My Reading List

Book Review: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Very entertaining”

This is a fun book. It’s utterly pointless… but, that’s kind of the point.

The author created a popular web comic that gets passed around a lot in geek circles. At one time, he was a robotics engineer for NASA, so he has a scientific bent.

I have no idea how it got started, but people ask him weird questions, and he works very hard to provide them with scientifically accurate answers.

Some examples:

When, if ever, will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass FedEx? (meaning, if Fedex ever shipped nothing but hard drives filled with data, how much data would it ship?)
If two immortal people were placed on opposite sides of an uninhabited Earthlike planet, how long would it take them to find each other?
If you called a random phone number and said “God bless you,” how long would it be until you found someone who had just sneezed?

The book is very tongue in cheek, but the answers are real. The author does a lot of research about both the answers, and the variables for the questions. (Example: do the two wandering people know about each other? If so, then one of them should walk and the other should stay in the same place.)

Also, he includes some questions which is doesn’t answer which caused him a little concern:

If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?
If you saved a whole life’s worth of kissing and used all that suction power on one single kiss, how much suction force would that single kiss have?

He does a great job of explain things in ways I hadn’t considered. (Example: to stay in orbit, you don’t have to stay up; rather you just have to move sideways really fast.) And he supplements this with his signature stick figure comics.

Really fun book.

Book Review: The Red Sparrow

Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fantasticly addictive”

This is a very, very good novel. I had a flight delay, so I asked AI, “Recommended a spy novel that I can read in three hours.” This was one of the results. I remember the movie (though I haven’t seen it) – I didn’t even know it had been a novel first.

To be clear, you’re not going to read in this in three hours. But you will read it compulsively, because it’s incredibly well-paced and tough to put down. It’s a “hangover” book – one that you can’t quite get out of your head, and your mind lingers in it, long after you’ve finished it.

Dominicka is an aspiring Russian dancer. When her career hopes are destroyed, she directs her rage towards becoming an intelligence agent in the Russian SVR and is eventually sent to become a “sparrow” – a honey-trap; a woman who seduces her target.

In this role, she ends up in Helsinki trying to compromise a CIA agent named Nate. This starts a whole sequence of events that pits the United States against Russia in wild chess game.

What’s interesting about the book is its lack of flashy action. There are a few scenes of violence, but they’re quick, realistic, and not at all cinematic. The core of the book is a strategic game between intelligence agencies. There are moles on both sides, and people are crossed and double-crossed to the point where sometimes you have to stop and concentrate on who knows what and when. There are a lot of scenes – and an entire plot thread – where two people know things about each other, and think the other person is ignorant of it, but they’re basically playing the same game from opposite sides. It’s… delicious.

It reminded me of John Le Carre, but in a good way (I’m not really a fan; see my review of A Legacy of Spies). It was very administrative – lots of talking, thinking, strategizing – but unlike Le Carre, it was never boring.

I loved it. I tore through it in one day. I barely even remember the two flights I read it on.

Book Review: Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Tue, 1 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Book Review: The Spy Camera: The Minox Story

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Strange, but comprehensive”

This is an odd little book. It’s the history of a tiny camera – the Minox – that appears in a lot of spy movies. This is the little camera that someone would use to photograph documents – they trigger the shutter by squeezing it from both sides.

I don’t know why someone would write this, other than a pure love for the device. It’s quite comprehensive. Turns out it was invented by a guy in Latvia in the 1930s, and was manufactured at least through the 1990s.

The company never had any comment on its product being used for espionage. They marketed the device as a “subminature” camera, and spent a lot of research making it as small as possible. The smallest model was about the size of a cigarette lighter. And remember, this was film camera. It had a moving shutter, and a film cartridge.

I went out on eBay and found that you can buy them as collectors’ items for about $200, though I think the film must be hard to find because most of them say “untested.”

I will admit to skimming quite a bit of this book. In some ways, it’s almost a photo album – there are pages and pages of schematics and design diagrams and advertisements, etc. And a lot of the technical details went way over my head. To totally understand the book, you need a working knowledge of how a film camera operates.

A big chunk of the book is an appendix-like section which is a detailed listing and description of every model and variant of the Minox ever produced.

The book is a really comprehensive history of a quirky device that most people have never heard of. I’m glad someone wrote it, and I enjoy it as a fan of spy films, but I’m not quite sure what the demand was for it.

Book Review: Red Storm Rising

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A military masterpiece”

I read this book in high school, 40 years ago. For some unknown reason, I picked it up again. It was every bit as good.

In 1985, Muslim militants sabotage and destroy an oil refinery in central Russia. This causes a looming crisis as the Soviet Union will face fuel shortages for years before it can recover. Some members of the Politboro come up with a plan to seize Middle Eastern oil fields.

However, to do that, there is the small problem of NATO. Since they know NATO will defend in the Middle East, first they have to “split” NATO. They decide to do this by (1) invading West Germany by land, and (2) taking over Iceland which will give them the ability to shut down the Atlantic to resupply convoys.

The book is the story of what happens next.

It’s told from several perspectives. On the NATO side, we have the commander of an anti-sub frigate, a weatherman who escaped the Iceland base and is hiding out in the hills, a commander of a submarine, etc. On the Soviet side, we have the tank commander in Germany, the leader of the Iceland force, and others.

The book jumps back and forth between people and situations. Every chapter usually provides an update on all the main characters.

A lot of the war hinges on the Atlantic. If NATO can be supplied from the United States, then it will survive. So there are long, cat-and-mouse games between the supply convoys, their escorts, and the Soviet subs. This might be the books only weakness, as some of this got hard to follow. Sub warfare is pretty abstract as it is – you can’t see anything underwater – and reading about battle after battle got a little confusing.

It helped me to look up the geographic locations that were mentioned. Their relative locations matter to the plot, so knowing where they are relative to each other is helpful. (There are some interactive and static maps published. Here’s one example.)

There’s a lot of military terminology. I kept my phone handy to search for various acronyms and references. Clancy just assumes you know what everything is.

A few notes on character naming:

Two of the Russian officers have very similar names, both starting with “A.” It’s easy to get them confused.
Two of the characters are father and son, and therefore share the same last name. I got these two characters confused too.
Some characters are occasionally referred to by their title, or an acronym of their title (“CINC-WEST” for “Commander in Chief, Western Forces”). Make sure you can correlate these titles to the right character.

(This reminded me of all the problems I had with Russian naming in War and Peace. At least in this one you don’t have the female “-ova” suffix to worry about. Considering the name, geography, and terminology issues, having a notebook handy while reading wouldn’t be a bad idea.)

Clancy does a great job of explaining massive movements of men and machines, but also zeroing in on the human element. He centers the story around the characters and what they’re going through.

It’s a great book – the action never lets up. There’s not a dull moment in the 700 pages.

Book Review: The Pentagon: A History

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, but nothing valuable”

I think I got this book because it was mentioned in How Big Things Get Done. I like books about infrastructure and construction of large projects, so I picked it up.

I don’t know that I got anything valuable about it. I learned some history about The Pentagon, clearly: it was astonishingly expensive for its time, and the subject of a lot of disagreement. The guy who really wanted it – General Somervell – was a little duplicitous about the size and budget. He low-balled at $35 million which sparked outrage. Then it ended up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million, in 1940 dollars.

It was built to consolidate the War Department, which was otherwise spread all over Washington. Roosevelt had a plan to use it for record storage after the war, but he died and no one else wanted to do that.

It was built in a huge rush, because right after they started building it, Pearl Harbor was attacked and World War II heated up quite a bit. They started building without plans – occasionally, the draftsmen would finished a plan for a section, rush them over to the worksite, and find that the construction crews just winged it and had already completely that section.

A big part of the budget was for the road system around the building. Lots of roads had to get rerouted, and entire interchanges were built. And, of course, the parking lots were absolutely immense.

Security was lax for a long time, and this caused two major incidents.

In 1967 there was a Vietnam protest March to The Pentagon. This is the source of the famous picture of protesters putting flowers in the barrels of soldier’s rifles. There were several scuffles right outside the doors to the building.
In 1972, the Weather Underground planted a bomb in a bathroom. Anyone could walk around the building, so one of their members just spent a lot of time there, until she found a place to hide a bomb, then they built it specifically for that purpose.

Later in the book, they spend a lot of time on the 9/11 attacks. I had also read about this in The Only Plane in the Sky, so there wasn’t much new information on the actual attacks. The Pentagon was undergoing a huge renovation at the time, and most people had not moved back into the area that the plane struck, which thankfully limited casualties. The book did go into detail on the repairs, which were rushed to be completed in a year so they could be completely rebuilt by the first anniversary of the attacks.

It was an interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. But I can’t say I learned much that will stick with me.

Book Review: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

Sat, 8 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “As a memoir, interesting; as self-help, probably not helpful”

This is a biography/memoir of a guy named David Goggins. He had a tough life, abused by his father then growing up as the only black kid in small town Indiana. He didn’t do well in school, was very overweight, had a dead-end job, and a marriage that was on the rocks.

Then he decided to become a Navy SEAL. That sounds kind of anti-climatic, but that’s the truth: he just one day decided to lose 106 pounds in three months and go to SEAL school (technically, “BUDS,” for “Basic Underwater Demolition School”).

He had to do Hell Week three times, because he kept getting medically disqualified – first for pneumonia, then for a broken kneecap. When that happens, they drop you and you can start over, but you have to do it all again.

He finally graduated, and then got into ultra endurance racing while he was serving as a SEAL. And let me be perfectly clear about something – David Goggins is an absolute freak.

His idea of racing is running for 24 hours – he covered 101 miles. Or doing an “Ultraman,” which is something like a double IRONMAN. Or doing the Badwater 135, which is some insane race for 135 miles through Death Valley (I think the guy from Fitness Confidential talked about this same race). Or doing some hike that took him 36 hours to cover five laps – the last of which he had to walk and which took him eight full hours.

His description of these things is kind of disgusting to read. He urinates bloody sludge. He defecates on himself. He vomits regularly. Toenails are temporary.

The level to which he pushes himself is insane. At one point, he has shin splints so severe that they’re essentially two broken legs. He goes to a marathon to watch his wife (second wife; he married and divorced the first one, twice), and then literally at the last second, decides to run it… on two broken legs.

He tries to break the 24-hour pull-up record. He fails twice (once on the Today show), but eventually does 4,030 dead-hang pull-ups in 24 hours. To prep for this, he was doing 1,500 pull-ups per day in the weeks leading up to it.

And somewhere along the way, the Navy figures out he actually has a hole in his heart. He has surgery on that twice, because the first one didn’t work.

…and don’t forget, he’s an active Navy SEAL who did tours in Iraq. (Though, perhaps oddly, there’s very little talk about his actual military service. I assume at least some of it is classified.)

