Tips

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…

You know several legumes that don't need cooking, like string beans, garden peas, snap peas, peanuts, and snow peas. The bulk section of my coop also sells chickpea flour, which I believe is just ground uncooked chickpeas. At least I've put raw chick peas in a blender and gotten chickpea flour out of it, though not as fine as the store sells, and blending them is loud. I tried blending other beans that way---I think navy beans---and it wrecked my gastrointestinal track for a day or two. I don't recommend trying it. I think some beans uncooked are poisonous. Yet some don't need cooking. I searched "legumes that don't need cooking" and found nothing that shared what legumes don't need cooking. The links I found…

This week I finished: Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl: one of my favorite books since I first read it, probably in the early 2000s. I hadn't read it in maybe ten years, which means since starting working on sustainability leadership. I find it more valuable than ever. It's perfectly relevant to our situation today. The book led me to develop the approach to difficult times: "However difficult my current situation, it's not as bad as Auschwitz and Frankl, in Auschwitz, wrote about bliss and love. He was no more or less human than I am. If he could find bliss and love there, I can find meaning and reward here." While I lose sight of this view at times, for the most part,…

I think I can safely describe myself as a power user of portable solar panels. I: Use them almost daily Set them up and break them down again sometimes multiple times per day Carry them up and down eleven flights of stairs a couple times a day when I have roof access Carry them a few blocks to the park and back through Manhattan streets when I don't have roof access Carrying and using wears out anything, new technology even more. I chanced into EcoFlow when I bought a used power station of theirs from someone on Craigslist. I wasn't looking to become a tester or influencer. I didn't even know if I could use their equipment, let alone rely on it for all the…

This week I finished: Version 1.0.0 Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli: I didn't know when I borrowed this book that it was an international bestseller with over 13,000 online reviews. I only knew it was short and on a topic I loved. I was indulging in an old passion I haven't indulged in for decades. The early stuff about relativity and quantum I had studied. Some later theoretical stuff I had gotten close to learning in school, but didn't reach. I had pursued mind-bending things that were consistent with experiment no matter how crazy they seemed. Still, just descriptions don't do justice to solving the problems and learning about the experiments. Part of me missed doing physics, as opposed to reading about…

This week I finished Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger: He seems sincere in his beliefs, but I kept thinking, "he's close, but keeps not getting the issue." For most of the book, I made mental notes of what to write about here that he missed, but I lost track after too many of them. Sorry, I'm not a professional book reviewer, so I'm not going to cover how much this book misses and misleads, but I see it as way off. It seems like the book was designed 1) to paint environmentalists as shrill and acting on religious fervor, not reason and 2) to call nuclear clean. It's so easy to paint your opponents as unreasonable and overzealous, everyone does it. I mean, he seems…

This week I finished: The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker: A friend I considered insightful recommended this book over a decade ago. At last I got a copy from the library. Reading it made me glad to have the PhD in physics. Otherwise, I'd feel stupid. It read to me like a salad of hard words strung together, maybe more like spaghetti. It seems like Freud created a bunch of models for people based not on experiment, but just making things up and writing about it. Then a bunch of intellectuals took up his ideas and started expanding on them, with complex language. I quote below one of the craziest passages, surrounding one of the most implausible and eyebrow-raising sentences, "Why is it that…

This week I finished: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by Adam Alter: Another fascinating, intriguing book on how much we are creating a culture of addiction and isolation, and tolerating it. Alter discusses chemical addiction, but focuses on behavioral addiction, which he clarifies is not like addiction. Behavioral addiction is addiction. Industry is learning ever more effective ways to manipulate our motivational and reward circuitry and addict us. He mostly looks at addiction delivered through cell phones and video games, though also TV designed for bingeing, online shopping, gambling, pornography, and a few others. He also focuses on the effects on children as well as their relative helplessness, not that adults aren't immune. He also treats the…

This week I finished: Repo Man: I remember watching this movie in the 1980s, loving it, and feeling like it was an underground movie. I rewatched it again for the first time in decades and enjoyed it as much as ever. It was different than most movies. It took chances. It has many quotable lines. The life of a repo man is always intense. I don't remember why I chose to watch it this time. I think because someone was talking about a plate of shrimp or I used that line and it made me curious. Learning to Love Midlife, by Chip Conley: I heard Chip on Alisa Cohn's podcast From Startup to Grownup (Alisa also appeared on my podcast). Then I saw him scheduled…

This week I finished: The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot, by Russel Kirk: I learned of this book from the Conservatism 101 course I wrote about in last week's selective media post. I read the book partly to learn, partly to see what of conservative values, history, and philosophy might resonate with sustainability. It turns out plenty. I read some online but mostly listened to twenty hours of its recording. It was hard to read. Kirk's writing is erudite, not simple. At first I read and reread, listened and re-listened, but after a while I had to get the overall gist since I'd never finish at that pace. I got annoyed at the complexity of the writing, but figure I'll reread or re-listen to…

This week I finished: You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, by Jen Sincero: You'll hear in an upcoming podcast conversation with a Nobel Peace Prize holder, Erika Frank, that she and I riffed on our complementary ways of living more joyfully sustainable. I commented that she reminded me of a book I see in bookstores a lot but haven't read, You Are a Badass. You'll hear when I post the recording how badass she is. I read that she enjoyed the comment. How could I not then read the book? Not many books over a decade old still get prominent placement in bookstores. It covers a lot of major lessons I've learned in exiting a…