Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
Here’s what’s happening right now with artificial intelligence: A handful of giant corporations are seizing control of the most transformative technology of our era, making unilateral decisions about who gets access, how much it costs, and what purposes it serves. This approach is fundamentally backwards. AI should function as a public resource accessible to all Read More “The Future of AI Belongs to All of Us, Not Just Silicon Valley”
I don’t typically write about the arts, but Gustavo Dudamel’s move from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to New York represents something bigger than a career change. This is a coast-to-coast story about how leadership works in America’s most traditional institutions. When Dudamel took the podium at Lincoln Center last month, he did something most conductors Read More “Mozart in the Jungle”
The story of rural healthcare in America is always a story of distance. Distance between patients and providers. Distance between federal policy and local needs. Distance between what is possible and what is practiced. Two years ago, I examined three pioneering programs that sought to close these gaps through health literacy initiatives. Much has changed Read More “Three Blueprints for Healing Rural America”
The rules of employment are shifting under workers’ feet. Artificial intelligence isn’t just automating tasks; it is redrawing the boundaries of entire professions. That leaves millions of employees asking the same anxious question: how do I stay employable when the ground itself is moving? Upskilling offers one answer. It allows workers to deepen their expertise Read More “The Cost of Change Should Not Fall on Workers Alone”
There’s something almost subversive about Anki. In a world where every app is designed to capture and monetize your attention, here’s one that actually wants to give your time back to you. It’s the most popular education app in the world, yet it has no marketing department, no subscription traps, no notifications designed to drag Read More “The Intellectual Elegance of Damien Elmes”
What happens when we stop asking how much people make and start asking how fairly it gets shared? That question drives the new web-based dashboard “Who Shares the Wealth?” at gini.commandos.cloud, a free, public tool that explores global income inequality before and after taxes. Built from this week’s 2025 TidyTuesday dataset, this project combines data Read More “Unequal. Unjust. Unacceptable: A Global Dashboard of Redistribution and Inequality”
The man sits in his kitchen at 2:47 p.m. on a Tuesday in late August, laptop open, coffee cold, staring at a cursor that blinks with the persistence of a smoke alarm. He is 34 years old, a freelance something-or-other who has spent the better part of three years learning to delegate his thinking to Read More “GPT Ate My Homework”
Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude offer powerful capabilities, but long-form creative work remains a persistent failure point. Projects that begin with clarity and style often degrade into generic, fragmented output. What begins as collaboration turns into cleanup. Two terms now help frame this experience: Language mummification describes the erosion of voice and vitality Read More “Naming the Pain: Narrative Labor, Language Mummification, and the Hidden Costs of Writing with AI”