Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
Consider Marcus, a software engineer in Indianapolis who has not written a straightforward line of code in years. His job, officially, is backend infrastructure. In practice, he spends his days making judgment calls: which abstraction holds up under scale, which tradeoff is acceptable, which system design will still make sense to the next team that Read More “The Creative Economy Is Not a Niche. It Is the New Default.”
A generation ago, if you wanted to find the cultural center of gravity, you could do worse than stand in the middle of a mall on a Saturday afternoon. Teenagers clustered in loose circles, families drifted between storefronts, and the food court served as a kind of informal parliament of everyday life. The space was Read More “The New Town Square Has a Login Screen”
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”
Your phone buzzes before the sky changes color. A cone graphic appears on television, tracking a spiral mass across warm water toward a coastline with names and zip codes you recognize. A radar loop pulses green, yellow, and red across a county map. A forecaster at a desk in Norman, Oklahoma, or Tallahassee, or Anchorage Read More “The Sound of the Siren”
On certain February Sundays the country pauses and performs a ritual that feels older than it is. Families gather, food is arranged in elaborate, slightly comic abundance, and a football game unfolds in the background while commercials and halftime performances take turns at center stage. The Super Bowl has long functioned as one of the Read More “The Quiet Reinvention of America’s Last Shared Event”
There are many ways to become an Olympian, and they tend to follow familiar lines. Childhood specialization. Early promise. A narrowing of options so complete that by the time the athlete arrives at the Games, there is little left in life that has not already been shaped around that single pursuit. This is not one Read More “Who is Simona de Silvestro and why you want to know.”
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”
Some ideas show up so simple that you almost miss how good they really are. Melladee was one of those for me. A little program, I wrote a few years ago, it plays MP3s, it shows JPGs, and it keeps the two in sync. That is the whole thing. No menu maze, no software trial, Read More “A Melladee and an Eight Dollar Pi”
Parents usually ask for practical gifts. A working coffeemaker. A night without chores. Something wrapped. This year there is a new contender for Most Useful Gift, and it does not come from a store: a VLAN. A VLAN is simply a way to separate your devices into different digital rooms. If you have ever used Read More “A VLAN for Christmas: The Smart Home Upgrade Parents Don’t Know They Need”