Pioneering Spirit

In the tech world right now, the hottest idea in education is AI tutoring. Personalized, mastery-based, infinitely patient digital guides — the dream is that every student could have the kind of one-on-one tutor once reserved for royalty. It’s a compelling vision, and experiments like Alpha School show the kernel of truth: students really do learn more when they progress at their own pace, with tailored support. But here’s the trap: if we treat AI tutoring as the end point of education’s evol...

The pothole isn’t the problem. The process is. That’s the first thing I learned as an Argonaut—one of a new fellowship embedded inside city government to make the invisible visible: how things actually get done. Not what’s written in the manual or the PDF, but what happens between departments, at the counter, in the inbox. What really delays the repair, stalls the permit, or tangles the procurement. Our program is called ARGO—Applied Research in Government Operations. We’re a cross-cutting ci...

In civic tech, we’ve gotten pretty good at saying how not to do things. Don’t build from the top down. Don’t ignore the user. Don’t digitize dysfunction. Important lessons, to be sure. But slogans like “build with, not for” are not blueprints. And while we’ve produced a forest of “open data playbooks,” they’re often too broad, too conceptual—or simply too disconnected from the messiness of real institutions and everyday implementation. What gives me hope, and what I believe defines the next w...

When the hurricane force firestorm came down Eaton Canyon in January, they did not discriminate between chaparral, oak, or stucco. In a single night the canyon reminded us of how ephemeral our cities really are, and of our fragility. It is easy for many to fall back into the familiar grooves of blame: arsonists, utilities, politicians, regulators, neighbors. But step back, and you glimpse something deeper. We are not simply contending with fire. We are living through the long transition from ...

Dear readers, You may have noticed that this year my posts shifted from hand penned artisanal crafted posts to a curated bit of what increasingly is called slop.* I say may because I really have no idea how many actual flesh and blood people really read this silly little web like log of various ideas and missives from the frontiers I spend time intellectually exploring. And no I make no apologies for said slop. I have a lot of ideas and AI offers a nice way for a busy dad with lots of actual ...

During the long stillness of the pandemic I went deep into the oral epics. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid and then their modern refactorings in Circe and Lavinia. What struck me was how each of these works began as a living river of words, carried on the tongues of countless tellers before they were ever written down. They were never fixed but always reshaped. This play between repetition and transformation is what gave them power. An epic is not a stone monument. It is a curren...

Picture this: you walk into city hall and it feels like stepping back into the age of typewriters. The same rituals, the same paper piles, the same council meetings where “public comment” means showing up on a Tuesday night to speak into a microphone for three minutes before anyone actually makes a decision. Even with Zoom layered on top, it’s still the same old play. The camera just lets you beam in to watch the theater from your couch instead of a plastic chair. You see it everywhere. Permi...

In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph. It was a consciousness-expanding tool. The Whole Earth Catalog grew from that impulse, offering tools and ideas to ordinary people who wanted to shape their own lives and communities. Th...

In an age of overpriced analysis from the consultant industrial complex—where dirt-simple projects are delayed by memos, models, and middle managers—the most urgent infrastructure breakthrough isn’t a new material or financing mechanism. It’s a return to something older: the ability to act in the face of uncertainty, to sketch boldly, to observe and respond swiftly. This is the path of Fermi-Dyson Thinking—a way of building rooted in approximation, improvisation, and a deep respect for the fe...

In the rainforest, a strangler fig begins its life high in the canopy, germinating not in the soil but in the crook of another tree. It sends tendrils downward, encircling the host. Over time, the fig thickens, strengthens, and slowly takes over. Eventually, the host withers, leaving a hollow column of living wood where something else once stood. Software engineers know this as the strangler fig pattern — a way to modernize legacy systems without tearing them out wholesale. You build new comp...

Every so often, a book kicks the legs out from under the table you’ve been sitting at your whole life. 1491 is one of those books. We’ve been taught to see the pre-Columbian Americas as a wilderness—vast, unspoiled, and empty. But what if it wasn’t a wilderness at all? What if it was a garden? A machine? A vast, decentralized, collaborative act of planetary design? That’s the thesis buried in the pages of Charles C. Mann’s 1491, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Turns out, the Inka did...

There’s a curious intersection outside the local high school in La Crescenta, California. It’s not curious because of its design—nothing fancy, just an unassuming street where kids walk to class, neighbors cross with coffee, and cars glide by with variable awareness. It’s curious because of what it doesn’t have: a stop sign. Now, you might think: surely, if a stop sign is needed, someone just installs it. But the tale, like so many in our modern civic life, is stranger than fiction and more t...