Gray Kimbrough

Private equity has apparently tired of sucking any surplus out of for-profit businesses and expanded into converting more altruistic enterprises into profit-making ones. For youth sports, this seems a hugely negative change for everyone involved except the few profiting. www.wsj.com/sports/baseb...

My son has gotten into baseball and has so far been fine with playing in Little League with mostly used equipment, but half of his team left this season to join a club team that costs over a grand a year in direct fees alone. I guess that price is actually pretty tame in the youth baseball space.

I'm wary of politicians telling people that we can solve problems by taxing Other People. I'd like to see this framed as an issue of fairness: We're good at taxing labor income. But through an array of tax breaks, we don't tax income from wealth and pass-through income as much. We should fix that.

I was not expecting the Iowa State Capitol to go this hard.

I've lived in the DC area for over 15 years, but I still snap pictures of the view of the Potomac when my Metro train pops over the bridge on the way to National.

We adopted an orphaned kitten that has been (after only a few days) playing well with the resident almost-one-year-old cat, and now my photo roll mainly looks like this.

This morning's kitten update:

Sometimes when someone gives a tool a name they find clever or funny, it can eventually end up just looking really dumb when use if the tool expands to other groups. Like, say, this:

My daughter has a procedure performed 2-3 times per year. It takes a few minutes and I owe a $30 copay after insurance. In July it was billed as surgery, for thousands of dollars. I've spent hours calling the Children's National billing office and they just told me that they won't fix it.

I've seen this graph before, but I still can't quite wrap my head around it being accurate. The bump around 2007 makes sense (around the time of a mandate to have passports to travel to more nearby countries), but I think what breaks my brain is the overall linear trend back to a 3% level in 1989.

One reason this isn't exactly "the percentage of the US population with a valid passport" is that the numerator sums passport books and cards. Passport cards didn't exist until 2008, and it's unclear how many of the 4.5M issued in FY2025 went to people who didn't have a passport book as well.

A milestone birthday today has me thinking about four years ago, when I traveled to NYC and first told a friend that after a year in therapy on my own, I knew I would be getting a divorce. I had no idea how hard things would be or how great they would then get, but his girlfriend took this picture.

A milestone birthday today has me thinking about four years ago, when I traveled to NYC and first told a friend that after a year in therapy on my own, I knew I would be getting a divorce. I had no idea how hard things would be or how great they would then get, but his girlfriend took this picture.

I'm getting excited about going to Montreal in a week and a half and went ahead and got my monthly Bixi membership (under $20 USD). That station density is just so beautiful.

It's been the same story in far too many U.S. cities: entrenched homeowners think they should be able to keep out all new housing. They're often willing to spend huge sums on lawyers to file lawsuits to get their way. I'm glad this is finally being recognized as generational warfare.

It was just my 12 year old and me tonight, so we got Ethiopian takeout and I introduced her to Game Changer and Make Some Noise. It was a good night.

In the past year, I've requested a lot of records from state and local governments. I was most impressed by the Dauphin County Register of Wills, who not only implemented a great online system to request a certified copy of the record I needed, but put her name on the envelope it came in.