Pinky and the Brain; So much to say; We’re doing fine, all things considered; The stories don’t write themselves; Mrs. Kelly’s Monster; Write what happened; Link dump; The Jordan doc and NFL Draft

Draft No. 4: Coronavirus Edition No. 2

1) What are we gonna do today, Brain? The same thing we do everyday, Pinky… Try to take care of the child.

When we last spoke, I wrote that we were on the eve of full-blown quarantine mode. Looking back, this was right before the rest of the country figured it out.

At the time, we didn’t know what to expect. About six weeks later, at least for me, it feels like this…

And this...

And this… (These Dave Matthews Band lyrics include “I'm stuck inside,” “Got central heating and I'm alright,” and “Open up my head and let me out.”)

I’m pretty sure Dave Matthews did not have a stay-at-home pandemic in mind when he wrote “So Much To Say,” but the song is so appropriate today.

Here in Maryland, our governor has done a great job communicating, keeping people updated, securing 500,000 COVID-19 tests from South Korea, and NOT suggesting you eat a Tide Pod to treat the coronavirus.

The curve has been flattened, and I truly believe that we’re just going to have to get used to living differently for probably the next year – like wearing masks out in public places.

Signs point to the virus not disappearing for some time. In Australia (opposite season to us), it’s there. In places like Singapore (which stomped out the virus early), it returned once people were let back out into the wild.

But we also can’t stay at home forever. Now that the worry about overwhelming our health care system (at least for now) has been reduced in a few places, there’s probably a middle ground of “social distancing” to be found eventually.

2) I’ve written a ton about the ‘pandemic economy’ over the last few weeks.

There’s more than a dozen links below. Here’s a sample from one, on March 17, for Stansberry Research:

The bars are empty on St. Patrick's Day...

That's the scene here in Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan ordered all bars, restaurants, gyms, and movie theaters to close at 5 p.m. yesterday.

Over the weekend, a bunch of images of college kids drinking together on social media seemed to have sealed the deal. Hogan said of the decision at a press conference...

The good news is that most people who get COVID-19 aren't going to get really ill...

It's just that vulnerable population of older adults and people with compromised systems or underlying health conditions, that the mortality rate is very high.

We're trying to keep those people from getting infected by all the other people, like the ones who were crowded into bars all weekend.

For a person with some Irish blood, it's tough... Drinking Guinness at home out of the bottle doesn't bring the same joy as it does sipping it fresh from a draft.

But of course, we have greater concerns today...

Fortunately, Jamie, Molly and I have been healthy through this whole COVID-19 episode… We’re doing fine, all things considered.

But I’d be ignoring reality if I said there haven’t been challenges, mainly with both of us balancing working from home every day while taking care of our dear 8-month-old. She’s pretty mobile now and also knows when we’re gone, so, you know…

In truth, Jamie does too much of the work around the house. I’d be lost and probably living in a cardboard box on the street without her. But we’re hanging in there.

I’ve been writing a ton about what’s been going on over the last month (see below for links)… and on deadline days (about three days per week) time to focus is a need, not a want. These stories don’t write themselves, after all.

At the same time, Jamie’s busy running point on a lot of different projects for the Johns Hopkins neurosurgery department. Most of the doctors, faculty, and residents have been thrust into COVID duty at the hospital with everyone else.

We’re not alone, of course. These last two or so months have been so hard for so many people in similar and different ways. But I’m here (mostly) to talk about writing.

3) Introducing, Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.

Along the lines of neurosurgeons, allow me to introduce to you one of the stories that inspired me to pursue journalism for a job or at least a passion back in my undergrad days at Penn State... Here it is… Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.

Now, there’s a lot of weird coincidences at work here…

First, I had no clue a decade ago that I’d up married to someone who works with actual brain surgeons all day long…

Second, the story, written by Jon Franklin, originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun. When I first read it in a class titled “Literary Journalism,” (I still have our textbook), I also didn’t know I’d end up in Baltimore.

But I did have a clue that the story Franklin wrote was amazing.

In brief, it’s the story of a neurosurgeon operating on a tumor, the monster. A simple idea. But it’s told in a totally fascinating, concise, detailed, compelling and award-winning way.

