Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
A data center does not sleep. It does not observe weather, or seasons, or the particular slant of light at four in the afternoon in November. It draws power at the same punishing rate at midnight as it does at noon. The newest ones, the ones built to train and run artificial intelligence, draw more Read More “AI after dark”
Saturday mornings in much of America still begin the same way. Folding tables go up before the sun is fully overhead. Pickup trucks back into parking spaces and unload crates of tomatoes, corn, peaches, and jars with handwritten labels. Coffee steams from paper cups while people walk slowly from stall to stall, talking more than Read More “Where America Still Meets Face to Face”
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”
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”
The first cold snap always carries a kind of civic honesty test. There is that familiar moment when the furnace clicks alive, sending warm air through the vents and a quiet warning through the household budget. We spend most of the year talking about energy policy as if it were an abstraction measured in megawatts Read More “Why Energy Policy Feels Different When Winter Arrives”
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”
On a quiet stretch of Indiana farmland, the combines should be humming. September is harvest season, when grain silos begin to fill and contracts with Chinese buyers typically bring relief to debt-laden families. Yet this year the bins stand conspicuously empty. China, once the world’s largest buyer of American soybeans, has turned off the spigot. Read More “The Heartland Pays the Price of Tariffs”
Most people believe that if a study proves something works, the system will change. That is not how it goes. We live in a country where the machinery of research is world-class, but the machinery of implementation is largely improvised. Brilliant people generate important findings. But the policies those findings should inform rarely shift in Read More “The Broken Bridge Between Research and Policy”
Maps have always been powerful tools for understanding our world, but with the rise of computational cartography, they are evolving into something even more dynamic and insightful. Computational cartography blends traditional map-making with data science, machine learning, and geospatial analytics. It’s not just about representing geographical spaces anymore, it’s about uncovering patterns, visualizing complex data, Read More “Lines on Maps”
There is a quiet, slow erosion happening across American cities. It is not an earthquake or a sudden crash. It is more like rot in the beams of a house, hidden until, one day, the walls sag and the structure fails. For generations, we built a civic infrastructure based on assumptions that once felt unshakable: Read More “Why Our Cities Are Quietly Breaking Down”