Found Earlier Is Not Yet Saved
October 23, 2026 · 3 min read
An FDA panel found Grail's Galleri blood test safe by a 10 to 0 vote but effective by only 6 to 4. The main trial missed its goal and has no mortality data yet, so earlier…
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The Best Thing He Did Was Go Home
October 22, 2026 · 6 min read
Washington could have stayed president, or been king. He published a farewell and went home. The habit held for 144 years, broke in 1940, and then we wrote it into the…
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The Shops Are There. They Are Hard to Find.
October 21, 2026 · 7 min read
A trade essay says America's machine-shop capacity is stranded by the quote. Companies have answered it in three ways, and some of the capacity sits in garages and spare rooms,…
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Math Is Not a Ladder
October 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Math is a set of branches, not one ladder of courses, and the useful skill is knowing which branch a problem belongs to: a sailor's chart, physics, chemistry, routing, and the…
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A C+ Is the Best the Bay Has Ever Done
October 19, 2026 · 6 min read
The Chesapeake Bay got its best grade in 40 years. The crab survey rose and the oysters reproduced, while watermen had a poor oyster year and the water got cloudier.
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How People Chose to Be Whole
October 18, 2026 · 5 min read
The law decides who may marry; people decide what they are to each other. From Loving to Obergefell, from Florida's adoption ban to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the law followed…
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Who Paid
October 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Two former CIA officers were convicted in two countries for opposite reasons. The author, who is not neutral, argues that people choose this work because they love their country,…
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When the Fear Rises, the Checks Fall
October 18, 2026 · 3 min read
The United States has built machinery against its own people's rights when it was afraid: the Red Scare, COINTELPRO and its targeting of the civil rights movement. What ended it…
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Sixty Years Ago, the Women Around Me Would Have Been Hidden
October 17, 2026 · 4 min read
The women mathematicians of Langley were hidden by segregation and by credit. In 1966 women earned under half a percent of U.S. engineering bachelor's degrees. Today it is about…
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Who Checks the Answer
October 17, 2026 · 23 min read
Machines have turned human language into numbers by three routes: hand-written rules, taxonomies, and learned statistics. Each moved where the structure lives, and the last…
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What Survives Automation
October 16, 2026 · 4 min read
A machine now reads, writes, checks and files for me. What it has not taken is a name given on trust, something handed down, the read, and the walk. All four are acts of trust,…
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Someone Has to Say What a Thing Is
October 16, 2026 · 4 min read
A name is a gift of authority, a hold, and a hope for a future no one can see. From Genesis to a Mandinka father to a model naming for a model, the one who names is trusted…
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The Harness Is the Mechanism. The Read Is Still Ours.
October 16, 2026 · 6 min read
The software around an AI model does much of the work, but the most valuable part is the read: judging a machine's output, a room or a person. That part stays with us.
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The United States Can Listen. It Has Nowhere to Put What It Hears.
October 15, 2026 · 10 min read
The United States has agencies built to listen and no single firm to give what it learns to. The vessel it once had was broken up, the law makes the receiver liable, and the path…
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