Writings

Watercolor-and-ink illustration of a modern coffee shop table with a takeaway coffee, an eighteenth-century copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a black iPhone, and white AirPods.

October 5, 2026

The Revolution Will Require Minds at Work.

What if the technology we need after the social feed is an old one? From Thomas Paine to Gil Scott-Heron to artificial intelligence, a meditation on pamphlets, participation, disability, and putting expensive thought back into circulation.

Edward Hopper's New York Pavements, showing a caregiver pushing a baby carriage along a city sidewalk below the steps of a large apartment building.

October 2, 2026

Pedestrian Ecology, or the sidewalk is not the system.

A sidewalk is a sidewalk problem. A tree is a tree problem. Stormwater belongs somewhere else. But the person trying to move through a community experiences all of them at once. Pedestrian ecology asks us to stop designing the pieces and start understanding the journey.

Composite artwork based on two plates from Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology: an 1812 plate of swallows at left and an 1814 plate of ibises and a flamingo at right.

October 1, 2026

Dual Diagnosis, or a grammar of birds.

Yale diagnosed me with two chronic conditions. One took years to acquire a name. The other came from a historian who told me I spoke “a grammar of birds.” Nearly thirty years later, I am beginning to understand what she meant.

Vintage 1954 postcard showing the lush green mountains and tropical rainforest of El Yunque, Puerto Rico, beneath a blue sky.

October 1, 2026

In The Presence of El Yunque, a tourist tale.

A family trip to Puerto Rico begins with a possibly misidentified tody on a field-guide cover and somehow accumulates a rainforest bird quest, three late birdies, a Yale connection, and a mysterious golfer headed back toward El Yunque.

American Progress, a nineteenth-century allegory showing a female figure carrying telegraph wire westward as railroads, settlers and agriculture advance and Native people and bison are displaced.

September 30, 2026

The Missing Innovation Market, or where’s the stuff?

We spend trillions trying to make new things possible. Yet 1.3 billion disabled people still encounter remarkably ordinary barriers to participation. The missing innovation market may be the space between what a person can do and what the world allows them to do.

Watercolor illustration showing a power wheelchair plus an accessible van plus a mountain destination equaling independence.

September 30, 2026

The Mobility Continuum, or three industries, one person.

A wheelchair, an adaptive vehicle and an accessible destination belong to different industries. To the person trying to move through the world, they are parts of the same journey. The continuity resides in us.

Elevated view of the 18th hole at Argyle Country Club, looking from above the lower teeing area up the fairway toward the clubhouse.

September 30, 2026

Welcome to Bonus Golf

A father watches his son cross into golf’s strange territory beyond scratch—and looks back at the years of clubs, lessons, tournaments and experimentation that got him there, including an AJGA TaylorMade Discount Program that made mistakes cheaper.

Banner celebrating the Town of Somerset's 120th anniversary, 1906–2026, hanging from a utility pole among trees.

September 30, 2026

What Somerset Can See, or the FY2027 budget as a map of municipal attention.

A municipal budget reveals more than what a town spends. It reveals what the town has learned to recognize—and what can remain difficult for the system to see.

Blue Garvanza neighborhood sign on York Boulevard at Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, with a palm tree behind it.

September 30, 2026

266 Thorne St.

A year in a small Garvanza apartment: mountains outside the window, dissertation pages accumulating, and a body beginning to behave differently. A Los Angeles story about work, illness, muffled signals—and a victory that took twenty-five years to recognize.