Richard Helppie's Common Bridge

Midterms don’t have to feel like a blur of hot takes. We step back and use historic norms to make sense of what just happened and why it happens so often: the president’s party usually loses US House seats, and when approval drops under 50%, that drag can be brutal. If you want clearer midterm election analysis without the partisan fog, we lay out the patterns, the numbers, and the “midterm penalty” that shows up again and again across competitive races. From there, we zoom in on the stories...

Paris and Marseille don’t erupt overnight. When we look past the headlines, the unrest in France starts to feel less like a single protest “about schools” and more like a stress test for the modern European welfare state. We talk with Robert Greenfield, a longtime American abroad now preparing to move back to the United States, about what he’s seeing on the ground and why he believes Europe is drifting toward a multi-layer crisis. We unpack how France’s deep protest culture can flip from per...

Europe is restless, US politics is nastier than it needs to be, and the information we rely on feels less trustworthy by the day. So this week we check in with the Historical Norms: three Revolutionary War-era gentlemen, all named Norm, who have opinions about how far we’ve drifted from what normal used to look like. Spoiler: the Norms are not impressed. We start by lining up the headlines about France and the broader unrest across Europe, because the way a story is framed often becomes the s...

Turning 65 sounds like a number until it lands in your body, your mirror, and your calendar. We sit down with Mike Bryskier from the Substack “Aging Against My Will” and let the conversation roam where real life actually goes: the petty annoyances that become big, the fear you pretend you do not have, and the relief that comes when you finally laugh at it instead of trying to “embrace the journey.” We talk about money and aging in a way that is funny but not fluffy, from senior discounts and ...

Independent doctors are being squeezed out of the market, and it’s not because they forgot how to practice medicine. It’s because the business side of healthcare has turned into a maze of Medicare fee schedule pressure, weak commercial payer contracts, delayed payments, denials, clawbacks, and rising costs that hit small practices the hardest. We’re joined by Preston Alexander of Forward Slash Health for a blunt, practical conversation about what it takes to keep physicians independent. We g...