Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
When Philadelphia learned it would host World Cup matches in 2026, city officials projected the usual benefits: tourism revenue, global exposure, infrastructure improvements that would look good in a slide deck long after the fans went home. Missing from those projections, at least publicly, was a simpler question. How many people who live in Philadelphia Read More “The World Cup Was Built on Cities It Locked Out”
The story begins, as so many stories do these days, with something that seemed purely technical and ended somewhere much darker. Last week, Anthropic announced a connector for Claude, its artificial intelligence system, giving the technology structured access to more than half a million federally registered clinical trials. The announcement arrived with little fanfare in Read More “Why Transparency Works and Authority Fights It”
There are still places in American life where standards are enforced without argument, and you can usually find them wherever people are arguing about pizza. Walk into a neighborhood pizza shop in New York and you are not encountering a menu so much as a test. The counter guy already knows. The regular at the Read More “Why You Know a Bad Slice When You Taste One”
American capitalism is often described as a contest. Firms compete. Investors choose. Markets decide. That story, repeated so often it sounds like natural law, leaves out a quieter arrangement that has been operating, mostly unnoticed, for more than a century. There exists across the Midwest, threading through small towns and farming communities, a different kind Read More “What Happens When Customers Are Also Owners”
In 2020, Kanye West tried to get on the presidential ballot in Wisconsin. He needed 2,000 signatures. He submitted 2,422. Election officials ruled that he had fallen 14 seconds short of the 5 p.m. filing deadline. Fourteen seconds. The decision was appealed, litigated, and ultimately upheld. Whether you think Kanye West should have been on Read More “The Machinery of Democracy: Literature as a Software Service and a Public Good”
Bruce Richardson has spent a lifetime around tea. He runs Elmwood Inn Fine Teas in Danville, Kentucky, imports leaves from dozens of countries, and advises the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. Few people alive think more carefully about how a global commodity intersects with American history. When Richardson looks at the current tariff regime, Read More “The Quiet Return of Taxation Without Representation”