loving you back, about deplatforming Trump in 2021 and believing that letting him back on in 2023 was right too.

Her new book, Disrupting Politics, comes out October 6th. It resists the easy version of her own story — aka the “villain at Facebook” — without letting anyone, including herself, entirely off the hook. That tension is the whole book, and it’s the whole conversation.

A quick behind-the-scenes note: we hit a few technical glitches this week — turns out coffee and a laptop don’t go well together — which meant I had to MacGyver my way through producing this entire episode on an iPad. Learned a lot. We got there.

Full episode is up now.

This one is about why it’s better to cheer for your team than cover them, especially when they roll in your adopted hometown.

Two outs, top of the ninth at Nationals Park. We were losing 7-0, their starting pitcher and reliever combining on a one hitter and ready to end it.

“Let’s...go...Cubbies,” I belted to a beltway crowd that didn’t seem that interested in their incoming win, or even standing up to root for the home team.

It’s one of the joys of not being a sportswriter anymore. Up in that great big press box in the stadium sky, reporters get fed statistics and soft serve. But they cannot cheer.

As a kid, sports was the place I wanted to be most. I wore a pinstriped home uniform to my first Wrigley Field game and sat next to my first drunk person when the Miami Dolphins beat the Chicago Bears at the Orange Bowl during a 1985 Monday Night Football game. I collected autographs at PGA events and baseball card shows.

Journalism brought sports to life, and those press boxes became my first writing studios for school papers and a couple of city ones, too. The laptops we used in those days are legends, just like hometown heroes Edwin Pope and Dave Hyde.

At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, credentialed as a “technician” for The New York Times, I penned a brief about staying in a capsule hotel and then bunked in the media village with George Vecsey and Jeré Longman. Dave Barry told me jokes while Mitch Albom introduced me to someone you’ll meet later who’s become a lifelong friend.

To the chagrin of teenage Darren and a few family members, I puttered out on sports journalism. I’d taken a big swing in college on a story about my school’s star cornerback with a history of domestic violence that got recognized far and wide but propelled me away from the beat’s routine of previews, features and gamers.

I said then I wanted to write about things more serious, and so freelanced from Tokyo for a Grateful Dead fan magazine and landed in the Pacific Northwest with assignments covering national parks, salmon fishing and Bigfoot.

It also meant I could go back to just being a sports fan. I timed a cross country move for a pitstop in Indianapolis to sneak into a Dolphins game with the halftime smokers. Bless one of my Politico editors during the 2016 election who was a Yankees fan and so understood the need to drop everything for a 30-hour road trip to Cleveland to punch my standing room only ticket for World Series Game 7.

And it paved the way for this past week’s latest detour. No longer a sports writer. On the sidelines from daily journalism, and with free time to catch all three Cubs games in Washington, followed by Miami opening its NFL preseason with Friday night lights.

I am among the miserable fans who love my hometown team so much that I’ll take public transit two hours round trip to a suburban stadium to watch guys I’ve never heard of compete for a spot on a roster that prognosticators say is probably going to suck. Their efforts meant nothing for the record books, but I still stood up during the final minutes cheering for one final touchdown even though the coaches cared more about no one getting hurt, rather than trying to win the game.

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Roger Pielke Jr. has been called a lot of things over the past two decades: misleading, inconvenient, a "cottage industry" unto himself, even Voldemort. He’s made it work, too.

In our conversation the University of Colorado professor turned Substack heavyweight (40,000+ subscribers, 174 countries) walked me through how he built a new public dashboard tracking U.S. extreme weather — heat waves, hurricanes, floods, drought, wildfire — after the Trump administration pulled the U.S. government’s climate indicators offline. He did it solo, using Claude, in a couple of weeks. A global version is next. He no longer has a research assistant.

We revisited March 2006, the month he won a National Academy of Sciences award for showing that rising disaster costs were about more people and property in harm’s way — not worse storms. Two months later, An Inconvenient Truth came out with a hurricane on the poster, and extreme weather became, in his words, “the face of climate change” almost overnight.

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His work didn’t fit a narrative. He named names on what came next: a 2014 campaign — he says organized in part by Michael Mann and the Center for American Progress — that got him pushed out of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.

Congress investigated him. He’s testified before Congress. He shows up in the WikiLeaks dump, the ClimateGate emails, and the Slack messages from COVID’s origins debate. For his being in so many places, I awarded him the environmental-wonk version of an EGOT.

We also got into cap-and-trade’s failure, the emissions drop nobody legislated for, what he’s learned about staying in the weeds while many others chase the headline.

Today's edition begins a new series: The Hemingways — one page, one sitting, always signed off with #30#. Also a special bonus for paid subscribers!

I’d wanted to stop at the house where Kerouac last lived before departing Florida but time got away and even with a full day flight delay the visit didn’t happen. What you’re about to read filled my notebook a few mornings later back in DC.

It’s a writing thing I’ve been doing for a while where I keep my journaling to a single page and try to land around the words I’d already chosen as a title, no matter where the page takes me along the way. I’d been circling versions of this for a long time, and it clicked into fresh form after visiting Hemingway’s Key West house in January. I’ve been playing with it in, um, earnest, ever since.

