Last year, to quote Mean Girls, I felt personally victimized by the word “innovation.” It followed me wherever I went. It was on giant buses that parked outside my glass-walled office. There were innovation awards, innovation grants, innovation seed funding, innovation lectures, innovation cookies served at innovation conferences alongside innovation…

Los Angeles is a complex city. It’s full of grit and glamour, extreme haves and have-nots, a vast variety of cultural goods and cultural appropriation. I grew up in the port of Los Angeles in a city called San Pedro, a bastion of oddity, art, and old world ideals proud…

Think about your family story. How far back does it go? Do you feel attached to it or is it but the account of strangers? Does it matter to who you are now? DNA testing or profiling began the year I was born, 1984, by Sir Alec Jeffreys. For humans, our DNA is 99.9% similar to every other person yet it is still possible within the sequences to find variations that tell a longer and larger story of our origins. (We also share…

Ah, creativity. The thing of self-help books, the typeface that launched a thousand scripts, and a driving force for all fields. There are tons of TED talks, books, plays, works, and musings on creativity. The realm of research illustrates the contradictions or at least our complex interactions with the concept…

Reading an odd variety of work as of recent, novels on dark matter, essays on creative cities, books on inevitable death, research on educational systems, synopses of how hopes are squashed and dreams achieved through shear grit, I’m keeping thinking about time, space, and the timeline of our dreams. Dreams…