Journalism

Before two games in 1986 I hung out with the salty-tongued LA Dodgers manager in his office under Dodger Stadium. This is the X-rated version of my quality time with one of the nicest celebrities I ever met. “I get these fucking invitations to weddings,” Tommy Lasorda was saying, his bare feet propped on his…

Zero. Everyone in Allegheny County — especially the local media — needs to know that number. 0. That’s how many people in Allegheny County under 20 years of age have died of Covid-19 — in four months. Here’s another number you should know — one that the local panic media might want to mention now…

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has risen to the top of the cable news heap to become the most-watched, most-hated and most influential commentator in our politically fractured and deeply divisive country. He’s so popular, now he’s being touted as a Republican presidential candidate for 2024. The Washington Post, his former colleagues at MSNBC and…

In April of 1988, when the Soviet Union’s evil empire was teetering and the Berlin Wall was about to fall, I caught up with my brother Dan’s touring rock band Kingdom Come in Germany. One of the articles I wrote for the L.A. Times was my search for a popular cafeteria in shabby East Berlin.…

Sorry, young people. Thanks to us old Baby Boomers you Millennials and Zoomers are now living in a world of trouble. We — your parents and grandparents — have screwed up before. Big-time. The Iraq War. The Great Recession of 2008. The creation of a gargantuan Surveillance/Security/Welfare/Warfare State that will never die, never shrink and…

For the record, this is the email I sent on May 9 to a guy I know who is the editor of a large and powerful East Coast newspaper that shall remain nameless: I encourage you to turn a few of your reporters loose on the chronic failures of private/public nursing homes/care homes to protect…

In my never-ending mission to challenge the lazy & lame anti-Uber articles written by my fellow journalists who hate Uber, think Uber drivers should earn $60k a year with full health care, and have no clue how awful the typical urban taxicab monopolies were for 80 years, I may have gone overboard. But in case…

Once again, for the dozenth time in my lifetime, the New York Times parachutes in and writes about Pittsburgh in a lame, biased, sloppy way. Not only did the article erroneously talk about the Strip District being a place where steel mills once flourished, it also did its usual hate-job on Uber by under-mentioning the…

Economics is not as difficult to understand as politicians, the main stream media or too many Econ 101 profs make it out to be. Every day for more than a decade at his web site Cafe Hayek Donald Boudreaux has provided coherent and valuable proof that basic principles like supply and demand — and more…

The smart young man — Scott Beyer of http://bigcitysparkplug.com/ — who wrote the smack-on critique of my pal Richard Florida’s new book The New Urban Crisis for Forbes — is coming to Pittsburgh next year. His visit will be part of his 30-city project to study the incredibly stupid things that have been done by…

Remembering fricking Tommy Lasorda — a nice guy in Blue

Pittsburgh’s Phantom Pandemic, IV — Numbers you need to know

Q&A: Tucker Carlson, before he became King of Cable — and GOP presidential timber

The Day I Lived under Communism — A Replay

So Sorry for That Shutdown, Kids

As has been obvious, the biggest scandal will be nursing homes deaths

Another clueless & imbalanced Uber-hating article, this time from CityLab.com

More Bad Reporting on Pittsburgh, plus the Usual Uber Hate, from the New York Times

Teaching economics to the man in the street or the man in the Oval Office is hard — unless you’re Professor Donald Boudreaux

A critique of Richard Florida’s new book “The Urban Crisis” in Forbes nails it — it is the zoning and land use regs, stupid