The best thing I can say about this story is the tension grows and intensifies with each line, each word.

I remember reading it for the first time and feeling my heart race, as Franklin takes you through the brain of the patient, Mrs. Kelly, and the doctor trying to save her, Dr. Ducker. It’s a feature writing clinic.

On the television screen the tweezer instrument presses on, following the artery toward the brainstem. Gently, gently, gently, gently it pushes aside the gray coils. For a moment the optic nerve appears in the background, then vanishes.

The going is even slower now. Dr. Ducker is reaching all the way into the center of the brain and his instruments are the length of chopsticks. The danger mounts because, here, many of the vessels feed the pilot light.

The heartbeat goes pop, pop, pop, 70 beats a minute.

The story humanizes the entire concept of brain surgery. In other words, it shows the realness of the people involved, which is a key thing to do when you’re writing anything.

At the end of the story, I learned in the footnote of our class textbook that it won the first ever Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1979. That seemed right.

If you are interested in great writing, I suggest you give it a read.

And if you want to get really nerdy about it, in an interview with Neiman Storyboard a few years ago (Neiman’s a great resource for writers), Franklin explained nearly every decision that he made while writing, and basically annotated every line to show his thought process.

It’s fascinating and you’ll learn a lot.

4) This Is His Lane

Fast forward to today. In the middle of last year, I worked on a feature story on Dr. Joseph Sakran, an emergency room trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins.

I will admit I had Mrs. Kelly’s Monster on my mind a little bit when I was working on this story, for better or worse. I don’t think it will be nominated for a Pulitzer, but Dr. Sakran’s tale sure is compelling and was one of the features in Baltimore magazine’s most recent Top Doctors issue.

In brief, Sakran was shot in the throat as a teenager, almost died, then decided to become a trauma surgeon, inspired by the doctors who saved his life. He’s become a nationally respected surgeon at one of the country’s busiest ER's and now he’s crusading against gun violence, as a leading advocate in Washington, D.C.

This is one story where I tried, as a writer, to just get out of the way. My friend Sirage Yassin (one of those who receives this newsletter unsolicited; Hi, bud) once shared some simple advice with me way back when, when I was feeling pressure writing a story that I don’t even remember today: “Write what happened.”

That’s always a good idea.

“I’ve said it so many times,” Sakran says, “the worst part of my job is having to go talk to the families of those loved ones and tell them that the child that left that morning is never coming home again.”

He’s done it too often, hundreds of times, which is why he’s currently in the middle of moving to Washington, D.C., a temporary relocation from his home in Brewers Hill, for a yearlong sabbatical as a health policy fellow at the National Academy of Medicine.

Related, one of the saddest stats I’ve seen about the pandemic (outside of the deaths and infections and jobs lost, of course)… is that March 2020 was the first March since 2002 without any school shootings in the U.S.

All it took was for all schools to be closed for it to happen.

4) Pandemic link dump

Here’s links to a bunch of stories I’ve written over the last several weeks, in the Stansberry Digest and DailyWealth newsletters.

These three include some bigger-picture ideas…

On prevention, the all-too-forgotten most valuable thing in the world: The Best Way to Save $2 Trillion, March 30.

On just the strangeness of living in a pandemic: It’s Strange Living in a Pandemic Economy, March 17.

And on when the stock market might bottom (implying it hasn’t happened yet): Bear Markets End When Nobody Is Watching, April 7.

And the rest are more of the daily “first drafts of history” variety.

When Fear Takes Hold, Don’t Overlook These Lucrative Assets, April 18

The ‘Meatless’ Trend That Nobody Expected, April 13

It’s a Crash Mash-Up of 1929, 1987, and 2009, April 6

Take a Breath, Pause, and Consider the Long Term, April 4

When Doctors ‘Redeploy,’ the Money Changes Direction, Too, April 1

The Fed Has a ‘Blank Check’… And Is Not Afraid to Use It, March 28

The Greatest Stocks of All-Time, March 26

Making A List and Checking It Twice, March 25

What Porter Is Doing With $1 Million Today, March 23

The Markets Are Running Like a Pack of Wild Dogs, March 18

Here’s What You Need to Know About the Pandemic Crisis, March 16

What Goes Down Must Come Up?, March 13

This Is Real March Madness, March 12

Panic Triggered the Circuit Breakers, March 9

5) Sports (kind of) on TV.

