Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Thank you, Andrew Morton. Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and most people outside the Linux kernel community will never read it. That is understandable. The announcement was posted to a Linux mailing list. The subject was the future of memory-management development. The prose was practical, Read More “Great Systems Outlive Their Heroes”
A society that cannot think systemically will use intelligent machines to automate its confusion. That sentence may sound severe. It likely is not severe enough. The great danger of artificial intelligence is not simply that the machines will become too powerful. The more immediate danger is that institutions will become more powerful without becoming wiser. Read More “Systems Thinking, the Fifth Moat: The Human Skill of Seeing the Whole”
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”
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”