The Case For... (with Matthew Campobasso)

It's late August 2006. I'm twenty-eight years old, sitting in my office on my first day as an Assistant State's Attorney in McHenry County, Illinois. I've been filling out health insurance forms for ten minutes when the...

I want to tell you about a man I used to work with. His name was Ian Turvill. For several years at the Chicago law firm Freeborn & Peters, our offices shared a wall. Ian was the firm’s Chief Marketing Officer. He was...

My seven-year-old daughter came home from school recently and I could see it on her face before she said a word. A friendship had shifted. She’d been left out. She was hurt. And my instinct — the one that fires before I...

entire life. But at some point, the question stops being hypothetical. It becomes real. And that’s when most people go quiet. Because the honest answer, for a staggering number of adults, is: I don’t know. I’m twenty...

My twelve-year-old daughter came home from a family wedding recently. She’d missed two and a half days of school. She opened her laptop, saw the list of assignments she’d missed, and completely shut down. Eyes filling...

It’s a weeknight in 2012. My son is three years old. His hair is wild and curly and he’s lying next to me in bed with his hand across my chest. He whispers three words: “You’re here now?” I tell him I am. But my phone...

I bought a guitar about seven years ago. Beautiful acoustic. I was going to be the dad who plays guitar. I could already picture it — me on the back porch, strumming Damien Rice while my kids listened. I was terrible...

You’re sitting in a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning. There are fifteen people in the room. Someone two tables over laughs at something on their phone and you almost ask what was funny. They’re reading a book you’ve...

More than ten years ago, a kid at a Law Day event asked me a question that stopped me dead: have you ever had to represent someone who you knew had done something wrong, and how did that make you feel? I’d been...

I woke up on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago and before my feet hit the floor, the list started. Work. Inbox. Calls. The podcast. The book. My kids. Laundry. Mail. Commitments I hadn’t honored. All of it landed in the...

Count how many times you say “I’m sorry” tomorrow. Not after a genuine mistake. Just in the normal course of your day. Sorry, can I ask a question? Sorry, I’m running two minutes late. Sorry, but I actually disagree...

There’s a poem most people have heard but few have sat with. Martin Niemöller wrote it after the war — after — as a confession, not a warning. He was describing his own silence. His own repeated, rational decision that...

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Steve Rogers is sitting on a park bench. He’s an old man. He’s lived a quiet second life. His friend sees the wedding ring and asks: do you want to tell me about her? And Steve Rogers...

I spent $45 as a broke law student to have this album shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland. It was grocery money, textbook money, train money. I had no business spending it on a CD. And more than twenty years...

My sixteen-year-old son recently told me I was wrong about something. Not with an eye roll or a sigh or something muttered under his breath. He sat across from me, looked me in the eye, laid out his reasoning, and told...