Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Last year, I wrote about the mounting risks of student loan delinquency. It was bad then. It is worse now. The American promise was simple: work hard, get educated, and you can build a life. That promise is breaking. Student loans were never just debt; they were the toll you paid for entry into the Read More “The American Dream Is Collapsing Under Student Debt”
They say when the economy contracts, it takes a while for the layoffs to reach the surface. But in Indiana, they’ve arrived. Ivy Tech, our statewide community college system, just announced the elimination of over 200 jobs. Most people will read that and think “budget tightening.” But if you’ve worked in public education or research, Read More “The Bridge We’re Building”
Modern economies reward efficiency, not reflection. Our institutions—schools, platforms, governments—are calibrated to deliver outcomes, track progress, and benchmark success. In this landscape, the arts are often treated as indulgences: budget-line luxuries, extracurricular distractions, or marketplace novelties. Yet this utilitarian bias misses something profound. The arts are not ornamental. They are infrastructural. They construct emotional intelligence, Read More “Art’s Journey to Wisdom Travels the Path of a Public Good”
It began with a cough. Then a fever. By the time the red rash appeared on Ian Rojas’s neck, the pediatric unit at Dallas Methodist had already started pulling masks from storage. A disease thought to be a relic of another era, one that once claimed hundreds of young lives in the United States each Read More “How Measles Came Back to America”
In 2024, a junior associate at a boutique law firm in Chicago began training a GPT model to write like his managing partner. There was no directive. No job title. No formal training. Just curiosity and a backlog of contracts to draft. He fed the model past agreements, tuned the tone, and refined the logic. Read More “The Future of Labor Is Already Clocked In”
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”
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”
When you live in Indianapolis, motorsport is more than spectacle, it’s civic texture. On Memorial Day weekend, the roar from the Brickyard isn’t just noise. It’s history echoing at 230 miles per hour. The Indianapolis 500 remains the world’s most prestigious single-day race. Formula 1, on the other hand, is something else entirely. It is Read More “From Gasoline Alley to the Grid: What GM’s Formula 1 Engine Means for American Manufacturing”
A funny thing happened on the way to the startup revolution. We built an entire mythology around the entrepreneur, but forgot to fund the human being behind it. For decades now, the entrepreneur has been hailed as a kind of American folk hero. Gritty, self-reliant, bootstrapped. A doer, not a dreamer. The stories are everywhere: Read More “America’s Innovation Economy Runs on Unpaid Labor”
Somewhere between staying current and staying employed, there’s a gap most people don’t talk about. It’s the space between what you used to be great at and what your profession suddenly expects you to know. It’s a quiet, dangerous space. Not because people fall into it, but because they quietly age inside it. One day, Read More “Mentorship as Infrastructure”