He eventually gets moved into recruiting and PR because he’s Black and they’re trying to recruit more Black operators that will blend in better in Africa. Additionally, he uses his ultra racing “career” as a promotional device – he’ll run an ultra every weekend after talking at a bunch of area high schools, to reinforce how much of a bad-ass he is to potential recruits.

To top it off, he has this weird fetish with other special forces training. He goes to Army Ranger school (…just because, I guess?), and fails to pass Delta Force selection twice. There are a couple other ones in there – Air Force ParaRescue and something called “DEVGRU” – just for good measure.

This is all super-interesting, but the book also tries to be self-help, which means there are a lot of platitudes in there about getting super-hard and enjoying pain. I just don’t know how relevant this is to the average reader. I’ll repeat: David Goggins is a freak.

Example: at one point his wife is begging him to go to the ER after a race, and he’s curled up on the floor saying that he just wants to “stay in this pain” a little longer – how relevant is that for the average person?

Is David Goggins a total animal? Yes, no doubt. Will this transfer to anyone else? Not likely. To do what he does would be a fast track to physical injury for most people. I’m glad that he can push himself so hard, but his mindset and physical resiliance are clearly very rare.

This means that the self-help sections are about an inch deep and will apply to virtually no one (they boil down to, “don’t stop; don’t be a pussy”). I think that maybe he just wrote a memoir, and the publisher said, “You know, if you can turn this into a self-help book, we’ll sell 4x as many….”

I’m glad I read it, if for nothing other than the sheer horror and amazement at what Goggins does to himself. And if the self-help stuff inspires you, awesome. But I just don’t think there are many people like David Goggins, so I’m not sure how applicable it is beyond simple morbid fascination.

Book Review: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A masterpiece”

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time – it’s one of those “goal reads” that I haven’t dared attempt for fear of failing. The book famously took seven years to write, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

This is the definitive biography of Robert Moses, who started off as a simple Parks Commissioner on Long Island, but accrued more and more power over 44 years to eventually become the man who totally controlled the development of New York City. He could do whatever he wanted, over the objections of whomever was the current mayor of NYC, or whomever was the current governor of New York State.

Moses was a builder. He longed to leave his mark on the landscape. He loved to build parks, and expanded this to the concept of “parkways.” As his power grew, he eventually managed to get control of building “expressways,” then bridges, then tunnels (thought he never liked them), then buildings, then entire public housing projects.

He accrued power by being a master of legislation. He wrote laws that meticulously established “authorities,” which are self-funding government entities that take in income through tolls, then issue bonds based on that income (at a huge multiplier, since the revenue only has to fund interest). Moses then took the proceeds from those bonds and built more stuff which generated more tolls.

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority eventually became an empire which controlled hundreds of millions of dollars (tens of billions in today’s money) and was answerable solely to Moses, who installed himself as the managing board member and could not be dethroned.

One of the ways he retained power was to hold multiple jobs at the same time. At one point, he held 12 different titles with various authorities and groups. So, if someone rebelled against Moses and evicted him from one position, he still held power in many others. You couldn’t get rid of him, unless you somehow simultaneously got him out of everything at the same time.

Moses could be a cruel man. He was arrogant, latently racist, and enjoyed humiliating his opponents. He never cared much for personal fortunes – he strangely never had much in the way of money – but loved to amass the power to impose his will on other people. Anyone who dared to challenge him was crushed – one phone call from Moses could instantly end someone’s career.

The author makes the point that Moses was like this because it had been done to him. He paints a picture of him as a very principled college graduate who sought to reform municipal government, but who threatened Tammany Hall a little too often. They destroyed him, left him penniless, and basically begging for work. He recovered at the age of 30 with a burning desire to never suffer that humiliation again, and employed those same tactics on everyone who opposed him for the next half-century.

Every one of Moses’s relationships was evaluated in the context of how much it would increase his power, as was every project. His desire for control became a powerful gravitational pull, growing year over year.

And Moses’s personal preferences became what NYC implemented. And Moses absolutely loved the automobile (despite not being able to drive). He disdained public transportation (in a larger sense, he disdained the public in general), so he built highway after highway, bridge after bridge, tunnel after tunnel, in a never-ending attempt to ease traffic problems. Of course, this failed – more capacity meant more cars and that meant more problems, so Moses simply kept building roads. No trains, no subways, just more and more roads for cars.

He managed his public image incredibly well. He was well-known in NYC, and cultivated an image of a tireless public servant, toiling away for very little money. The press loved him… until they didn’t.

In the 1960s, he began to falter. He over-stepped on some threats, picked some fights he couldn’t win, and his image took some hits. His enemies, seeing blood in the water, began to pile on and he was eventually brought to heel. He decided to run the 1964 World’s Fair, and it was a financial disaster.

But he ruled until very late in life. He was still wielding huge amounts of power in his late 70s. He was in his 80s when this book was published (he issued a 29-page rebuttal to it), and finally died in 1981 at the age of 92.

Was Moses a hero or a villain? The book says the latter, but despite his petty motivations, he wasn’t completely without merit. He did provide a lot of new public spaces for New Yorkers, even if it was unevenly distributed and capricious. The mark of a good biography is perhaps that it leaves with you with both good and bad impressions, as is the case here.

Robert Moses left an indelible mark on NYC that stands today, and this bled over to other cities. Many metropolises based their development off of what Moses was doing in New York, and today, many of them are still trying to dig themselves out from under the vehicle dependence that the strategy embodied.

This is a monster of a book – some 1,300 pages. But it’s never boring, not for one second. Robert Caro has done a stunning job of weaving an incredible tale of hubris. I loved it.

Book Review: Seafire

Thu, 6 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Just okay”

I don’t love John Gardner’s Bond novels. There, I said it.

This was from 1994, which is very late in his tenure. He would only write one more original Bond novel after this one (plus the GoldenEye novelization). It was his 13th original novel in the series.

He fiddles with the canon quite a bit. Bond is now in charge of “Two Zeros,” which is some branch of MI6, I think? Also, he is living with his girlfriend, a former Swiss intelligence agent named Fredericka, or “Flicka.” I gather they met during a prior Gardner novel.

Note: This content includes a spoiler which cannot be hidden in RSS. Click through to read it.

This installment is… serviceable. It’s not bad, but Gardner always has some weirdness in his books. In this one, for instance, he has two cross-dressing female assassins who are apparently drop-dead gorgeous women, who also pass as male “Delta Force types” and manage to capture Bond and Flicka. That just didn’t seem credible to me.

There are also awkward moments in the plotting. Bond and Flicka are told not to do something, and they decide to go rogue, only to be stopped at the airport and sent back to MI6 to be told that it’s okay now – they can go do that thing… which eventually puts them right back on the same course they were on.

There are lots of henchmen on the villain side. It was hard to keep track of them all. In my head, I kept trying to envision it as a movie, and it just wasn’t working.

One more thing: maybe this is just filtered memories, but I feel like Gardner is kind of obsessed with Nazis and “the Fourth Reich.” Do lots of his Bond novels involve neo-Nazism? This one does, and I know there’s at least one more, maybe two, which seems odd.

I read it during a short business trip. I had found the novel in a used bookstore on vacation, and it’s one of the few I didn’t already have, so it was top-of-mind.

Book Review: Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Quite good”

This is part memoir, part management advice. It’s the story of one man’s tenure managing a NYC restaurant called Eleven Madison Park, which climbed the ranks to be named Best Restaurant in the World.

Interestingly – and critical to the book – the author is not a chef. He was front-of-house – he managed the dining room. This book is about all the crazy things they did for their customers in the name of “unreasonable hospitality.”

Examples –

They overheard a customer saying they regretted not leaving NYC without getting a street hot dog. So they went and bought one, and delivered it to the table with gourmet presentation.
A customer panicked because they left a bottle of champagne in their home freezer when they left for the restaurant. They persuaded the customer to give them their house keys, sent someone to the house, retrieved the bottle and moved it to the fridge along with a tin of caviar, a box of chocolates, and a happy anniversary card from the restaurant.
A customer joked that he needed a million dollars for a business deal, rather than an after-dinner drink. So they delivered the drink accompanied by ten “100 Grand” candy bars.

And the list goes on. The culture at Eleven Madison Park was to go way over the top. They dissected their service in detail – what worked, what didn’t, what consequences were there, could they try something new, etc. They were (are?) always ready to change and evolve things.

Along with these details, the book gives a lot of general management and team-building advice. Most of it is pretty mainstream.

However, one thing stuck with me –

Identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort

They would find situations that came up again, like some questions:

Who does your floral arrangements?
Can you tell me more about the farm that made this cheese?

They created a card file with the answers, so that their customers could always feel like they were knowledgeable and they were never caught off-guard. They called this “systematizing improvisational hospitality,” which is oxymoronic (nothing “improvisational” is supposed to be “systematized”), but the idea was to seem improvisational, but be over-prepared.

Other examples –

If a customer had their luggage and mentioned catching a long flight, they had some “flight snack boxes” on hand to give them as they left.
If a customer ever joked about how they might be hungover in the morning, they sent them home with a “morning rescue kit” containing some ground coffee, Alka-Seltzer tablets, a muffin, and a fake doctor’s note recommending a day off.

They did something once, realized it could be “a thing,” and they systematized it.

They eventually created a position called “Dreamweaver” that they specifically hired for. This role was to look for opportunities to go over and above, and then see if they could (or needed to) systematize that, so it could be repeatable.

This is a critical business point, I think. Being adaptable is great, but what’s better is being able to identify those unique moments that might not be so unique, or that you might want to make less unique by lowering the bar to act on them.

The book is full of “inside baseball” about the restaurant business, which I found fascinating, but it tries to be more general by setting up the idea that unreasonable hospitality can be used in any industry where you want to leave an impression on a customer. The idea is to imagine what that specific customer might need or want and go out of your way to make that happen.

It’s a good book. Even if you don’t have anything to do with hospitality, it’s interesting and there’s a lot to learn here, for any discipline.

Book Review: Laws of Software Engineering: A Guide to the Patterns that Shape Software Systems, Teams, and Decisions

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A collection of free information”

This is a collection of 63 laws and axioms about building software – some serious, some not. Some are wildly obvious and general, others are unknown and specific. Some are genuinely about software development, and other are just about life in general.

For example:

Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will
Gall’s Law: a successful complicated system started from a simple system and grew over time; complicated systems cannot start as complicated systems
Conway’s Law: organizations tend to design software that mirrors their internal structure
The Duning-Kruger Effect: the less people know about something, the more they think they know
Tesler’s Law: any domain has a base level of complication beyond which it cannot be simplified

And so on.

Each law has a few bullet points, some commentary, and some examples. Each one is cross-referenced to other laws (in the book), and there are external link references.

