Numlock Sunday: December 9, 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Aaron Gordon, who a writes Signal Problems, a newsletter I love that’s about the New York subway system.

Mass transit is really interesting to me because it’s a physical manifestation of the consequences of bad policy. It doesn’t take a researcher, a statistician or a scientist to draw conclusions about what happens when a government underfunds maintenance, or the consequences of a vast bureaucracy, or the issues that stem from a total lack of accountability to voters. Anyone can experience them in a cramped train stuck underneath the East River. And while I try to keep hyperlocal stuff out of Numlock, the NYC subway is just such a perfect example of how this goes wrong.

Because of that, I absolutely devour Signal Problems every Friday.

This interview has be…