Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Life and Death in Palestine

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One of the things we have been hearing lately, with respect to our own domestic politics,is the debate between conscience and politics. Some...
Monday, June 27, 2016

Love Wins

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Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in Brown v. the Board of Education was a parent of a child denied access to a Topeka Kansas School. Clarenc...
Thursday, June 23, 2016

Who Started the War On Government?

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In 1953 in his first Inaugural Address, Dwight Eisenhower talked about the positive impacts of government. Thirty years later Ronald Reagan ...
Friday, June 17, 2016

The Future is Inevitable

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If there is one overriding meme today it’s about fear. Fear of change, fear of a shrinking world, fear of the impact of technology; in shor...
Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Before the Play, There Was the Book

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Before Lin-Manuel Miranda, before the Play there was the book.  Miranda has talked about how his inspiration was Ron Chernow 's 2004 boo...
Monday, June 13, 2016

GRIT

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We are a nation that believes deeply in the Horatio Alger story of hard work and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. In political terms...
Friday, June 10, 2016

What Really Helps Children Succeed?

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We know that children living in poverty generally tend to do worse academically than middle class kids. We also know that even some kids fr...
Tuesday, June 7, 2016

The Tribal Bonds of Soldiers

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“We hear of of war and the rumor of war.” We thank our soldiers for their service and we think that we are welcoming them back into society...
Monday, June 6, 2016

The end of humans

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If anything represents the new new thing in our technological age, it's the arena of artificial intelligence. From the factory floor to...
Wednesday, June 1, 2016

How to deal with conflict all around us

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Look around us. Conflict is everywhere. In our culture, certainly in our politics, in the broader world and in our interactions with institu...
Saturday, May 28, 2016

Finance vs. American Business

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Recently I had a conversation with a Professor at UC Berkeley about the subject of Power. In the course of the conversation he referred to ...
Thursday, May 26, 2016

Power...it’s not what it used to be.

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Whether we want to believe it or not, every relationship we have...with a friend, a spouse, a child or co-workers, has a power dynamic as a ...
Wednesday, May 25, 2016

The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

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We throw around the word globalization without really thinking about all of its impacts. The instant and free flow of goods around the corn...
Sunday, May 22, 2016

Susan Cain and The Secret Strengths of Introverts

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We live in a world of bombast and noise. Sometimes it seems the volume is turned up full blast, all the time. A quick look at our Presiden...
Thursday, May 19, 2016

A Surfing Life as Art

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The poet William Blake talked about art as “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” I suppose that what he also meant was the ability to move ...
Monday, May 16, 2016

Are Riots and Insurrection on the Horizon?

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Not since the 1960’s have we lived in a time of more public anger. Today, issues of race, economic disparity, power imbalance and distr...
Friday, May 13, 2016

Why Physics Matters! - Part II

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A Scottish writer, back in 1915, coined the phrase “think globally, but act locally.” While it was about grassroots movements, it could jus...
Thursday, May 12, 2016

Why Physics Matters!

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For better or worse, particularly for those of us here in the Bay Area, we have come to think of science in rather utilitarian terms. A bet...
Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Even Burglar's Prefer the City

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Think about our built environment and how much of it is designed around safety and security. The gated communities, the numbers on top of o...
Sunday, May 8, 2016

The Silicon Valley Business Model, Circa 1920

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Ask any of the 20 and 30 somethings working in tech in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and I assure they think they are inventing the world...