Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
The question usually arrives near the end of the interview, after the pleasantries are spent and the résumé has been reviewed twice. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? The applicant already knows the choreography. Sometimes the interviewer glances back down at the page, suddenly hunting for a reason to stop. Sometimes the tone Read More “Second-Chance Saints”
Antoinette Tuff was sitting in the front office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy when a young man carrying an assault rifle entered the school. Nearly 900 children were inside. Tuff was not the principal. She was not a police officer, counselor, or trained hostage negotiator. She was the school’s bookkeeper, one of those Read More “The Person Who Knows Where Everything Is”
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”
Before the first child arrives, someone unlocks the school. Before the county office opens, someone answers a phone that has already begun to ring, and does it before anyone in the building has had enough coffee. Down a quiet hallway a floor gets swept. A medication gets checked against a chart. A pantry shelf gets Read More “The Architecture of Ordinary Goodness”
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”
Consider a man like Marcus, who teaches automotive technology at a regional career center in central Ohio. He has been teaching for twenty-three years, and in that time the cars have changed three times underneath him. He started with carburetors and distributor caps, the kind of engines a student could understand by looking at them. Read More “Adaptation, the Fourth Moat: Learning Without Losing Ourselves”
The news was heavy again this morning. It usually is. Traffic reports, political arguments, prices rising, systems failing, everyone seemingly convinced that the person on the other side of the argument is either foolish or dangerous. There is a weight to the information environment we have built for ourselves, a low-grade exhaustion that accumulates before Read More “TTST: Thank Three Someones Today”
There is a man named Raymond who does tile and fixture work out of a white van with his name and number on the door. He has been at it for twenty-two years. He answers his own phone. He is not the cheapest contractor in the county and he is not the most expensive, and Read More “Trust, the Second Moat: When Information Gets Cheap, Trust Gets Expensive”
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”