With the Tiger King phenomenon now thankfully behind us, it seems the most talked-about thing streaming today is the new “Jordan documentary,” a.k.a. The Last Dance. I’m looking forward to watching the next episodes tonight.

One takeaway from the first two episodes: The number of interviews included, including one with Chicago Bulls fan Barack Obama, is really impressive.

Finally, the NFL draft happened over the last few days. I’ve said before the draft is essentially a glorified business conference broadcast on TV, but in an era where literally nothing new is on except for the anxiety-provoking news, it was a welcome respite.

How many classic games can one watch?

So not surprising that a record 15-plus million people watched the first night of the draft, which I wrote about here for Baltimore magazine. It was different than usual, since all the team officials and players were at their own houses rather than gathered in one spot.

The Ravens had an incredibly good draft, and it went off without a “glitch.” #DadJoke

That does it for now. Hope you’re all doing well. Stay strong.

Corey

P.S. If you haven’t gotten the last few of these e-mails from me, that’s because I thought it better to not overwhelm your inbox and send these only to people who signed up by choice (except my immediate family, so long as they haven’t disowned me.)

But, it turns out, I’m only sending these notes about once per month, which is less frequent than I thought I would. So I’ve added a few of you back to my e-mail list since last month’s issue.

If you wish to unsubscribe, feel free, of course, but like I said at the start of the year, everyone receiving this newsletter has brought something good and valuable to my life either professionally, personally, or both (whether you know it or not). So thank you.

Understanding COVID-19 and trying not to panic; 5 work from home tips; What should you do with your money right now?; Quarantine Watch List; Link dump; Orioles spring training

Draft No. 3: Coronavirus edition

1) I hope people are taking the coronavirus outbreak seriously, but not panicking…

If I was still in college or just out of college, I’d probably be out at the bars right now too at the start of an extended spring break. At the same time, if Molly was 21 instead of seven months old, I’d be grounding her!

Everything going on today is unbelievably unusual. Social distancing is a new, understood term. People still largely have no idea if they have COVID-19 or what to do about it…

If you already do, I apologize – and skip on down to other exciting content – but I spent a good part of this week writing in-depth about various angles of the virus and its spread… mostly about the financial impact but also about how people should take the whole health thing seriously.

In one piece, I quoted our resident doctor at Stansberry Research, who said people are not taking the threat seriously enough…

I'm predicting that with this kind of stupidity, this virus will quickly infect 50% of Americans in the next four weeks.

And that's going to be the hardest part... this will happen quickly. The bad news is that we trusted the government to properly prepare. I've read that there is only a one-day supply of the N95 masks needed for health care workers.

The speed of this virus's spread will overwhelm hospitals and ICU resources. Folks will die because there isn't room in the hospitals.

That’s the real danger here. There’s no way the health care system in this country has the capacity to deal with the “worst case” scenario projections of the number people getting infected and seriously ill.

And our leaders have proven to be slow to make logical, useful decisions.

There are literally not enough ventilators in this country for the demand if things go in the direction they’ve gone in Italy.

From everything I’d been able to gather, here are the most important points…

If you have a fever, take note of it. And if you’re having unusual shortness of breath at the same time, call or go see a doctor… If you’re having symptoms, you’re probably contagious.

Those over 60 years old and with underlying medical conditions are most at risk because they’re immune systems aren’t as strong as us young studs. But anyone can get this thing.

It’s not just about you not getting it, though. You can have it, feel relatively fine, and spread it to other people without knowing it… and then the virus could eventually get to someone who is more susceptible to getting sick.

Wash your hands. Don’t cough or sneeze on people, though nobody should be doing this anyway. Here’s a helpful chart:

My stories about all this from this week are behind Stansberry paywall for now (they go free after seven days). But here’s one from Thursday, which was adapted into an essay for the free DailyWealth newsletter: It’s Finally Here… And It’s Time to Think Clearly.

And there’s more links to stories from previous weeks below, like this one from last month: You Can Go to Starbucks In China… Just Take Your Temperature First.

