Christopher Wink

What happens after Eureka?

We love to celebrate the spark of a good idea, but we too often skip over the long, uneven road it takes to get that idea into the world.

Research on innovation keeps pointing to the same tension: breakthroughs come from serendipity and “structural holes,” where people from different disciplines collide, but impact only happens when we deliberately smooth the path that follows. That’s what made a conversation I led at Baltimore’s University of Maryland Biopark, inside the innovation district’s year-old 4MLK building feel special.

I contributed Technically coverage here and here. The Biopark team had a photographer on site, so I also just pulled some of the shots of me in action below.

How to prepare for facing violence

Violence is rare. Even those who seek it might encounter only a few hours of direct and active violence

For of the rest of us, a few minutes could shape the rest of our life. Better prepare.

That’s from the 2011 self-defense book Facing Violence by Rory Miller, a longtime corrections officer who worked in Iraqi prisons and developed self-defense training courses.

Miller has a vibe and a viewpoint, including personal stories alongside tactical advice. This book is a philosophical and practical guide that would be a good accompaniment to self-defense training. The book’s chapters are the seven stages that he identifies are part of navigating violence. Those stages:

Legal and ethical frameworks
Violence dynamics
Avoidance
Counter ambush
Breaking the freeze
The fight itself
The aftermath

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Simulacra and Simulation

The industrial mass-market modern age brought forth intertextuality, hyperreality and meaning implosion. These concepts — that media reflect other media, rather than reality, until we can no longer separate truth from story — is a defining princiople of postmodernism.

That’s how French philosopher and controversial academic Jean Baudrillard put it in his influential 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. I read excerpts as an undergrad, and his other works. I just reread the 1994 English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.

It’s a challenging read, but like all good philosophy, whether you disagree with it all or not, Baudrillard certainly makes you think. Once strawberries were a whole food to eat seasonally and locally. Then they became an ingredient, and then chemically recreated as a flavor. How does that change us?

Below I share my notes for future reference.

On moral relativism

(This was originally a social video, and below is my script)

Most people totally misuse the phrase “product of their time.” Here’s the fix.

There’s a classic trap in moral relativism debates. We say, “Well, people back then didn’t know any better.” But here’s the key idea from moral realism in philosophy: something can be true, even if most people at the time don’t recognize it.

A vision for Philadelphia 250 years in the future

I’m deeply proud and honored to have helped develop a vision statement for Philadelphia for the next 250 years. An earlier version was shared last summer here. I shared this new version more widely for one last round of resident feedback in an Inquirer op-ed here.

The statement, a place to give feedback and information on the process can be found at PH.LY.

Below is the vision statement as it stands now.

Is a river alive

What if a river isn’t just scenery or infrastructure—but a living being with rights, memory, and agency? If a corporation has personhood, then certainly ecological systems can.

That’s from the much-publicized lyrical 2025 book Is a River Alive by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It’s gotten heaps of praise, though I’ll admit I found it an over-stretched poem at times. It felt a bit pompous but I so appreciate the book’s premise.

Below I share notes for my future reference.

This is what a robotics ecosystem looks like

A robotics ecosystem connects education to workforce training to entrepreneurship and industry. Many parts and components fit in, overlap and even compete but contribute to a shared goal.

While out there, I filed a story on driverless freight company Aurora, and on a new mural series.

That’s what I got to in a panel discussion I led on the main stage of the Pittsburgh Robotics Discovery Day last Thursday. Below watch video of the panel.

Improving gender equality at home

Becoming an equal partner is the man’s glass ceiling.

Most American households are dual-income earners, and even in these, men contribute less domestically than women. Gender plays an outsized role. But even in same-sex relationships, one partner seems entirely aloof of what the other does domestically. Culture seems to make this all difficult to overcome, so a manual helps.

That’s the spirit of the 2022 book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, written by Kate Mangino, who has a PhD in social development.

“It is harder and more time-consuming to be a good mother than to be a good father, and it is easier for a woman to fail in motherhood than for a man to fail in fatherhood,” Mangino writes. “We have set the caregiving bar too high for mothers and too low for fathers.”

Mangino makes great effort to speak to relationships with different genders, while reflecting that close to 90% of American households have those in a male and female roles. Those “male-coded” and “female-coded” dynamics are a theme. I found the book challenging at times — sometimes productively, and a few times because I just flatly disagreed with the author’s framing. But I respect and appreciate Mangino’s contribution. It helped me marriage, and will help others. I recommend it. Buy it here.

Below I share my notes for future reference.