I was going to list them all here, and I wondered if that was beyond Fair Use, but then I realized that the book has a website on which all the content in the book is published. So, if you don’t want to buy the book, just go there. It’s the same content.

Am I better for having read it? …maybe? It reminded me of some things, and introduced to me to some new ones, but I think this is one of those books that you’d need to read in a group and study with flash cards or something to really internalize.

And even if you did… would you be any better off for it? Would you be wiser? I don’t know. Maybe you’d just be more cynical?

Book Review: Wuthering Heights

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Boring, annoying characters”

This is a novel about crappy people. Or, specifically, one really crappy guy named Heathcliff, who is adopted by an Northern English family, treated poorly, and proceeds, over the course of generations, to extract his revenge on them in all sorts of different ways. Nothing acute and immediate, mind you – this guy is in for the long haul, and his revenge takes place over decades.

I have problems with classic novels, it seems (this one dates to 1847). I read them, and generally hate them, because I think I’ve been broken by contemporary fiction. I think I just fail to evaluate them in the context on when they were written.

Very few novels written before the 20th century have really, genuinely entertained me in the present. I can remember that Dracula was very good, and I was blown away by the ending of A Tale of Two Cities when I read it in college. But then I read things like Crime and Punishment or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Pride and Prejudice, and I’m just…meh.

So, at the risk of pissing off literary purists, compared to a modern novel, this one is just a long snooze.

There are only two settings – two Yorkshire estates: Wuthering Heights and Thurcross Grange, which are about four miles apart, separated by the moors (hills, basically – the setting is just south of Scotland). All of the action takes place in one of these two houses. People argue, make up, get married, are born, die, weep, fight and have all sorts of drama in these two places (or occasionally in the space between them).

The character naming doesn’t help. I had this same problem with War and Peace and Shogun. It’s hard to keep track.

Catherine gives birth to Cathy, who is also called Catherine quite a bit
Edgar Linton has a son named… Linton Heathcliff (not to be confused with the main guy, Heathcliff)
There are multiple Earnshaws, including Hareton and Hindley
Nelly is the maid and the narrator of most of the story; she’s also called Ellen occasionally

Almost the entire story is told in flashback, except the very beginning and the very end. Nelly narrates most of it, telling the entire dramatic history of the inhabitants of the two houses to Mr. Lockwood, who spends a couple nights at Wuthering Heights and is traumatized by how awful the people are. The long flashback is book-ended by a brief beginning and end in the present – the core conflict of the book is how the people came to be the way they are.

One of the problems is that the main(-ish) character sucks. Healthcliff is an abusive jerk. This is not a love story, which it’s sometimes presented as, and which the 2025 movie has been framed. The “love,” if you absolutely want to call it that, is perverse.

Also, I found the book confusing. I had to follow along with SparkNotes after every chapter, and I missed a lot. I don’t know if I stopped paying attention, or if the writing is just obtuse (or, again, if it was fine in its time, I’m just not putting it in the right context).

(I actually stopped reading it at 68%, but left the SparkNotes page open in my browser for months out of some feeling that if I closed it, I would be admitting defeat. I finally came back to the book and finished it in a 24-hour span, because I refused to let the book beat me.)

It got tedious at the end. There’s no big revelation, and I was just kind of happy it was over. I suppose there’s some satisfaction in the final disposition of some of the characters – the main theme is about a younger generation shedding the emotional baggage of the generations before them – but the entire story had been such a bore to that point, that I had stopped caring.

Book Review: My Life, My Fight

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting and endearing”

Steven Adams is only the second New Zealander to play in the NBA. And he’s had a decent career too. He’s never been an all-star, but he had five solid years with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and at one point signed a $100 million contract with them.

Adams is known to be one of the nicest guys in the NBA – very friendly, very down-to-Earth. There’s a video floating around of him giving up an easy shot to prevent an opponent from taking a hard fall.

(Here’s a full 17-minute video of Adams being a “gentle giant.”)

This is his autobiography. It was written in 2018 towards the end of his stint with OKC. Since then, he’s bounced around for a few different teams – he’s currently playing for the Rockets.

I don’t have any particular affinity to NBA bios, but he’s Kiwi (so am I, remember), which is neat, and I’ve always been partial to the big, background guys who support their teammates rather than take center stage.

Adams was one of 14 kids. Actually, no one really knows how many kids his father had – reports range from 14 to 21. His father apparently had an thing for Pacific Island women, because there were quite a few different mothers involved who were mix of ethnicities, but they all mainly stayed with their father, which is interesting.

Adams mother is Tongan. One of his (full) sisters is Valerie Adams, who won a couple Olympic gold medals in the shot put, and another sister is Lisa Adams who was born with cerebral palsy yet has also managed to win shot put gold medals in the para-Olympics.

Everyone in the family was tall. Both Adams and his father are 6’11’ (his mother, curiously, was only 5’1”). Val is 6’4”, and he has a couple of brothers who played semi-pro basketball in New Zealand.

His family life was pretty fractured. He was very close to his father who died when he was 13. After that, he bounced around a bit, lived with his mother for a stretch, got into trouble, but was then rescued by a network of friends who moved him from Rotorua to Wellington and into a prominent private high school where he could develop his basketball talent. After school, he did one season of pro ball in New Zealand, spent one year at the University of Pittsburgh, and was then drafted to the NBA in the first round.

Again, this was written right at the end of his five years with the Thunder. He goes through those five years in detail – he played with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbook during that time – and does a nice job in explaining some of the intricacies of basketball without getting bogged down in it (it reminded me of Andre Agassis’s autobiography, Open, in this sense).

He talks about friendships and how the business of basketball sometimes makes that hard. In one anecdote, he sits next to a teammate on the bus ride to a game, then notices his friend never came inside the building – turns out he was traded right as he stepped off the bus. Adams gets back to New Zealand as often as he can, and he’s dragged a bunch of his teammates back over the years to work at his youth basketball camps.

(Anoter fun quirk is the New Zealand slang. Adams uses a lot of it, and doesn’t always explain what it means. Sometimes you can pick it up from context, but other terms remain a mystery.)

He has a couple comments about race. He refers to himself as a “brown kid” more than once. At one point, in an interview, he referred to some black opponents as “quick little monkeys,” and was accused of racism. He discusses how “monkey” has a different slang meaning in New Zealand, and he was genuinely ignorant of its meaning in America. He makes the point that even though he’s technically a person-of-color, he’s considered “European White” by his teammates, but “colored” by Americans, which leads to some weird double standards.

The book is simple but endearing. It had a co-author, of course, but it’s a friend of Adams’ from New Zealand who played basketball with him, so it doesn’t seem overly polished. Adams genuinely seems like a nice kid who came from nowhere, grew up with nothing, and loves his sport, yet still has very strong ties to his family, his friends, and his country or origin.

Book Review: Jurassic Park

Thu, 2 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “The movie was better”

As it turns out, this started as a screenplay, then got turned into a novel, with the full knowledge that it would become a movie. The novel was released in 1990, and the movie in 1993, which means movie prep must have begun immediately after the manuscript was complete.

Not surprisingly, it reads like a movie.

I decided to read it after reading Cracking the Genome. I have no idea why I thought that this was the best use of my new-found knowledge of DNA, but had a couple of plane flights that day, so I needed something light.

It was okay. Clearly, I saw the movie 30 years ago, and there are some key differences. Many of the characters are quite different in the book (one of the good guys is actually kind of a bad guy in the book), and they have different fates (more people die in the book).

The main problem is that as the book goes on, it basically becomes a tactical exercise in running away from dinosaurs. That’s easier to make sense of on a movie screen than in print. In some extended sequences, I had a hard time figuring out who was where, doing what. I got the locations jumbled up in my head, and had no visual clues to sort them out. (I had the same problem in the final action climax of Reamde).

Even outside of the action scenes, there are a just lot of characters, and they get spread out all over the island. It’s hard to keep that straight. The entire group of humans is never all together, so you’re constantly trying to remember who is where and why.

Also, it’s interesting that several scenes from the book made it into later movies in the Jurassic Park canon. There’s a whole thing with a raft and a sleeping T-Rex that I think only appeared in the latest Jurassic movie. And another scene of a little girl getting bitten on the beach that was in another one of the movies (the third, maybe?).

I finished the entire book in an eight-hour travel cycle (two flights and a long layover). It was fun, just not revelatory.

Book Review: Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Good, but a little tedious, and maybe dated”

I read this because I’m a fan of Francis Collins, who is the current head of the NIH, a devout Christian, and who wrote one of my favorite books about faith: The Language of God.

This is the story of the Human Genome Project, which was something I was only vaguely aware of. I’ve never been particularly good at science, especially the “hard” sciences, so I only kinda sorta knew what this was about.

Just to recap and ensure my own understanding, here’s what I learned –

Human DNA is essentially a long string (like, 3 billion) of four letters. These letters represent something called “bases”. These letters basically form a big instruction manual of how to order amino acids to build proteins. Your body is constantly using this manual to rebuild itself.

This long string of letters is divided into substrings called “chromosomes.” We all have 46 of them – 23 from each of our parents.

Within the chromosomes are smaller substrings called “genes.” The genes are just sections of the longer chromosome, surrounded by what used to be called “junk DNA,” but is basically just information for which we don’t know its purpose. A very small percentage of the total DNA bases are identifiable genes – maybe 1-2%,

Each gene does… something. We don’t know what they all do, but we’ve identified many that control very specific protein formation to which we can trace diseases and genetic traits.

DNA replicates constantly, and sometimes it makes mistakes. These mutations accrue over time, and this leads to disorders of aging, where the body’s “instructions” get less and less accurate. Other outside forces – like radiation – can damage DNA, meaning our body is trying to rebuild itself from faulty instructions.

The Human Genome Project was a successful attempt to map the entire string of DNA – determine the correct sequence of all the bases in every chromosome. By having this “master instruction manual,” we can now identify specific genes (subsections of the entire DNA string), and determine what those genes do. By identifying specific genes responsible for specific conditions, we can perform more accurate research to find ways to treat those conditions.

DNA was discovered in the 1950s, so it was 40 years later that the scientific community decided to make a map of it all. The project was started by the NIH, but one of the researchers eventually broke off and started a private company because he found a way to do it faster. This led to a lot of acrimony, but the two sides eventually reunited to complete the project.

The book spends quite a bit of time on the intellectual property aspects of genes. Companies who “discovered” a gene – meaning, they identified the specific sequence of DNA that comprised that gene – attempted to make a legal claim to it, so that other companies had to pay them to use it in research. This caused quite a bit of outrage, since DNA already exists and these people didn’t “create” anything, they just identified something that was already there – literally something that lives inside every human.

