Twenty years ago this week, I wrote my first Tech Matters column for the then-relatively-flourishing Chicago Sun-Times. It profiled Freshwater Venture, an effort by Chicago entrepreneurs Eric Antonow and Keith Schacht to map, showcase and water the technology companies already growing here. “The way Chicago will build

Chicago takes something arriving from somewhere else, mixes it with everything already here, plugs it in, turns up the volume and sends it back stranger and more useful than when it arrived. Chicago should build the East India Company of the 21st century. Relax. Not the armies, empire, opium, extraction

Generation X has spent most of its life being told that it arrived at the wrong moment. Too late for the great postwar expansion. Too young to have invented rock and roll. Too old to be digital natives. Too skeptical for politics. Too ironic for leadership. We were Slacker. We

What Artificial Intelligence Makes More Human—and More Necessary. Before Chicago conquers AI, quantum and the other frontier industries, perhaps we should make sure the humans can still finish 300 pages without asking a machine what happened. Nearly two decades ago, Katie Couric asked Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Q-Bomb Chicago is making one of the largest frontier-industry bets in its history. The people making it may even be right. Project Middle Ground would simply like somebody to explain the plan to the rest of us. Chicago

A crowded mayoral field, two would-be presidents and three frontier industries are not yet a 25-year plan. Chicago did not invent optimism. We invented something more useful: a way to keep the scene moving when nobody knows exactly what comes next. Yes, and… The improvisational rule most closely

Chicago knows how to demand a championship from its football team. We need an equally legible scoreboard for a half-billion-dollar bet on the future of computing. I am a Chicago Bears meatball. Not recovering. This is not an insult. It is an inherited emotional operating system: Bears all