Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
There is a small box somewhere in your home that connects everything. Your phone. Your laptop. Your kid’s tablet. Your thermostat. Every byte of data that moves through your house passes through that box before it reaches the internet. The federal government just declared it a national security emergency. On March 23, 2026, the FCC Read More “Your Router, the Supply Chain, and a Growing Concern”
Politics tends to flatten people. Over time, complex lives get reduced to a handful of talking points, a voting record, or a few moments on cable news. The result is a public square populated by simplified figures rather than human beings shaped by place, culture, and experience. Mary Peltola is often described as the first Read More “Who Is Mary Peltola and Why You Want to Know”
Democracy is one of the most discussed subjects in American public life and one of the least examined. Citizens are saturated with commentary, prediction, and partisan argument, but almost never given access to the structural mechanics that determine how elections actually work. I built the Midterm Dashboard because that gap is not a minor inconvenience. Read More “Mapping the Mechanics of Power: A New Civic Tool for Midterms”
Consider Marcus, a software engineer in Indianapolis who has not written a straightforward line of code in years. His job, officially, is backend infrastructure. In practice, he spends his days making judgment calls: which abstraction holds up under scale, which tradeoff is acceptable, which system design will still make sense to the next team that Read More “The Creative Economy Is Not a Niche. It Is the New Default.”
There is a man in his mid-fifties who works in logistics outside of Columbus, Ohio. He owns his home outright, drives a truck he paid cash for, and has a 401(k) that has roughly doubled in the past decade, tracking the market as he was told it would. By the numbers that define American economic Read More “Stability Versus Growth in Late-Stage Capitalism”
A generation ago, if you wanted to find the cultural center of gravity, you could do worse than stand in the middle of a mall on a Saturday afternoon. Teenagers clustered in loose circles, families drifted between storefronts, and the food court served as a kind of informal parliament of everyday life. The space was Read More “The New Town Square Has a Login Screen”
There are moments in a long project when it is worth pausing to look around and take stock of who is still standing with you. This is one of those moments. With this note, we also close Season 2 of “What Still Works in America.” The idea behind the series has remained simple. The country Read More “The Things That Still Work and the People Who Keep Them Working”
Every generation is convinced that the arts are in decline. People say nobody goes to plays anymore. Nobody listens to real music anymore. Nobody watches serious movies anymore. Technology changed everything, attention spans are shorter, and culture is supposed to be collapsing under the weight of its own distractions. Complaints about the state of the Read More “The Show Must Still Go On”
There is a gymnasium in a small Indiana town where, every other November, a few dozen folding tables are arranged in rows and draped with American flags. Poll workers arrive before dawn with boxes of supplies, voter rolls, and a binder of procedures updated since the last cycle. The doors open at six. By mid-morning Read More “The Machinery of Democracy: 250 Years and Counting”
Consider a composite figure who is easy to find in any American city right now: a healthcare administrator, say, 39 years old, earning $74,000 a year in a mid-size metropolitan area. She has good credit, nine years at the same employer, and a carefully managed budget that accommodates her car lease, her streaming subscriptions, her Read More “The Economy Shifted From Ownership to Access and Nobody Announced It”