dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about stories, the work... and my mother.

Back in July, I decided to defend my choice of telephonic device with a blog post, titled, “Why I Do Not Have a Smartphone.” Many people read this post, said they appreciated my opinion and then told me that I was a moron. The questions about my phone persist. Every week, a handful of people (…)

It is 72 degrees in St. Louis today, and it is January. This, by itself, would be considered unusual, except that today, something even more unusual is happening: I am traveling on Amtrak. When I was a kid, living just outside Washington, D.C., I used to love traveling by train. I loved riding D.C.’s subway, (…)

Dear University of Missouri J-Schooler, I remember when I was but a wee undergrad. The year was 2009. A young man named Barack Obama had taken stewardship of our country. The economy was in the crapper. I drove around in a Chevy TrailBlazer with vanity plates. Much has changed since then. (The Blazer no longer (…)

I went to see NBC News’ David Gregory speak tonight in a little auditorium on Nantucket Island. He spoke for an hour, mostly about the failures of our political system and our economy and our media, and then he closed by reminding everyone that we were on a little island 30 miles off the coast (…)

I am finding that lately, I have had to defend my choice of telephone. I find this strange, as my telephone does exactly what I want it to do: It places and receives phone calls anywhere in America. The fact that it does this, and that I pay about $35 per month for such services, (…)

I went out to dinner last night with this girl. She was about my age. From upstate New York. We met via kickball, and I asked her out. Nothing too formal. Kickball romances typically aren’t, I’m told. But we were on this patio, and it was a nice night, and she had gone through the (…)

The most unusual thing happened to me last week. I was buying tickets for a concert that I’m seeing on Monday. The artist is Bob Schneider. He’s an Austin legend. He’s a songwriter who’s probably going to make linguists come up with a word that goes beyond ‘prolific.’ He’s got a catalog of songs that (…)

I have a friend from Kansas City. Her name is Angela, and she did something kind of unusual the other day. She started a blog.(1) Angela’s always been one of those girls who seemed out of step with the Midwest. She’s a fashion nerd who grew up in Kansas City, which is like being a (…)

They said it couldn’t be done.(1) They said it shouldn’t be done, really. They said I would have to be an idiot to quit my paying job in San Antonio, move to Biloxi, Miss., and start my own news bureau. They said that I should find a more enjoyable way to blow my savings. I (…)

I’m not supposed to move. My right leg is inside an MRI machine, one that’s designed only for limbs. So the rest of me is sitting on a piece of hard foam, flipping through the issue of SI with Stephen Strasburg on the cover. The MRI technician has the local Jack FM station on the (…)