Dan Sinker/blog

Unfinished Business,
a weblog

This is a place where I can think out loud, work through ideas, and talk about stuff that doesn't fit cleanly into the type of freelance writing I do. Some ideas will be fully formed, others, as the title implies, will be unfinished.

A Visit With The Stamp King

I took my dad's modest stamp collection to Chicago's last stamp dealer. The money wasn't good, but it was a perfect end.

Published on Jul 18, 2025

Three Escapes

Sometimes you need to step out for a second, to take yourself out of the here and now and go somewhere else. With everything so *waves hands in all directions* right now, here are three places I'm going, if only for a moment.

Published on Jul 11, 2025

Gathering Grief

A meditation on death, grief, and the card game Magic: The Gathering.

Published on Jul 3, 2025

Things End: Punk Planet, Year 13

For more than a year, I've been writing essays about Punk Planet, the influential, incredible, miracle of a magazine I worked on for 13 years. For more than a year I've been dreading writing this ending, because the reality is this: Sometimes things end and you never, totally get over it.

Published on May 30, 2025

The Who Cares Era

We're living through the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore, while the government stomps its uncaring boot on our necks.

Published on May 23, 2025

Things Fall Apart: Punk Planet, Year 12

Memory is a real son of a bitch. I thought I remembered the last painful years of Punk Planet vividly. Looking across the wreckage of Year 12, our next-to-last year, it turns out there was a lot I didn't remember.

Published on Apr 30, 2025

Take a Look, It's in a Book

On Independent Bookstore Day, a look at how a bookstore changed my life and why indie bookstores are so vital right now.

Published on Apr 26, 2025

Taking Things Apart (in three parts)

I wrote about how you can learn by taking things apart, about how geeky electronics were transformed by the global supply chain, and about how nothing happening in in the administration right now is about fixing broken things.

Published on Apr 11, 2025

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