The Projects
frey
A dead simple, honest investing app that turns idle cash into a real portfolio in about five minutes — bringing the American habit of building wealth in the market to the young Europeans the banks ignore. A landing page, an interactive product demo, and the one page pitch.
The Margin
Free daily forecasts across politics and sport — poll averages and seat models for seven democracies, plus MLB and NFL, in one place.
Mapping Washington DC
Nobody agrees where DC’s neighborhoods begin and end. So drop a pin, name the spot the way you actually say it, and watch Washington draw itself block by block from everyone’s pins, updating live as they come in.
EssayLens
An AI college essay reader that gives an admissions style scorecard: seven dimensions scored, your top fixes, and a cliché check. Plus free writing tools and deep, annotated guides to the Common App and school specific prompts. It critiques; it never rewrites.
Mandate
Take charge at a real moment of crisis, from the Greek debt standoff to Merkel opening the borders. Type any policy and watch the parliament vote on it, the press spin it, your party rebel, and the markets react. An AI powered political sandbox of real leaders and real crises.
Railpass
Flighty, but for trains. Track any journey live — real-time delays, platform predictions, the whole route drawn on a map — while it quietly builds a passport of every train you’ve ridden. A native iOS app with Liquid Glass throughout; the web version runs here.
Ledger
A strength tracker built to out-do Strong: 873 exercises, each with an animated demo and a muscle map, fast in-gym logging with warm-up and drop sets, reusable routines, a plate calculator, and progress charts. Native iOS; the web version runs here.
Trainy
Flighty for trains, in your browser. A map-first live tracker — every journey drawn on the map with a moving train, real delays, and rolling stock rendered class by class — while a passport of every train you’ve ridden builds itself. Log trips on any date.
The Travel Map
Every UN member state I’ve visited, mapped: 49 of 193 and counting. Click a country to read about the trip.
From the Newsletter
America Doesn't Exist in the World
America is in a culture war with Australia. And nobody told the Americans.
Do trash cans actually make cities cleaner?
Surprisingly, the data says no
Ten surprises from Mexico City
Americans don’t know a lot about a country they love to talk about.
Citizen, Asterisk
An army recruitment sign in Mexico City said you had to be Mexican by birth to enlist. That sent me into the surprisingly particular world of how Mexico decides who is Mexican,…
Does Mexico love China?
I landed in Mexico City and a stranger told me to download a Chinese app. Turns out the whole country already did.
Will we make it in time?
Everyone is racing to get their AI slop product to market. Will you be done with yours before the window closes?
Do whatever you want
American individualism was once bounded by genuine community obligation. It has shed that obligation and kept the freedom. What remains is something the tradition's founders would…