Personal Updates – CGW's Blog

The case for a throwback summer

What is your favorite childhood summer throwback?

I, for one, remember a lot of morning sitcom reruns, sandlot baseball, the icy-chill of a well-conditioned library and an annual block party. What’s yours?

I enjoyed joining the impressive Cherri Gregg and Avi Wolfman-Arent on WHYY’s Studio 2 this week, alongside Stephanie Humphrey and Marc Faletti.

This is especially timely as the parent of young kids, as I embark on a summer of activities and camps — balancing developing and fun, boredom and screens and all the rest. Give this a watch and let me know what you remember from your own summer childhood! https://lnkd.in/gZ-VqfVr

A vision for Philadelphia 250 years from today

This might be the project, and the writing, I’m proudest of in my career thus far.

Find here the backstory, and an Inquirer op-ed here I wrote. Below find the words of a vision statement for Philadelphia 250 years from now, which has now inspired a mural by my friend Sean Martorana and Mural Arts Philadelphia.

AI a Performance-Enhancing Drug: my interview on WYPR

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Chris Wink, cofounder and CEO of Technical.ly, to explore whether AI is becoming a performance-enhancing drug for founders and what that means for workers, entrepreneurs, and the cities trying to build ecosystems around both.

Recorded in Philadelphia during Philly Tech Week at the WHYY studios, the conversation digs into Chris’s framework for cutting through the AI noise, the gap between what AI could do at work and what people are actually using it for, why the most exposed workers may not be who you expect, and what the bar is now to be taken seriously as a founder in 2026.

LISTEN HERE

ESHIP “Builder of the Day”

The tribe I feel closest to are the ecosystem builders: those who work their tails off to bring entrepreneurship to the center of local strategy.

One of the chief conveners is ESHIP Alliance, which is growing an online community of just such ecosystem builders. Smartly, and generously, there they’re highlighting longtime and active ecosystem builders. I’m proud they kindly highlighted my Technical.ly work today.

This is a clever strategy 🙂 Thanks to ESHIP leader-organizers and champions

Yes, I vibe-coded a new landing page

I’ve been blogging for at least 20 years now, which means this site has lots of embarrassing signals of previous versions of myself. That also means whatever particular post I put up doesn’t necessarily present the particular person I think I am.

So I thought it would be helpful to have a simpler landing page online for my work and identity as a journalist and community contributor — one that isn’t owned by some distant publicly-traded corporation. Meanwhile, I was looking for a tiny coding project that I could complete on my own with the current generation of AI tools.

Here it is: I vibe-coded a (very) simple landing page at ChristopherWink.com, migrated my decades-old WordPress blog to a new hosting provider and brought it to a new subdomain.

Mega-events have failed cities before. Are we learning?

Cities love hosting mega-events — the Olympics, World Cup, NFL Draft. But decades of research suggest they rarely deliver the long-term economic boost leaders promise.

Are we learning? This was the focus of the plenary discussion I moderate this week in Washington DC at the annual leadership summit hosted by the International Economic Development Council (IEDC).

I also wrote about it for Technical.ly here.

My 2026 resolutions

For my annual resolutions, I thought more about my ends.

I think often of Vonnegut’s advice that the very point of life is “to experience becoming.” I get personal joy from identifying experiences and goals that give me meaning, and their pursuit is the point.

I find meaning in becoming a better version of myself, of becoming the man I want to be — and that is a lifelong pursuit. After years of resolution-making, this year I also wrote down a few areas I want to be stronger, and that better tied why my resolutions for the year fit now. Both areas of growth and resolutions are below.

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.

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.

We didn’t remove gatekeepers; we replaced them with algorithms.

I joined CURRENTLY, the slick video interview series from the creative agency [Electric Kite], hosted by principal Kevin Renton, to talk about local journalism, entrepreneurship and how we build healthier information ecosystems. (I wrote more about it on Technical.ly here)

Themes we hit: why geography still matters online; why “friction” is a feature of community; how luck shapes entrepreneurial outcomes; and why journalism is a strategy you attach to sustainable business models.

Below the full video, and a few points I want to stand out.