Tips

This week I finished more books than usual, partly resulting from the rain of the past two weeks, restricting how much time I could spend using the computer: Tonight in Jungle Land: The Making of Born to Run, by Peter Ames Carlin: Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 80s, listening to classic rock and album oriented rock meant knowing Bruce Springsteen. I recently read his memoir, Born to Run and a few years ago watched a recording of his Broadway show. When I learned of this book, about the making of his album Born to Run, I knew I had to read it. I knew he was driven to create a great album and worked everyone in the band and studio to realize his vision.…

This week I finished: Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence, by soon-to-be podcast guest Robert G. Parkinson: Wow, I've been learning a lot about the revolution, but didn't realize how much challenge the colonists faced, nor did I learn about the people on the British side. I knew about the big events and interactions that make the history books like the Stamp Tax, Coercive Acts, Boston Massacre, Lexington and Concord, and the ones you know about. I didn't know about events like the Gaspée affair, the burning of Falmouth, Gwynn's Island, and all the British aristocracy and military acting. I had only learned about people like Hutchinson, Gage, Dartmouth, and so on as caricatures, not real people. I didn't know what motivated them.…

Context: A few months ago I posted How I watch videos I find online: not online, which describes how I save time, distraction, and battery power by downloading videos, usually at 144 resolution or audio only, and watching them later offline. I recommend the practice, not just to hurt people less by polluting and depleting less, but to avoid the distraction of being tempted to watch other videos and get stuck. It creates mental freedom, a common result from hurting people less. Today I want to point out another way to restore mental freedom, focusing on YouTube. I was reminded by seeing someone showing a screen capture of their browser on the page. It was full of ads and recommended videos. I haven't seen either…

This week I finished: Silkwood, directed by Mick Nichols starring Meryl Streep: I saw the dvd at the library so borrowed it. I had seen the title in my recent posts about nuclear disasters. It even mentioned Hanford as a place that the plutonium processed by the characters in this movie was sent. I understood this movie to have come out very close to when Three Mile Island partially melted down, therefore culturally important, but I confused it with The China Syndrome. In any case, Silkwood featured three big stars and a big director. I expected an exposé but it mostly showed a set of roommates nearly close enough to be a family where they all worked in a facility that processed plutonium with shoddy, horrific labor…

This week I finished: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff: After biographies and documentaries of Washington, Franklin, Douglass, Lincoln, Calhoun, Jefferson, and I'm sure I'm forgetting others a biography of Samuel Adams by a Pulitzer Prize winner made sense. I didn't know how important he was before Washington and even before Franklin. I learned back stories to the colonists' responses to the Stamp Tax, the Townsend Acts, and more. Of course the Tea Party. The purpose of Paul Revere's midnight ride. How much the Tories controlled commerce and gave government positions to their families. How much Samuel Adams led Americans to rebel. How quotable he is. A well-written book that tells the story before the revolution in Boston, then Lexington and Concord, as well…

This week I finished: Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?, by Ian Frisch in the New York Times: Reading this article prompted me to comment in an online community and to follow up with a string of other articles. The article recounted stories of people reporting to police seeing children without parents watching them, followed by police and the government pursuing the parents. It described an ongoing trend of children being rendered unable to develop independence and social emotional skills. I found the article on the StrongTowns community site. Its founder and podcast guest Chuck Marohn was going to record a podcast episode on it and was soliciting comments from the community. I wrote: From the NY Times article: “Some experts point out…

This week I finished: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, by Christopher Ryan: This book covered a huge part of what I've understood about how our culture formed. I didn't learn much anthropology in school, maybe none. I woke up to it starting with podcast guest James Suzman's book Affluence Without Abundance, about the San in southern Africa. It revealed to me that people I thought were living in the Stone Age weren't suffering or hopelessly behind the times. On the contrary, they were living in tune with their environment. In many ways, they lived in ways many in what I thought of as modernity would envy. Later I found the book Tribe by podcast guest Sebastian Junger, the book The Dawn of Everything, and the videocast What…

This week I finished: The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be, by podcast guest J. B. MacKinnon: I read this book years ago, before recording the episodes with J. B. I reread it for the book club of the alumni of my workshop. It made a big impression on me then. I like it even more today. It was coincidental how timely it was as a counter to Julian Simon's work. This book illustrated the depletion and homogenization humanity has unleashed on the world. J. B. uses the term "ten percent world" to describe the amount of wildlife left. He portrays how earth used to be. It has never been static, but there was a lot…

This week I finished: Gates of Fire, by podcast guest Steven Pressfield: The moment I finished listening to this novel, I restarted from the beginning and I'm a third of the way through my second time. I loved it, especially about halfway through, when the Spartan characters, way of life, and values start coming through. I loved The War of Art, but didn't cross over into Steven's fiction until a few months ago with The Arcadian and Man at Arms. I wrote about a section that hit me in Wounded Warriors, by Steven Pressfield, and Ourselves. Gates of Fire treated fear, love, duty, honor, masculinity, femininity, and other values in a way I don't know how to describe, but I'd say both subtly and head on. He broke a…

This week I finished: The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon: This book is fascinating. I first came across Julian Simon and his influence in 2022, as I posted in The book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels; freedom, ingenuity, progress, and related books, videos, and resources, which includes many videos and peer resources I dove into then. A libertarian friend wrote in response to words in an email, "When you use the word depletion, though, I cringe a little bit. Have you read Julian Simon's Ultimate Resource or some of the more recent work along the same lines, like Superabundance?" I had read Superabundance in 2024, as I posted in This week’s selected media: January 28, 2024: Superabundance, The Population Bomb, War Is a Racket,…

My favorite phone app that saves battery and connects me with people and community: Airplane mode. Most days I use it about 12 hours. The more I use it the more I save battery, but more importantly, the more I connect with people. I recommend using it as much as you can.

