Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
Thank you. That is the only honest way to begin. The past week brought a surge of new readers to Breaking Barriers, and the analytics point to something I did not expect: most of this new traffic is coming from outside the United States. A large percentage is coming from China. Several other countries follow Read More “Curiosity is an act of courage”
The video opens the way these things usually do. A blurred screenshot. A whispery narrator. The suggestion of a hidden truth just out of reach. Facts are optional. Ambiguity is the point. A vague accusation drops into the digital bloodstream and within hours it mutates into certainty. Thousands share it. Tens of thousands believe it. Read More “When Disinformation Becomes a Business Model”
Democracy doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes, step by step, pushed along by leaders who see rules as obstacles instead of obligations. Trump is well into his second term now, and he’s been clear about one thing: institutional constraints are for other people. His latest demand is the most dangerous yet. He wants Senate Republicans to Read More “The Day Duty Quietly Won”
Chicago has always had a kinetic pulse. Stand at any Loop corner and you feel it: the steel skeleton of the L humming above, declaring that this city believes in motion. The tracks run not only through downtown corridors but through the city’s sense of itself. Chicagoans will tell you that you can navigate life Read More “The Last Train to Somewhere: Chicago Has a Transit Problem. Illinois Has a Math Problem.”
There are moments in Washington when the ideological theater goes quiet and something like common sense breaks through. This is one of them. Twenty-two House Republicans, led by Long Island Reps. Andrew Garbarino and Nick LaLota, have sent a draft letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner with an unusual request: please do not disrupt the Read More “The Housing Program So Effective That Lawmakers Are Fighting Their Own Party to Save It”
The NBA tipped off another season last night, and for those of us who have followed the game since Reggie and Rik, something feels different this time. The league is no longer chasing the NFL. It is quietly outgrowing it. The NFL still makes more money, but that’s not the same as momentum. Football owns Read More “The NBA’s Global Bet: How Basketball Became America’s Most Valuable Export”
Want your computer to think more like you? Remember those YouTube lectures you loved? Summarize research papers you bookmarked but never read? You can train your own AI to do exactly that. No coding. No cloud clusters. No PhD required. All you need: two free tools. YouTube and NotebookLM. Step 1: Choose Your Brain Food Read More “How to Train Your Own AI (Without Writing a Line of Code)”
This week marks a quiet but important milestone in tech life. On Tuesday, October 14th, Windows 10 stops receiving security updates. After that, every unpatched PC becomes a little riskier to use. For millions of families, that means one thing: someone’s about to call you for help. I’m already there. My parents’ computer has started Read More “Mac, Windows… or Maybe Something Better”
There’s a peculiar dynamic at work in American energy policy right now, one that reveals something deeper about our political moment than mere partisanship. The facts themselves are straightforward enough. Seventeen of the twenty-two states drawing the highest share of their electricity from wind and solar now enjoy below-average retail power prices. Iowa generates nearly Read More “Green Energy Won the Market. Ideology Won’t Let It Win the Narrative”