And this one, China’s $244 Billion Easy Money ‘Cure’, where we talked about the issue with telling people “not to panic.” An excerpt:

If somebody yells, 'Don't panic!'... what are you tempted to do?

Panic.

It's like the "pink elephant" story that psychologists like to use...

When's the last time you thought of a pink elephant?

Never.

But then, try not to think about a pink elephant... and you can't get it off your mind.

This is technically called the "ironic mental process"... And doctors say stress worsens its effect. The lesson is supposed to teach us that it's counterproductive to suppress anxiety-producing and depressing thoughts...

2) Like a lot of the rest of the country, we’ll be working at home a while…

That’s the plan for the next two weeks… And with the way things are going, I suspect it will be longer…

I kind of saw this coming when I wrote about what was happening in China last month with the virus. This piece was titled, What Happens If Everyone ‘Works From Home’, and talked about “contactless” food pickup at Starbucks and McDonald’s in China.

Here, though, the speed and scale of this whole situation has been surprising. Suddenly, there are no sports to watch on TV, college classes have gone to Zoom, and we don’t be sitting in any meetings any time soon.

Fortunately, I’ve worked at home on and off for a few years, so it won’t be too much of an adjustment. But it’s also easy to lose your mind if you’re not careful.

For the uninitiated, here’s a few helpful tips…

• Don’t wear sweatpants. In other words, act as if you were leaving the house for the day. Take a shower, shave, etc. You can always wear shorts, though.

• Go outside. Take a walk in the morning, or at lunch, and definitely get out of the house when you’re done working. I’ve got Manny dog-walking duty, so he gets me out for at least a little while during the day.

• Set boundaries. Hopefully, you have an office space where you can shut the door and pretend like you’ve commuted to work. With kids at home, it’s going to be hard to focus…

• Take advantage of opportunities to nap. Here in America, we find it weak for some reason to say we’re tired and need to take a nap at 2 in the afternoon. Well, we’re you’re in quarantine, you can do the siesta without judgment. Just make sure you’re not missing anything important while getting some mid-day shut eye.

• Don’t be a Slack fool. For those already familiar with communication platform and general e-mail replacement Slack, this tweet is pretty funny. For those who aren’t, don’t be this person…

Maxim Leyzerovich @round

newly remote coworkers on slack every four minutes

4) Since last we spoke…

Here’s a few other pieces I’ve published over the last month. Busy times…

What Should You Do With Your Money Right Now?, Stansberry Digest
As the stock market started to sell off, we updated readers on what to expect in the short and long term.

The Fed’s ‘Emergency’ Rate Cut Is Far From a Guaranteed Cure, Stansberry Digest
Sure wasn’t.

It’s a Good Time to Go Against the Crowd, Stansberry Digest

It will drive you crazy (and possibly lose you money) if you try to time any of these things, make sense of an endless stream of headlines, or predict what might happen next...

The Forces Behind Tesla’s Wild Ride, Stansberry Digest
Elon Musk and his company are a lightning-rod. So is Tesla’s stock price.

The Biggest Winner in This Year’s Super Bowl, Stansberry Digest
This year’s Super Bowl seems like a decade ago. The point of this story was that sports betting is getting huge.

Maryland Hoops, and Everyone Else, Stomachs a Sudden End to Their Seasons, Baltimore magazine
No March Madness. Crap.

Hope Springs Anew as Orioles Begin Year Two of Rebuild, Baltimore magazine
In which the Astros sign-stealing scandal also came up, given the O’s GM Mike Elias was there in the Houston front-office when it all went down.

Asked if he knew about the situation when he was in Houston, Elias told us, “My work and focus was with the Astros' was the minor leagues, the international scouting department, the domestic scouting department, and I'll leave it at that,” he said. “It's an issue that I'm glad baseball is rectifying.”

5) Quarantine Watch List…

Jamie and I suggest McMillions on HBO. A six-part documentary series on the story behind the McDonald’s Monopoly game fraud scheme of the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s great. We just finished it Sunday.

