Some number of books

It’s hard to know exactly how many books I’ve read recently, but here my notes on some of them are.

Seven Brief Lessons On Physics by Carlo Rovelli, read by Carlo Rovelli, and Anaximander: And the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli, read by Roy McMillan.

Late last summer I biked from Poughkeepsie to Ashokan. The ninety-something-kilometer ride took about four and a half hours and mostly followed rail-trails. I was riding to meet my family, on a bike that I don’t use that frequently, in a region that I’m familiar with but don’t visit often. It was lovely, and on the ride I listened to all of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and part of Anaximander before switching back to the first book I ever consumed of Rovelli’s: The Order of Time, which is narrated brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch and which is probably my single favorite nonfiction book.

I don’t have that much to say about Seven Brief Lessons, and I have even less to say about Anaximander. The former was probably made more interesting and slightly less intelligible by the fact that it was narrated by the author, who speaks with a professorial Italian accent. The latter was probably my least favorite of his books — note, I never finished it — but did connect to The Order of Time in a few interesting ways, and contained at least one observation which I have managed to retain. (I dearly hope that I don’t now butcher it: As I recall, Rovelli explains that however advanced and meticulous Chinese astrology was during Anaximander’s time, Chinese culture was so dominated reverence to the Emperor that certain basic ideas were impossible to conceive of — like the fact that the Earth is a body floating freely in space.)

But there’s something broader about Rovelli’s writing that I find deeply soothing, and while these books left a relatively small footprint on my thinking, I think they’re part of something bigger that I want to understand, or at least take note of. I have listened to The Order of Time many times over in the past two or so years, and I have also read parts of the paper book. It has affected my thinking in significant ways, expanding my understanding while at the same time making it clear that the extent to which I understand anything is quite narrow indeed. It opened the possibility that time might not need be experienced as I experience it, and that there could, conceivably, be intelligent creatures which perceive time very differently than I do. More generally, it pointed to the deep and utter weirdness of one of the most pedestrian and commonplace aspects to life: the fact that time passes with apparent seamlessness. I’m not sure what, precisely, to do with any of these realizations, but I know that once I had consumed some of Rovelli’s writing I immediately wanted more, and that my appetite for discussions of relativity and quantum mechanics is significantly larger than I had previously known.

The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger.

I read this book with SOW’s Members’ Reading Group. In it, Schlanger argues that plants are both conscious and intelligent; she bases this argument on a series of what James Coleman called “cool plant facts,” each of which is more remarkable than the last. Plants understand the proximity of close relatives by sensing the wavelengths of light that pass through their neighbors’ leaves. They sense and respond to local stimuli using electrical signals similar to those in our nervous systems, and they communicate with similar and dissimilar plants by synthesizing and releasing all manner of chemical compounds. They perceive, communicate with, and in many cases seem to manipulate other organisms in their environment, including animals that eat their nectar, attempt to copulate with them, and “farm” (aka feed, water, and generally care for) them. The list goes on — plants really are remarkable, and for every way that humans understand and modify their environment, plants seem to do something similar.

When Schlanger reports yet another cool plant fact I nod my head. When she claims that plants are conscious, I think “of course.” When she claims that they are intelligent I do the same — and yet I found The Light Eaters’ logic and argumentative style to be somewhat unconvincing. Perhaps this reflects some internal bias on my part — I’m not sure — but my ultimate takeaway from this book was that it was indeed an excellent collection of cool plant facts, wrapped in a line of argumentation that I agreed with the conclusions of but was somehow unconvinced by.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, read by Robert Fass.

I did not quite finish this audiobook, but I did see a production of King Lear immediately after listening to... eighty-nine percent of it. This feels adequate.

