Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Something happened in my family recently that I had not expected. As a member of the sandwich generation, we know that there will be change. Relatives pass, children go off to school or start a family of their own. It is a moving target largely expected. One of my family passed and there was grief. Read More “The Rule Did Not Change. The Household Did.”
Your phone buzzes before the sky changes color. A cone graphic appears on television, tracking a spiral mass across warm water toward a coastline with names and zip codes you recognize. A radar loop pulses green, yellow, and red across a county map. A forecaster at a desk in Norman, Oklahoma, or Tallahassee, or Anchorage Read More “The Sound of the Siren”
There is a phrase that lands differently depending on where you sit in the American political conversation. Say “social engineering” to a conservative and you will see a familiar tightening around the eyes, the look of someone who has just caught a bureaucrat in an admission. Say it to a progressive and you will see Read More “What We Quietly Teach Ourselves”
Early in the morning in northern Virginia, the lights inside a windowless warehouse complex never go off. Thousands of servers hum in tight formation, training artificial intelligence models that will write code, diagnose disease, and accelerate the tempo of global commerce. The people who built these systems track processor speed, model parameters, and inference latency Read More “The Battle for the Next Kilowatt”
A nation reveals itself in how it treats the most vulnerable. Judges across the country are now raising alarms about the detention of pregnant women and nursing mothers in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Federal courts, not advocacy groups, not pundits, are describing what they see as harrowing: women separated from breastfeeding infants, women in Read More “We Are Better Than This”
There are times in sport when beauty is obvious. A gymnast floats. A skater lands as if gravity signed a waiver. A downhill racer carves a line so clean it looks drawn by a compass. And then there are times when beauty arrives wearing a mouthguard. The United States women’s hockey team may be the Read More “They Are Team USA Too”
On certain February Sundays the country pauses and performs a ritual that feels older than it is. Families gather, food is arranged in elaborate, slightly comic abundance, and a football game unfolds in the background while commercials and halftime performances take turns at center stage. The Super Bowl has long functioned as one of the Read More “The Quiet Reinvention of America’s Last Shared Event”
The game unfolds the way it always has, without apology, without hurry, without the slightest concern for what the rest of us have decided constitutes progress. A pitcher works through his ritual. A batter steps out, adjusts his gloves, steps back in. The crowd murmurs rather than roars. This is baseball, which is to say, Read More “The Ninth Inning of American Patience”
There are many ways to become an Olympian, and they tend to follow familiar lines. Childhood specialization. Early promise. A narrowing of options so complete that by the time the athlete arrives at the Games, there is little left in life that has not already been shaped around that single pursuit. This is not one Read More “Who is Simona de Silvestro and why you want to know.”
At a launch site in Florida, the moments before liftoff carry an odd restraint. Engineers sit behind glass walls, studying screens that glow with data too precise for enthusiasm. The rocket stands indifferent on the pad, a monument to careful preparation rather than spectacle. When the countdown pauses (and it often does) no one protests. Read More “Why Rockets Don’t Care What You Believe”