From his controversial 1990 print debut in Bicycles Today magazine, to the moment he was fired from a supposedly independent media company for lampooning a General Motors executive, to his current status as the #11 most popular author in Substack’s “Music” category, Jack Baruth has earned a reputation for forthright reporting, immersive storytelling, and absolutely luminescent acts of self-sabotage. (Might as well be completely truthful, right?) He has been published around the world and translated into more than a dozen languages across outlets including The Free Press, the Washington Examiner, Yahoo!, MSN, MSN Singapore, MSN Malaysia, WIRED, Popular Mechanics, Road&Track, Esquire, Bicycling, Jalopnik, SURFACE, Watch Journal, The Truth About Cars, Wheels Weekly, EVO Malaysia, and many more.
As a consultant and resource of various sorts, Jack has worked with and for: American Honda, NVIDIA, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, JP Morgan Chase, Ford Motor Credit, BMW Financial, Nationwide Insurance, Motorists Insurance, Progressive Medical, Cardinal Health, Belron International, and other Fortune 500 firms. He designed the server hardware for the VitalPath application and was part of the Spindletop Project at MIT. He co-founded Synecdoche, a GNU-based web hosting co-operative that served Free Software and open source providers from 1999 to 2003.
Jack is a former professional BMX racer, albeit not a very good one, and an occasional professional auto racer with IMSA, SRO, and CTCC. He has set seven track records and has won four SCCA divisional championships in addition to a NASA regional championship, a few autocross awards, and a One Lap of America class win. His current racecar lineup includes a Radical SR8, a Radical PR6, a World Challenge car built with Honda Manufacturing Alabama, and an absolutely bulletproof 1995 Plymouth Neon. He has played more than five hundred gigs on guitar and bass across the Midwest. His original design for an electric guitar, the Melody Burner, has been played on stage by Billy Gibbons and Sheryl Crow among others. He has written and recorded nine songs that, frankly, you’re probably better off not hearing. He is a 1994 graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Born in Brooklyn, Jack now lives in Morrow County, Ohio with his wife, their two children, and approximately thirty cats.