I had purchased tickets to Kenneth Branaugh’s Lear a few months back, and was preparing to see it. I didn’t really know what King Lear was about, and after reading a short piece in the New Yorker about the play’s portrayal of bad weather, and watching the Anthony Hopkins production on Amazon Prime, I decided that I should attempt to read (or, ideally, listen to while taking bike rides) the play itself. I failed at this; the library had no copies available of the dramatized productions of Lear, but they did have this (rather academic and somewhat obscure) history of England in 1606, the year that Shakespeare finished King Lear and wrote parts of both Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

I know very little about all of these plays, and similarly little about England in the early sixteen-hundreds. This was a time of turmoil and change: King James I, who had been King of Scotland for almost fifty years, had taken the English throne in 1603. He would spend much of his reign attempting, unsuccessfully, to unify Great Britain. He also helped to plan and execute the colonization of Ulster (the region of Ireland that would eventually become Northern Ireland). This was also relatively early in the history of the modern Church of England, which had been put under control of Henry VIII in 1534. This resulted in considerable sectarian conflict during Shakespeare’s lifetime, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot (to assassinate King James and blow up Parliament) of 1605. Note also that the King James Bible was commissioned by King James in 1604 and published in 1611.

So, King Lear was written in this context. Except that it was really more adapted than written; Shakespeare’s Lear was more of a reboot of an earlier play, King Leir. Learning this made me think of our own contemporary reboot culture, which I am prone to looking down upon as unoriginal and trite; perhaps this is naive of me.

Did I enjoy this audiobook? I suppose so, at least mildly. Did I enjoy watching Branagh’s King Lear? I would say ditto. But I enjoyed more the excuse to learn about something that I would not otherwise have chosen to study, and I enjoyed even more the fact that while I was en route to the play itself, I ran into a neighbor on the street (someone I know reasonably well and see frequently) who told me it was among their favorite plays. He made reference to one of its core conflicts: Lear somewhat generously divides his kingdom up to his three daughters, but then spitefully refuses to give anything to one of them because she won’t praise him with fawning language. He then feels attacked and neglected, until his death, by all three. I’m not sure there is a lesson here which I could apply to my own life — it all feels a little unlikely and obtuse — but the fact that I was able to understand and share a cultural moment with my neighbor was totally worth the effort.

Good Trouble: Stories by Joseph O’Neill, read by like eleven different voice actors.

I loved Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland when I read it in ~2010, and at a recent moment when I needed some easily-digestable audio content I rented Good Trouble and blasted through it. The stories were a little more adult and a little less grounded in New York City culture than I remember Netherland being, but I continue to find it enriching to follow O’Neill’s output and track the way his voice has evolved.

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill, read by Karen Chilton & Kirby Heyborne.

Similar to how Netherland was a profile of New York after 9/11, Godwin struck me as a profile of liberal America during the late Obama years. This didn’t really become clear to me until after I had finished it, and the book mentions politics almost not at all, but its mood balances anxiety and hope in a way that, sitting here in late 2024, strikes me as characteristic of the twenty-teens.

I found the book to be exciting, captivating, and mysterious. Its two main characters both surprised me multiple times, and their relationship to each other was strange and confusing in the ways that many of my own relationships are to me. They seem to orbit around each other like a binary star — the book’s oscillating point of view, and the audiobook’s two narrators, emphasize this effect — wobbling into and out of instability as other characters enter their gravitational field. O’Neill resolves his story’s tension in a way that’s both surprising and satisfying, and it closes on a note that is at once heartwarming and full of futility.

Three books

Notes from three books I read recently:

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias, read by Matthew Yglesias.

I enjoyed this book, without investing too much of myself into it. This is partly because I had the sense – from interviews he gave about the book in 2020, I think – that Yglesias had used the premise (the idea that we should roughly triple the US population) as a good-enough container into which any number of compelling and thought-provoking policy positions could be put. I enjoyed these policy positions, and was generally inclined to accept, at least for the purposes of discussion, Yglesias’ larger premise as well, and it was enjoyable to spend a couple of hours listening to his nerdy and slightly overeager thoughts on housing, transit, and technological development.

There’s also this bigger thing, which is that I don’t see how liberal policy proposals can survive in a context where liberals are seen as anti-patriotic. And Yglesias’ premise strikes me as directed squarely at this problem: He bases his whole book on an idea that is jingoistic, prideful, and a little bellicose.