The book was written in 2001, which means it was before the landmark 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated most gene patents. The Supreme Court ruled that:

a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated

However, the court did allow for “complementary DNA,” which was the practice of identifying genes then removing all the junk DNA to effectively create something new.

The book is necessarily tedious – if you weren’t looking for something that goes deep into scientific minutiae, then you probably shouldn’t have picked up this book in the first place.

I enjoyed it. It prompted me to do a lot of research and fill in gaps in my knowledge.

(And, energized by my newfound knowledge, I immediately decided to read Jurassic Park which is pure fantasy from a scientific perspective, but kinda matched the theme.)

Book Review: Abundance

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Well-written, very interesting thesis”

This book was written by two Left-ish authors: one is a columnist for the New York Times and the other is a columnist for The Atlantic. The hook is that this book calls out the Left for a lot of problems in today’s society.

Their central claim is that a lot of societal problems are driven on the supply side: we don’t have enough housing, we don’t have enough medical breakthroughs, we don’t have enough green energy, etc. They make the argument that the Left has stymied attempts to expand our access to these things through too much regulation and other roadblocks.

They paint a picture that society is gridlocked. We need more housing, more invention, more innovation, more energy, but we’re stuck arguing about how to get it. Whenever someone comes up with a plan, everyone piles on in attempts to discredit it or attach their pet project to it.

They argue for the government to be used as a battering ram to push projects through. Ironically, given their political orientation, they point to Trump’s Project Warp Speed effort to get a COVID vaccine out the door as an example of how things should work.

It’s a fresh take on politics, which I enjoyed. Instead of pushing the same hackneyed arguments, they take a new view of it. It’s well-written and always interesting. I’m planning to read it again.

Reread

Added on July 28, 2026

I listened to the audiobook of this on a long roadtrip to Colorado and back. Here are some random points that jumped out at me the second time through.

Over-regulation is death by a thousand cuts. Lots of regulations get added for good intentions, in and of themselves, but when combined with other regulations, the entire effect is overbearing.
Lots of organizations try to piggyback good, worthwhile goals onto projects. There are rules to favor minority-owned businesses and small businesses and increase disabled access, etc. The problem is that so many goals are attached to each project, that they often prevent the project from happening at all, which means no one gets their goals met.
One of the myths of innovation is that discovery is enough. In truth, you have to have a good idea and the ability to deploy it. And in many cases, the government is the only entity large enough to help deploy something.
Government financing can be “push” (here’s money to do this thing) or “pull” (here’s a bonus if you get that thing done). We can employ both to encourage private enterprise to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t take.
Operation Warp Speed – the COVID vaccine program – was a great example of the government helping and prodding private enterprise to do something. Weirdly, however, it’s been abandoned by both parties. The Right is anti-vax, and the Left doesn’t want to praise Trump in any way. So this great example of the success of government inventive and reward has been orphaned.
A lot of the problems in the world right now are scarcity problems. If we have enough of something, there are less problems. We simply need to be free to do more stuff.
A great phrase: “Don’t defend something just because your opponent attacks it.” Just because the Right attacks over-regulation doesn’t mean the Left needs to defend it.

Book Review: Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This was apparently a revolutionary book, back when it was published. It pushed back on the idea that industrial accidents were usually the fault of human error. It advaned the idea that in the world of connected systems, humans simply be expected to understand the ultimate ramifications of everything they do, and we have to start putting some responsibility on the systems themselves.

The author goes deep into the Three Mile Island accident in particular. He talks about all the failures that had to happen leading up to the accident, and the list is considerable. Maintenance was delayed, a pump failed, systems designed to be backups failed, etc. There was, at some level, a human error, but so many other things in the chain went wrong, that you can’t pin the blame solely on that.

In general:

Industrial systems have become so complex that humans cannot always accurately predict the future state that will result from an individual action
Backup systems fail as often as – or perhaps more often – than primary systems. Just saying, “We have a backup isn’t enough.”
Humans act irrationally when stressed. They miss very simple things.
Having “slack” in a process can be helpful. While it may seem more efficient to automate everything, having “circuit breakers” where a chain reaction stops and waits can give humans time to react to a negative outcome.

The author attempted to reframe accidents as problems of the systems themselves, rather than the humans that run them. The lack of a human ability to manage the system should be viewed as a problem of the system, not of the human. The solution isn’t to get better humans or blame them when things go wrong, rather the solution is to design systems that account for human fallibility better.

Book Review: The Trap

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Lightweight and fun, like the rest”

This is the third book in the Emma Makepeace collection. If you remember, she’s a secret agent of sorts in a shadowy British organization.

Like this other two, this is a fun novel. It’s not deep, but there’s a lot of good action and suspense, and it’s a nice way to pass time.

In this entry, something is planning an assassination attempt at the G7 Summit in Scotland, but they don’t know who is doing the planning or who their target is. It’s a tight timeframe of trying to figure out what’s happening before it actually happens.

There’s a callback to a prior character which extends the story of Emma’s personal life a bit. And a new character is introduced, which I figured was going to fall into Roger Ebert’s Law of the Economy of Characters, but… well, that’s a spoiler.

I noted that the author has written a book outside this canon since this one was published. I hope that doesn’t indicate they’ve moved on from the character.

These are fun novels. I’d like to keep reading them.

Book Review: The Westing Game

Thu, 4 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fun mystery”

This is technically a young adult book, I believe. It’s from the late 70s, and is fairly well-known.

An eccentric millionaire dies, and leaves a game to be played by a group of people who have all moved into a new condominium building next to his mansion. The team that puts the clues together and comes to the correct answer will win his fortune.

It sounds cliched – and it is – but it’s well-done, and a little darker that the setting would suggest. There are 15-20 people involved, and there are lots of relationships and history between them all. It gets a little hard to keep track of, but some of the intricacies are important.

In addition to solving the mystery itself, there’s character development and conflict resolution for characters beyond the immediate plot.

The resolution is quite good and unexpected. I’m not sure if I could get it myself, but it was nicely done.

(Interestingly, I read about the book from someone who said it was the first book that didn’t “lie” to him when he was a kid, meaning the solution to the mystery didn’t have to do with hidden information that the reader was unaware of. I would have to go back to audit all the clues to make sure there’s enough to solve it, but that could be true.)

Book Review: Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11

Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A definitive history”

I read this because NASA’s Artemis mission was in the news, and I felt kinda of guilty that I don’t follow space much. It’s poor geek cred, I know, but outside of childhood, I’ve just never been that interested in space exploration.

But my brother got me to watch an Apollo 11 documentary, and it was really compelling. It was amazing how many problems NASA encountered and fixed during the race to get the moon. So, after watching that, I asked AI what the canonical history of space exploration was, and it recommended this.

The book is quite good. It starts at Sputnik in 1957 and goes through the manned landing on the moon – Apollo 11 – in 1969. In the process, it goes through the Mercury and Gemini programs in detail, and all the missions leading up to Apollo 11. It stops pretty abruptly at that point.

It spends a lot of time on the personalities. The Mercury Seven were the astronauts who became celebrities at the time – a local car dealer gave them all Corvettes, and they were the prototype of the dashing hero. Some of them drank too much and bedded a lot of the local women around Cape Canaveral.

There was a lot of competition between them – they all wanted to be the first to do everything. Buzz Aldrin in particular was pretty annoyed that Neil Armstrong was going to set foot on the moon a couple minutes before him, and he shamelessly lobbied to reverse the order. They were all headstrong and a bit arrogant, and unlike today’s space flights, they held a lot of power in the cockpit (one of them in particular ignored orders and jeopardized a mission, so was never allowed to fly again).

I found it interesting that the country wasn’t as interested in space exploration as we think it was. During the 60s, the American public didn’t care so much after the novelty wore off, and there were some complaints that we were spending too much money on it.

(I remember, when I was a pre-teen, watching the first Space Shuttle mission. But towards the end of that program, I didn’t even know when or if we had a shuttle in orbit. Things are miraculous when they first happen, then become mundane weirdly fast.)

Also interesting were the dynamics of the “race” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They, of course, had the first satellite and human in space, which put us behind, and led to the famous “missile gap” fear mongering. A lot of what the Soviets did during the 60s is murky – several cosmonauts died in the process, and we don’t really have a full accounting of it.

But, when the U.S. made our moonshot, the Soviets acquiesced to tacit support. They had a spacecraft orbiting the moon at the time, and they gave us its location and trajectory to ensure it wouldn’t interfere. Additionally, when the U.S. astronauts placed their plaque on the moon commemorating the men who died during the pursuit (mainly the Apollo 1 crew), they added some deceased Soviet cosmonauts to the list.

The book is well-written. It’s never boring and deftly toes the line between lots of detail and not too much that it bogs down. It’s a great history of the moonshot project.

Book Review: The Maltese Falcon

Tue, 2 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Worth reading as a genre reference point”

When I read classics like this, I think to myself, “Man, this is so cliched…”

And then I have to remind myself: this is actually the source of the cliche.

Put another way: this isn’t cliched, everything else is cliched.

This is the story of Sam Spade, private eye of San Francisco in the late 1920s. Despite the ubiquitous voiceovers in movies, this is written in the third person. You don’t get inside the head of Sam. (I was surprised by this, because the classic film noir trope is the voiceover of the hero talking about some “dame” who walked into his office…)

Sam is hired to find a jeweled bird – a falcon, originally from Malta, that has some relation to the Knights Templar. It’s painted black to disguise its true value.

The problem is that everyone is lying to him about why they want it, what their relationship is to it, and why they want to hire Sam. He can’t really trust anyone, and he’s dancing around multiple agendas.

Also, Sam is an anti-hero. He’s not a really nice guy. He’s having an affair with his partner’s wife, and then his partner gets killed (not really a spoiler; it happens pretty early). Sam will seemingly lie and betray people whenever it suits him.

The plot drags a little in the second half, and I don’t totally understand the resolution of some of the threads. But it’s a thrilling novel, nonetheless, and it’s fun to read the source material for a half-dozen films, and perhaps the entire “noir” genre altogether.

Book Review: Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Mon, 1 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Meandering polemic against mandatory parking”

This is a lot of book to make a central point: mandatory parking minimums have caused parking to have a weirdly outsized effect on the world. It has influenced city planning and even contributed to the housing shortage.

The book tells a lot of stories to make the point. They’re never boring, but they do get a little repetitive in later chapters. It’s horror story after horror story about how the need for parking minimums has prevented development from happening. Particularly in California, projects seem to anguish for decades because the developers are short one or two parking spaces.

This entire book seems like it wants to inherit the “parking polemic “ crown from Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, which is references quite a bit. That 2005 book is considered a veritable infrastructure bible by many people, so I’m curious what this book has added to the argument (I haven’t read Shoup’s book yet).

