Yet another one of those “I can’t believe it took an entire year for this damn story to come out” articles. Back in mid-2008, Conde Nast Portfolio (R.I.P.) sent me out to Nebraska to write about a beer-drinking, cowboy-boots-wearing, badass ex-farmer named Patrick Gottsch, who runs a TV station and related media properties aimed at rural America.

If you are reading this, odds are you have never heard of Gottsch’s RFD-TV…that is, unless you’re among the 25 percent of America that lives outside cities and towns, in which case I guarantee you either watch it or know someone who does.

Gottsch is a real character, and he made for a pretty interesting man-against-the-world story, but Portfolio kept pushing it off until the magazine died (over 16 months, Conde Nast spent almost $20k on me without ever publishing a single word of my copy). So I ended up selling it to Fast Company, and it’s finally out this month (link).

The FC editors (particularly Jeff Chu) deserve a ton of credit for updating the piece and cutting the length by more than half, while preserving its essence. Here’s the most interesting stuff that was left out…

We had to cut down the long, brutal saga between the time the first incarnation of RFD went belly-up around 1990 or so, and the relaunch about 10 years later. It was a tough time for Gottsch — he and his wife divorced, and he moved with his two daughters to Fort Worth, Texas. He worked on and off as a sales director for a video cattle auctioneer, subsisting on loans from friends and family and feeding his kids and himself macaroni and cheese, all the while plotting a revival.

He flirted with idea after idea that failed, including more than one involving Willie Nelson. (Gottsch showed me a binder from the mid-’90s promoting the idea of a “Cowboy Channel” with Nelson’s name all over the brochure.) Dozens of potential backers dismissed them all as dumb concepts with little moneymaking potential.

As Gottsch told me: “Even my dad would tell me: ‘You’re a smart kid, you got two daughters. Go get a real job.’”

To cope with frustration, Gottsch would pull out a box of 8,000-odd heartfelt thank-you letters from the then-defunct network’s viewers and sit alone, silently reading them. When he did relaunch RFD, it was astoundingly low-tech. Gottsch would edit a day’s worth of shows and commercials together in his living room, copy them to a hard drive, and ship it off to Dish Network for broadcast. That was the extent of his “cable network.” Given those lean years, it’s amazing to see what he’s been able to do since then.

Another nice stat we had to leave out because it added too much nuance: The U.S. had only 1.3 million farmers, ranchers, and agricultural managers as of 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s interesting that agricultural America has declined so much, even though (as I wrote in the story and above) there are still millions of people who think of themselves as “rural folks.”

A related quote from Gottsch that is, I think, particularly relevant: “With urban-based television, if it’s not a draught or a disaster or something bad going on, rural America gets no coverage.” I’ve written often about the lack of coverage that the red states (or even major non-coastal cities like Chicago and Minneapolis) get from national media outlets. I think Gottsch has proven that there are millions of people out there who feel like their issues aren’t getting discussed, and they’re willing to watch what’s relevant to them.

Last summer, Dwell magazine sent me all the way out to Hennepin, Ill., (don’t worry, I didn’t know where it was, either) to write about an innovative house designed by architecture firm UrbanLab and owned by Chicagoans Diane Pascal and Thomas Richie. Normally I feel a little icky writing about products, especially very expensive products, because it feels like…well…it feels like advertising.

But this was a different sort of deal. The whole point of the house was to create something unique, beautiful, artful, and all the other stuff you think of when you think of architecture/living magazines, except on the budget of an upper-middle-class couple (these people clearly make more money than I do, but not an order of magnitude more than I do) and with a reasonable ecological footprint. I think it succeeds. See if you agree. The article and accompanying slideshow are here: link.

My favorite thing about the house is that its square footage is small, but it feels really large. An entrepreneur friend (and Dwell subscriber) told me that the reason most American homes aren’t designed this way is that, because “home values are equated with price per square foot, builders aren’t inclined to build homes that are efficient in terms of space.” Interesting.

The owners were nice folks, and I got to talk about smart growth and the new urbanism with Martin Felsen. So, you know, not a bad trip.

Last month, I took a long drive out to northern Iowa to visit Loren Toussaint, a young talent in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of forgiveness research. Its key overall finding — and this is from hundreds of studies — is that when you don’t forgive someone who’s done you wrong, you never forget it, and it stresses you out, increasing your chances of mental troubles like depression and physical ones like cardiovascular disease.

My Miller-McCune story on this stuff is here (link).

The most interesting thing to come out of our conversations that didn’t end up in the story was this quote, which Toussaint attributed to Michigan statistician Roderick Little:  “Science is about looking at the world and making everything that happens in it relevant to the area you’re investigating.” For Toussaint, everything from spirituality to heart attacks is seen through the prism of forgiveness. As I was driving home, I thought about that a lot, and I realized that many of the people in my life think in an analogous way — seeing everything in their world as an economist, or an artist, or a journalist, or a psychologist, or whatever. As Toussaint says, of course, that this has advantages and disadvantages, but it’s worth remembering, especially the next time you’re in a brutal argument.

