Christopher Wink

PhillyABCs: my first kids book

After reading a particular regional children’s board book one too many times, I decided my home of Philadelphia deserved better.

I’m a journalist who spends my days obsessed with how places develop identity and share that with people to live, work and thrive. I’m also the father of two young kids in the city’s Fishtown neighborhood. I also happen to have a close friend who is a talented illustrator and a new mother herself (Hi Sara Scholl!).

I wanted to create a simple board book that would keep young kids engaged, amuse grown-ups and actually contribute something to a region’s identity. I was working on the alphabet with my pre-schooler, who responded best to fun environments where she could tie visuals to sounds and letters.

As dead-simple as it is, the ABCs framework had been used for just a couple states and cities around the world, along with some industries and hobbies. I made a list of kids publishers that seemed to produce a similar vibe, did hours of research of contacts and processes at those firms. Then I led outreach.

On Sept. 28, 2025, my first kids book launches, and can be pre-ordered at PhillyABCs.com.

Below I share some other background, lessons and insights for later.

Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink (that’s not me) appears in the Epstein Files

Well, my name is in the Epstein files. Not me though.

There’s another Chris Wink. He’s the founder of Blue Man Group, the eclectic artistic troupe that got its start in New York and maintains a longstanding residency in Las Vegas.

That Chris Wink (Blue Man Group founder and artist) is 25 years older than the Chris Wink (journalist) who is writing this. Once a friend pointed out that name appeared in this heinous file and document release, I wanted to ensure somewhere on the internet this clarification was made: there are (at least) two very different Chris Winks. When I was getting my journalism started in 2008, I first learned of the name competition.

My 2026 resolutions

For my annual resolutions, I thought more about my ends.

I think often of Vonnegut’s advice that the very point of life is “to experience becoming.” I get personal joy from identifying experiences and goals that give me meaning, and their pursuit is the point.

I find meaning in becoming a better version of myself, of becoming the man I want to be — and that is a lifelong pursuit. After years of resolution-making, this year I also wrote down a few areas I want to be stronger, and that better tied why my resolutions for the year fit now. Both areas of growth and resolutions are below.

What I read in 2025

I like reading the long form of books: Sitting with someone’s big idea that took them years.

I surprised myself by staying up later, and getting up earlier, in 2025 to read nearly as much as I ever have before. Below I share the list.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Nonviolence should be a tactic of resistance movements, not a holy covenant As famed South African activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.”

Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?

That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.

As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:

moral: we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option and
strategic: it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option

Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.

As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What Works (and doesn’t) in Community News

This is primarily a place for my notes from this book for my future reference, but I have also included below an essay about the book I originally posted on Linkedin.

American journalism leaders rightly view local news models as worryingly limited. After nearly 20 years founding and operating a local news org, I believe many take too narrow a view of how to address that worry.

That’s why I was interested to read What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate, published in 2024 and written by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, two well-regarded journalism insiders who also host a podcast on local news. (Clegg is a longtime Boston Globe veteran who founded hyperlocal news site Brookline News; Kennedy is a Northeastern University faculty member.)

The book came out two years ago, and for fellow local news nerds, it’s still worth adding to you collection. Buy it!

Below, I share my reflections, and I have criticisms, but they’re more about the broader local news discourse than the book itself 🙂 I come with peace and love.

What happens after Eureka?

We love to celebrate the spark of a good idea, but we too often skip over the long, uneven road it takes to get that idea into the world.

Research on innovation keeps pointing to the same tension: breakthroughs come from serendipity and “structural holes,” where people from different disciplines collide, but impact only happens when we deliberately smooth the path that follows. That’s what made a conversation I led at Baltimore’s University of Maryland Biopark, inside the innovation district’s year-old 4MLK building feel special.

I contributed Technically coverage here and here. The Biopark team had a photographer on site, so I also just pulled some of the shots of me in action below.