Essays
Writing
On measurement, evidence, and the gap between how decisions are meant to be made and how they are made in practice.
What Hip-Hop Taught Me About Construct Validity
Try to score something people argue about, like rap lyricism, and every flaw in your workplace metrics becomes easy to see.
Coming soonMaturity Gap: Young Adults, the Legal System, and the Data Between Them
A data story in a dozen chart forms: the system's busiest years are exactly the years the capacities the law assumes at 18 are still arriving.
When the Metric Becomes the Policy
How measurement choices quietly become legal and organizational ones, and why that matters for anyone who builds or uses performance measures.
Coming soonA Right That Exists on Paper: Compassionate Release
Compassionate release is on the books in almost every state and almost never used. A data story on the distance between the law and its use, built entirely from public records.
How Old Is Old? The Age the Law Pretends to Know
The legal system pins hard numbers (18, 50, 65) onto a boundary that the science of human development never draws. A short piece on turning a fuzzy category into an exact number.
Coming soonTrust the Checklist: Why Expert Judgment Keeps Losing
Decades of evidence say a two-variable rule predicts better than the seasoned professional: in pretrial risk, in clinical judgment, almost everywhere we've checked. Why we keep trusting our gut anyway, and what that costs.
Coming soonCultivating a Court's Data Story
Most court data is buried in reports that go unread. A field guide for turning administrative numbers into something a judge, a funder, or a community will read and remember.
Coming soonMore essays in progress.