Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
A small gathering of aspiring developers in South Bend, Indiana, does not look much like the opening scene of an American success story. There is no ceremonial shovel, architectural rendering or oversized check. The conversation concerns renovation costs, financing, contractors and the stubborn arithmetic of bringing a neglected property back into use. Experienced builders explain Read More “Capacity Is What Remains”
There are moments in business when the price tells you that you are looking at the wrong thing. NVIDIA is reported to have agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company whose annual revenue has been put at roughly $150 million. Reuters carried the story on August 27, relaying reporting from The Information, Read More “The Empire Strikes Back”
A woman walks into a public library because she needs to print a form. That is the problem she presents. The problem she has is larger. She needs the form for unemployment benefits, which she needs because the car stopped running, which cost her the shifts she missed, which is why the electric bill went Read More “The People Close Enough to Notice”
Donavan McKinney, a Michigan state representative running for a Detroit-area congressional seat, has become a small but telling case study in a much larger question: what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is trying to become after 2024. That question is bigger than any one race. It is worth separating from it here, because Read More “Donavan McKinney and the Politics of Credibility”
There are people in every neighborhood who seem to possess an unofficial jurisdiction over whatever has gone wrong. They know which plumber will answer on a Sunday. They know who has a pickup truck, who still owns a ladder tall enough to reach the gutter, and which church keeps a small fund for families whose Read More “Repair Is a Form of Belief”
She buys the pencils herself. Not because the district asked her to. Not because there is a line item for it. She buys them because a child arrives on a Tuesday without any, and the lesson does not pause to wait for a purchase order. This happens in classrooms across the country every week, quietly Read More “Ordinary Saints”
The first room at the Obama Presidential Center is quieter than visitors expect. People come in from Jackson Park ready for the noise of recent politics, ready to argue or to grieve, and what they find instead is a long curved wall of text, photographs of a young senator who has not yet become anyone Read More “The Platform Before the Candidate”
A mail route is one of those ordinary systems that reveals a civilization’s moral life better than most speeches do. Doreen has carried hers for twenty-six years, all of it on the same rural circuit. The route looks, from any administrative distance, like logistics. Addresses. Parcels. Envelopes. Weather. Timing. Fuel. Dogs. Traffic. Scanners. A route Read More “Meaning, the Seventh Moat: What Is Worth Doing”
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”