6) Thanks and holler back…

Thanks to those of you who sent me encouraging messages after last month’s “draft.” I’m really enjoying writing this as a way to keep in touch and hearing your feedback and thoughts for improvement, etc.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this craziness that’s going on right now. You can reply directly to this email or send a note to firstdraftfeedback@gmail.com. I’ll share responses in the next issue.

Also, if you think it’s worth it, please share the fact that this newsletter exists with anyone who you think might be interested.

Stay clean out there.

All the best,

Corey
@corey_mcl

Stories and our brains; Information is food; Sports and the coronavirus; The antler says spring is here; Thankful for a good password app; Feedback!

Draft No. 2

1) Quite often, more often than I would like, I find myself questioning why I’m writing — for, like, a career.

This even goes when I’m starting to work on projects or stories that were my idea in the first place; not assigned to me by someone else.

But by the end of all the work – the idea-generation, the reporting, tracking down the right people, the transcribing, the writing, the telling myself this sucks, that I’m terrible, then the editing, the going for hours without eating and toss in whatever else is going on in life — the finished product is still somehow always worth it.

So what gives?

It turns out we humans need stories to make sense of the world. We need to both create stories and consume them. It’s science. It’s a big part of how our brains work.

In other words, this bodes well for the business of writing, of “content,” or storytelling, whatever you want to call it — no matter how much craziness is going on the media and publishing world.

From a textbook called the “Neuroscience of Psychotherapy”… (I’ll explain why I came across this at a later time.)

The evolution of the human brain is inextricably interwoven with the expansion of culture and the emergence of language. Thus, it is no coincidence that human beings are storytellers. Through countless generations, humans have gathered to listen to stories of the hunt, the exploits of their ancestors and morality tales of good and evil. It has long been supposed that these stories support the transmission of culture while promoting psychological and emotional stability.

Stories connect us to others, prop up our often fragile identities and keep our brains regulated. Thus I believe that both the urge to tell a tale and our vulnerability to be being captivated by one are deeply woven into the structure of our brain.

Narratives perform an array of important functions, including grounding our experience in a linear sequential framework, remembering sequences of events and steps in problem solving, serving as blueprints for emotion, behavior and identity, keeping goals in mind and establishing sequences of goal-attainment, providing for affect regulation when under stress, allowing a context of movement to self-definition.

A story well told containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions and thoughts flavored with emotion connects people and integrates neural networks.

All that to answer a simple question.

Some people have “Play Like a Champion” as their mantra. But when I’m feeling particularly annoyed at myself, and I’m questioning my life decisions, or I’m stuck on a story or feeling short on time and patience, I take comfort in this universal “Humans Need Stories” idea.

2) Along these lines, I was blown away the first time I came across this idea: Information is food.

When you think about all the information that we’re bombarded with every day (like this newsletter) as if someone is throwing all the food in the world at you, it might make you think differently about what you take in.

I would say watching cable news is like hitting the drive-thru at Taco Bell compulsively, but I love Taco Bell too much to say that. Anyway, the point is that brain doctors say…

“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful,” said Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, a neuroeconomist whose research employs functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), psychological theory, economic modeling, and machine learning. “And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful–what some may call idle curiosity.”

I think we all know this inherently. Watch trashy television, feel bad. It’s like the idea of garbage in, garbage out. This Ted Talk explains it quite well.

3) Here are a few stories I published since Draft No. 1 last month…

For Towson Basketball Coach Pat Skerry, Autism Awareness Is Personal (Baltimoremagazine.com)

If you watch a college basketball game this weekend—and, even in February, millions of people will—pretty much every coach, even the well-known ones, will be sporting a blue puzzle piece-shaped pin on their suit jacket lapel.

What’s that for, you may ask?

Well, that’s the point. It’s for autism awareness. For the estimated one in 59 children in the United States today, like Skerry’s son, and more than 70 million people worldwide living on the broad autism spectrum. And it’s specifically for Autism Speaks, the advocacy organization pushing for more research into what’s hypothesized to be a brain and nervous system disorder, but whose cause is still largely debated as diagnosis rates continue to rise.

