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...

To Governor Jerry Brown, This is our most desperate hour. I regret that I am unable to present this message in person, but I am writing from the edge of a strange precipice in time. The future of our species is teetering on the brink. We are losing the plot. The American experiment in self-governance needs deep renewal. The threats to the future of the republic have returned. The winds grow hotter, with hurricane force firestorms devastating communities close to my home in Southern California...

I originally published this piece in 2017. I thought I'd share it with my lovely newsletter community. What do autonomous vehicles have to do with California water? More than you might think. Governor Brown recently declared the end of the California drought and has released a new long term framework to make conservation a way of life in California. As we think long term about California’s urban water use, it’s worth noting that autonomous vehicles will have transformative impacts on urban wa...

"Where is the California alternative to DOGE?" - Bill Maher in conversation with Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan. That's an important question. Governor Newsom responded earlier saying effectively that there's already the State Office of Digital Innovation. But here's the former CA state chief data officer saying that the model for the last decade hasn't worked and the gov tech movement needs to step its game up. More deeply, the flames of today’s tribalistic politics are fueled by a deep dist...

You've heard about agile software development, right? The web 2.0 manifesto usurped the upper echelons of high technology and overthrew the waterfall crowned kings of the 1990's internet. I'd like to share an example of what we can call agile infrastructure development. Here I don't mean servers or data warehouses or any backend bits or bytes. I mean moving actual atoms. Specifically essential infrastructure and more specifically a stormwater recharge facility in my hometown, a humble ditch w...