Postcards: Publishing Ethics, Cars I Dislike, And the Week Ahead

Well, my wife is happy... and that's good. Also, let's talk about the week ahead, the ethics of the publishing industry, and another rant about cars.

Dear Fellow Expat:

The first night I met my publisher in person, he asked a question that put us on opposite spectrums.

It wasn’t a political question.

It wasn’t business-oriented.

But if you’ve read the Butter Battle Book… it was a question that puts people into different camps.

“Do you like cars?” he asked.

I don’t.

They are typically depreciating assets.

I drive a 2016 Honda HR-V.

I bought it two years after it was manufactured with 7 miles on it.

It had fallen off a truck, and the door fell off when it originally arrived at a dealership.

It took 18 months to fix due to backlogs.

I scooped it up on the cheap, yet it involved a lot of protest from me.

My wife convinced me to buy it ahead of my daughter’s birth.

For some reason, I thought (in all of my unimpressive misunderstandings of parenthood) that you could just Uber a baby around Chicago.

“It’s like London… where they put the carriage in the cab,” I told my wife before she yelled common sense into me.

We needed a car.

I went with…