Tips

This week I finished: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan: This book follows up Cadillac Desert. Both recount Americans believing themselves independent, especially of government, settling/colonizing new territory. They believed they could dominate nature. They believed their science and technology would enable them to do new things. They believed more people solved more problems. Then nature didn't behave how they predicted. They end up asking for government support that helps them but never ends. They don't reflect on what caused their problems, in this case nearly a decade of deadly dust storms blowing topsoil away from multiple states worth of land. The book is compelling and engaging. I recommend it for a…

This week I finished: The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, by Nick Romeo: I had heard about Mondragon, the cooperative in Spain, a while ago. I told a friend who recently moved to Barcelona about it. She found Nick Romeo's New Yorker article on it, which led me to look at his other articles, which led me to his book. The book compiles a lot of those articles. I sometimes describe a difference between physics and economics: when a theory in physics makes a prediction and nature does something different, physicists say the theory is wrong. when a theory in economics makes a prediction and nature does something different, economists say nature is wrong. I think Romeo would agree not with the literal…

This week I finished: An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, by Peter Fritzsche: This book recounted life during 1939-45, mostly in Paris, Warsaw, and Switzerland. I got it because I'm interested in learning how people and cultures rationalize and justify acting against their values. The book delivered, though people's internal psychology wasn't its main point. Still, it talked about how citizens of occupied countries knew what the Nazis were doing with Jews, but focused on their concerns. They separated themselves. On the other hand, it didn't treat to what extent the Nazis planned and successfully made resistance too risky and costly. What would anyone do when any resistance could mean death? You may be partly enraged that, say, Jean-Paul Sartre describes the French as resisting…

This week I finished: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo: After watching the video I mentioned of DiAngelo speaking, I had to finish the book, not just skim it. She doesn't understand what causes racism so she can't attribute it to its causes. Instead she grasps at what she can, no matter how inaccurate or how much she exacerbates the problems she purports to solve. White people can do no good in her view except to acknowledge they benefit from racism but can never understand it or overcome it. Black people can do know wrong in her view. Only they can truly understand racism, she implies. White people just can't. I think she just wants…

This week I finished: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo: Engaging, intimate, researched, poignant. It's hard to imagine it was written by an American, not someone who lived there. This book recounts a period in a Mumbai slum from the perspectives of a few of its residents. Their lives interact. The global economy affects them. Some things they can control, others they can't. In some ways they're savvy, in others they're ignorant and helpless. Their lives are different than those of anyone I know, yet they're human. In my case, my dad lived in India for many years, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He took us to working class neighborhoods he knew longtime friends in that might have…

This week I finished: Educated, by Tara Westover: I didn't know about this book except seeing the cover in bookstores and the library. I looked it up and saw how many people and institutions put it on their "best of" lists. I found it riveting. I almost couldn't believe someone lived through it. I read it toward the end of my first year since my father died. That year brought me introspection, reflection, listening to others talk about their fathers, and sharing my relationship with my father, which regular readers may have picked up from my description of Sebastian Junger's In My Time of Dying. Tara Westover's experience blows away the experience of anyone I've spoken to or nearly I can think of. Her resilience…

This week I finished: The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, by podcast guest Manisha Sinha: A comprehensive and thoroughly researched review of how slaveholders thought from around 1820 to secession. The book prompted my recent post about how we study Lincoln and abolitionists because we want to be like them or at least have them as role models. We would help ourselves to learn about slaveowners because we are more like them than most of us would like to believe. No matter our skin color or ancestry, regarding sustainability and how we rationalize and justify our cruelty, they are our behavioral ancestors. Recall that polluting and depleting create orders of magnitude more suffering and death than slavery did and is…

This week I finished: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, Manisha Sinha: From the author of The Slave's Cause: a History of Abolition, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and other awards, and one of my undergraduate teachers. Like The Slave's Cause, this book is encyclopedic in detail and being comprehensive. It treats the Civil War and Reconstruction as a different period, as the title suggests. I confess I knew little about this period in American history, so can't speak to how this view compares with the old one. A big point, as I understood it: Reconstruction didn't fail. A counterrevolution against the new republic of authoritarianism and racism defeated it. It covers many aspects of the revolution restoring…