Here’s yet another story of the shortcomings of modern clinical trials. It turns out that there’s no standard way of measuring pain or fatigue — or anxiety, sleep, well-being, or any number of other ways people function that doctors claim to be able to measure.

All this stuff is just so subjective that there are no agreed-upon scales, which means that it’s hard to know which drugs work well, which don’t, which have side effects, how bad the side effects are, etc. A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health realized this problem and set up PROMIS. The project, which has made big progress during the past five years, is extremely wonky and nerdy, but it has the potential to make a huge impact on the medical world. I wrote about it for Miller-McCune (link).

As of this week, I’m a regular contributor to AOL’s DailyFinance. Although I’ll be writing about a lot of different business topics for them, I’m planning to concentrate on sectors with a strong presence in the Midwest, including legal/accounting, transportation/infrastructure, and food/agribusiness.

The people who run AOL’s blogs have some pretty ambitious plans for the DF site. I can’t tell you whether they’ll be successful, but I’m pretty excited to get another chance to write about corporate America for a mainstream audience of millions.

For those of you wondering, I don’t expect this to change my relationship with Miller-McCune or the other magazines where I’ve been contributing.

My posts will be here (link).

There are some odd (and not so good) things that happen when sick people leave their health care plans. I wrote about this problem, and some ideas to deal with it, for Miller-McCune. Story here.

The new issue of Miller-McCune hits newsstands this week, and I have a review in there (link) of Timothy Kelly’s Healing the Broken Mind: Transforming America’s Failed Mental Health System.

The book is a great introduction to an issue that does not get enough attention, and it’s surprisingly well-written, given Kelly’s wonky background as a psychology professor and ex-chair of Virginia’s mental health department. Many of his proposals are merely common sense, but more than a few are pretty innovative. And his success in Virginia lends some credence to his analysis of the national situation.

My friend Robby Bearman sent me a copy of his band’s new album, and after a couple listens I decided to review it for the site…

I cannot tell you whether or not you’ll like Glenn Labs. The San Francisco-based quartet are not a band with an easy litmus test (“Do you like Wilco?” “Are you into hardcore punk?”) for potential fandom. But that’s part of the pleasure of listening to them. On their debut album, Best Laid Plans, the melodies and time signatures are far from standard, and the guitar solos are filled with tension. Each song is like a journey through a futuristic mansion: You never know what’s coming around the next measure – a Beatley romp of a chorus or a dissonant verse in 7/4 time. Yet they bake all the elements together to make the music feel original, instead of merely experimental.

In songs filled with messy relationships and doleful longing, lead singer/guitarist Brian Davis’ lyrics at times fall into tired clichés (“Hurts so bad / Is all we ever had / I mean it really has been / So bad”). But just when you’re about to zone out and focus on the stellar instrumentation, he tosses out clever, absurdist wordplay reminiscent of the Magnetic Fields, or even Cole Porter. His voice is outstanding, and frequently ballsy. When he plays the role of crooner, he’s as earnest and in-control as Sinatra or Bing Crosby. In the rhythm section, Drew Baglino’s piano, keyboard, and organ playing are particularly inspired. He alternately injects Zappaesque carnival tomfoolery or lends a haunting background mood to Davis’ tunes.

Definitely worth a listen, or if you’re in the San Francisco area, checking out live.

This month, Chicago magazine publishes my profile of Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman (link).

The commentary thus far has been, as expected, pretty mixed, with more than a few personal attacks. (The best stuff, if you want to check it out, is here and here at Catalyst writer Alex Russo’s District 299 blog.) Many have quibbled with my being too negative or too positive about Huberman, Mayor Daley, or U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan (who preceded Huberman).

A lot of people who are critical of CPS for one reason or another felt I was way too soft on Huberman. And there was another class of critics (esp this guy) who believe that, since Huberman is a Daley apparatchik with zero education experience, no matter what he does, he sucks. They just can’t believe Huberman has any chance of doing a good job. So to them, any story that is at least 50% positive is assumed by a certain group of people to be fatally flawed — no matter that he’s only been in office for several months, and most of what he’s done seems at least semi-reasonable. The situation is actually pretty similar to what happened with Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C.

One nice thing is that, while I had a lot of my claims and assertions questioned, no one has challenged the actual facts, and that’s what matters most to me (and Chicago‘s fact-checkers, who were good, but not as hardcore as I expected).

But I want to address some of the things people brought up. The big one is — how the hell could I say this guy has done a good job? He’s gone from position to position every year — there’s no way he could’ve succeeded in so many jobs so quickly. Right?

Well, actually… Look, I don’t want to paint this guy as the savior of Chicago government or even of CPS. He has made mistakes, and he has faults, which I feel like I called out in the piece. But meeting with him and talking with people who worked for him or watched him closely convinced me to tilt the story toward the positive.

The hype has been strong with this guy for years (check out this Wired piece from 2005, a gigantic wet kiss), so I went into the story fully expecting to find some brutal skeletons. That’s usually the case when stories about someone have been nothing but ultra-puff pieces for their entire career.

