25 2025 July
The U.S. Postal Service Turns 250—So Let’s Celebrate the Innovations They Have Given the World
For over 100 years in the early days of the U.S. Postal Service, the way mail would get sent from small towns involved a crazy...
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27 2025 June
Inside the Relentlessly Cheerful Campaign of Zohran Mamdani
Amidst all the coverage of what some news outlets described as a “political earthquake” with relative newcomer Zohran Mamdani defeating longtime NY politician Andrew Cuomo...
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23 2025 June
Denmark’s Radical Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge
It is a beach cliché to see random idiots with metal detectors and sifters trying to find everything from loose change to diamond earrings. Using...
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16 2025 June
How To See Through a Manipulated Headline (A Retailwire Case Study)
One thing I often talk about in this newsletter is honing our media literacy. This week I found a perfect case study to illustrate how...
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06 2025 June
The Doing and Undoing and Redoing and Undoing of American Policy
Being outraged used to be easier. You could look at a policy or an announcement or something happening in the world and if you disagreed...
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22 2025 May
When the Government Refuses to Protect Consumers, Tools Like This Can Fill the Gap
For over thirty years, the EPA’s Energy Star testing and certification program has helped consumers see how energy-efficient an appliance or electronic device is before...
Read Now05 2025 May
The Dangerous Stupidity of “Doing Your Own Research”
In a recent interview, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that parents of newborn babies should do their own research before vaccinating their babies. Here’s the...
Read Now02 2025 May
Why the Nike Backlash May Be Just the Beginning
When Jennifer and I wrote Beyond Diversity, one of the first things we talked about was blind spots. We knew that there would be things we...
Read Now01 2025 May
UAE Becomes First Region to Experiment with Using AI to Write New Laws
Here’s a fascinating statistic about the recent state of AI regulation: “at least 69 countries have proposed over 1,000 AI-related policy initiatives globally, but these...
Read Now25 2025 April
Earth Day, Environmental Hostility and The Blue Marble 50 Years Later
This past week was Earth Day and one of the efforts to commemorate the day was NASA recognizing the 50th anniversary of their iconic “blue...
Read Now18 2025 April
3 Powerful Talks from TED This Week That Are Already Available Live to Watch
The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social...
Read Now07 2025 April
How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model for Truth and Verification
Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the...
Read Now01 2025 April
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis
In the words of bestselling author Garrett Graff who recently wrote a review for The Washington Post, this book “examines some of the remarkable people who...
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