This is a now page. It answers the question people actually want answered when they visit an about page: what are you doing at this moment? Updated when things change.
01What I'm writing
The current issue of this journal. Six essays, all in different stages. One is done and already embarrassing me the way finished things do. Three are drafts I keep opening and closing without touching. Two are still ideas that have not found their first sentence.
That ratio is normal. The two with no first sentence will be the best ones.
02What I'm building
AI systems for life-stage decisions. Tools that help people navigate Medicare, benefits enrollment, and the kind of paperwork that costs real money when you get it wrong. Twenty years of engineering, pointed at problems that do not get enough serious attention.
The work is technical. The point is human.
03What I'm reading
Joan Didion's notebooks. Not for the first time. The way she builds an argument out of what looks like disconnected observations is the closest thing I have found to a model for how an essay should move.
Also: one novel I will not name because I am not sure I like it yet and I do not want to commit to an opinion in print before I finish.
04What I'm thinking about
Whether honesty is a skill or a habit. I keep landing on: it's a habit that looks like a skill once you have done it long enough to stop flinching.
Also: the gap between what people say they want to read and what they actually read. That gap is where the interesting essays live.