Here’s what I actually heard: You would not believe the number of people (I spoke with dozens) who talked about him like he was the most effective, most talented boss they’d ever worked for. I’m not talking about people like Lori Healey of Chicago 2016, who gave me the predictable “Ron is a great manager” mantra that you’d expect from another of Daley’s young turks. I am referring to the underlings, the interns, the middle managers, and all the other beneath-the-radar folks who keep the city running. When I asked these people to speak freely, totally off the record, and gave them license to lead me down the darkest corners of Huberman’s career, most of the time I heard: he is awesome, I wish more people in Chicago government were like him. Even a former employee that Huberman laid off for basically no reason, when granted the opportunity speak off the record, just gave him high praise. I was astounded.

Outsiders had similar opinions: Kevin O’Neil of CTA Tattler, a blog set up for the express purpose of criticizing the CTAthat has at times been very critical of the agency, does not have to talk about how great Huberman was for CTA. But he did. I’m sure L.A. police chief Bill Bratton has a pretty busy schedule and didn’t need to call me half a dozen times to speak on the record about Huberman. But he did.

When I watched Huberman speak and met him personally, I came away impressed. I wasn’t awed — I did not see him as a political or social or statistical genius the way many coworkers or teachers did. He was, at times, a little robotic, a little boring, sort of a nerdy quant in a triathlete’s body. But he had answers to my questions that were well-thought out, even when he obviously hadn’t expected them. He didn’t avoid anything I said, and he was honest about some of his own faults (impatience with red tape, for one).

There were a handful of people I spoke with who hated working for Huberman, and hated him personally, and claimed he was a total fraud. I wanted to get at least one of their stories into the piece to provide more balance, but none would talk on the record, so my editor and I had to settle for a few generalizations. Frankly, if I had a beef with Ron Huberman and I had a city pension coming my way, I probably wouldn’t talk to a reporter either. But because it was only a tiny minority who had these opinions, I had to assume it was personal (not that they didn’t have cause for not liking him, just that it was more interpersonal conflict and less some overarching problem with Huberman’s character). All that said, I have little doubt that working for Huberman kind of sucks for some people. Any job with low pay, long hours, and little public recognition does, especially if your boss is as serious as Huberman obviously is.

One odd thing that came up during the reporting — and after the story came out — was that people were surprised that I was critical of Arne Duncan’s reign as head of CPS. There has been this generally positive opinion of Duncan, a sort of, “Well, Obama wouldn’t pick him just for being his basketball buddy. Obviously he did a great job,” throughout the city. But as soon as I looked at the numbers, I saw that was bunk, and that the record has been, as I said, mixed at best. (For the curious, check out the fine work by Catalyst, here’s just one of many examples.) Fortunately, last month the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, a who’s who of well-connected corporate titans in the city, published a report (link) basically saying 15 years of school reform has failed — despite what the Mayor will tell you. Given that this same club is one of the major powers behind the Renaissance 2010 school reform plan, they didn’t have much incentive to make a statement like that.

Another section in the piece that a lot of people thought was really interesting looked at Daley’s ability (or in some cases, lack thereof) to spot young talent, and the fact that a lot of people in the Obama administration once worked for him. If you want to know more, check out this Lynn Sweet column from over the weekend likening the White House to the 51st Ward.

A ton of people asked me during and after reporting about Huberman’s sexuality. Why did he come out right after he was named CEO of the schools? Why not before? Now, I talked with Huberman about this a lot. It was, honestly, quite awkward, especially because I could care less if someone is gay — gay rights is one of the few issues where I admit being partisan. It’s something I don’t generally report on because I have so much trouble understanding the perspective of people who are against gay marriage or civil unions. But given that we live in such a homophobic city (quick, name three other prominent gay bureaucrats in Chicago), it’s, sadly, still newsworthy for someone to be out, proud, and the head of a major government agency.

Huberman looked me right in eyes and claimed that he was always out, and everyone within shouting distance of him in his jobs knew it, and it was just that no reporter had ever asked before Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times did so. Given that former coworkers also knew he was gay well before a few months ago, and that people in the gay community knew, too, I had no reason to doubt him. A few weeks later, on the phone, he said his sexuality has never been an issue at CPS or anywhere else, which we both knew was bullshit. In fact, one education reporter I talked to after the piece printed said if it were better-known that Huberman was gay, he might not have been appointed, given the kerfuffle over the queer high school last year. But I’m glad he’s out now, and that he doesn’t spend all his time talking about it.

The last thing a lot of people have asked about are the references to him being a potential mayor of Chicago. The reason I used the word rumor in the piece is because most of what I heard was just that — rumor. I also had someone say that after a few years at CPS, he’s going to sell out and become a VP at McKinsey, but too many people said that even the Mayor himself talked about him as a potential successor for me not to lend some credence to the rumblings. I personally don’t think Chicago is ready to elect a gay Jew, but New York City probably wasn’t either, back in 1978, when it made Ed Koch mayor.