Whatever you think of maximizing growth (and, in particular, birth) rates, Yglesias’ argument is conveniently agnostic to how that growth is achieved. If you’re inclined to be worried about women’s health and nervous about policies directed towards increasing family sizes, Yglesias is happy to talk instead about dramatically increasing immigration – and offers thought provoking (if unlikely) ideas about how that might be achieved. And even if you rejected his premise outright, much of One Billion Americans could be reinterpreted as a series of suggestions for improving general quality of life: Build more housing, prioritize clean mass transit over privately-owned motor vehicles, and generally enact policies that make it easier to start and grow families.

Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley.

I’ve already published two things about this book: First a field trip report from when Nicola and I visited a commercial refrigerator store in the Bowery, and then an interview that SOW’s Reading Group had with Nicola a few months later.

I learned that Nicola was writing this book some time before it was published; I believe this is the first time in my life that I’ve had that experience. It felt special: Every so often I’d see that she had written a byline in the New Yorker or the Times, and if it was about cold stuff then I’d wonder how it would fit into the book. If it wasn’t about cold stuff, I’d wonder how it fit into the rest of her career — why it grabbed her attention, whether it helped her round out her journalistic or literary skill sets, how it impacted her relationships with her editors.

I imagine it would be helpful to regularly write in a more diverse set of publications, and about a more diverse set of topics. I also imagine that it would be helpful to have editors in the first place, and for that matter to have any role whatsoever (notwithstanding John McPhee’s mildly disparaging description of what it means to be a staff writer at the New Yorker) in a publication that’s larger than yourself. These are things that I thought about while reading Frostbite — and things that I think about while I read more or less anything, these days.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.

I didn’t particularly enjoy reading this book. I was looking forward to it, and was curious to learn more about its structure, and the way in which it blurred history and fiction. The first chapter was, per the acknowledgements at the end of the book, completely accurate to history save one paragraph. It was also completely horrifying and quite intense, dealing as it does with chemical warfare, mass suicide, and the Third Reich. The second chapter is no sunnier, nor the third, and as I reached the final chapter I found myself grappling with the reality that while I knew that much of what I was reading was deeply fictionalized, the historical people and events which inspired it were just as bleak and disgusting.

That said, I would at least gently recommend the book to anyone who has looked at, for instance, the Wikipedia page for Erwin Schrödinger or his eponymous cat. For to the extent that quantum superposition confuses me (and it does confuse me), I am ultimately distracted from the couple of paragraphs on how much of a sexual predator he was. Labatut, though, takes the liberty to dive into these headfirst, telling a story that isn’t meant to be precise but does seem to be accurate. More importantly, though, it’s memorable.

When We Cease to Understand the World concludes in a way that I didn’t expect, and I’m left with a somewhat mystical sense of the world, and knowledge. Labatut seems to have put his finger on something about the inaccessibility of history, and I think that the book’s structure — and the discomfort that reading it brought me — may have been instrumental to this. So while I didn’t enjoy reading it, I do appreciate having done so.

Three books

Hey now, it’s book time!

Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 by John McPhee, read by John McPhee.

How this book came to me: I was looking for an audiobook to follow Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild, which I read recently. I considered re-reading Travels in Siberia, which I loved and think of often, but decided to try something new; there was nothing of note by Ian Frazier in my library’s catalog, so I moved to an adjacent author, John McPhee. I’ve read a decent amount of McPhee’s writing, from Levels of the Game to Waiting for a Ship to Draft No. 4, but I’ve somehow missed a few of the big ones, and upon finding Coming Into the Country on my library’s shelf, I borrowed and started listening to it.

But Nelson Munger’s reading felt a little old fashioned, and my progress stalled. So I searched again and found Tabula Rasa, which appeared to continue the themes in Draft No. 4. This appearance was not an accident, and I enjoyed Tabula Rasa as well.

