Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
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”
There is a certain kind of American story that never quite makes the front page. It has no villain, no scandal, no moment of dramatic collapse. It is a story about thousands of people who simply decided to build something together and share what they made. It turns out that story, quiet as it is, Read More “The Knowledge We Build Together”
Artificial intelligence now shapes decisions about jobs, loans, healthcare, and education. When those systems carry bias, the consequences are real for the people affected. One of the biggest obstacles to fixing that problem is surprisingly basic: everyone uses different language to describe it. Researchers, policymakers, auditors, and educators often mean the same thing but talk Read More “The Missing Language of AI Accountability”