I asked AI what this booked added to Shoup’s:

Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking is a 700-page academic treatise – economics, policy analysis, dense with data. Grabar’s contribution is largely translation and narrative: he’s a journalist, and he turns Shoup’s framework into a readable story with characters – parking attendants, valets, a Chicago meter-deal fiasco, the mafia’s role in the parking industry, people shooting each other over spaces.

So, it’s just a more approachable translation of Shoup’s book, I’m gathering.

Also, I would love to hear the other side of the argument. I’ve read quite a few arguments against parking minimums, and all of them do so with a feigned astonishment that the institution has survived this far. Surely, there has to be some argument in favor of it. I’d be curious to read that.

Overall, not a bad book. But it got a little tedious towards the end, and I just don’t know what it added to the debate, or how it built on Shoup’s work, which is considered canonical.

Book Review: Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Uneven, like most anthologies”

Appropriately, I started this book just after having returned from five days in New York City. I was there for a two-day conference in Brooklyn, but I stayed in Tribeca, and spent some time walking the streets of that neighborhood and Soho. Between those sojourns and the subway to Brooklyn each morning, I got pretty good dose of a “messy city.”

I’m going to document the book in real-time below. It’s an anthology, so each chapter is a self-contained essay.

Introduction

Whomever wrote the introduction started off by talking about “desire lines” or “desire paths,” which are paths worn into the ground by where people actual want to want, rather than that’s planned. I enjoyed this quote:

They are the paths we take rather than the paths we are given.

And that really sets up the entire book.

The goal of this collection is to show that messiness is an essential element of the city… Messy urbanism needs championing, because out minds and instincts tend to default to the seemingly simpler options of seeking order.

I also enjoyed a quote from an separate article about “complexity” in a city, and what it demands of us:

…learning to interact well with strangers requires a toleration of ambiguity, the capacity to contain frustration, an ability to listen carefully to people whose speech, needs, or desires may seem alien.

Reflections

A Farewell to El Gran Burrito

This is an elegy for a Mexican street vendor in Los Angeles. The authors make the point that it was in a crappy building, but the food was amazing. The authors relate a story of visiting in the wee hours of the morning and being amazed by the cross-section of the people who were there – with an emphasis on the local queer community.

Sadly, the El Gran Burrito building got torn down to redevelop the area around it.

As urban planners and designers, we are schooled and trained to think that the best buildings and public spaces are born of grand visions framed by clean lines and filled with exquisite details.

[…] And what happens when they aesthetics get repeated as nauseum? You get a sameness in scale and look that makes cities almost indistinguishable from each other.

The authors ask how cities might avoid this sameness and codify protections for an eclectic mix of building types.

They use the word “vitality” a lot, which I suspect will come up throughout the book.

These Walls, These Roads

This is a very political essay from a Palestinian about the Israeli occupation of the land his family calls home.

His larger point seems to be that the forces that control a city can force other people into patterns of life that affect their sense of time.

How long is the bus stop wait? How long is the walk to the nearest grocery store? How many years of work until you can afford a home? How long is the co-op housing wait list? How about your commute.

He finishes with a reference to a concept called “right to the city.”

the right to full participation in the collective act of the city, the right to not only be from or belong to a place but to see yourself reflected in it and to partake in the creative act of shaping where you reside.

This essay seems a little out of place. I don’t deny the validity of the author’s experience, but I’m not sure how it relates to the purported subject of the book.

Living Loud: The Migration of a Steelpan Soundtrack

This is an essay about the noise of a city. The author was originally from Trinidad, where he was constantly subjected to noise.

He and his family immigrated to Toronto, and he discusses how the perception and toleration of noise is vastly different there.

The energy, the vibrancy, the joy of family noise has migrated to other countries and, carried miles and miles abroad, where it has not always been welcomed.

[…] It is no wonder that many from the south who venture to build new lives up north feel a chill not just of winter’s cold but of that silence.

I think his point is to promote the idea of noise as a key part of a vibrant city.

The good news is that we can live with noise. In the same was that the rhythm of our breath or our heartbeat steadies us. Noise is not a hindrance to a good life – it can propel a tidy life with a syncopation that can bridge oceans and cultures.

Planning for an Unplanned City

This is a discussion of whether we might have over-regulated cities. The author opens with a discussion of a Hanoi train that passes within inches of merchants and restaurant tables on it way out of the city, and how this would never be allowed in a Western city.

Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities? Or are they critical bulwarks for protecting public health and safety?

The author seems torn on the question. On the one hand, he wants more flexibility in how cities can respond to challenges, but on the other hand, he concedes that we need to keep people safe, and that flexibility in rules means they might be abused by people seeking to take an advantage:

Each of these, on its own, serves a valuable public purpose. In the aggregate, however, they can also preclue some of the dynamic urbansim that many cities are trying to recapture.

Interruptions

The author talks about their Toronto neighborhood, which is very dense, and how every neighbor is part of their neighbors’ lives. They borrow things from each other, know the entry codes to everyone’s house, and are constantly discussing their lives with each other.

I was recently sharing with some friends about colleagues about this resolving door of daily interruptions… They visibly recoiled at the prospect of interactions this intimate in their own living environments.

The author claims that living with this level of casual intimacy makes for better understanding between people.

There’s evidence that knowing people with vastly different lived experiences than your dramatically increased your capacity for empathy for them and others of their background. …it’s part of the social contract I think we agree to when we live in big cities.

No citation is given for that, but the other does also mention a 1995 Chicago heat wave where survival was linked to someone’s intimacy with their neighbors, which meant that groups of people would check on each other and make sure they were coping with the heat and not in distress (I assume there is some known evidence for this, though I didn’t find anything on the Wikipedia page).

The author discusses how they moved to Toronto from Vancouver, and how they believe they they were subconsciously looking for more closeness with neighbors. He cities his background in an Indian-Kenyan family, and makes a funny observation about American sitcoms like Family Matters and Full House where the neighbors (Steve Urkel and Kimmy Gibler, respectively) were always dropping in unannounced.

Packrat City

This is discussion of the author’s role as a “heritage planner” for the city of Toronto. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite figure out what a heritage planner is. I searched for the author, and found her on v various platforms, but I still don’t have a great definition.

She starts the essay talking about how she keeps physical things that bring back memories. She calls herself a “packrat,” not a hoarder.

More recently, heritage planners have shifted toward a conversation paradigm that includes buildings not for their landmark status, but for the contextual role they play in the city. These buildings weren’t constructed to communicate nationalism, wealth, or grandeur, but they have more subtle stories to tell. The role of the heritage planner is to find those stories and determine whether and how to hold on to them.

That’s the closest I got to a definition.

Localities

An Argument Worth Having

This essay is by the head of the Chinatown Land Trust in Toronto, which is a type of organization that collectively owns land and allows members to vote on usage.

She writes that arguments and conflict are good. It means that people are engaged in the process and feel that their communities are worth arguing about and for.

I have come to believe that Chinatown’s ability to weather its storms comes from an organic level of protection – a healthy capacity for community conflict. In all its most dysfunctional and generative ways.

[…] I would pick a conflict with my co-op neighbor about who to hire for our giant plumbing contract next year over begging my landlord to let me turn on the air conditioner every summer.

Conflict means that people have skin in the game, and it implies that they want good resolutions because they need and plan to live with the consequences.

Dixie Road

This essay seemed to be a bit of a polemic against the suburbs. The author was an immigrant, and after moving to Toronto was immediately struck by how big the spaces were – how wide the streets were (hence the title), and how far away everything seemed.

The author proposes two changes:

Greater variation in zoning requirements, allowing closer usages of land types
A reduction in car-based regulations, such as street width, corner radii, and minimum parking requirements)

Suburbs across the country are victims of normative planning and development processes that prioritized the creation of a rapid revenue base through large-scale, rural-to-suburban land-use conversion and rigid, car-centric design standards.

A Beach Like No Other

This was essentially a story about a construction site and what a neighborhood did with it.

When a building was demolished and the ensuing construction was delayed, an empty lot appear in a neighborhood. Several people rallied around this lot, named it “Bloordale Beach” and began gathering there.

For most of the year and a half, Bloordale Beach existed as a gorgeous landlocked oasis, if not in its physical appearance, then in the community’s hearts and minds. The beach offered levity during the most difficult months of the pandemic.

The essay tells of a “Shared Space Initiative,” where Toronto designated certain spaces as “open” during the pandemic, but encouraged people to socially distance within them.

If the city would lighten up a little, like they did with the beach, and let us have some fun, who knows what other kinds of creations could emerge.

The Ballet of the Parking Lot

This is a discussion of “POPS” – Privately-Owned Publicly Accessible Space (the acronym doesn’t quite work). In particular, it’s discussing strip mall parking lots, which are private-owned, but have public uses.

The authors created a program they called “plazaPOPS” where they created more inviting spaces in these parking lots. They would install benches and tables, and invite social gatherings and public events to take place.

[The] parking lots may be unappealing, yet they anchor the city’s social life. Should strip mall plazas be considered part of the public realm?

What is Safety

This one is really out of place. It’s a discussion of an organization called Rainbow Railroad that helps LGBT people in oppressive countries immigrate to friendlier countries. The story is anchored around the suicide of a woman who attended a queer concert in Egypt and was persecuted for it.

There is very little tying this one to the topic of the book. There a few mentions of a housing crisis and how hard it is to find a place to live once you immigrate, but is essay is mainly concerned with explaining the plight of queer people in countries like Uganda and Afghanistan.

Why Can’t We Sell Stuff Anyplace?

This is… discussion (?) of zoning laws that prevent people from selling things wherever they want.

…why some cities, especially in the Global North, are so particular about where shopping can happen.

The essay discusses how shopping happens in other, less regulated, areas of the world – Hanoi, Istanbul, etc. – and then goes into a long-ish history of zoning laws and how we ended up separating business and residential areas.

In the end, other than highlighting the fact that the “Global North” tends to separate these areas, the author doesn’t seem to argue much in either direction. He seems satisfied to simply note the difference.

Desire Lines in the Sand

This essay is a discussion of Hanlan’s Point (or sometimes “Hanlan’s Beach”) in Toronto, which is an informal gathering place for the LGBT community and a generally accepted place for nudity in the city.

It discusses how the area morphed into its current use over the course of a century, which explains the “desire lines” of the title: some areas become what they are because there is a need for it among the populace, and they sort of just “claim” a space to fill the need.

For queer communities, desire lines symbolize the many ways that queer people have made places for themselves in cities that have often excluded or erased them.

The essay talks about an effort of the city to develop Hanlan’s Point into a entertainment district, and the grassroots counter-effort that sprung up to prevent the removal of a claimed area for the queer population of Toronto.

Conjay’s First Walk Home

This is a bit of fiction, about a boy named Conjay and his first day of second grade. He lives in the Toronto neighborhood of Little Jamaica.

