About

Every morning when I get to my office, I have coffee and a corndog. My office manager thinks this is insane. She may be right. I’ve been doing it for a while now anyway.

I’m Rick Horowitz. I’ve been a criminal defense attorney in Fresno for about twenty years. Before that I helped build some of the first internet service providers in Central California, and before that I was a hospital corpsman in the Navy and later an EMT and then medical transcriptionist — I even owned AccuStat, a medical transcription business that gave me a good living for around 15 or more years and allowed me to gets me an edumacation. Somewhere in there I picked up a philosophy degree. I started law school at forty-four. I’ve been writing long-form on the internet since 1998, back when that was a strange thing to do and you had to hand-code your own HTML pages.

I already have two other Substacks, and both of them have rules. Or, more accurately, a focus.

Probable Cause Media is primarily criminal defense and some constitutional law. What the State does to people, how it gets away with it, and what the law is supposed to say about that. Although I sometimes talk about cognitive science, memory, and AI there, when I do I try to keep it focused on criminal defense or constitutional issues.

Reading the Tape is about, well, reading the tape. Essentially, it’s pattern recognition — how you learn to see what’s actually in front of you rather than what you expected. It ranges pretty widely, but it almost always has to come back to the market.

Those are good rooms to work in. They’re also small rooms. I try to write every piece so that it finds its way back to the “main subject” of criminal law and pattern recognition respectively. And every piece therefore has to know what it’s talking about, building real arguments, and staying, as I said, focused. That’s a lot for something I want to write on any given day and I’ve started to find it limiting. Writing for those Substacks sometimes feels more like a chore than just fun writing and thinking.

So this is another kind of place. No specific subject. No anchoring angle. Whatever moves me that particular day, which could be politics or food or science or something one of my dogs did. Something cute. I won’t talk about the messier stuff dogs do. I expect it will be shorter than what I usually write, and more personal. Not always building toward a thesis, though it’s likely sometimes one will show up uninvited.

And when that happens? Well. Whatever.

Pull up a chair. There’s coffee.

And a corndog.

Which reminds me…

Or just…

No strings attached.