Orioles Execs Not Mentioned in ‘AstroGate’ Sign-Stealing Scandal (Baltimoremagazine.com)

We read the details of the MLB report closely since Mike Elias, hired as Orioles general manager in November 2018, and his top aide, former NASA engineer Sig Mejdal, worked closely with [now former Astros general manager] Jeff Luhnow and [now former manager] A.J. Hinch for years with the Astros – before arriving in Baltimore with plans to turn around our dear franchise with their analytics-driven approach.

Related, I’m finishing up work on a season preview feature of sorts on the Orioles’ rebuilding efforts. I spoke in depth with Elias, Mejdal, manager Brandon Hyde, several players, and others.

The Trouble With ‘Virus Crisis’ Speculation (Stansberry Digest)

Any company promising it is working on a detector or a "cure" for a new virus is likely overstating its potential.

When a Giant Economy Gets Sick (Stansberry Digest)

It isn't easy to stay calm when you're constantly seeing images on the news of people wearing masks at airports and on the streets... and hearing that the U.S. citizen infected with the Wuhan virus is currently in isolation.

4) Apparently, and you probably know this, deer lose their antlers near the end of winter.

I was walking Manny the other day when we came across this deer antler in the wilderness (not really) of our backyard…

Jamie was none too pleased that I said I carried the antler to a spot near our back door, but she’s coming around to it now. I’m probably going to make a giant bottle opener out of it.

More importantly, spring is near. Forget the groundhogs. They’re so yesterday. I will now determine if spring is on the way by the date on which the deer around Baltimore County drop their antlers.

5) If remembering all the passwords that you have annoys you as much as me…

Give Bitwarden a try.

It’s a totally free app that says it works on most operating systems. It definitely works on iOS. You can save passwords across devices and auto log-in.

6) Feedback!

First Draft headquarters received its first piece of feedback shortly after our first issue, on the idea of financial literacy specifically… Have something to share? Reply directly to this email or send a note to firstdraftfeedback@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.

“Takeaway from the first distribution. About three years ago I started using Mint to track my finances and create budgets. Now there’s not a single dollar that we spend that isn’t tracked or coded. The end result is we now save a decent amount of money each month as opposed to when we were breaking even or slightly dipping into our savings.

“Before investing I think one of the biggest ignored areas for the average household is understanding personal finances and budgets. People always account for mortgage and student loans but when they budget they often ignore the small things. Those small things sometimes take out about 30-40 percent of our expenses.

“Once we got the budget under control we were then able to smartly invest. It was a game-changer and very simple exercise.” — From friend and newly-hired assistant editor “Rob, the.” (Strange name, I know.)

Until next time,

Corey

Written in Baltimore, Maryland | Visit CoreyMcLaughlin.com | Follow me on social media: @Corey_McL

Our first edit; Datelines; The Ravens' losing locker room; What Dave Chappelle knows about great writing; The things they don't teach you in school

Draft No. 1

BALTIMORE — First off, thanks to those of you that have signed up for First Draft. You are the early adopters of this venture, and I am thankful.

Astute readers may notice, in authentic first draft fashion, I dropped the “s” from this newsletter’s original name. My editor (Jamie) and I preferred it, and so we made the change to the name and our links. The red squiggle you see over the “s” in the logo is a proofreaders’ mark that means “delete.” We thought the image was appropriate and it will stick around for a while.

Second, one of my simple pleasures when I started writing newspaper articles in college was the use of datelines. For those unfamiliar, this geeky journalism nuance is the city name in ALL CAPS at the start of the article. As far as I understand, a dateline is meant to indicate to the reader where a particular set of facts was gathered or where the writer is actually writing from. I’m confident most people don’t care about this, and a lot of publications have abandoned the practice — and some new ones have never used it all.

But not here. We will not give up the fight.

Why? One, because it makes me feel like I’m doing something important, but more seriously I think it gives readers a good sense of place to start off reading a piece of writing. Most of the time here, you’ll see “BALTIMORE” unless I’m somewhere else, which is unlikely since I swore off traveling beyond driving distance with five-month-old Molly in toe now — and the Ravens aren’t going to Miami for the Super Bowl.

On we go…

I covered the Ravens-Titans NFL playoff game on Saturday night.