This week I finished: Planet of the Humans, written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs, executive produced by Michael Moore: I watched this movie in 2020 when they released it on YouTube. I remember thinking that solar and wind might not be perfect, but they're better than fossil fuels. Before saying my reaction this time, I should mention after watching it this week, I read, watched, and listened to about a dozen reviews, articles, and interviews about the movie. At least a third were critical, such as having "debunked" in the title. Many researched the movie's numbers. In many details the movie seemed misleading. For example, pointing out the electric vehicle got power from the grid, but the grid got its power from coal misrepresents…

This week I finished: Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World, by Admiral William H. McRaven: I saw the video of McRaven's commencement speech to the University of Texas years ago. It resonated with me because My sidchas, standard operating procedures, and preferences include waking up, making my bed, and crossing the room to turn off my alarm within sixty seconds. Also, I had just finished the long book at the bottom of this page, No god But God, so wanted a short book. I finished this one in an afternoon. I recommend it. Loosely, the structure was that he'd describe learning a lesson in Navy SEAL training, then how it applied in practice, often a life-or-death situation. It's…

This week I finished: The joint course in urban planning between the video series Not Just Bikes (hosted by podcast guest Jason Slaughter) and Strong Towns: I can't recommend Not Just Bikes or Strong Towns enough. If you live in an American city, know and act on these resources. The course comprised nine videos (I think I counted right) plus dozens of articles. They repeated a fair amount, but you'll never look at cars, highways, stroads, suburbs, congestion, growth, or many parts of American history and culture again. Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again: by Johann Hari: Hari writes well and covers many reasons why we can't pay attention, or rather why corporations and greedy businesspeople steal our focus…

This week I finished: Albatrosses, by Diane Ackerman: I took a year off of college in 1990. I gathered all the savings I could, about $1,000, bought a one-way courier ticket to Paris for $140, and did my best to stay a year. If my savings dropped to $140, I'd have to decide either to use my last $140 to buy a flight home or commit to staying somehow. I found a family to stay with as an au pair, rare for men, which took care of room plus some board. I taught some English and found some odd jobs, which handled living expenses, and found French classes to take at very low costs, so made it. I was starved for English to read. My…

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…

This week I finished: Animal Liberation Now!, by Peter Singer: Since I last ate meat in 1990 and any dairy or other animal products about ten years ago (I don't remember when), I can't remember first reading this book, but this new version is well updated. Now I've met Peter, spoken a few times, and read The Life You Can Save. I love how readable his writing is (also his speaking, as I saw him speak at his farewell conference at Princeton last week among other philosophers and they overwhelmingly spoke in academic-ese, which was hard to understand). The reasons not to eat factory farmed meat are more than abundant. I can see people eating meat as hunter-gatherers, but we don't live that way. Unless…

This week I finished: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg: Approaching a quarter-million burpees without missing a day in over a decade, among other habits, I always enjoy reading about habits. This book is engaging. Duhigg tells stories, presents science, and builds engagement over the course of the book well. I still haven't found someone who treats how not to stop habits as well as my technique in starting sidchas in my video in Life Changing Habits. Also, that starting habits that stick is a skill that the more you do the better you get at it. I see changing habits, breaking old ones, and recognizing you don't have to keep at old ones…

This week I finished: Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: A powerful book about how Manifest Destiny manifested in the American west. Diverting rivers and depleting aquifers created some of the biggest bureaucracies and, as the book puts it, the biggest socialist projects for people claiming to loathe socialism. From this 2011 review from the Environmental Law Institute: "The year before Reisner’s untimely death at age 51, Cadillac Desert was 61st on a list of the 100 best nonfiction books in English in the 20th century, as compiled by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and inspired an award-winning documentary by the same…