Introduction: A Fire on the HillsideThis past spring, the Eaton Fire swept through the foothills above Los Angeles, forcing the evacuation of my family and consuming the homes of friends. The flames were swift and merciless — but more than the forest burned. The fire made visible what we often forget: that the climate crisis is not a future to prepare for. It is a present we are already living. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects up to 200 million climate refugees by 2050 —...

In January, the foothills of Los Angeles caught fire again. We shouldn’t have been surprised. Hurricane-force winds, a record-setting dry spell—the driest January in 150 years—and a landscape thirsty for ignition. The flames raced through canyons and neighborhoods, testing the boundaries of our preparedness. But more than just the hills burned—so did something deeper. So did our civic soul. Amidst the smoke and sirens, the moment could have been one of shared reverence: for the firefighters b...

Marginal Revolution, a frequent stopping ground in my internet tendency, linked to a David Brooks article on the "most rejected generation." I am a bit further removed from the college application and early career establish-yourself-in-the-world hustle though do remember that grind very well. I remember reading William Deresiewicz's works on how elite highly selective culture trains "excellent sheep" and wrote a piece for my college newspaper on "the temptations of gamespace" which seems to h...

I write to you as one heading north into this emergent city, this edge of Esmeralda, from the land of water—California's first technology. The beating heart whose hydraulics powered the gold rush, fed the citrus groves and the Central Valley fields, cooled the silicon foundries, and still, to this day, sustains twenty-first-century cities with the same elemental lifeblood. It is from that ancient yet ever-adaptive infrastructure of flow and force that I make this journey, drawn by the glint o...

Part one of the story of my dad lives here. Chapter Two: In the Desert, a Well“The work is long. The road is dry. But somewhere under all this dust, there is water.”Before the father becomes a myth, He must first become a man. And so Richard, son of Dora and Dick, Having walked from football’s field into stone’s domain, Traded jerseys for blueprints, helmets for hard hats, And entered the strange and shifting world of urban planning. Not a hero’s path, no trumpets nor cheers — Just paper, mee...

Tonight I was walking my dogs with my daughter and wife. There was a light drizzle and cars flashed by, an absurd level of risk to pedestrians that I'm confident future generations will look askance at. I was reflecting about how many teens in the foothills where I live take e-bikes everywhere and how E-VTOL "flying taxis" (basically giant drones capable to taking people places) are rapidly becoming a thing. Those twin emergent realities offer a glimpse of the near future. I asked one of my b...

What follows is a mythopoetic interpretation — a kind of Aesop fable — that explores the contrasting styles we see playing out today in efforts to transform government operations. It’s not meant as a literal account or a technical memo, but rather as a symbolic reflection on the temperaments, postures, and energies that shape change in the public sector. Once upon a time, in a restless land of marble halls, cubicles, and humming servers, two tribes moved through the realm of government. The D...

Long ago, at a small house known as Toad Hall, a professor named Ward Elliott asked a question that cuts to the marrow of the human experience:"Who is your hero, and what is your cause?"Ward, a beloved professor at Claremont McKenna College, was a master of simplicity wrapped around depth. His life was a quiet adventure in civic virtue — an open house, a bottomless kettle of conversation, and a stubborn belief that individuals could matter. He was no dry academic: he had a profound impact on ...

People tell me work once happened before email. What strange practices did that involve? How did that function day to day? Guided by the light of oral history and forged by the fire of work stress tinged with so many emails, I asked my AI assistant to spin a mythopoetic yarn about the creation of the inbox, its power over its former masters, and ultimately point to how we might live in harmony with the inbox. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Enjoy! In the First Days, before the Stream...

If we want to make real progress on climate action, we have to be honest with ourselves: asking people to sacrifice in the name of a better future only gets us so far. Sure, there are moments of altruistic inspiration. But enduring systems change? That happens when we make the sustainable path the easy, obvious, and self-interested one—when it works better, faster, cheaper. In other words, we need to design climate action that doesn’t just appeal to our better angels, but to our everyday ince...

As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected. The future of infrastructure is...

My good friend and former co-founder shared the following story on LinkedIn about our work building a low cost street quality sensor. That type of work is radically common sense. Cities don't actually know where all the potholes are and overpay a consultant-industrial complex for suboptimal garbage-in-garbage-out reports that don't actually reflect the operational reality of urban infrastructure. As we grapple with the climate crisis and the massive disruption recked by DOGE, there's an urgen...