Let's get acquainted, again

Notes from the road in a busy month

Greetings from Route 84 East, roundabouts La Grande, Oregon. My very generous partner is driving us home from a long and lovely weekend with friends and family, as well as some flora and fauna as the natural result of a camping trip in Columbia River Gorge.

This trip, which followed the close of yet another semester at Boise State, means that spare time has been tough to come by over the past few weeks. Throw on top of that a trip to my native New England next week, followed by a long-awaited vacation to Scotland and Iceland the last two weeks of June, and it’s clear that writing opportunities will be scant in the coming month.

This doesn’t mean I won’t post here, just that the entries might be leaner than usual for a bit. However, a wide-open July and August, plus an upcoming research sabbatical in the fall, are opening up new frontiers for You Are Here that I’m excited to explore starting in a few weeks — stay tuned.

In the meantime, I thought today’s post could be a nice opportunity to (re-)introduce myself, especially to the healthy number of new subscribers I’ve acquired in the last few months (welcome!).

Who exactly are you?

My name is Charlie, and I live in beautiful Boise, Idaho. I’m originally from Rhode Island. I lived mainly in Washington, DC in between those two while I went to grad school. It’s an interesting and sometimes bewildering experience to have my two main biographical “places” be such small states, and yet such different ones. To my friends and family who don’t live in Idaho, I’m almost certainly the only Idahoan they know. To my friends and family in Idaho, I’m absolutely the only Rhode Islander they are likely ever to know.

As a teacher, I like to see this as an opportunity to bust myths about these two places; for example, that Rhode Island is the same thing as Long Island (it very much is not), or that Idaho isn’t good for anything besides potatoes (it very much is, though the potatoes are both bountiful and fresh).

As a writer and researcher with an insatiable interest in the power geography has to shape the human experience, my personal “place story” is the music playing in the background of the thinking I do on this Substack. I won’t waste space regurgitating the thesis statement of this newsletter, which I did in my very first post nearly two years ago. But it should suffice to say that I think a lot about the places we live and love, and how they carve unique rivets into the personal, political, and even poetical etchings that make us who we are.

Most importantly of all, I am blessed with an amazing wife and two blundering dogs, Pennie and Rhody. Feast your eyes.

What exactly do you do?

Answering this question is getting a little more difficult (and, I think, more interesting) with each passing year.

My day job, which I adore, is as an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University here in Idaho. This means my job is to teach and do research on the topics on which I cultivated some passable level of expertise when I got my PhD; in my case, American elections and representation, mainly in Congress. I teach classes on Congress, campaigns and elections, the presidency, and a bunch of other related topics.

My research spans a ton of areas thanks to an inability to make up my mind (state politics, campaign finance, and congressional committees, for example), but the subject that motivates me most consistently is how members of Congress represent the specific places that elected them, rather than just their party. My first book, Home Field Advantage, explored a bunch of different ways that deeply personal, local ties in their actual districts (as opposed to parachuting in later in life) positively affect their relationship with the people they’re supposed to be representing in Washington.

I also wrote a textbook about Congress with a couple amazing co-authors called Congress Explained. How I came to write a textbook remains a mystery to me, but it’s not a mystery why I wrote this one: I unironically care a ton about Congress as an institution. A lot of my writing in this space reflects that. The American people generally have a pretty low opinion of Congress, and it’s not hard to see why. But for anyone who thinks a functioning American democracy is a good thing (I’m guessing, or hoping anyway, that’s most of my readers), Congress is the indispensable tool for the job. As this kind of tool, it doesn’t need to be dulled or thrown out; it needs to be sharpened. If you’re interested in what this sharpening looks like, fear not — I’ll be writing and speaking a whole bunch on this in the coming months, both here and elsewhere.

What have you been working on lately?

I recently got what we academics call “tenure” (you’re now legally required to congratulate me, and legally prohibited from firing me). As a result, I’m doing some necessarily threshold-induced deep thinking about the next stage of my career. This Substack and other developing projects (stay tuned) are likely to play starring roles.

But lately, I’ve been pretty active in what in the biz we call “public-facing research.” I’m still attempting (with mixed success) to publish in peer-reviewed academic outlets, but I’m increasingly seeing that I can make a more substantive impact by creating in outlets and settings that are actually read, heard, and consumed by non-academics. I love my job, but if there’s one thing that bugs me the most about academia, it’s the insular way it operates. We shouldn’t just be preaching to the choir — or worse yet, just to fellow academics. If we feel comfortable doing so, we should be getting out there not just doing research, but translating and contextualizing it in ways that make sense to the curious public.

That’s one of the main goals of this Substack, but it’s also a guiding principle of the big audio projects I’ve been involved with over the past couple of years. One is The Big Tent, a live weekly radio show on Boise’s main community-supported radio station, KRBX. On The Big Tent, my co-hosts and I — all of whom are public affairs-oriented professors at Boise State — talk about the week in the news through an expert lens, and go deep on the local, national, and international stories we think matter the most. We also release each episode as a podcast, if you have a spare 25 minutes each week.

The second project that’s ongoing, but currently on hiatus, is Scandalized, a limited-run podcast I recorded with my dear friend and colleague Jaci Ketter on the NPR Network through Idaho’s main NPR affiliate, Boise State Public Radio. On Scandalized, Jaci and I dig through the dustbin of political history and unearth some of our favorite political scandals. We take turns dishing all the gory details, then chase them with a healthy dose of political science so that we all actually learn something. We like to call it the “nerd version of celebrity gossip.”

If I can do a little horn-tooting on this one, Scandalized has racked up about half a million downloads, and just a couple of weeks ago won a general excellence award from the Idaho Press Club. It’s been successful beyond most of my wildest dreams, and I’m happy to report that I absolutely love making it. Jaci and I are currently working on season 2, but you can listen to season 1 right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or by searching for “Scandalized” wherever you listen to podcasts.

I’m also in the planning stages of a third major podcast project that’ll be dropping in a few months that I’m absolutely over the moon about; stay tuned for that.

Finally, if this post hasn’t done the introductory trick, here’s a smattering of other appearances I’ve made in a few different media settings over the past few weeks.

• I’m not really sure how it happened, but the CBC — which is essentially the Canadian version of the BBC — has decided I’m a passable person to speak with on television about Canadian intersections with American politics. I was on a few weeks ago to talk about the implications of President Trump’s trade policies, which have presented major practical and political challenges in Canada. You can watch that segment here.

• I’m a regular guest on City Cast Boise, a lovely local podcast that covers everything from the best brunch spots in Boise to local political drama. I’m on every few Fridays to talk about the week in the news; and in one recent case, to talk about some of the local impacts of national news happening in Congress. A couple weeks ago, I was on to talk through the interesting ways one of Idaho’s members of Congress, Rep. Mike Simpson, is clashing with his party on the issue of public lands.

• I also write pretty regularly for The Conversation, a sensational outlet that features academic authors writing about current events in their own expert voice. Essentially, we try to do what I cited earlier as being really important: communicating research findings to the public to help readers understand the nuance behind current events. I’ve written in the past about gerrymandering, partisanship, and Kamala Harris; this time, I covered the basics of why it’s so important for Congress to be a co-equal branch of government with the President.

I’ll leave it there for now. However, I would absolutely love it if readers (particularly newer ones) felt like commenting on this post with their own “place stories”, and maybe even what drew them to my newsletter! I’d really love to get to know more of you, especially beyond those lovely few of you who have been with me here from the beginning.