In a perfect world, I’d write one really good sports story (or something on any topic) a week, get paid enough to live on and invest, call it a day, go drink a Dogfish and take a swim in the ocean. That’s not my station in life right now, but thankfully through freelance work with Baltimore magazine, I’m able to continue to live out my childhood dream of being a sportswriter. As I realized when I first got into this business, sports provides a wonderful platform to tell stories of all different kinds — and actually have people read them.

On Saturday night, I was fortunate to cover the Ravens playoff game against the Tennessee Titans, the biggest football game in town since well, almost exactly one year earlier. This one ended like that one, with a loss, and quarterback Lamar Jackson not playing very well. There were more expectations for the team this year, being the top seed and all in the conference. The mood in the Ravens locker room afterward this time, a 28-12 defeat, was shocked, stunned, frustrated, those kinds of words.

You’d think it would be difficult to get players to talk to you after a game like this — and often it is a challenge — but this particular Ravens team has a lot of players that are respectful of the media. And, in games like this with a lot of media credentialed, there’s huge gaggles of TV reporters that roam from player to player, making it pretty obvious they want to talk to you.

Players don’t need to stick around for when reporters are able to enter the locker room, and not all of them do. But as you can read in my story from the game, plenty of Ravens stuck around to talk, and Jackson, just 23 years old, who spoke from a podium in a crowded interview room, answered everything thrown his way. He’s a stand-up guy. From the article, The Stunning End to This Ravens Season Won’t Be Easy to Get Over, published today:

You hope this isn’t the start of a “best team to never win a [fill in a blank]” discussion or “best player never to win a [fill in the blank]” discussion when it comes to the super-likable Jackson in particular. But dubious narratives are downright impossible to shake until you, well, win whatever is missing. And the questions already started flowing in Jackson’s direction as soon as 15 minutes after the game ended Saturday night.

At age 23, he’s now 19-3 as a starting quarterback in two pro seasons, and 0-2 in the playoffs with a 63.2 postseason quarterback rating (out of a 158.3 maximum). To his credit, dear Lamar, still wearing his game pants, along with a pair of Nike flip-flops and a gray Baltimore dri-fit t-shirt, stood at the podium in a humid interview room and answered more than a dozen questions in front of 11 television cameras and about 50 reporters. He said he made too many mistakes, promised to work harder, and come back stronger next season.

If last season indicated to the quarterback that he needed to work on his passing mechanics, the jolting end to this year may suggest,“I need to improve on everything," he said. "Whether it’s running, throwing the ball, pocket poise, everything."

One reporter asked the question of the day for fans, whether it will be painful to hear people talking about him not winning a playoff game over the next year. “I don’t really care about what they say,” Jackson said. “This is my second year in the league. Many people [aren’t] able to bring it to the playoffs. We’re just going to keep going, like I said, [and] get ready for next year.”

The thing is, nobody wanted to be talking about next year so soon.

This bring up another point, one of my favorite things in the world is observing things on the field or in the locker room that maybe someone else doesn’t see, or probably isn’t going to write about, and putting the scene into words and providing context. In this case, I caught a little moment between two Ravens offensive lineman that you probably could pick up in the piece that I doubt anyone else will write about.

As a kid who grew up playing Little League baseball, football, tennis, etc., I still always think it’s a privelge to go to a game, write about it, and get paid for it too. Free food and weather-proof shelter on questionable stormy days is nice too. Last night, finding my assigned parking lot was the hardest part of the whole evening, and the trouble was entirely my fault. I put in the wrong lot in GPS and you can imagine traffic outside a stadium two hours before a game.

As long as people let me in, I’ll be there.

Related, if you’ve ever wondered what it looks like from the perspective of a news anchor standing in front of a camera for a live shot, check out the photo below. This was WJZ’s (the Baltimore CBS affiliate) spot for after the game, where I watched part of the finish… (I was not on TV.)

Dave Chappelle is the man and always will be

Yes, I’m one of those white people who loves Dave Chappelle. I would pay to interview him, which isn’t exactly ethical by journalism standards, but I think you get the point.

He speaks the truth, and he has been the best comedian of my generation for a long time. My Chappelle’s Show DVDs are collecting dust somewhere.

This week, PBS aired the ceremony that honored Chappelle with the annual Mark Twain Prize, the country’s top honor for a comedian.

