Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
The first mistake is looking for disappearing jobs. The second mistake is looking only at Silicon Valley. The third mistake is assuming that the country with the best artificial intelligence model automatically wins the century. Each of these mistakes is comfortable, because each of them lets us keep the maps we already own. Taken together, Read More “Welcome to the Iceberg Economy”
There was a time when horse racing was gloriously inefficient, which is to say human. A man in a wrinkled seersucker suit could study a racing form folded soft from handling, squint toward the paddock, listen to a rumor drifting through cigar smoke, and persuade himself that wisdom, not luck, had brought him to the Read More “This is why we can’t have nice things”
There was something almost quietly radical in the announcement, though it arrived wrapped in the familiar language of a government press release. Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Ottawa and proposed what Canada has never had before, a national sovereign wealth fund. The Canada Strong Fund was introduced as an instrument of nation-building, a vehicle Read More “When Democracies Start Thinking Like Investors”
Something has changed in the texture of professional life, though it is difficult to name precisely because the change is happening in the quietest of places. A spare bedroom. A converted den. A home office overlooking a backyard where no one is watching. A single person sits at the center of a system. Emails are Read More “The Conductor and The Rise of the One-Person Company”
Politics tends to flatten people. Over time, complex lives get reduced to a handful of talking points, a voting record, or a few moments on cable news. The result is a public square populated by simplified figures rather than human beings shaped by place, culture, and experience. Mary Peltola is often described as the first Read More “Who Is Mary Peltola and Why You Want to Know”
There is a man in his mid-fifties who works in logistics outside of Columbus, Ohio. He owns his home outright, drives a truck he paid cash for, and has a 401(k) that has roughly doubled in the past decade, tracking the market as he was told it would. By the numbers that define American economic Read More “Stability Versus Growth in Late-Stage Capitalism”
Consider a composite figure who is easy to find in any American city right now: a healthcare administrator, say, 39 years old, earning $74,000 a year in a mid-size metropolitan area. She has good credit, nine years at the same employer, and a carefully managed budget that accommodates her car lease, her streaming subscriptions, her Read More “The Economy Shifted From Ownership to Access and Nobody Announced It”
Something happened in my family recently that I had not expected. As a member of the sandwich generation, we know that there will be change. Relatives pass, children go off to school or start a family of their own. It is a moving target largely expected. One of my family passed and there was grief. Read More “The Rule Did Not Change. The Household Did.”
Early in the morning in northern Virginia, the lights inside a windowless warehouse complex never go off. Thousands of servers hum in tight formation, training artificial intelligence models that will write code, diagnose disease, and accelerate the tempo of global commerce. The people who built these systems track processor speed, model parameters, and inference latency Read More “The Battle for the Next Kilowatt”