Nuclear Meltdown is about family

I’m a professional journalist, husband, and father of three young kids. The idea for this newsletter started percolating in my mind even before my wife and I had kids, but I decided to finally start writing about our experiences raising a family shortly after we moved (back) to Salt Lake City in order to be closer to our network of extended family.

The idea behind the blog is that the Nuclear Family is great. But also, historically many families were also more expansive and multigenerational, and as a parent of young kids I’d really love to reintroduce some of that support network (“it takes a village…”) back into my life.

So, the idea here is to explore history, economics, stories, and more that give us our ideas about family — and to think about what a more robust version of family might look like. The name “Nuclear Meltdown” (aside from being a pun) gets at the idea that the nuclear family is facing a lot of challenges right now, and that even when it functions well it may not offer the kind of support network many people in history have leaned on.

So thanks for checking out this block and please subscribe. It’s free, but subscriptions really do make a difference.

For those curious about my background, I’m currently the special projects editor at Inman, a news site that covers housing, real estate, housing-related technology and more. I also occasionally write lengthy hot takes for the Deseret News, and shorter hot takes for the Institute for Family Studies. Previously I worked at BuzzFeed News, where I covered protests, riots, the environment, politics and more. And before that I worked at the Salt Lake Tribune.