Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sports stories are supposed to simplify that further still, handing us a winner and a loser, a hero and a villain. Somebody raises the trophy. Somebody drops the ball. Everybody knows whom to cheer and whom to blame. This story refuses to cooperate. Late on Read More “The Team That Tried Too Hard to Win”
Antoinette Tuff was sitting in the front office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy when a young man carrying an assault rifle entered the school. Nearly 900 children were inside. Tuff was not the principal. She was not a police officer, counselor, or trained hostage negotiator. She was the school’s bookkeeper, one of those Read More “The Person Who Knows Where Everything Is”
Donavan McKinney, a Michigan state representative running for a Detroit-area congressional seat, has become a small but telling case study in a much larger question: what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is trying to become after 2024. That question is bigger than any one race. It is worth separating from it here, because Read More “Donavan McKinney and the Politics of Credibility”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
There are people in every neighborhood who seem to possess an unofficial jurisdiction over whatever has gone wrong. They know which plumber will answer on a Sunday. They know who has a pickup truck, who still owns a ladder tall enough to reach the gutter, and which church keeps a small fund for families whose Read More “Repair Is a Form of Belief”
Before the first child arrives, someone unlocks the school. Before the county office opens, someone answers a phone that has already begun to ring, and does it before anyone in the building has had enough coffee. Down a quiet hallway a floor gets swept. A medication gets checked against a chart. A pantry shelf gets Read More “The Architecture of Ordinary Goodness”
A data center does not sleep. It does not observe weather, or seasons, or the particular slant of light at four in the afternoon in November. It draws power at the same punishing rate at midnight as it does at noon. The newest ones, the ones built to train and run artificial intelligence, draw more Read More “AI after dark”
She buys the pencils herself. Not because the district asked her to. Not because there is a line item for it. She buys them because a child arrives on a Tuesday without any, and the lesson does not pause to wait for a purchase order. This happens in classrooms across the country every week, quietly Read More “Ordinary Saints”
A small and unexpected bit of encouragement from across the Pacific: two of my jazz tracks, “Waltz for the Unseen” and “Counterpoint for C…”, showed up this week on SoundCloud’s Japan-facing Trending Music: Jazz playlist. I am not entirely sure whether to call it a playlist, a ranking, or a little algorithmic postcard from the Read More “Trending…”
The first room at the Obama Presidential Center is quieter than visitors expect. People come in from Jackson Park ready for the noise of recent politics, ready to argue or to grieve, and what they find instead is a long curved wall of text, photographs of a young senator who has not yet become anyone Read More “The Platform Before the Candidate”