Mike Conklin

Love your tunes? Us too. We've rounded up every A/V product you should be using to enhance your listening experience.

Potential vice president...and big vinyl guy? Tim Walz's record player of choice is a widely recommended, not-at-all weird turntable.

This is part of InsideHook’s list of The 100 Best American-Made Products, a celebration of the gear, clothes and goods that make up our lives, and are the life’s work of our fellow Americans. If you think back 70 years, there aren’t many facets of popular culture that have stayed the same. Clothing and hairstyles have gone through their natural trend cycles, of course. Films look different. Music sounds different. The distribution channels by which we enjoy pop culture are even different, now…

We have made a fair amount of jokes here at InsideHook HQ about the Flint and Tinder Waxed Trucker Jacket being the official garment of the publication. A bunch of us have acquired more than one of them over the years. We write about it all the time. And we have ample data suggesting that you, the reader, share in our affinity for the best-selling jacket from Huckberry’s premier in-house brand. When we talk about the Waxed Trucker Jacket, we are generally referring to the flannel-lined ver…

James Beard Award winner and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio has been an ambassador for Made In since late-2019, which, not at all coincidentally, is when I, a Top Chef stan through and through, got my first cookware from the DTC company. I was in the market and considering stepping all the way up to All-Clad the way any gear-obsessed home cook eventually does, but, swayed by Colicchio’s association, I chose Made In instead, and I haven’t looked back. Made In has previously released two produc…

When HBO’s The Last of Us caught the world by storm earlier this year and every single men’s lifestyle website on the internet insisted on telling you they’d identified the very handsome and utilitarian jacket Joel wears throughout much of the action, we felt weirdly, suddenly…inclined to gate-keep. We have, like most men’s lifestyle websites, to be fair, been singing the praises of the Flint & Tinder Flannel-Lined Waxed Trucker for years now. At one point, there was half-serious discussion…

Hi there, reader. My name is Mike Conklin, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of InsideHook. I’d like to welcome you to the new and improved version of our site. We’ve been working on this redesign for the better part of a year to ensure that what you see on the screen before you is the most accurate possible reflection of who we are and what we hope to provide for you. I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and I hope you are, too. Before you start poking around, a few notes on what we’ve ch…

For Christmas of 2015, I received as a gift a long-sleeve Merino 150 Base Layer from Smartwool. It was maroon with tiny black horizontal stripes. It was unfathomably soft out of the box, and over the next three months, it only got softer. It’s the best long-sleeve running shirt. At the time, I was running at least five days a week, and I realize you will probably think I’m exaggerating when I say this, but I am not, I swear: I wore “my Smartwool” every single time. I wore it on its own on mil…

Everyone’s got a black-dial watch, right? As far as versatility is concerned, it’s a no-brainer if you’re only going to have one watch and wear it every day. It performs admirably in myriad situations, from a backyard BBQ to a black-tie wedding. And maybe you’ve got a blue-dial watch, too. Depending on the particular shade and how it reflects light, it can work just as well as a black dial, offering up just a bit of playfulness for anyone willing to look close enough. But today we’d like t…

Thirteen albums and nearly 30 years into a career that’s most easily defined by Jeff Tweedy’s continued insistence on evolving, Wilco has come to be written about and discussed almost exclusively in terms relative to one’s favorite era of the band. You have your old-school alt-country types, who favor the straightforward singalongs of A.M and Being There. You have your diehard Jay Bennett acolytes who swear by the dense power-pop arrangements of Summerteeth. A ton of extremely vocal and extr…