In 1987, a man named Bob Ellison walked into a department store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and bought a snowblower he did not need. It was marked down from $580 to $340. The markdown felt like money saved. The snowblower broke in 1991. In 2023, thirty-six years later, I called Bob Ellison and asked him about it. He still felt good about buying it.
This is, probably, where I should explain who I am and what I do.
I write about why the world works the way it does. Not the obvious version of why, but the actual version, which usually involves one decision made by one person in one decade for reasons that had nothing to do with whether it was true or good, and then two hundred other people copying it, and then all of us calling the result common sense. The snowblower story is about the psychology of loss aversion and the economics of anchor pricing. But it is also just about Bob Ellison, who is a real person and whose experience is more interesting to me than any study.
I spent four years as a reporter in South Bend and Indianapolis, six years writing about science for a national science magazine, six more years teaching at a midwestern university before concluding that the tenure process was rewarding documentation of work more than the work itself, and I was not built for that. I have a master’s in cognitive science that I earned at forty-one while still writing full-time. I wrote a thesis about how health journalists miscommunicate risk statistics. My committee told me it read more like a long-form magazine piece than an academic paper. I took this as a compliment.
I have written for national magazines across science, culture, and ideas. I have written two books. I have been getting things wrong in public for about thirty-five years, which is different from being wrong in private, and the difference has made me more careful.
What I fight for, in every piece I write: the idea that any adult can follow a careful argument if the writer does the work. That oversimplifying is not a kindness to the reader but a condescension toward them. That the word “probably” is not weakness, it is precision. That “the evidence is mixed” is, frequently, the truest thing anyone can say.
I live in Columbus, Indiana, with my wife Lynn. I walk every morning before I can think clearly, and I do my best work at night, when the connections form. I have sixty-three index cards pinned above my desk. Several of them are probably an article. One of them might be yours.