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Ronell The panic over one punctuation mark says less about AI than it does about writers optimizing for the wrong audience. The em dash has become a Rorschach test. Use one, and somewhere a reader is deciding you let a chatbot write your sentence. The advice that follows is predictable: strip the dashes, prove your humanity, … Read more
A group of parents wanted to expand a local park. The land was owned by the city and already used heavily by the community. As the neighborhood grew, the need became obvious: benches, a small playground, a half-mile trail, and lighting. The cost was modest — less than $10,000 in labor and equipment. So the … Read more
There’s a particular kind of parental frustration that doesn’t get talked about enough. It appears when a genuinely talented kid struggles to see herself clearly. My youngest daughter is a college freshman studying data science and computer science with a business minor. Her résumé already reads like someone much further along: four years of honors … Read more
Last week at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, a friend of mine — the head of AI for a multi-billion-dollar company — shared an analogy about AI adoption that I haven’t been able to shake. He said leading AI transformation inside a large organization feels like whitewater rafting. Everyone is in the … Read more
High-growth cities eventually reach a moment when making decisions becomes harder than it should be. The plans may still be sound. The finances may still work. The leadership may still be capable. But something changes in the environment around those decisions. Debates start recycling. Stakeholders fragment. Public meetings grow more tense. And every vote begins … Read more
A governance-level breakdown of exposure, identity friction, and approval resilience I’m writing this after recently returning from a trip to Atlanta, which has more than 100 data centers, which are attracting a lot of attention at the moment. I figured I’d write a post on how I’d approach tackling the push back from the community, … Read more
Last week, I stood in front of 100 high school students and asked a simple question: What is the most “AI-sounding” sentence you’ve read today? They did not hesitate. They recognized the tone immediately — polished, predictable, technically correct, emotionally vacant. That recognition matters. As artificial intelligence tools become embedded in education, business, and media, … Read more
A year of books on incentives, institutions, narrative, and decision-making—what each one argues, why it matters, and where it’s useful The Upside of Down | Megan McArdle McArdle examines why failure is essential to success. She pulls from economics, psychology, and personal narrative to argue that societies and individuals that learn from failure outperform those … Read more
Career arbitrage and the power of unfair ease If you listen to enough commencement speeches or scroll through enough Instagram quotes, the advice for young adults seems unanimous: “Follow your passion,” and “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” It makes sense. It’s also incomplete advice—and fragile when real … Read more
A developer sees a prime opportunity to revitalize a declining urban corridor. On paper, the project is a win—it expands the tax base, prevents blight, injects life into a stagnant neighborhood. She doesn’t file the plans. Not because the plan is flawed, but because it’s politically unsafe. Local sentiment equates any new development with traffic congestion … Read more
“Content is king” is nonsense. While I’m hopeful marketers are working to extinguish that phrase from their vernacular, it’s a lazy cliché that sets the wrong expectation. It makes content sound like a single, monolithic thing you must produce.That mindset reduces content to deliverables, when what small businesses actually need is a way of seeing. … Read more
Why organizations that think like publishers—not advertisers—win trust, loyalty, and growth. For years we’ve been told that content is king. It’s catchy, but wrong. Content isn’t what you publish; it’s how you think about the experience you create. A content mindset is less about volume and more about vision. It’s how leaders, brands, and creators … Read more
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