In the story, he walks home with his friend Omar, but gets lost. However, he’s so familiar with his neighborhood – the people, the businesses, and the sights – that he’s able to find his way back.

It’s a bit cringey and utopian, but I get the point. When we go everywhere in cars, we’re insulated from landmarks and waypoints. But since Conjay lived in a neighborhood where he could walk, he was much more familiar with his surroundings.

Flexible Streets

This one is a little confusing because it starts with an anecdote about a blind woman and her dog. She is testing whether a new street configuration is navigable by the disabled. This made me think it was going to be about accessibility…

But it’s not. It’s about changing city streets to do more than just route cars. It discusses a bunch of different ways that cities have tried to get more use out of these streets: from little parks in parking spaces to Dutch streets that are considered an extension of the residents’ front lawns.

…as part of an increasing challenge to the dominance of the motorized vehicle, [the] boundaries are being blurred. Publish spaces are being reimagined and hybrid, flexible, or shared, their boundaries fuzzy and their functions bleeding into each other.

Leave the Leaves

This essay is an admonishment of the practice of cleaning up leaf waste. It makes the point that “leaf litter,” as its often called, plays an important role in the bio-chain and shouldn’t be packed up into bags and moved. It should just be left where it is.

Far from being waste, leaf little is an ecosystem – an damp, dark place of decomposition and regeneration. […] The landscape “cleaning up” choreography, timed with autumn’s arrival and repeated in the spring, is a ritual of harm. […] We’ve been trained by aesthetic conventions to view organic detritus as something that looks “messy.”

I identified with this one, quite a bit. I hate cleaning up leaves, and my wife loves how they look on the lawn. I’ll leave them as long as possible, and the only thing I’ll usually do is mulch them up in the mower. I would never bag them.

The essay was good: had a strong point and recommendation.

Non-humans (Heard and Unheard)

This one was really odd. It explained an exercise that the authors conduct in workshops (I gather that the authors are indigenous artists).

It’s a listening exercise. You are meant to listen carefully to all the sounds you hear. But has some odd angles.

For the next five minutes, do you have permission to listen? Can you remember how to hear the unheard sounds of non-humans? […] Acknowledge you are a visitor to this place, and attune to the sounds/vibrations as they enter your ears and move through/against your body.

I struggled to find anything meaningful here (I noticed that I didn’t highlight anything). However, when describing an after-exercise discussion, a participant said something interesting:

If we could only get rid of these sounds, we could have better listening.

That feels like an attempt to deny the reality of what is and replace it with the fantasy of what is desired.

My Teacher

This is a very short essay about a turtle laying her eggs, and more generally about the plight of many turtles in Toronto’s High Park and the dangers they encounter.

The lands have become a place that prioritizes human activity and often forgets the impacts of this activity on all of our animal and plant relatives.

Again, it’s very short. There’s not much of a point beyond the quote above.

Beyond the Lawn: Meadow or Mess?

This is a longer essay (the first one with subheaders) about a “pollinator habitat” front lawn that was cited by Toronto code enforcement. Unfortunately for the city, the person who maintained the habitat is a “professor of urban planning.”

The fight over this particular lawn apparently dragged on and was something of a cause celebre. The author eventually got a meeting with the mayor of Toronto about it, at which the mayor was presented with a comprehensive plan to reform the lawn to allow habitats like this. The author states that none of the reforms were ever implemented.

Interesting, the author cites a Canadian court precedent that says that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

…extends to protect expressions of environment values and beliefs reflected in natural gardens.

The author also calls out that laws on these situations are necessarily subjective:

A weed is simply an undesired plant, a flower growing in the wrong place.

And there’s some commentary on how traditional, manicured lawns imply something about society:

The lawn is all about order and control. Much has been written about this, along with its colonial roots. As a symbol of leisure and wealth introduced from Britain, the virtues of the clean-shaven lawn were extolled and emulated by American elites from Jefferson to Olmstead, and later, postwar, became integral to the identity of the suburban landscape. Facing the street, the front lawn signals conformity to neighborhood norms, order through homogeneity – a monoculture cut to prevent seed, its fertility controlled.

I could not determine if the author ever had to cut down their habitat.

Designing Out Disorder

This essay is about “defensive urbanism,” or the design of the built environment to discourage certain behavior. The author singles out specific things designed to prevent homeless people from using the spaces to live.

The most common forms of defensive urbanism include modified seating, unusable surfaces, spatial barriers, uncomfortable light and sound, and the absence of public amenities.

This is apparently linked to something called Crime Prevention Thought Environmental Design which is a philosophy that dates from the 1960s.

Beyond direct criticism of defensive urbanism, the author expands the perspective to the philosophical:

the purpose and meaning of public space is contested.

[…] encounters with difference are one of the defining features of urban life. Urban historian Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit – indeed to encourage – the greatest possible number of meeting, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life my be enacted.”

That is an opinion, clearly. The author continues to explain why this matters:

While not always comfortable, exposure to people of different ages, races, classes, religions, politics, and cultures and create conditions for mutual respect, political solidarity, tolerance, and civil discourse. […] When we use design to displace, it means hiding, rather than acknowledging, the social and political realities faced by marginalized communities and individuals.

There’s a point there. Doing things to remove homeless people from public spaces does not fix homelessness. It just prevents us from having to acknowledge it. The truth is that most of us are just fine that homelessness exists, so long as we don’t have to look at it.

The Collective Effervescence of Messy Parks

This is about how parks are meant to be a collision of lives. It very much echos the theme of the last essay:

[…] that’s part of the beauty of parks – they bring you into contact with other people, and contact sometimes leads to friction. However, it’s working through these frictions, rather than avoiding them, that strengthens communities.

The essay claims that “good” parks are ones that lots of different people use for lots of different purposes. “Overdeisnged and overregulated” parks make them less approachable and less comfortable.

Just as we tend a garden, we need to embrace the complexity of life and give our parks the right mix of resources, care, and freedom to evolve and grow into their own.

Mexico City’s Eclectic Apartment Architecture

True to the title, this essay starts out discussing the author’s trip to Mexico City and the wide variety of apartment styles he found there. Then he segues into a discussion of too much planning in city development.

The overly planned cities in Canada and the U.S. make it very challenging for builders to experiment with de elopment and learn from successes and failures.

[…] Many of the planning restrictions that define development in Toronto have been instituted for one three broad reasons: to prevent specific outcomes that the city has determined are undesirable, to protected the (assumed) needs and desires of existing residents who live near a development, or to advance arbitrary aesthetic preferences.

And this gets the to the heart of the book and the underlying problem: cities are opinions. What one person likes, another will hate, and city planning is an attempt to figure out how to balance everyone’s preferences. This author has a different preference, and would prefer the city accomodate that.

Later in the piece, he does discuss outcomes other than preferential:

Micromanaging every aspect of a proposed building as led to worse outcomes for new developments and has made it difficult to achieve thriving, successful communities with abundant housing.

One of the problems, I think, is that buildings are relatively permanent. This isn’t like allowing a temporary sidewalk sale or something. When a building is built, you’re kind of stuck with it for a long time. Does this imply we should be more conservative?

Tower Communities Are What We Make Them

This is a short essay, and a little confusing. It discusses some large tower apartment buildings in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

I’m not sure what the author was advocating for, other than a recollection of a place where they grew up. They tell of tightly-packed units in buildings with residential spaces repurposed for other uses, like a mosque.

Honestly, while the author seems to recall this all with some fondness, it doesn’t sound great.

Many of the apartment units housed considerably more people and the names reporting in the rental agreement […]

[…] The staircase had a unique smell, a blend of bleach, oil-based paint, remnants of tobacco from the Backwoods cigars being repurposed as blunt wraps, and the occasional waft of urine.

To me, that sounds awful. But I’m a product of my upbringing, just as the author is a product of theirs.

Global Cities

This section expands past Toronto into other cities of the world.

Rasta Cape Town

This essay is about the author’s experience living among the Rastifarians of Cape Town, South Africa.

What I learned from these underappreciated change-makers were the foundational lessons in the messiness, contradictions, and vibrancy that come from poor people’s movements.

I wasn’t sure what the entire point of the essay was, or how it related to city planning. The author seemed to be making some point about how cities evolve around cultural leaders, and they should employee those leaders to …help?

[…] the culture-builders, those who speak the language of identity to the descendants of the colonized, are far more effective at mobilizing for change than social workers, teachers, parole officers, welfare administrators, and well-meaning non-profit do-gooders – the conventional first response for well-meaning urbanism.

Chaotic Unregulated Tokyo: The quintessentially Messy City?

This essay is a discussion of zoning and building code laws in Tokyo, and how they have contributed to that cities eclectic feel, and – apparently – low housing costs.

The author points out a number of unique features of Japanese zoning laws and building codes:

The laws are federal, not local or state. So individual cities can’t override the federal laws.
The laws are mostly concerned with building structure and features, not land use. So, as long as your building is within code, you can use it for whatever you want.
Subdivision rules are lax, so houses are often demolished and replaced with many smaller houses
Building lifespans are intended to be short. Buildings are generally of lower quality and meant to survive only one generation before being replace, so building usage is much less permanent.

The author concludes by pointing out that most public judgments of a city come from people visiting it, who don’t share the native culture of a city.

So Japan’s “spontaneous” urbanism is neither the product of a lack of planning regulations nor of informal urbanism, but more the result of a different culture and different priorities in zoning and planning regulations. Tokto’s “messy” urbanism exists more in the eye of visiting urbanists than anything. For most Japanese, Tokyo has a clear order and set of structuring principles. Different urban cultures and regulatory system work to different sets of values and to different conceptions or order and disorder.

The Readable City

This essay is encouragement for cities to be messy. The author correlates this with vibrancy and culture.

Clean cities give you the official line. Walking through them lends a vetted and permitted version of the city. […] [A messy city] makes a place seem exciting and infinite, a layer that can turn a city from a giant museum piece to a dynamic one where the landscape can change as quickly as culture does.

The author spends a lot of time talking about posters, and about several underground marketing campaigns he did for various projects, where they ignored city posting laws because the bureaucracy was too much to handle.

In this essay, the author really does hit on the major theme in this book: cities are a coalescing of opinions. And this author clearly has a strong one. He even concedes this at one point:

The disorder of [a messy city] – like, say, the unjuried nature of graffiti and street art – makes some people nervous.

Right there – that’s a conflict of opinion. And who decides who wins? Does the person desiring order have any less right to their opinion than the author?

And that’s the hard thing about cities.

Cities for Women and Girls

This is an essay about the dangers that women and girls face in cities. There are some attempts to correlate this back to how the cities are designed and how they function:

Within and across India, public spaces and transport are frequently very crowded, with bodies packed into small spaces. In these instances, personal space is often violated under the guises of anonymity.

