This week I finished: Strong Towns 101, by Strong Towns: Podcast listeners know I hosted Jason Slaughter, the host of Not Just Bikes, a video series I love. It's one of my few subscriptions to anything. He refers to Strong Towns a lot. I finally dug in to their courses, so I'm not just learning courses on conservatism and their recommended readings. Regular readers may know I I helped get bikes allowed on New York City subways and continued volunteering with Transportation Alternatives and other city-improving causes since the 1980s. I read The Power Broker and The Death and Life of Great American Cities decades ago. I recommend Strong Towns' introductory course.

Want to hear what we should do to decrease polluting, depleting, and plunder? Milton Friedman's advice on curbing government spending to reduce inflation applies: "A tough policy that takes courage." Watch this video, but substitute the following, So I hear: "Pollution is the most destructive disease known to modern society." Instead ofSubstituteInflationPollutionEconomyEconomy and peopleEmployment/UnemploymentMore technology/Less technology He knows what has to be done in one area. It turns out it's what we need in another area. To clarify: I'm not promoting or discouraging his ideas in economics or philosophy. I'm only saying even this limited-government free-market advocate supports big government action in domains where he considers government action appropriate. If you don't advocate limiting government as much as him, I propose you consider government banning…

This week I finished: In my time of dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, by podcast guest Sebastian Junger: Sebastian and I have met a few times in Manhattan and become friends. His book Tribe influenced my book tremendously, in fact I read it the morning I unplugged everything in my apartment, beginning living off the grid in Manhattan. I was predisposed to like the book. It begins gripping. After some background on his family's history, including with some of the great twentieth-century physicists, he dives in, sharing his experience nearly dying from an aneurysm. While that story is engaging, he isn't the first person to confront death. We all do, or can. I wondered if he was…

This week I finished: When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi: This book sold huge and I've seen it for years. I kept comparing it to Ikiru the movie by Kurasawa and Death of Ivan Illyich the novella by Tolstoy. They're all works on evaluating and reevaluating life, how to live it, and what we value when confronted with mortality. Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl too. People may look down on me for it, but I felt spoiled by those other three works. When Breath Becomes Air was compelling to read and I'm glad I finished it, but I didn't feel it delivered more than what they did, combined with my own seeing mortality ever closer in my 50s, working in an area that…

This week I finished: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil deGrasse Tyson: I didn't know how popular this book was when I read it. Now I see it was on the New York Times bestseller list over a year and has over 30,000 reviews on Amazon. I think of science as something you do involving nature. You can experiment, work with equations, or other active things, but I don't think of reading about it as science. Reading about music, for example, may help you appreciate it,, but isn't playing, listening to, or creating music. I'm not saying appreciating science is good or bad. As I see it, people in indigenous cultures do science all the time---many of them more than people who call…