Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

CBS Radio Brings the News My longtime friend Kay (Uncle Kay) Carsten, when faced with changing circumstances, would consistently say, “Nothing stays the same, except rocks.”  As a budding business tycoon, I loved it when he told me that. Now that I’m just a self-appointed observer, I find myself overly nostalgic about all the changes society has undergone since the 1950s.  Recently, CBS News announced it is shutting down its radio news service next month after nearly a century of operation. The network was born in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters. A young cigar entrepreneur, William S. Paley, took over in 1928 and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. In the early years, radio didn't "do" news. They just read bulletins from the newspapers. CBS broke the mold in 1932 by ignoring a news embargo to report live on the Lindbergh kidnapping.  Radio news was the social media of the middle part of the 20th Century. From the Roaring Twenties through a worldwide depre...

In our highly mobile society, where "home" is often just where the Wi-Fi connects, we sometimes get taken over by a desire to know where our “people” came from, at least before the grandparents, whose story we learn growing up. And, like most things today, an industry has sprouted up to make money off what I like to call the Heritage Hype. There is something deeply humbling about paying a tech giant in Utah forty bucks a month to confirm that my ancestors were exactly who they said they were: a long line of stoic Scandinavians who would be absolutely horrified that I just spent forty bucks to talk to a computer about them. This renewed curiosity about origins became especially relevant for me back in 2018, when I struggled with a painful medical condition that was beyond the treatment ability of my specialist in Duluth. He referred me, with little optimism, to a specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  After a day of invasive tests, a surgeon young enough to be my son tol...

Here we are to talk about the SAVE Act, which is simmering wildly in the halls of Congress. It is purportedly designed to prevent election fraud. It appeals to the same crowd of citizens who believe we never landed on the moon, W was behind 9/11, Haitian immigrants were dining on the house pets of white neighbors in Ohio, and Aurora, CO, was "invaded" and "taken over" by Venezuelan gangs. For those of us who saw through those charades, the SAVE Act is a solution looking for a problem, a problem that doesn’t exist. When I was coming of age, the mechanics of our democracy felt as reliable and unnoticed as the plumbing in a house—you only notice the pipes if there’s a problem, like a leak. Nowadays, if you listen to the national rhetoric, you’d think our democracy was in crisis. But voter fraud is less like a flood and more like an occasional, isolated drop of water in an otherwise dry basement. American elections are difficult to manipulate because we don’t hold a sin...

Just wrapped up my 2025 tax returns. Good news: as a pensioner living mostly on Social Security, I didn’t owe any taxes except something called the payroll tax. The Bohunk and I supplement our meager Social Security earnings with whatever scratch I can squeeze out of publishers.  As a freelance writer, an independent contractor, I pay something  called the “Self-Employment Tax.” It is the same “FICA” taxes you see deducted from your paycheck each week, but an employer isn’t paying half; I pay it all. The full 15.3% (12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare). Unrelated to taxes, our Medicare monthly premium is more than $400 for the basic Plan B coverage, with a $250 deductible per person and a 20% co-pay for services.  This undermines the perception of Medicare as a complementary service. Nevertheless, misconceptions persist, and there are still criticisms that elderly individuals like me receive free health care. Furthermore, I am required to continue paying into ...