[…] Nuses and abandoned cars line the side of the road, often blocking the street lights and making it a great place for robbers, drug addicts, and miscreants to lurk in the shadows waiting for their next victim.

It’s an interesting look at how social norms and expectations collide with city planning. Public transportation is often not safe, and public spaces are where opinions and bias can be on public display.

She relays a heartbreaking story of a girl who dropped out of school strictly because she felt unsafe on the bus ride. And she notes that women spend more money every year than men in order to feel safe.

Of course, the base problem here is bad men doing bad things. But this is a factor in city design. While fixing the base problem of bias and violence against women would be perfect, in the absense of that, we need to account for its existence when designing cities and considering public spaces.

A Food Map of Toronto

This author is a food reporter, and she explains how she views Toronto mainly as a collection of restaurants. She starts with a (perhaps fictional) narrative of giving a friend “directions” which consist solely of a series of restaurant landmarks.

She doesn’t seem to be advocating for much, but she makes a few points toward the end:

Loving a city isn’t just about seeing its good parts. It’s about recognizing its quirks…

And:

I like the idea of everyone having their own versions of city maps, however distorted they might be. Some stretches might seem shorter because they’re packed full of places you love or seem longer when there’s nothing that speaks to you. But that’s how you make the city yours – by adding the little touches and notes of delectable mile marks and intersections that you can’t wait to tell your friends about.

Sports and Spaces

This essay is about “urban sports” – sports which are played in the city. In the U.S., our thoughts would likely go to basketball, or “street ball.”

The author starts out by discussion a suburb of Mumbai where the government created a sports courts, and they became well-used. The author continues with a discussion of something called “9-man,” which I gather is kind of like volleyball, which originated among Chinese immigrants during The Depression. It’s become a part of immigrant cultural identity.

A great deal of sporting culture plays out every day on the streets of cities around the world. […] The messiness of urban sports and street games makes our cities more livable, sustainable, and socially connected, and contributes to improving their future.

Everything Is Everything… But the Details Matter

This essay opens with the central theme of the entire book:

Cities are ideas expressed as built form.

I’ve said many times on this page along: “Cities are opinions.” They are a physical manifestation of how someone – whether and actual person, or an aggregate person based on many opinions – things you and I should live.

After that, this essay gets a little murky. It tells the story of a very modern mall in India which failed. The author claimed it failed because:

[…] it didn’t conform to the Eurocentric model of progress.

I think the larger point is that the mall was someone’s grand vision, but the “details” involve making sure something meets the local needs. The author further states:

[…] while seemingly outdated community-led initiatives might appear disorderly, they often address local needs effectively. Conversely, externally imposed developments may seem formal and well-organized in their design, but fail to integrate seamlessly into the community, sometimes causing more harm than good.

And:

Participatory decision-making is essential for creating urban spaces that reflect the needs and values of those who live in them.

The above quotes are a pretty coherent point. I think maybe I was just confused because the title of the essay is needlessly vague?

The Case Against Controlling Infrastructure

This essay perhaps sums up the entire book. The author makes the claim that too much control over infrastructure makes cities “orderly,” but at an… artistic (?) cost:

The case for “orderly urbanism leans of technical efficiency as the prime goal. However the positive aspects of great spontaneity and diversity of situations and priorities, although appearing “messy,” can have their inherent order.

The author clearly seems biased in one direction – towards varied cities that demonstrate diversity and are “livable, democratic, environmentally friendly, and inclusive – they do call for a “positive tension between both extremes.”

Painting the Town

I knew we would eventually get to a chapter on graffiti – or “street art” as the author calls it. I was kind of dreading this, because I have a very strong reaction against it. My feeling is that if it’s not your wall, don’t paint on it.

But the authors of this essay doesn’t seem to be advocating very strongly for any particular side. They make the point that “tagging” is not the same as street art (tagging is when someone just writes their initials or something). They also note that street art is usually a way for marginalized communities to express themselves.

They conclude with this:

Whatever its source, street art is an upwelling of artistry, identity, and energy from the denizens of the city. It is a sign that creativity is thriving and will not be suppressed. It reminds us that a creative city is a messy city.

That’s fine. But, again, if it’s not your wall, leave it alone.

Urban Systems

Banquets and Belonging

This essay is in support of banquet halls, which seem to be an odd thing to support. But the author makes an effective case that for many cultures, large celebrations are part of their cultural identity.

The author opens with a discussion of a South Asian (Indian, perhaps?) wedding and the hall in which in which it takes place. These celebrations are very important to their culture, and the author laments that banquet halls are so pedestrian that they’re often not included in planning discussions.

A lot of cultural planning efforts began with an emphasis on preserving a very narrow definition of culture – primarily focusing on the high arts tradition and representative spaces and artifacts, such as museums, art galleries, and public sculptures.

The trick with banquet halls is that the hall is not the thing. The cultural significance isn’t the hall itself, but the events that it enables.

They allow people to participate in ritual and to pass on traditions to future generations, to gather and form community, to make memories… We need to pay attention to these sites of cultural infrastructure and create systems that support them so they can continue to exist as places for future generations to gather and celebrate.

Satisfying Our Thirst for Agency

This is a fascinating essay about why we’re are (the author claims) attracted to “messy cities.” They satisfy our desire to detect “agency” or life.

The author provides an example from nature. If you’re looking into a stream and see something move, how do you determine if it’s a fish or just some debris?

A leaf’s movements would simply follow the laws of physics in turbulent waters. […] A fish would defy those laws in some way, moving in directions counter to the local turbulence.

That’s “agency,” and it’s what we’re attracted to. To humans, agency signals life. Moving in defiance to local currents is what we try to detect and it brings us comfort.

When we see mess or “disorder” in an urban environment, is it possible that what we discern is the potential for us to exert our own will on our surroundings? And is there where the attraction of messy complexity comes from?

Does mess signal freedom? Does it empower us to telling us, “You can exist here. You can exert your own will over this space?” By extension, does conformity do the opposite?

Best essay in the book so far.

Industrial Land’s Secret Sauce

This is kind of an odd one. It’s in support of industrial land in the downtown core of a city. Th essay effectively laments that this land is constantly being re-zoned for “mixed use,” which means residential, office, and retail.

The essay is oddly academic. It seems clearly to have been written for city planners (there’s a note that the end that was a condensed version of something that appeared in another book).

The argument is a little scattered – I couldn’t pick out a clear theme. But the author does not like that industrial uses are being pushed out of the downtown core of cities, and they’re encouraging cities to maintain industrial zoning because allowing “mixed use” tends to push rents up too high for industrial tenants.

Thinking Twice About Consultation

When the author says “consultation,” they mean public input on a project (this might be a Canada-specific term?). This essay basically says: public meetings about low-income housing are a disaster because only people opposed to the project show up, and they’re elitist, classist, and often racist.

So, the “thinking twice” of the title basically means “don’t do it.” At one point the author comes out and says:

If an affordable housing proposal meets all the building and zoning requirements, there should be no further reason to engage the public.

And.

Should there be a limit on public engagement? When does consultation lead to exclusion? […] Should we seek public input on who gets to live in a community? That act should be considered “people zoning” for which there is no legal or moral basis.

Lifeline at the Door

This one seems a little out of place. It’s a defense of public health services, and, in particular, the “Supervised Consumption Services” they offer where drug addicts can consume injected drugs in the presence of a health professional in order to make it less risky. I wasn’t completely sure of the scope of services, but it might (?) involve testing for fentanyl concentration.

Again, this one doesn’t seem to fit into the rest of the book. There’s some passing comments about how some people think a line of homeless people every morning is “messy,” but it’s really just a call to be more compassionate about other people’s’ circumstances.

Public Health in the Post-Covid Era

This is another odd one. It doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with city planning. It’s more about the relationship between poor housing and someone’s health. I agree that this is a real thing, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with the theme of the book.

The author makes the point that the lifespans of homeless people are 30-40 years less than the general public:

[…] we are effectively stealing three to four decades of life from the unhoused not because of personal choices but because of policy failures.

The gist seems to be:

Housing is health care.

Again, no argument that housing plays heavily into someone’s health, but it just seems to be an outlier against the rest of the book.

Another Fine Mess About Regionalism

This is the biggest outlier so far. It recounts a very specific inter-government spat about health care. It has nothing to do with cities or city planning.

I barely followed it. It was a very esoteric look at some aspect of city government, and concludes with this:

There were many lessons to learn… Perhaps the greatest: don’t create an intergovernmental body unless it has an active, realistic, and meaningful mandate.

I can’t argue with that, but, again, it seems very much outside the point of the book.

We Can Live With That

Another odd one. It recounts the story of an official “Growth Plan” for the Greater Toronto Area and how the Toronto government didn’t seem to follow it until it was eventually repealed.

Had trouble finding a theme, but there was a quote I liked:

Successful city building means searching for the delicate balance between the objective subjective, the tangible and intangible. It involves not only designing functional infrastructure and efficient systems but also creating spaces and places that resonate with people on an emotional level.

I think the author was just a little salty with how their plan was disregarded:

Consensus and compromise are valuable tools in the planning process, but they must be accompanied by an ongoing commitment to collective action.

Confessions of a First-Time Parade Organizer

This is simply the story of someone who organized a parade through Toronto. There’s not much here in terms of argument, but the authors ends with this observation:]

Organizing this parade energized my own urbanism practice, reminding me that it’s one thing to talk about social connection and quite another to practice nurturing it. … While parades may not solve our most intractable issues, they can help us learn how to be together and trust each other, which comes in handy when we want to embark on the harder stuff…

So, that’s it.

I keep coming back to the same point: cities are opinions. To build a city, you have to balance what lots of people living in close proximity want, and you will always fail. Your only hope is to “ride the gestalt,” but that means figuring it out.

The authors of these essays clearly have a bias (why else would they have written for the book?). They used the words “vibrant” and “vital” and “diverse” a lot.

But for every one of those people, there are others that feel the opposite. For every person who calls graffiti “street art,” there is someone that just calls it vandalism. How do you balance the needs and wants of all those people?

This is why cities fundamentally differ from rural areas. In a city, almost everything you neighbor does will affect you. A city is a big commune where behavior spills over, and you have some right to be concerned with what everyone else does. Out in the country, who cares? When your nearest neighbor is a mile away, who even knows what they do?

I don’t know the answer. I’m tempted to say that there’s an undercurrent of arrogance in the book – this is the way, dammit! – but then I realize that’s to be expected. They wrote the book. They clearly have a point of view that they want to evangelize.

But is the majority point of view? Would someone with the opposite point of view write a book about it?

I don’t know. Again, cities are opinions, just like books are opinions. The authors have theirs, and city residents have their own.

