Christopher Wink

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The Gulf War was a seemingly decisive military action led by the United States against Iraq in 1991.

Over a series of essays, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued the war was an expression of his concept of “hyperreality,” in which emerging visual media could be used to create something false that appears even realer than reality itself.

By 1995, he assembled these essays into a final, short book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.

My storytelling keynote to Tech Hubs leaders in Montana

Meaningful commercialized science and intentional local economic coalition building does not correlate to high-quality storytelling about it. Economic development leaders should take storytelling seriously.

The kind folks at Montana’s Headwaters Tech Hub gave me the chance to address their summit of Montana ecosystem members and other tech hub leaders from around the country. I gave a storytelling presentation informed by this research — and led with the impressive tale of how Jeanette Rankin became the country’s first female Senator.

The “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis

What Americans call a “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis — economic, geographic and social. Housing is where that immobility becomes most visible, and so expensive housing is more a symptom than the disease.

That’s from a new book by historian and Atlantic journalist Yoni Appelbaum called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.“

In healthy economies, including for much of the American golden age, people move to better jobs, cheaper places, growing regions. In the US today, people are increasingly trapped in place. When people can’t move, demand piles up in a small number of “winning” metros. Prices explode there, while other places stagnate or hollow out. I’ve written on the topic this year myself here and here.

Appelbaum’s book recounts the long trends that are piling up today. He recounts how American zoning regulations were introduced for race and class control, not for genuine health or safety concern. Early 20th century leaders, including eventual-US President Herbert Hoover, misunderstood crowded tenements and single-family homes as the obstacle and the accelerant, rather than what they really were: the launching pad and the eventual destination for those who made it out.

That history has persisted to today, where regulation and competing priorities strangle what might naturally occur. As famed mid-century urbanist Jane Jacobs said, over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”

Below I have notes for my future reference from Greenbaum’s detailed book. It’s wonky, and less colorful than I expected, but for anyone invested in the topic, it’s worth it.

Of Boys and Men

A very small number of men dominate the most powerful and wealthiest positions, and are among the most aggressive humans alive.

But though this tiny number accounts for many disparities, and men have not taken enough domestic imbalances, their trend lines are worrying. Boys and men are going the wrong direction fast.

That’s from the 2024 book by Richard V. Reeves: “Of Boys and Men Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.” It’s one of a growing collection of research and literature.

As Reeves writes: “We have an education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports Israeli forces have killed nearly 200 journalists

Four Al Jazeera journalists — and three others — were killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza this month. We need to talk about that.

I usually only share reporting I’ve done, or topics where I have real expertise. International politics isn’t my beat, so I don’t pretend to have unique insight there. But this is different.

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.

Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorter

The singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.

That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The CIA Book Club

In the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.

Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.

This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.

The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.

Below find my notes for future reference.

The Big Myth of the “free market”

“Market fundamentalists aren’t wrong about everything.”

Sometimes the right solution is to do nothing until there’s more information. Some markets do resolve themselves. Prohibition was a worse cure than the very real disease of alcohol abuse.

“But competition doesn’t mean we don’t have rules.”

That’s from The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, a 2023 book from Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. They’re the journalist-researchers behind the influential 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which identified the strategy of disinformation used to defend cigarettes and then climate denial.

When they wrote their 2010 book, they assumed those blocking interventions into tobacco addiction and then climate change were motivated by greed. Later, they realized it was because of a true and ideological market fundamentalism. This new book is answering how that pathological fundamentalism came to be.

A binary choice between the market and the state, between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet central planning is a myth, they argue. The “free market” category, and spirit, was a manufactured marketing and propaganda campaign. Instead, a sensible approach balances market and government interventions.

It’s not the problem that corporations don’t do more for society, they write, it’s that they stop governments from doing so. “If efficiency were our only goal, then market fundamentalism might make sense. But efficiency is a tool not an end.”

Below notes for my future reference.

We’re all journalists now: Scott Gantt wrote in 2007

The 20th century “hardened an artificial distinction between professional journalists and everyone else.” The 21st century has crashed that down.

That’s from “We’re all journalists now,” a book written almost 20 years ago in 2007 by lawyer and constitutional law scholar Scott Gantt. As he wrote: “In a sense, we are returning to where we started.”

Gantt’s thin volume is a valuable representation of what was changing then. Below I share notes for future reference.