Uneven text wrap in columns

Yeah, this has been bugging me for years.

I can tell you WHY it's happening, but I don't know any good way to prevent it from happening.

Your text box first baseline is (probably) set to Ascent, so the top of the frame will start that way, as well as any subsequent columns will start that way, as in my example.

Text wrap, however, wraps according to whether the entire linespace will fit under the wrap, which it doesn't in the first column.

If you set your text box first baseline to leading, you can control it better, but of course that has the drawback of having your first line in the frame being lower than you want it. Not ideal. InDesign needs to rethink their wrap to maybe add the option to treat lines near a wrap in all columns like the first baseline. Not there yet, I'm afraid.

Does you text use Auto leading?

I used default settings except for setting an absolute leading and I'm not seeing the problem.

My memory is that text wrap on objects that cross column boundaries has been problematic forever, and to be hoonest I don't know that there was ever a "good" way to deal with it.

One thing that might work is a cobination of align to grid and a slightly smaller top and bottom (especially bottom) wrap offsets than you really want which should force text further away than the offset (align to grid) everywhere except when the offset and grid lines match up.

Is the paragraph on the left being interupted by the text wrap or is that the actual end of the paragraph? If it is the end of a paragraph and there is space after applied to that paragraph then the gap would be as expected. It's hard to tell by the way that you've cropped the screen shot.