Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
People gather in kitchens across America today. Someone is checking the turkey, another is trying to find the good plates, a niece drifts into the room with headphones and slides back out again. Families arrive with their private burdens tucked under their arms. They bring anxieties about money, worries about illness, or the unspoken tension Read More “Hope as a Political Act, A Thanksgiving Reflection”
Thanksgiving week in Indiana always tells a story. Highways fill with families, pickup trucks, and the hum of engines that shaped the state’s identity for generations. The American car has been more than transportation. It has been freedom, pride, and a ticket to the middle class. That is why a quiet shift in the global Read More “How Much Longer Will Americans Pay the Premium? Thanksgiving Reflections from the Crossroads of America”
Some ideas show up so simple that you almost miss how good they really are. Melladee was one of those for me. A little program, I wrote a few years ago, it plays MP3s, it shows JPGs, and it keeps the two in sync. That is the whole thing. No menu maze, no software trial, Read More “A Melladee and an Eight Dollar Pi”
Commissioner Engelbert, WNBPA leadership, team owners, and members of the basketball community: I am writing as a longtime supporter of the WNBA who believes that the league is entering an important moment in its history. The momentum around women’s sports has never been stronger, and the WNBA stands at the center of a cultural shift Read More “An Open Letter to the WNBA and Its Stakeholders”
Parents usually ask for practical gifts. A working coffeemaker. A night without chores. Something wrapped. This year there is a new contender for Most Useful Gift, and it does not come from a store: a VLAN. A VLAN is simply a way to separate your devices into different digital rooms. If you have ever used Read More “A VLAN for Christmas: The Smart Home Upgrade Parents Don’t Know They Need”
Congress is supposed to argue. It is supposed to debate, negotiate, and fight like hell over ideas that affect millions of people. What it is not supposed to do is shut itself down because one man decides democracy is inconvenient. Recent reporting revealed that Speaker Mike Johnson refused to convene the House of Representatives for Read More “The Day the People’s House Went Dark”
A late October evening in Denver, and a software designer named Marcus sits at his kitchen table scrolling through his health plan options. The renewal notice arrived with a jolt. His premium is jumping more than twenty percent this year. His rent is up. Groceries are up. And he has not been sick once in Read More “The Legal and the Low-Risk: The People Insurance Markets Can’t Afford to Lose”
Night in Las Vegas behaves like a living thing. The Strip glows with gold and neon. Light swallows the stars. Every sound echoes off monuments to audacity, each casino reflecting the certainty that anything built with enough money and nerve can be justified later through legend. Inside the Formula One paddock the atmosphere narrows into Read More “What Happens When Apple, Cadillac, and Democracy Walk Into a Pit Lane”
College football functions as civic ritual as much as sport. The stadiums resemble cathedrals. The rituals resemble holidays. Generations of families plan their lives around Saturdays in the fall. The Big Ten has long held a unique place in that cultural landscape. It represents not only tradition but a certain Midwestern idea of fairness and Read More “The Big Ten’s Payday Loan”
There is a county clerk in Wisconsin who can tell you, without looking, which precincts always flip their absentee tallies at the last minute and why. She knows which vendors require a workaround nobody wrote down. She knows the unspoken truce between her office and the town board. She is retiring next month. Her replacement Read More “The Wisdom of the Ward and the Decline of Institutional Memory”