Category: Policy

What Still Works in America: The Seven Moats Season 3, Article 1: The Frame

Posted on by cary

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”

The Price of Being Seen: How Open Access Publishing Is Sorting American Science

Posted on by cary

A recent LinkedIn post by Dr. Jillian Goldfarb called attention to an invoice most of us never see. She had been asked to peer review a paper for a Nature-family journal. The article processing charge, paid by the author to make that single paper open access, was $12,850. That figure deserves a moment. It is Read More “The Price of Being Seen: How Open Access Publishing Is Sorting American Science”

Your Router, the Supply Chain, and a Growing Concern

Posted on by cary

There is a small box somewhere in your home that connects everything. Your phone. Your laptop. Your kid’s tablet. Your thermostat. Every byte of data that moves through your house passes through that box before it reaches the internet. The federal government just declared it a national security emergency. On March 23, 2026, the FCC Read More “Your Router, the Supply Chain, and a Growing Concern”

Who Is Mary Peltola and Why You Want to Know

Posted on by cary

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”

Mapping the Mechanics of Power: A New Civic Tool for Midterms

Posted on by cary

Democracy is one of the most discussed subjects in American public life and one of the least examined. Citizens are saturated with commentary, prediction, and partisan argument, but almost never given access to the structural mechanics that determine how elections actually work. I built the Midterm Dashboard because that gap is not a minor inconvenience. Read More “Mapping the Mechanics of Power: A New Civic Tool for Midterms”

The Creative Economy Is Not a Niche. It Is the New Default.

Posted on by cary

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.”

The Things That Still Work and the People Who Keep Them Working

Posted on by cary

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”

The Machinery of Democracy: 250 Years and Counting

Posted on by cary

There is a gymnasium in a small Indiana town where, every other November, a few dozen folding tables are arranged in rows and draped with American flags. Poll workers arrive before dawn with boxes of supplies, voter rolls, and a binder of procedures updated since the last cycle. The doors open at six. By mid-morning Read More “The Machinery of Democracy: 250 Years and Counting”