Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker may have taken industry observers by surprise with their acquisition deal last month, but one of their largest partners likely wasn’t. “Nike clearly bought…

A Brookings researcher told a House subcommittee last week that the U.S. Postal Service's financial condition cannot be fixed by cutting costs alone — and that Congress, not postal management, is the only actor that can resolve it. Congress created the universal service obligation — the requirement to deliver to all 170 million U.S. addresses at uniform, affordable rates, six days a week — but has never directly funded it. Instead, it relied on the letter-mail monopoly to pay for it. That monopoly revenue has collapsed, and no replacement financing mechanism exists. The core finding is one Congress has avoided acting on for decades: the Postal Service's universal service obligation is a public good that the market cannot sustain on its own, and the financing model Congress created to pay for it is gone. Patel's statement frames the choice starkly — either fund the mandate explicitly, or let a liquidity crisis narrow the network by default, at the expense of the communities that depend on it most.

The other day, I saw an early sign of Spring: an election campaign commercial on TV. It was just a 30-second ad, but it did make me wonder how long it will be before more of them start showing up everywhere, even on streaming. With so many seats and offices at stake in this midterm election year, we’ll be bombarded with them. That’s why direct mail plays such a crucial role in modern campaigns. Mail has a built-in advantage. A well-designed piece consists of a strong headline, crisp, high-resolution images, and a focused message. It gets physically handled, read, and often saved. It doesn’t disappear with a click or get buried in an inbox.