I’ve been waiting for the show for months — I’ve watched each of the past years’ ceremonies celebrating Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, etc. — and it was worth the watch.

One of the big themes Chappelle talked about was the importance of telling the truth as a comedian, which of course he does better than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He also said that being a comedian is the one profession where you “can use everything that you know.” I find both of these points true in writing too.

Here’s the show.

Related, at least to the name of the award Chappelle won, I happened to write on Thursday about how Mark Twain was a terrible investor and how readers can learn from the mistakes that bankrupted him. The full version ran in the Stansberry Digest, but it’s behind a subscriber paywall until Thursday (a week after it originally ran is the policy). Alas, you can read a shortened version of the same article here, which ran in the DailyWealth financial newsletter on Saturday.

The things they don’t teach you in school…

Lastly, a topic I’ve become very interested in the last few years.

Since I started working in the financial newsletter industry, I’ve become a huge proponent for financial literacy.

Not only because I realized what knowing what to do with my money could do for my own life, but because I think the world in general might be a much better place if everyone had at least a basic knowledge of things like budgeting, credit, dividends, etc. Most people my age haven’t a clue, but knowing these concepts can give anyone the ability and freedom to do what they actually want to do every day.

So when I had the chance to write about the importance of financial literacy recently in some depth, I took it. You can read the whole piece for the Stansberry Digest here, and here’s an excerpt:

The veteran Baltimore City cop started to talk about money...

We were sitting in the officer's makeshift office in West Baltimore's Pennsylvania Avenue Market. It's about a 10-minute drive from our Stansberry Research headquarters, but it might as well be an entire world away...

This is the part of Baltimore that was portrayed in the former HBO hit show The Wire... the blighted side. Most people would tell you not to come to this part of town at night, at least not without a police escort like I (Corey McLaughlin) had...

Robberies, assaults, drugs, murders, shootings... Evan Anderson, an 18-year Baltimore Police veteran, has seen all of it on a regular basis. For the fifth straight year, there have been more than 300 homicides in Baltimore... many in the district where he works.

In fact, as we talked – his now-standard-issue body camera pointed right at me – Anderson admitted people were probably dealing drugs on the street outside the building at that moment.

We were talking about something completely unrelated to regular Digest matters. But as so often happens, you'd be surprised at how much two ideas, or different worlds, are connected...

Across the country, a lot of folks try to offer solutions for the problems in low-income, high-crime areas like this one, Anderson said. They often suggest adding more cops or stiffer enforcement. But he went in a different direction with how to make things better...

'Schools don't teach people finance,' Anderson said...

"Most of us – not until we're adults, get credit, and mess up – we're not learning how to save or invest or anything like that," he said, alluding to his own experience in racking up consumer debt. "That's why a lot of people get in the situations they're in."

Finance should be a mandatory class in high school, according to Anderson. (I countered with middle school.) As he explained, maybe then people would find better ways to live, rather than taking a few bucks from a local drug dealer to go sell some products on the corner.

"We don't find out about finance and investing until we're already in trouble, then we go looking to learn, and you have so much ground to cover," he said. "My son is 16. I'm teaching him, breaking it down, that way he doesn't have to make the same mistakes I did."

That does it for tonight. I hope you found this interesting and helpful. Have a great week.

If you have any comments, questions, putdowns, etc., about the first full edition of First Draft or suggestions for future issues, you can reply directly to this email or send me a note at firstdraftsfeedback@gmail.com.

I’d love to hear from you, and I’d love this newsletter to keep growing. Please tell your friends or colleagues and spread the word to anyone interested in following along.

All the best,

Corey

First Draft

On writing (mostly), plus sports, culture and other things and stuff.

Welcome to First Draft, a place where you can read and talk about the craft of writing, sports, culture, and any other stuff that doesn’t fall into those categories.

Sign up below to get my newsletter… (Right now, I’m saying they’ll be monthly emails. You can always unsubscribe at any time if that’s too much.)

And, in the meantime, please share the news that I've started this thing if you know someone who might be interested.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them whenever you’d like to firstdraftfeedback@gmail.com.

And, finally, to read past work from me and check out my bio, visit coreymclaughlin.com.

All the best,

Corey