Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Every December, we make the same mistake. We treat the year as something to summarize rather than something to absorb. We list events, measure shifts in power, identify winners and losers, and then turn the page as if history were a sequence of episodes instead of a cumulative process. A more demanding exercise asks a Read More “What We Learned by Watching What Didn’t Break”
The year did not collapse. That is not nothing. A school quietly opened a food pantry so families could pick up groceries without paperwork or spectacle. Students raised money for neighbors they knew by name. Volunteers turned a library into a place where children decorated gingerbread houses instead of sitting at home alone. None of Read More “What Tech Cannot Replace During the Holidays”
People gather in kitchens across America today. Someone is checking the turkey, another is trying to find the good plates, a niece drifts into the room with headphones and slides back out again. Families arrive with their private burdens tucked under their arms. They bring anxieties about money, worries about illness, or the unspoken tension Read More “Hope as a Political Act, A Thanksgiving Reflection”
College football functions as civic ritual as much as sport. The stadiums resemble cathedrals. The rituals resemble holidays. Generations of families plan their lives around Saturdays in the fall. The Big Ten has long held a unique place in that cultural landscape. It represents not only tradition but a certain Midwestern idea of fairness and Read More “The Big Ten’s Payday Loan”
There is a county clerk in Wisconsin who can tell you, without looking, which precincts always flip their absentee tallies at the last minute and why. She knows which vendors require a workaround nobody wrote down. She knows the unspoken truce between her office and the town board. She is retiring next month. Her replacement Read More “The Wisdom of the Ward and the Decline of Institutional Memory”
Thank you. That is the only honest way to begin. The past week brought a surge of new readers to Breaking Barriers, and the analytics point to something I did not expect: most of this new traffic is coming from outside the United States. A large percentage is coming from China. Several other countries follow Read More “Curiosity is an act of courage”
Want your computer to think more like you? Remember those YouTube lectures you loved? Summarize research papers you bookmarked but never read? You can train your own AI to do exactly that. No coding. No cloud clusters. No PhD required. All you need: two free tools. YouTube and NotebookLM. Step 1: Choose Your Brain Food Read More “How to Train Your Own AI (Without Writing a Line of Code)”
This week marks a quiet but important milestone in tech life. On Tuesday, October 14th, Windows 10 stops receiving security updates. After that, every unpatched PC becomes a little riskier to use. For millions of families, that means one thing: someone’s about to call you for help. I’m already there. My parents’ computer has started Read More “Mac, Windows… or Maybe Something Better”
One of the quiet pleasures of middle age is scanning your own bookshelf, not for something new, but for the ghosts of what shaped you. The books are a map of who you’ve been, and sometimes, who you still hope to be. The other morning, I noticed a gap. My copy of Daniel Boorstin’s The Read More “The Subversive Power of Sharing Books”
Executives love big ideas. They gather in conference rooms, swap metaphors about “moonshots,” and unveil glossy decks about transformation. Yet when the excitement fades, most projects remain exactly where they started: on the slide, never touching the lives of employees or customers. The problem is not lack of vision. The problem is lack of discipline. Read More “Better Is Not Discovered Once, It Is Rediscovered Daily”