Tips

On Sundays I post the selected media I finished that week, usually books and movies, though sometimes videos or other media. I looked back at the list I finished this year. My top book is Sustainability Simplified, and not because I wrote it. I wouldn't have written it except that I see zero approaches to our environmental symptoms that even in principle solve the greatest problem humanity faces---PAID culture, a concept the book explains---let alone show how we can enjoy the process. I believe the book, plus Note, I'm counting works by when I finished them, not by when they were published. Most weren't recent releases. My favorite books of 2024 In no particular order: The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South…

This week I finished: This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, by podcast guest Christopher Ketcham: I consider Chris one of the top journalists on our environmental symptoms for many reasons. The top two are his taking on essential topics few others do, especially growth and limits to it, and writing about them knowledgeably and effectively. In This Land he reveals the tragic horror story of corruption, extraction, and depletion of the US west. Chapter after chapter hits like a gut punch of how our taxes are paying for the opposite of what we'd expect. When you think it can't get more dire, the next chapter reveals a whole other dimension of corruption. Corruption feels like the most nightmarish part.…

This week I finished: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis: I read this book after watching the movie based on my expectations on recent legislation. I expect that top-down sustainability efforts like the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, moving trillions of dollars toward technologies that won't work, will create market bubbles that will burst. In the process, they won't help on our environmental problems. On the contrary, I expect them to accelerate them to greater sizes by distracting us from solutions that could work. I'm curious to find ways to reduce the damage. I wouldn't mind putting my money where my mouth is by shorting the industries with ineffective, counterproductive would-be solutions that misguided support will prop…

This week I finished: A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn: This book came out swinging, on Columbus, and kept on punching. In my opinion, every American would benefit from reading this book. If you believe government should solve social problems, this book will bring depth and history to help you understand your cause. If you believe government shouldn't get into an individual's business, you'll see how much people who claimed to espouse such beliefs did the opposite. I knew people who promoted hierarchy enforced it through violence, thereby controlling the political system through non-democratic means. This book revealed how much, and how much through machine guns, murder, and more. I also didn't realize how much my history education growing up left…

This week I finished: Giants of Political Thought: Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, volumes 1 and 2, read by Craig Dietschmann and a Supporting Cast: This audiobook isn't the Wealth of Nations, but is a summary with many quotes from it. I got it from the library as a quick review. I don't think I've read any of Wealth of Nations since college and never read it cover to cover. Covering it after Friedman, Hayek, Bastiat, and their peers reminded me how much of their work depends on his. Watching Free to Choose, I thought Friedman claimed limited government, low regulation markets helped the poor as a rhetorical trick to disarm his political opponents. Reading Smith I conclude he wasn't making those claims to trick,…

This week I finished: Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, by Arnold Schwarzenegger: I got this book expecting something to pass the time and got much more. Maybe it's just me, but I find it easy to forget how Arnold Schwarzenegger is just a regular person like you and me who has achieved a lot. He isn't lucky. He wasn't born rich. He didn't have any special advantages. He isn't a robot from the future with superhuman powers. He's disciplined. He has vision. He persists. He learned how to work with people, manage emotions, acknowledge his weaknesses, and more. As a result of these things and more he's achieved greatness in several areas of life where many of us would consider ourselves outstanding if we…

This week I finished: The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Two podcast guests created works on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Eric Metaxas wrote a book on him. Martin Doblmeier created a documentary. I confess (no pun intended) to have learned about him only recently, but everyone who knew about him valued his influence on their lives. Learning about him as a Lutheran helped me understand things about my mom, who was raised Lutheran. At least I think it did. People are complex. It was time to go to the source: his words. I'd never read anything like this book. He analyzed and assembled an understanding of the Bible to a degree and with thoroughness I'd never seen. I couldn't help reading it knowing he would within…

This week I finished two great works: Serpico, by Sidney Lumet starring Al Pacino about Frank Serpico: I watched this movie again since starting volunteering as an auxiliary, not that I see anything like what this movie covers. Before commenting on the content, Pacino's acting made watching the movie watching him. He didn't upstage others. He just played the role masterfully. On par with Pacino's acting is the story of Frank Serpico and its relevance to my work. Serpico found the NYPD systemically corrupt to the highest levels. When you live in a corrupt culture, it's easier to follow culture than to stick with what you believe is right. In a community where everyone is corrupt, people ask “Who can trust a cop who doesn’t…

This week I finished: Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Understanding and Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems, by (me) Josh Spodek: The copies below are called "advanced reader copies" or ARCs in publishing. They're proofs that may still be edited, printed early for people in the industry, like journalists, bookstores, and podcasters. Still a milestone to hold a printed copy in my hand. Several rounds of proofreading has led to my reading every word several times in the past few weeks. I'm biased, but I find it excellent reading. As one endorser wrote, "This book is a masterpiece." The back cover: Lifegasm: Marshall's Promise, by Evelyn Wallace: Hosting the This Sustainable Life podcast has led me to meet and befriend many authors, including…

This week I finished: Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity, by Donald Yacovone: I was curious about this book. I watched a few of the author's talks. He reviewed American history textbooks and found they promoted white supremacy. I'm glad I read it since I learned yet more about this country's inequality. He covered a lot of history, but like the 1619 Project and White Fragility, he doesn't understand the cause of dominance hierarchies so he keeps assigning to whiteness what skin color doesn't cause. Racism didn't cause slavery, slavery caused racism, and whiteness didn't cause slavery, material conditions did. I have to write a book on racism at some point to clarify this common misunderstanding. I have…

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…