Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
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.”
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”
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”
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”
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.”
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”
There is a phrase that lands differently depending on where you sit in the American political conversation. Say “social engineering” to a conservative and you will see a familiar tightening around the eyes, the look of someone who has just caught a bureaucrat in an admission. Say it to a progressive and you will see Read More “What We Quietly Teach Ourselves”
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”