I didn’t launch Cubillos.com because I needed a hobby.
I launched it because I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.
When you’ve spent decades in newsrooms, city halls, barrios, military bases, and aboard Navy ships, you learn to recognize the sound of history circling back—only this time with sharper teeth.
You learn that the biggest stories rarely arrive announced.
They start as small things.
A policy nobody reads.
A technology nobody understands.
A trend nobody takes seriously.
A warning nobody wants to hear.
Then one day, everyone wakes up and asks the same question:
“How did we get here?”
The answer is usually simple.
Nobody was connecting the dots.
I’ve spent more than three decades connecting dots.
I didn’t go to journalism school.
I fell into journalism almost by accident.
I started writing obituaries at The Daily Californian. Then came a front-page story on the eve of the first Gulf War, and something clicked. The pressure. The responsibility. The realization that words matter because people make decisions based on what they believe to be true.
From that moment on, journalism stopped being work.
It became part of me.
Over the years, I reported from neighborhoods, city halls, military installations, conferences, courtrooms, and communities that most national commentators never see.
I became a regular voice on a PBS radio program alongside editors from major newspapers.
I rattled politicians.
I rattled bureaucracies.
I rattled parts of the media itself.
Because journalism was never supposed to make powerful people comfortable.
It was supposed to keep them honest.
Years later, an editor at a Scripps-Howard newspaper told me:
“You know how to connect the dots.”
That stayed with me.
Because that’s the job.
Not stenography.
Not access journalism.
Not rewriting press releases and calling it reporting.
The job is understanding how today’s decisions become tomorrow’s consequences.
How technologies reshape societies.
How governments gain power.
How institutions lose trust.
How ordinary people end up living with decisions made by people they’ve never met.
Today, those questions matter more than ever.
Artificial intelligence.
Data centers.
Energy.
Military technology.
Civil liberties.
The future of work.
The future of journalism itself.
These aren’t separate stories.
They’re the same story.
And too often, the people making the decisions aren’t the people who have to live with the results.
That’s why I write.
Not from a television studio.
Not from a think tank.
Not from a corporate boardroom.
I write from the perspective of someone who has spent a lifetime talking to the people downstream from power.
The soldiers.
The workers.
The families.
The taxpayers.
The communities.
The people who are usually handed the bill after the experts leave town.
Cubillos.com is where I connect the dots.
Where I examine the forces shaping our future.
Where I challenge conventional wisdom when it deserves to be challenged.
I try to separate fact from fear, hype from reality, and truth from talking points.
Because I’ve seen this show before.
The names change.
The technology changes.
The slogans change.
Human nature doesn’t.
And somebody still has to take notes.
So I brought my notebook.