This week I finished: Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp: Parts of this book I loved and parts I found unhelpful. I loved its collection of history and anthropology, which seems more thorough than those of Jared Diamond's Collapse and Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. It covers more examples more thoroughly than I would have in my book, many of which give evidence to my description of how our culture formed as it did and why we're stuck. By "as it did," I mean dominated by dominance hierarchy, imperialism, and pollution. It describes how we tend to see civilization through its achievements but not how life was for most people. Much of what we call civilization, he calls Goliaths:…

This week I finished: Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow: Last week I watched five documentaries about Washington after watching a movie about him and realizing my gaffe at not learning about this historic leader and influence on my nation and world. I looked up biographies. Chernow's topped many reviewers' lists. The library had a copy. It's long but engaging for many reasons: I found the language simple and engaging, the story meaningful and exciting, and of course the man a role model. Washington was complex, as were his times. While it goes without saying, on a personal level, learning the details revealed aspects of leadership I hadn’t paid attention to before. I’ve worked with leaders in the military, in politics, in social movements, and…

This week I finished: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson: I met him at a talk at a place in Brooklyn called Pioneerworks, invited him to be a guest on the podcast, and he agreed. I finished Ministry of the Future a couple years ago so am preparing by reading another of his books. He suggested this one both because we were in New York City and because I asked him about the water in that time. I anticipate that many landfills will flood, leading nearly all the waste we thought we were keeping from polluting the rest of the world to empty into the oceans. He said the water in the book was filthy. It was, though not as much as I would…

This week I finished: Four Horsemen, directed by Ross Ashcroft: I'm not sure how I hadn't heard about this documentary since it came out in 2012. Still, it's another documentary full of information, lacking a vision or plan how to get there. As I understand it, it lays our economic system at the root of our society's problems. It says we should be informed, but actual changes are things like changing the federal reserve system and global equivalents. What exactly should I do? I was pleased to see two people I've met and one whose book I'm in the middle of. I know Joseph Stiglitz because he teaches at Columbia Business School. I didn't take a course with him but attended at least one talk he…

This week I finished: Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet, by Beth Gardiner: I read this book for the book club of alumni of my workshop. I watched and listened to several interviews before reading the book. In the interviews, she did the usual liberal/progressive environmentalist bending over backward to say that individuals aren't responsible, only the corporations are. I don't see the logic that you being responsible for your actions makes someone else not responsible for theirs. Yes, Exxon and its peers are responsible for what they did. So is everyone who funds them by buying their products, at least when they don't have to. I also expected I'd know most of what they book covered---at least…

This week I finished: The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman: My friend and podcast guest at Cato, Travis Fisher, recommended this book. I've come across many of the ideas before, even the radical replacement of every vestige of government, from readings like The Individualists and Coase's paper The Problem of Social Cost, but not together, comprehensively. I'm glad to see it all put together. It's easy to dismiss views on privatizing everything as just seeking profit. A less thoughtful past me would have said it's not possible and misguided. Why bother even thinking about it. It would just turn into 1984 or some version of one corporation running everything, or a small number of them, all for profit, removing anything not commodifiable, like art, nature, and love. Such…

This week I finished: Progress : Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, by Johan Norberg: I met Johan at a Cato event in midtown last month. I'd watched videos of his before. He spoke last month about his latest book, Peak Human, which I expect to read, but started with this book. I thought it would read like Steven Pinker's books Enlightenment Now and Better Angels of Our Nature. I didn't expect as much Julian Simon, but Norberg recalled all of them. As with Pinker's books, I was pleasantly surprised myself to find many of his points compelling. Despite how much inequality, poverty, injustice, and war exists, much of it is less than before and decreasing and, while there are innumerable factors, some reasons are…

This week I finished: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum: I read, listened, and watched a lot on the gulag system while reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This book came up a lot, after all it won a Pulitzer. Compared to Solzhenitsyn, it's more scholarly and researched, less personal and biting. I think only survivors could include humor like his. Applebaum said she was prompted to write this book in part based on seeing USSR memorabilia sold to tourists in Eastern Europe, noting that no one would consider buying and wearing Nazi memorabilia. She commented what many have and what these works have led me to conclude: Americans don't know or understand enough about what happened in the USSR. Many people consider The Gulag Archipelago essential…

This week I finished: Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies, by John Adams: This pamphlet is shorter than some blog posts, but covers a major part of what became the Constitution. Adams wrote it in the spring of 1776, after Common Sense and before the Declaration of Independence, which Adams helped write. I understand that Adams was mailing people his ideas of how a republic could work and endure. He wasn't the first. Colonists up and down the coast were taking on that challenge. He promoted three branches with two legislative bodies, checks and balances, limited terms, and more that found its way into the Constitution. If you're curious how the Constitution formed, this document shows how people thought…

This week I finished: The Arcadian, by podcast guest Steven Pressfield: The book's cover describes it as genre-bending and it is. I'm scheduled to record a second episode with Steven this week, so look for the recording soon. I found it hard to put down. Steven makes the details vivid---of one character's toes gripping the grass or the size of the splinters of a piece of wood being broken. I kept imagining how to make it visual if made into a movie. After a while, it becomes clear that the main characters are in a cycle of rebirth. That concept would seem to me Hindu or Buddhist, but it's western: Christian, Roman, Pagan, a bit of Jewish. I'm not sure the meaning or value of…