Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Every spring, American employers enter a lottery for the right to hire foreign professionals. For fiscal year 2024, they submitted 780,884 registrations for 85,000 places. For fiscal year 2027, the count fell to 211,600. A tempting story writes itself from those two numbers: AI coding tools arrived, demand for imported programmers collapsed, and technology quietly Read More “The H-1B Numbers Are Falling. AI Is Only Part of the Story”
A factory can have a full order book, a skilled workforce, and every intention of opening on Monday morning. Its executives can have secured financing, negotiated shipping contracts, and purchased sophisticated equipment. Yet a missing component can render all that preparation useless. The value of the missing part may be modest. Its power over everything Read More “What does China want in return?”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
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”
Most of what matters in technology arrives quietly. Not with a keynote. Not with a countdown clock and a curtain drop. Just a file, a version number, and a few paragraphs of technical notes that almost no one reads. That is what happened on June 3, 2026, when Google DeepMind released a model called Gemma Read More “The Model T moment for AI”
The first mistake is looking for disappearing jobs. The second mistake is looking only at Silicon Valley. The third mistake is assuming that the country with the best artificial intelligence model automatically wins the century. Each of these mistakes is comfortable, because each of them lets us keep the maps we already own. Taken together, Read More “Welcome to the Iceberg Economy”
There was a time when horse racing was gloriously inefficient, which is to say human. A man in a wrinkled seersucker suit could study a racing form folded soft from handling, squint toward the paddock, listen to a rumor drifting through cigar smoke, and persuade himself that wisdom, not luck, had brought him to the Read More “This is why we can’t have nice things”
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”
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”
There is a diagram I drew on whiteboards for twenty years. Three boxes, stacked vertically. Application at the top. System Software in the middle. Hardware at the bottom. I called it the ASH model. Students thought they were learning about computer architecture. What they were actually learning was how the world absorbs a good idea. Read More “The Next Species of Computing”