EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING.
This fundamental principle has guided my life and writing for as far back as I can remember. Which is to say, about 1972.
I can recall when I was little, brushing my teeth at night, getting distracted by reading the back of the toothpaste tube. I can remember obsessively reading The World Almanac, looking at the birth and death dates of NOTED PERSONALITIES — ENTERTAINERS OF THE PAST or poring over the list of the planet’s longest rivers. I can remember reading the classified ads in The Pittsburgh Press, wondering what prosaic item or call to action I might serendipitously come across.
When I became a journalist, I spent the first years of my career driving around rural Pennsylvania in my little 1990 Nissan Sentra looking for stories. And while I was supposed to find news — and often did — the stories that captured my most passionate attention were those of the everyday. I wrote about a valley town that was flooded to build a dam, and then reappeared a generation later during a drought. I found the world’s first Holiday Inn — not a hotel, but a roadside bar in a coal town in western Pennsylvania’s hills. I wrote about a scholarship that was exclusively for left-handed people and about new government policies governing the viscosity of ketchup. In a retirement home in Pennsylvania Dutch country, I found the ancient inventor of bubble gum and interviewed him about his groundbreaking concoction.
This has continued throughout my career, wherever the stories have taken me. I tracked down the descendants of the original General Tso in China’s rural Hunan Province and asked them whether they’d heard of the chicken dish named after him. In Pakistan, after 9/11, I went to a neighborhood of used book stalls and used Archie Comics to examine whether, in fact, a culture war was unfolding. In Afghanistan, after the Taliban fell, I told the story of how exuberant signage was returning to the streets of Kabul, the capital, and what that said about the changes in life there. In Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, I found a union of villains — or, to be fair, actors who played villains — who’d fallen on hard times because Burmese moviegoers had grown more interested in glamorous international bad guys.
And when the COVID pandemic arrived, I spent more than a year writing and assigning stories about how it was changing daily life, from our attempts to grapple with invisible adversaries to the perils of decision fatigue to why, on Halloween 2020 in the middle of some serious apocalyptic terror, we still went out to “scare houses” to experience the exhilaration of fake fear. I also am kind of obsessed with memory, with what messages entertainment is sending to us — and with the intricacies of baseball.
Finally, most obsessively of all, I spent seven years writing an entire book about a single song.
You get the idea. I try to excavate the significance of things and ideas that are pretty much unsorted — and that might seem at first to be downright insignificant.
Not enough journalism in the world does this, it seems to me. Everyday life produces the building blocks of our reality, yet so much is happening at such a breakneck pace that we need to understand what makes us tick. The loudest things aren’t always the most important.
So I invite you to stick with me as I explore the significance of the everyday, dig into history and marketing and technology and storytelling, and try to understand the endlessly intriguing collage of 21st-century life.
Keep reading below and I’ll tell you what you’re in for.
WHO I AM
Someone in love with, obsessed with and deeply suspicious of storytelling who has not only covered thousands of stories around the world but written many stories about stories and what makes them tick.
Someone who has seen a lot, done a lot and can connect the dots. I have skied in North Korea, climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia and crawled through underground sewers in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. I have covered murder trials and school board meetings and hurricanes and wildfires and school shootings and campaigns and inaugurations. I have interviewed presidents and dictators and a Taliban ambassador, hiked the hills of northern Thailand and navigated the whitewater rivers of Idaho. I have eaten burgers on the banks of the Rio Grande, gnawed on grilled chicken-skin skewers in remote Chinese towns and snacked on smoky beef served in cones made out of old newspapers on the dark side streets of Gusau, Nigeria.
An enthusiastic internationalist who grew up partially in China and Singapore, and believes that the robust interaction of cultures — on an equal and respectful basis — is a key foundation of progress. Also: a deeply committed American mutt whose ancestors were causing trouble to the establishment — and being excommunicated, exiled and in one case hanged in public for heresy — long before the republic was founded.
Someone likely to be overheard saying, "It's about all of us! It's about who we are as a nation."
A son of linguists who grew up surrounded by books on delightfully random subjects and played word games every night at the dinner table. (Learn more about them here and here.)
A cultural omnivore who evaluates ideas on their merits, no matter where they come from.
WHY I’M DOING THIS NOW
I’m a working journalist and have been for 30 years. But there’s a whole lot of news, and these days most of my energies go into news management (though I still write for the wire as often as I can).
Yet because I am certifiably ADHD (I found this out, finally, in 2019 at age 50), there are all sorts of fragments I want to write about and ideas I want to pursue. Too many seemingly little things are too interesting to be ignored.
So here you’ll find a combination of journalism and musings, of analysis and (I hope) compelling ideas that will make you think about the world around you in ways you might not have in the past.
WHAT YOU’LL GET
These dispatches will be a mix of what my father used to call “glorious miscellany” about the world—mostly essays about America, but some global stuff as well. I’ll ask lots of questions and dig into them, but — as in life — there won’t always be answers.
Since this space is unreservedly about writing, there will be a lot of words. But there will be images, too; visual storytelling is a key part of what drives fascination for me.
Some of what you’ll receive will be short bursts: observer pieces about the world around us and the media we consume — whatever is interesting me at the moment. There will be the occasional audio story, too — and maybe eventually even a podcast.
Finally, you should know that there will be a lot of content about stuff. In 2007, I moved back to the house where I grew up when my parents, starting to struggle with dementia, moved out. Fifteen years later, they are gone and I am still navigating a path of grief and fascination around the many things they left behind from a life of exploration and academia. “Unsorted but Significant” is a label I found on a box in the back of the closet in my father’s study (now my study), and it is an organizing principle for all of this.
I’m aiming at a dispatch a week at first, with a hope that I can grow that as I hit a groove.
HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE
First of all, please subscribe and come ahead with criticism and requests that you think will make it better.
I’m going to throw lots of words at you. That’s what you’re signing on for. But I want to hear your words, too. I’d love to get ideas from you on things to write about, and if you have an interesting story to tell about the unexpected parts of everyday life, I’d love to consider showcasing it here.
I hope this will grow, and I hope you’ll stick with me to see it happen.
Thank you for reading.
Ted Anthony
Allison Park, PA
New York, NY
“Civilization is a stream with banks.
The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record;
while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks.”
— Will and Ariel Durant, historians
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