Going forward, love, journalism’s readers can expect more of these outside-the-box writing exercises. Paying subscribers at any level can also expect a limited printed edition in the mail at year-end. Become a subscriber now to get yours.

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And now…

Please, God, Let There Be a Bowling Alley in Heaven

Declarations of donut independence. Rise up and do justice to the doughy compartments of fudge and life and grins and smiles of endless topping bars where pure black coffee mixes into a rhyme of cereals and commercials. And I’m so sorry childhood ever ends. Please, god, let there be a bowling alley in heaven.

#30#

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Everywhere, Moms Sigh, So Heavenly

Pinch deep down in the side of your ankle, above the bone, in the muscle. Squeeze carefully both sides. Hold tight and feel — oof. Good oozes of sunrise. Blue day starting. Those joyous first birds wake and sing songs of great days to come. Move the feet and start to shake free. Eat breakfast. You deserve ground coffee. Moms take care of such things. Moms look out for their kids. I love my mom, I love so much. Everywhere, moms sigh, so heavenly.

#30#

Little Laughs of Recognition

When the words suddenly come and know too where they’ll land, you can do tight leg tucks and shimmy, shimmy, bang, bang. Because the freedom comes in these kinds of moves where form rewards tightness. Mind over matter and promises of firsts ahead. Little layers of success, little layers of certainty. When the landing is right there in sight, hunger in the morning gut, hunger in the head when birds, morning, sing, and I delight in the little laughs of recognition.

#30#

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Maybe This Is What They Say It Is

A brain empty already by five thirty AM. Bugs aren’t even yet buzzing. The mosquitoes leave no change. Here I show off what’s happening. No idea tomorrow what I said today. This never ever happened. I can say I won’t remember, and nor should you — like a dream, like a road on vacation. Maybe this is what they say it is.

#30#

What’s That Chicken Scratch?

Hard rock, ‘cause there wasn’t much else but Chick-fil-A or expensive Chinese food. Delayed American, again, two hours, then canceled and redirected without asking, to Miami. Okay, bar fajitas. A hundred dollar tab for two Negronis, too. Tatted fed waiting for daughter. She disses the bartender for reccing the original Hooters. Not much else in Clearwater — I mention it’s home of Hulk Hogan and the Scientologist. She rolls her eyes. I know. I got stuck there during concrete snow this February. Helping mom — the Mom Express, kids helping parents. Then two guys see my journal, ask me to move my bags. Excited. Who still does this, one of them asks? The other, smack, at the sight: “What’s that chicken scratch?”

#30#

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Don’t Look Back at the Garbage

Brains tend to knock down, dismiss, shoot messengers. They win many times because they run things around here. Here’s where I see the rub — they should be ignored, dismissed too, for that goober of a thought. Champion it and give it all the room it needs to grow — a day, a month, a grapevine lifetime. Stick it to the man. Stick it to the stupid monkey mind brain. Let it be in your notebook. Don’t look back at the garbage.

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Now, Suns Come Up

Son, I tell you now, I know not to tell you anything. Sorry isn’t even the half of it. I apologize, I apologize, I apologize — on behalf of fathers everywhere, even though I never fathered a soul’s real blood. So question me, so show me, so forgive me. I’m not your dad, I’m not your pa, I’m no one really but me. Best I can do is show you, pick you up, take you anywhere, prove through actions over words. Do what I say and not what I do. A tune you know I know. A road you know I know. A bird whistle, a plane, Jane, a choppy day at sea. My promise to you now is to be my best, to let the best rest, and to sleep early — for the body, for the soul, to walk with joy, by cat kisses, to pee. And now, suns come up.

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Dastardly Coughin’

His name, when I learned it, made no sense. Who picks a name like that? Makes no sense. Did he do something wrong? Did his dad? Grandma? Last, I understand — grandpa’s... you can keep going back, and somewhere they got to that. But still, who sticks that on a kid, so the kid gets called this — dastardly coughin’.

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Gray Cat Scratched at the Tree

A squirrel hustled from tree to tree, got so high so fast, no wonder he had no clue, except I’m sure he did. Down below, Gray got into his potato roll. Art therapy! Great, it’s what it is. Thanks to it, we can choose a way, and then back — while the gray cat scratched at the tree.

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Bonus Track: My Blood for the Mosquitos

I’m a proud Ashkenazi Jew. I come from two places my people found fantastic. I was a snowbird before I knew the word for it, a jumper before bungees, a singer who owned the lounge, loved women, loved life, loved so much more than my family. Genetically predisposed to trauma, separated preteen from mom and dad’s union — who knows what bad seeds formed, pitted one against another. The ultimate ref. I had no choice but to survive two boomers, parents who fought and survived and were born here, so don’t even ask. A line behind me that shoots sideways now — my blood for the mosquitoes.

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The love, journalism Show dedicates some time to a media brand that has led the way for decades covering energy and the environment.

A big change is happening in the world of energy and environmental news — and you probably won’t know it.

One of the most prolific news organizations on the planet is transforming into something else here in August, and with it, an era ends and a new one begins.

