Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
The first room at the Obama Presidential Center is quieter than visitors expect. People come in from Jackson Park ready for the noise of recent politics, ready to argue or to grieve, and what they find instead is a long curved wall of text, photographs of a young senator who has not yet become anyone Read More “The Platform Before the Candidate”
Most of what matters in technology arrives quietly. Not with a keynote. Not with a countdown clock and a curtain drop. Just a file, a version number, and a few paragraphs of technical notes that almost no one reads. That is what happened on June 3, 2026, when Google DeepMind released a model called Gemma Read More “The Model T moment for AI”
Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and almost no one outside the Linux kernel community will ever read it. That is partly the point. The memo was not built to be read by the rest of us. It went to a mailing list, it concerned the Read More “Ownership, the Sixth Moat: The People Who Keep the Promise”
Consider a man like Marcus, who teaches automotive technology at a regional career center in central Ohio. He has been teaching for twenty-three years, and in that time the cars have changed three times underneath him. He started with carburetors and distributor caps, the kind of engines a student could understand by looking at them. Read More “Adaptation, the Fourth Moat: Learning Without Losing Ourselves”
Three years ago, I wrote an article called “AI and the Adjuncts: The Converging Trends Reshaping Higher Education.” At the time, the argument felt speculative, though not far-fetched. AI was beginning to move into teaching, tutoring, grading, writing support, and academic administration. Adjunct labor had already become one of the hidden foundations of American higher Read More “The Graduation Promise and the Adjunct Reality”
Earl walks the apron at 5:47 in the morning, before most of the airport is awake. He has worked for the same regional carrier for thirty-four years, and he is one of the senior aircraft maintenance technicians at a hangar that services a fleet of regional jets nobody outside aviation thinks about. He carries a Read More “Craft, the Third Moat: Done Is Easy, Good Is the Moat”
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”
There is a woman named Renee who has worked as a unit secretary at a regional hospital for nineteen years. She schedules procedures, coordinates patient transfers, fields calls from frightened families, and serves as the unofficial institutional memory of a floor that sees everything human life produces: birth, recovery, confusion, grief, and occasionally joy. Last Read More “What Still Works in America: The Seven Moats Season 3, Article 1: The Frame”
A recent LinkedIn post by Dr. Jillian Goldfarb called attention to an invoice most of us never see. She had been asked to peer review a paper for a Nature-family journal. The article processing charge, paid by the author to make that single paper open access, was $12,850. That figure deserves a moment. It is Read More “The Price of Being Seen: How Open Access Publishing Is Sorting American Science”
Democracy is one of the most discussed subjects in American public life and one of the least examined. Citizens are saturated with commentary, prediction, and partisan argument, but almost never given access to the structural mechanics that determine how elections actually work. I built the Midterm Dashboard because that gap is not a minor inconvenience. Read More “Mapping the Mechanics of Power: A New Civic Tool for Midterms”