The trick is finding a solution everyone can live it, even when it inevitably doesn’t make everyone happy.

Book Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fun, kinda harmless”

This was a…nice book. I don’t think it was very ambitious, but it basically just explains why humans love stories. It does this from a few different angles: dreams, games, rationalizing, etc.

I can’t really say that I learned a lot from this book. In large part, it was just kind of a confirmation and elucidation of what I knew intuitively. It’s well-written and it’s interesting and I enjoyed reading it.

But it’s not a very…challenging book. There wasn’t a lot of chew on or disagree with here.

I’m not criticizing it for that. Some books are just… nice? Some books just let you enjoy an idea without trying very hard to disrupt it or reframe your world view.

This is one of those books.

Book Review: There is No Antimemetics Division

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Promising but confusing”

An antimemetic is an idea that resists spreading. I read an entire book about this last year. But that was about real antimemtics. This is about monsters.

This book was an outgrowth of the SCP Wiki which is a community-edited wiki that represents a fake world of monsters and aliens and such that have to be contained.

The idea is that there are ideas that are so dangerous that they’re effectively monsters – they could actually kill you. They’re called “Unknowns,” and they’re numbered. They actively prevent themselves from spreading – they force you to forget about them once you’ve encountered them, and they erase any evidence of their existence. If you meet with one, you will forget everything that happens. If you encounter them again, you need to hope there’s some written record of what happened that you can refer to.

People working in the Antimemetics Division take “mnestics,” which are drugs to help them remember. They’re effective, but they damage the body over time.

The book starts with the main character being called into her bosses office, and him demanding to know who she is and what she does. Turns out his memory of her and her role was stolen by…something. She has to explain to him all over again why she exists and what she does.

Then a co-worker is “attacked” in the company cafeteria by a coworker that’s really a disguised Unknown. There are people all around him, but the Unknown has him in a “field” that causes everyone to forget everything they see. He manages to find a written record that has been extended by everyone that this Unknown has killed explaining what they tried to do to survive, and encouraging them to extend the record before they get killed so that perhaps someone down the line can survive it.

The whole thing was confusing, and I admit to not totally understand what was going on most of the time (especially towards the end). But I loved the premise. It was unique and interesting, and some of the individual scenes were horrifying in a new and unique way, even if I didn’t quite get it all.

It was very Lovecraftian. It depended on things unseen but felt. There’s was this kind of “scary thing lurking in the background” vibe to it).

I read this at the same time as The Gentle Romance. The understand them both about the same, but I disliked this one less because is exposed me to an interesting idea that I understood enough to appreciate.

Book Review: The Gentle Romance: Stories of AI and Humanity

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Just didn’t get it”

I did not get (almost) any of the stories in this book, and I feel badly about that.

The book was recommended highly by Kevin Kelly in Recommendo.

They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile imagination. I found more insights per page in Ngo’s The Gentle Romance than in any other book I’ve read for a long time.

It’s written by a guy who researches AI. He’s not a typical novelist. He’s kind of an industry analyst.

…I just didn’t get it.

It’s an anthology of short stories. I don’t think I understood one of them. I got about 75% of the way through the book before I abandoned it. (Maybe I understood one, about how a worker abuses his AI agents. I’m not sure there was a larger point to it, but it didn’t completely mystify me, anyway.)

Every story was the style of “tell them as little as possible and have them figure out the details.” Lots of in media res starts, flowery writing, and vague endings.

I feel dumb about this, and pretty disappointed (in myself?). The book was promoted as some big package of insights, but maybe I’m just not destined to get any of it. (Sad trombone…)

Book Review: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A little tedious, but still interesting”

This is a story of a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. It lost power, was surrounded by water with backed-up sewers, and there weren’t enough boats or helicopters to evacuate everyone. Lots of people died. Maybe too many people.

When the hospital lost power, all the ventilators shut off. A lot of patients were in immediate distress, compounded by the 110-degree indoor temps and the humidity. Conditions in the hospital deteriorated sharply. There wasn’t enough equipment or people to serve everyone, and without power, many of the patients had little to no chance of surviving.

What happened next is the big question. The District Attorney maintains that a doctor named Anna Pou and two nurses entered the rooms of several doomed patients – many with standing Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders – and knowingly injected them with enough morphine to kill them.

But did they? There were 45 bodies at Memorial – stacked up in a makeshift morgue in the chapel – and a very high percentage of them tested positive for morphine, even though the patients were not prescribed the drug. It was clear that they were administered morphine, but was it to kill them, or just ease their suffering while they died naturally?

There were three people in the various rooms when it happened, and they have steadfastly refused to say what happened, assuming they even agree on what their individual intentions were. Before they entered the rooms, there had been fleeting discussions and fragmentary conversations between multiple people about the possibility of euthanizing patients. It was an idea that was apparently floating around in the heads of a lot of people during the crisis.

If they did intend to euthanize patients, would it have been the right decision? How many of the patients were days or even hours away from dying anyway – even under normal conditions – and the injections just gave them relief in their final hours? And did the conditions the hospital was operating under at the time justify any of this?

The book is divided into two parts. The first is a tight narrative describing what happened at Memorial during Katrina. The second part covers a few years afterwards when people are investigated, arrested, and charged with crimes. (If you want to know what happened, here’s a Wikipedia page which explains it all.)

The book ends with an extended epilogue about efforts in the last decade to define how medical professionals should act in situations like what happened with Katrina, when medical support starts failing and decisions have to be made about who receives the limited care available, and who is evacuated first when capacity is limited.

This is the second book I’ve read about Katrina (after The Great Deluge). It gets a little tedious in places – there are lots of names and locations, to the point where there’s a map of the hospital in the front of the book.

Still, a solid read.

Book Review: Project Hail Mary

Sat, 4 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Solid storytelling”

I read this because the movie came out, and I wanted to read the book before I watched the movie (I did the same thing with Shogun a couple years ago). I finished the book at 1:00 p.m. one afternoon, and I was watching the movie at 2:30.

The book is very good. It’s the story of a middle school science teacher who wakes from a coma and finds himself on a spaceship with no idea how or why he got there. Through a series of flashbacks, he learns that the sun is being drained by a new, parasitic lifeform that has been systematically infecting stars throughout the galaxy. One star remains unaffected, so he was part of a mission to travel to that star and find out why, in an attempt to return that knowledge to Earth and save humanity.

Problem: the trip to the star takes 14 years. And there’s only enough fuel for a one-way trip.

Also, an alien shows up.

The book is the story of how this guy figures out his circumstances, learns to communicate with an alien, and makes use of what might be his final years of existence. It’s a lot like The Martian in the sense that it’s about one guy, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, trying to survive. And it has a lot of the same vibes to it.

(Note: I never read the book The Martian. I only saw the movie.)

Unlike The Martian, there’s the alien. That’s the one part of the book that’s not strictly “hard” science fiction. But it’s a nice story that highlights the commonalities that any sentient species would have with each other, and how we can use that to communicate with and understand each other. Some of how the main character and the alien figure each other out gets a little far-fetched… but we’re talking about aliens, so we already crossed the line of believability a ways back.

However, the movie was better. I don’t say that lightly, because it’s rarely true, but the movie was an absolute triumph. There was a lot of science in the book that the movie found some great ways to summarize understandably, and Ryan Gosling gave a fantastic acting performance. (The cinematography of the movie was breathtaking. It will kill at the technical Oscars next year.)

Regardless of those quibbles, it’s a great book.

Book Review: In the Beginning Was Information: A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Intereting premise, but stretches too far in the end”

So, this is actually a reread, even though I didn’t have any notes from back when I read it for the first time (probably in 2010 or so?). I do remember this was recommended to me by a guy I sat next to on a plane. He was reading the Bible, and we got into a discussion about that, then realized we were both in IT, and he recommended this book.

I reread the book because I was hoping I would get some amazing insight from it that I missed the first time, but the basic message is the same: it’s an attempt to prove the existence of God via Claude Shannon’s information theory.

The author – who is a German mathematician, and Young Earth Creationist – goes deep into examining Shannon’s theories, to prove a seemingly simple point: the transmission of “information” requires an intelligent sender. Meaning, the formation of information requires that a being with a thought process was able to form the message and transmit it, otherwise everything is just gibberish.

I’m onboard so far, and I don’t think this is disputed much in science.

However, the author then extends this to say that DNA is the “original information” of the world. It fits all the criteria for information, and it – by definition – existed before Man did, therefore we must accept that the creation of Man was via information (hence the title of the book), and this requires us to accept an intelligent designer.

I actually like the theory. But the author makes a massive tonal shift in the third part of the book when he attempts to prove that all this validates the Bible. That’s an illogical extension of his core theory I think: he goes from proving that some intelligent designer existed, to saying that the Hebrew Bible is therefore valid. I just don’t think his central theory – which, again, I rather like – supports this.

I’ve often thought there are different “levels” in someone’s journey of faith. They kind of go like this, using myself and my current faith position as a destination.

Atheist: “There is nothing”
Agnostic: “I don’t know if there’s anything”
Supernaturalist: “There’s… something”
Theist: “There’s… someone(s)”
Monotheist: “There’s a single someone”
Christian/Jew: “There is the God of the Hebrew Bible”
Protestant: “Martin Luther was right! The Pope is bad!”
Baptist: …I have no idea
Converge Baptist: …no idea about this either

If you accept what this author is saying, that takes you from #1 to… #4? Maybe #5? His argument really has no relevance beyond that.

Outside of the third part, the book is actually a really good discussion of information theory in general. And his central point about an intelligent designer proven by the existence of information is thought-provoking. It’s not an unassailable point, by any means, but it’s interesting.

So, there are three logical parts to this book:

Information theory in general, which is good
DNA as an attempt to prove the existence of a Creator through information theory, which is novel and interesting
DNA as an attempt to prove the validity of Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, which is highly questionable

So, the third part is a big leap, and I’m just not sure the prior portions of the book support it. Does it ruin everything that went before it? No, I don’t think so. The parts leading up to that are absolutely worth reading.

Book Review: The Most Beautiful Book Places in the World

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Lovely pictures”

The title of this book is key: it’s “the most beautiful book places.” Not libraries or bookstores specifically, but just places with books.

That said, it’s lovely. Some wonderful photographs of different places around the world that have a lot of books. The pictures of often two page spreads, which makes the binding a little annoying, but it was still amazing in places. Some of the pictures almost literally took my breath away (I mean, just look at this).

Lots of libraries and bookstores, of course, but also a fair amount of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants.

I especially liked The Library at The NoMad, which is in a hotel in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The website says:

The Library is a members-only workspace by day that transforms into an intimate cocktail lounge by night.

That sounds like a dream. I’ll have to look that up next time I’m in the city.