Dylan Black

DisabilityTech, which encompasses assistive, adaptive, and inclusive technologies, represents one of the fastest-growing and most consequential sectors in innovation today. In this white paper, we summarize the scope and human impact of disability, which affects an estimated 1.3–1.85 billion people globally, and propose a unified framework for categorizing DisabilityTech across end users, functions, products, and technologies. We highlight preliminary trends from our database of 1,400+ companies, identify areas of concentrated innovation and remaining whitespace, and make the case that user-centered design is essential to success in this market. Greater sector clarity, we argue, will accelerate investment, entrepreneurship, and impact for disability communities worldwide.

Can labor disputes permanently reshape the output of an entire industry? I study this question using the 1942 American Federation of Musicians (AFM) recording ban, which barred unionized musicians from commercial recording for over two years. I employ an event-study design comparing genre-styles that experienced larger output declines during the ban to those less affected, exploiting continuous variation in strike exposure across 134 genre-style pairs drawn from over 1 million American releases in Discogs, an open-source release database. I find that on average styles lost approximately 2 percentage points of within-genre market share — a 23% decline relative to the baseline average — that persists without attenuation for at least 20 years. The mechanism was supply-side displacement: while RCA Victor and Columbia refused to settle until 1944, hundreds of independent labels settled throughout 1943, entering genres previously dominated by the majors and recording smaller-group, experimental styles that permanently diversified the musical landscape. These findings provide the first quantitative causal evidence that a labor action restructured a creative industry's composition, contributing to the literature on non-wage effects of strikes and the economics of creative production.

Since their introduction to American households in the early 1950s, prepared meals have fundamentally reshaped the cultural, domestic, and entertainment landscape of the United States. Beginning with the Swanson TV Dinner in 1954, the ready-made meal industry grew from a practical solution to surplus inventory into a multi-billion dollar force transforming how Americans cook, eat, and engage with media. This paper examines the history of prepared meals from 1950 to the present through four thematic lenses: changing food culture and consumption practices, gender and domestic labor, public perception and health discourse, and the relationship between prepared meals and television. Drawing on advertisements, journalism, literature, and art, the paper argues that prepared meals have been the single most important force reshaping modern American food culture, simultaneously reflecting and actively transforming domestic life, gender roles, and consumer culture. Understanding this history is essential to understanding broader shifts in the American household and its relationship to food and entertainment.