I’m referring to E&E News, aka Environment & Energy Publishing LLC, and its family of publications: E&E Daily, Greenwire, E&ENews PM, ClimateWire and EnergyWire.

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If you know them, then you know them. If you don’t, you can rest assured their reporters were often the ones getting first and deep into the weeds on the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions central to everything that makes the planet and its inhabitants tick

POLITICO bought the company several years ago and now has plans to fold it into its own energy and environmental reporting — a 24/7 juggernaut that long ago helped turn politics and policy journalism on its head is ending some familiar name brands and starting fresh.

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This is one show in a bit of a series: Volts’ David Roberts on E&E’s demise, a tribute to Biruté Galdikas and “The Fish.” All center around this place I stumbled upton that became my family for the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

It’s a lineup of the people who lived E&E — editors, reporters, and colleagues from across the decades:

• Debra Kahn — Editorial director, Energy and Environment at Politico, and a former E&E colleague of mine.

• Michael Witt — E&E News co-founder and team market owner, Frederick Flying Cows professional basketball team

• Dan Berman — Assistant managing editor, CNN Politics and one of my former E&E Daily editors

• David Leavitt — Senior director of social media at Early Warning, (technically) a co-owner of the Green Bay Packers; and a former Greenwire editor

• Mary O’Driscoll — President of Northern Arizona University Alumni Association, former media relations director at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and former E&E News nuclear reporter

• Suzanne Struglinski — Former E&E News reporter

• Ben Geman — Energy reporter and newsletter author, Axios and former E&E News reporter

We’re talking about people who’ve been working in journalism with experiences spanning the Reagan to Trump administrations. One of them even got inducted into something we’re calling the “Doctors of love, journalism.” You’ll have to tune in to see what that means.

Over the next two-plus hours, you’re going to hear from some of the people behind this news organization — one that often worked in obscurity beyond the DC beltway, with a team of media pros driven to excellence, operating atop their business while being rewarded well for their service.

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It was a great place to work. Still is. And I know it well, because I got my Washington start at E&E News, where I spent a decade before being poached by... Politico. And yes — there’s a bingo card, if you want to play along or make your own at home (and share on social or directly with me).

TONIGHT! 5:30 pm ET - The love, journalism Show goes LIVE to say goodbye to one of the most potent news organizations you maybe never even heard of.

A big change is happening in the world of energy and environmental news — and you probably won’t know it.

One of the most prolific news organizations on the planet is transforming into something else by the end of August, and with it, an era ends and a new one begins.

I’m referring to E&E News, aka Environment & Energy Publishing LLC, and its family of publications: E&E Daily, Greenwire, E&ENews PM, ClimateWire and EnergyWire.

Subscribe now

If you know them, then you know them. If you don’t, you can rest assured their reporters were often the ones getting first and deep into the weeds on the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions central to everything that makes the planet and its inhabitants tick

POLITICO bought the company several years ago and now has plans to fold it into its own energy and environmental reporting — a 24/7 juggernaut that long ago helped turn politics and policy journalism on its head.

If you read “The Fish,” you already know where this is headed.

In 2024, when The Messenger folded, I memorialized it with an entire series — six podcasts in all. I’ve always taken a certain amount of pride in going a little overboard when something like this happens. So here we are again, except bigger.

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RIP E&E News: A love, journalism Show Live Tribute will start TODAY, WEDNESDAY Aug. 5 at 5:30 PM ET. Click here to watch.

I’m hosting the whole night, joined by a growing lineup of the people who lived it — editors, reporters, and colleagues from across the decades:

• Debra Kahn — Editorial director, Energy and Environment at Politico, and a former E&E colleague of mine.

• Michael Witt — E&E News co-founder and team market owner, Frederick Flying Cows professional basketball team

• Dan Berman — Assistant managing editor, CNN Politics and one of my former E&E Daily editors

• David Leavitt — Senior director of social media at Early Warning, (technically) a co-owner of the Green Bay Packers; and a former Greenwire editor

• Mary O’Driscoll — President of Northern Arizona University Alumni Association, former media relations director at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and former E&E News nuclear reporter

• Suzanne Struglinski — Former E&E News reporter

• Ben Geman — Energy reporter and newsletter author, Axios and former E&E News reporter

We’re talking about people who’ve been working in journalism with experiences spanning the Reagan to Trump administrations. A few of them are getting inducted into something we’re calling the “Doctors of love, journalism.” You’ll have to tune in to see what that means.

Over the next few hours, you’re going to hear from some of the people behind this news organization — one that often worked in obscurity beyond the DC beltway, with a team of media pros driven to excellence, operating atop their business while being rewarded well for their service.

It was a great place to work. Still is. And I know it well, because I got my Washington start at E&E News, where I spent a decade before being poached by... Politico.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss it. And yes — there’s a bingo card, if you want to play along tonight.

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.

Send me yours - people on benches, or whatever things keep sneaking into your photos.

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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.

Send me yours - power lines, or whatever thing keeps sneaking into your photos uninvited.

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A few things percolating, for paying subscribers:

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