Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
A small and unexpected bit of encouragement from across the Pacific: two of my jazz tracks, “Waltz for the Unseen” and “Counterpoint for C…”, showed up this week on SoundCloud’s Japan-facing Trending Music: Jazz playlist. I am not entirely sure whether to call it a playlist, a ranking, or a little algorithmic postcard from the Read More “Trending…”
At 4:17 in the morning, the medical ICU is quiet except for the soft chirp of monitors and the hush of pumps cycling antibiotics. The early-warning system on the wall, the hospital’s new AI deterioration model, shows the patient in bed seven as stable. Heart rate green. Respiration green. Oxygen saturation green. The model has Read More “The 7 Moats: Moat #1 – Judgment, The First Human Advantage”
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.”
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 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 life has developed a convenient habit: we treat outcomes as moral verdicts. If you succeed, you must have earned it. If you fail, you must have fallen short. The logic is simple, efficient, and deeply misleading. This confusion is not accidental. Judging people by outcomes rather than effort flatters those already advantaged and punishes Read More “The Moral Difference Between Effort and Outcome”
Something quietly miraculous has happened, and almost no one stops to admire it. Entire families now gather in the same room without sharing oxygen, appetizers, or unresolved childhood grievances. Aunts, cousins, siblings, parents, and the occasional unexplained addition coexist in a digital space that did not exist a generation ago. Nobody had to drive. Nobody Read More “Blue Bubbles, Green Bubbles, and the Accidental Genius of the Family Group Chat”
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”
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”
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”