Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Every spring, American employers enter a lottery for the right to hire foreign professionals. For fiscal year 2024, they submitted 780,884 registrations for 85,000 places. For fiscal year 2027, the count fell to 211,600. A tempting story writes itself from those two numbers: AI coding tools arrived, demand for imported programmers collapsed, and technology quietly Read More “The H-1B Numbers Are Falling. AI Is Only Part of the Story”
Americans of a certain age learned that the dollar was once backed by gold. The real history was messier than the classroom version, but the core idea held: behind the paper sat an asset the government could not print. Congress could pass any law it liked, but it could not legislate another million ounces into Read More “The Treasury Standard: Stablecoins, Gold, and the Debt Behind the New Dollar”
A small gathering of aspiring developers in South Bend, Indiana, does not look much like the opening scene of an American success story. There is no ceremonial shovel, architectural rendering or oversized check. The conversation concerns renovation costs, financing, contractors and the stubborn arithmetic of bringing a neglected property back into use. Experienced builders explain Read More “Capacity Is What Remains”
Hank Green took some heat recently for using artificial intelligence in his work. Vanity Fair framed the controversy around the anger of some fans who believed his use of AI crossed a line between technological assistance and creative authenticity. One Hank would like to stand up for another. The criticism raises a larger question that Read More “Hank Green, AI, and the Economics of Authenticity”
Over the past several years I put together a set of lecture notes for teaching bioinformatics, pairing classic Python/BioPython methods with AI-assisted workflows so students could see both approaches side by side. I’ve cleaned them up and organized them into a free 14-chapter book: Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction. It moves from the basics Read More “Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction”
For years, teaching bioinformatics meant building the same lecture over and over: here is the biological concept, here is the Python script that operationalizes it, here is what a student needs to understand before either one makes sense. Over time those notes accumulated into something larger than any single course, a full walk through computational Read More “Notes From the Classroom, Now Free to Everyone”
Antoinette Tuff was sitting in the front office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy when a young man carrying an assault rifle entered the school. Nearly 900 children were inside. Tuff was not the principal. She was not a police officer, counselor, or trained hostage negotiator. She was the school’s bookkeeper, one of those Read More “The Person Who Knows Where Everything Is”
There are people in every neighborhood who seem to possess an unofficial jurisdiction over whatever has gone wrong. They know which plumber will answer on a Sunday. They know who has a pickup truck, who still owns a ladder tall enough to reach the gutter, and which church keeps a small fund for families whose Read More “Repair Is a Form of Belief”
Before the first child arrives, someone unlocks the school. Before the county office opens, someone answers a phone that has already begun to ring, and does it before anyone in the building has had enough coffee. Down a quiet hallway a floor gets swept. A medication gets checked against a chart. A pantry shelf gets Read More “The Architecture of Ordinary Goodness”
She buys the pencils herself. Not because the district asked her to. Not because there is a line item for it. She buys them because a child arrives on a Tuesday without any, and the lesson does not pause to wait for a purchase order. This happens in classrooms across the country every week, quietly Read More “Ordinary Saints”