14 years of saying the same 5 words
I found a journal in the garage last week, 4 of those words in my daughter’s handwriting. What it shows about how children adopt their parents’ values, and which children never get the chance.
Ronell
The price of the $100,000 fish
This story has stayed with me since I first read it. For a while I couldn’t say why. It reads like an anecdote about trust, and anecdotes about trust are cheap. What gave me the language to explain it was Haim Shapira’s Probably the Best Book on Statistics Ever Written: How to Beat the Odds … Read more
Long live the em dash
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
The constraint is not where you think it is
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
The chair: the career advice that finally clicked
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
AI adoption isn’t a technology problem
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
Frisco at an inflection point: governance challenges in fast-growing cities
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
Why data center projects stall during approval
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
Narrative intelligence in the age of AI
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
2025 reading list: brief reviews, durable ideas
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
The uncomfortable career advice I give my daughters
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
The invisible factor: Why great ideas need a permission structure to succeed
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