Below is the first e-mail newsletter I’ve sent in quite a while (it went out on May 31). If you’d like to subscribe, here you go — it will arrive in your inbox more often than once every two-plus years, but not a lot more often.
Hello readers,
It’s been a while, I know. My excuses: (1) A few weeks after sending the last one of these e-mail newsletters in February 2024, I flew to Hawaii for what turned out to be the beginning of a nine-month adventure in intensive eldercare. By the end of those nine months neither of the elders (my parents-in-law, who did not reside in Hawaii but needed to be rescued from a cruise ship there after one of them had a heart attack on board) was still living, so let’s just say I wasn’t very good at it. (2) Then, last summer, my dad died. He was 102, but had never needed eldercare and was starting to seem potentially immortal, so this was a bigger shock than you might think. (3) Also last summer, I agreed to add a chapter and some other new material for an updated edition of The Myth of the Rational Market (publication date: Oct. 13, 2026), to which I devoted many hours of procrastination in the fall and slightly fewer hours of actual writing in the winter. There’s no practical reason why I couldn’t have found a few minutes during all this to write an email (or two or three or four or five) with links to some of my recent Bloomberg columns, but it just felt like too much. Now it finally doesn’t.
My dad was my most faithful reader through the years, and the fact that he wasn’t around to read the next one of these e-mails was perhaps a reason why I couldn’t bring myself to write one. His period of peak readership had come during my three years at Time magazine in the late 2000s. Part of my job there consisted of daily blogging, and “Dadfox” — then in his mid-to-late 80s — became one of the core group of commenters on the Curious Capitalist blog. It was such a lovely way to interact with him, and just stay part of one another’s lives in a lowkey way. Which I had to go and mess up by taking a job at the Harvard Business Review.
I’m now 62, which means that if I make it as long as my dad I have four decades to go. My mom died at 69, so I’m aware it could be a lot less than that, but my father’s behavior after her death is an inspiration either way. My mother had been the chief communicator and instigator and organizer in their partnership, and he recognized immediately that he had to step up his game. He never became as adept at any of those things as she was, but he worked really hard at it. He tried lots of other new stuff too, and while he certainly slowed down as he got older never stopped learning and exploring. After having written zero books before the age of 80, for example, he wrote four after — two hefty volumes of family history (about his father’s family and then his mother’s family), a spinoff tale from the second that some predatory publisher talked him into doing, and collection of reminiscences, poetry and other writings by himself and others that he titled Blueberries and Jello: How to Live to 102 and Like it and completed not long before his death. I don’t want to oversell the benefits of a growth mindset here — the single biggest reason apart from genetics why my dad lived so many healthy years was that he worked out every day — but it certainly didn’t hurt.
I, meanwhile, have yet to grow out of writing not-especially-opinionated opinion columns for Bloomberg News. As a Bloomberg.com subscriber I get five gift links a month and the month is almost over, so I will share my bounty with you. I created a gift link on Thursday for “New York and Chicago Haven’t Escaped the Urban Doom Loop” and they expire after seven days, so that should be good through Wednesday. I’m creating them right now for the recent columns “The K-Shaped Economy’s Defining Statistic Has Some Problems” and “Gen Xers Are Kings of an Uncertain Job Market,” and the essay/book review “Why Catching Criminals Matters More Than Punishing Them.“
The final gift link goes to December’s “How Birthright Citizenship Sort of Saved Christmas,” because of course it does. I spent a lot of time early in 2025 reading through all the 1866 Congressional debates on birthright citizenship, and wrote a more straightforward piece about them headlined “Birthright Citizenship’s Origin Is Complicated. Its Meaning Isn’t.” But you can read about that history elsewhere, whereas I’m pretty sure that I’m the sole reporter on the Clement-Clarke-Moore-and-birthright-citizenship beat.
The videos I occasionally make for Bloomberg Opinion are free for all to see on multiple social media platforms and the Bloomberg website, and a ridiculous number of people (2.6 million on LinkedIn alone) saw the one I recorded in October 2024 on why New York City is so safe. That led to (not quite as popular) videos on why Arlington, Virginia, is even safer, and why the New York City subway, while not as safe as it should be, is still probably safer than your car. Other video topics have included Social Security, DOGE, and pistachios.
Till next time (and I promise it won’t be more than two years from now)!
Justin