Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
The news was heavy again this morning. It usually is. Traffic reports, political arguments, prices rising, systems failing, everyone seemingly convinced that the person on the other side of the argument is either foolish or dangerous. There is a weight to the information environment we have built for ourselves, a low-grade exhaustion that accumulates before Read More “TTST: Thank Three Someones Today”
There is a man named Raymond who does tile and fixture work out of a white van with his name and number on the door. He has been at it for twenty-two years. He answers his own phone. He is not the cheapest contractor in the county and he is not the most expensive, and Read More “Trust, the Second Moat: When Information Gets Cheap, Trust Gets Expensive”
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”
There are moments in a long project when it is worth pausing to look around and take stock of who is still standing with you. This is one of those moments. With this note, we also close Season 2 of “What Still Works in America.” The idea behind the series has remained simple. The country Read More “The Things That Still Work and the People Who Keep Them Working”
Saturday mornings in much of America still begin the same way. Folding tables go up before the sun is fully overhead. Pickup trucks back into parking spaces and unload crates of tomatoes, corn, peaches, and jars with handwritten labels. Coffee steams from paper cups while people walk slowly from stall to stall, talking more than Read More “Where America Still Meets Face to Face”
The game unfolds the way it always has, without apology, without hurry, without the slightest concern for what the rest of us have decided constitutes progress. A pitcher works through his ritual. A batter steps out, adjusts his gloves, steps back in. The crowd murmurs rather than roars. This is baseball, which is to say, Read More “The Ninth Inning of American Patience”
At a launch site in Florida, the moments before liftoff carry an odd restraint. Engineers sit behind glass walls, studying screens that glow with data too precise for enthusiasm. The rocket stands indifferent on the pad, a monument to careful preparation rather than spectacle. When the countdown pauses (and it often does) no one protests. Read More “Why Rockets Don’t Care What You Believe”
The story begins, as so many stories do these days, with something that seemed purely technical and ended somewhere much darker. Last week, Anthropic announced a connector for Claude, its artificial intelligence system, giving the technology structured access to more than half a million federally registered clinical trials. The announcement arrived with little fanfare in Read More “Why Transparency Works and Authority Fights It”
In 2020, Kanye West tried to get on the presidential ballot in Wisconsin. He needed 2,000 signatures. He submitted 2,422. Election officials ruled that he had fallen 14 seconds short of the 5 p.m. filing deadline. Fourteen seconds. The decision was appealed, litigated, and ultimately upheld. Whether you think Kanye West should have been on Read More “The Machinery of Democracy: Literature as a Software Service and a Public Good”