Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
A small and unexpected bit of encouragement from across the Pacific: two of my jazz tracks, “Waltz for the Unseen” and “Counterpoint for C…”, showed up this week on SoundCloud’s Japan-facing Trending Music: Jazz playlist. I am not entirely sure whether to call it a playlist, a ranking, or a little algorithmic postcard from the Read More “Trending…”
There are still places in American life where standards are enforced without argument, and you can usually find them wherever people are arguing about pizza. Walk into a neighborhood pizza shop in New York and you are not encountering a menu so much as a test. The counter guy already knows. The regular at the Read More “Why You Know a Bad Slice When You Taste One”
The year did not collapse. That is not nothing. A school quietly opened a food pantry so families could pick up groceries without paperwork or spectacle. Students raised money for neighbors they knew by name. Volunteers turned a library into a place where children decorated gingerbread houses instead of sitting at home alone. None of Read More “What Tech Cannot Replace During the Holidays”
Something quietly miraculous has happened, and almost no one stops to admire it. Entire families now gather in the same room without sharing oxygen, appetizers, or unresolved childhood grievances. Aunts, cousins, siblings, parents, and the occasional unexplained addition coexist in a digital space that did not exist a generation ago. Nobody had to drive. Nobody Read More “Blue Bubbles, Green Bubbles, and the Accidental Genius of the Family Group Chat”
We live in an age obsessed with data, algorithms, and productivity metrics, yet it is easy to overlook the simplest truth: people live by stories. We organize our lives through them, we build trust with them, we justify decisions with them. And yet, in the great ledgers of economics, stories are treated as if they Read More “Why the Future Belongs to Storytellers”
I don’t typically write about the arts, but Gustavo Dudamel’s move from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to New York represents something bigger than a career change. This is a coast-to-coast story about how leadership works in America’s most traditional institutions. When Dudamel took the podium at Lincoln Center last month, he did something most conductors Read More “Mozart in the Jungle”
This year, my writing here reached 100,000 impressions for the first time. But that number tells only part of the story.Behind every impression is a choice someone made. A choice to pause, to read, to engage, sometimes to share. You didn’t have to stop scrolling, but you did. You didn’t have to wrestle with complex Read More “The Power of Small Acts”
The man sits in his kitchen at 2:47 p.m. on a Tuesday in late August, laptop open, coffee cold, staring at a cursor that blinks with the persistence of a smoke alarm. He is 34 years old, a freelance something-or-other who has spent the better part of three years learning to delegate his thinking to Read More “GPT Ate My Homework”
Today is my mother’s birthday. She’s not just the woman who raised me. She’s the woman who raised four college graduates, each of us with a degree from a historically Black college or university. That is not a coincidence. It’s the result of vision, grit, and a relentless belief in the power of education as Read More “For the Woman Who Believed We Could Go Further”
In Bloomington, Indiana, a small independent newspaper called The Ryder provided an unlikely launchpad for my writing career. A motley crew of locals and students worked tirelessly to put out a publication that was as synergistic as it was eclectic. The publisher, the late great Peter LoPilato, was a man of few but potent words. Read More “The Art of Professional Transformation”