What to say about Tabula Rasa? It is only the first volume of McPhee’s memoirs, a designation that McPhee suggests is intended to keep him alive long enough to publish a second volume. It is relentlessly funny while at the same time being totally serious and (in McPhee’s own reading) mostly deadpan. I’m not sure precisely what it taught me, but I do find McPhee’s own story (born in Princeton, educated at Princeton, now teaches at Princeton while not writing for the New Yorker) to be a pointedly twentieth-century one. That said, McPhee remains endearing and manages to sit somewhat askew from the people he writes about. And through Tabula Rasa, I felt as if I were sitting askew with him.

Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, read by Grover Gardner.

I’m not totally sure what to make of this book. Short and playful, it is a work of fiction which riffs on the bizarre and mind-bending ideas underpinning the theories of relativity and quantum physics. It purports to be a collection of dreams, dreamed by Einstein himself, during a period of time in which we imagine that his head would have been swirling with complex and confusing thoughts. I’m not totally sure what the dream-stories say about Einstein’s theories per se. But I was struck by one of them in particular, in which a world is imagined where people live only twenty-four hours. If a person were born in the morning, their entire early life would be lived in daylight, and they might face large cognitive and emotional hurdles at dusk. The world goes black, and suddenly all the skills they have developed in the daylight become irrelevant. Do they adapt? Do they stagnate? Do they give up? This is, of course, something that happens in our world, though in place of daylight and dark we face unprecedented war, or unprecedented peace, or changes in technology or a death in the family or the predictable yet punishing changes that occur inside one’s own body.

Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang, read by Matt Godfrey.

I listened to (and read in print) this book for the SOW Members’ Reading Group, for which it has been nominated a couple times and finally won out recently. I’ve had it on my shelf for at least a year or two, and though Tim is a friend I had never, alas, made the time to read it.

Tim’s core argument is that the internet is largely funded by advertising, and as a result its structure is largely dictated by the needs of advertisers, and ALSO that internet advertising is just kind of broken. His worry, I think, is that the bubble in internet advertising might pop, and that such a pop might lead to large-scale failure across the internet — which is, it should be noted, a place that he feels protective of. In all of these points I agree with him, and through the conversations we had in the Reading Group (including a chat with Tim when we finished the book), I reflected a bit on my own role as an internet publisher and the way in which my own business, career, and life have been shaped by advertising.

Today, about 88% of my income comes from individual subscriptions (Members and Supporters of SOW); the remaining 12% comes from advertisers (the sponsors whose logos, and infrequent text ads, appear in SOW). This is a dramatic shift from the way it was two or three years ago, when more like 70% of my revenue came from advertisers and a significant portion of the rest came from job posts (which are also, in effect, ads). I am not totally pleased with this transition; sure, the total number of dollars I receive from individual subscriptions has increased since I went full-time on SOW, but the decline I’ve seen in advertising has been much more dramatic. In other words, I’ve lost much more money from decreased ad revenue than I have from increased subscriptions.

But I’m also not totally displeased with this either, and in net I’m happier now with my business than I have been at really any other point. Sure, I’m making less money, but also my incentive structure is more clearly oriented towards producing good content and I do believe that the content I’m producing is better now than it was four years ago. Furthermore, individual subscribers are for the most part more pleasant to do business with.

These tradeoffs aren’t really present in Subprime Attention Crisis, and from our conversation with Tim it wasn’t completely clear how much hope he has as a result of the rise of subscription-based content models like Ghost (which SOW runs on) and Substack (which Tim subsequently worked at after publishing the book). Regardless, it was interesting to consider my corner of the world that Tim wrote about, and I’m glad that I seem to have avoided catastrophe in my own career by setting up non-advertising revenue models in parallel to the (lucrative and kind of addictive) ad business that SOW grew to prominence with.

Three books

More books read, and written about:

Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, read by Ezra Klein.

This was, like, a very long podcast episode.

I think that’s a compliment? I enjoyed Klein’s conversational style, the way he’d chuckle at his own pre-written jokes, the pervasive sense that he is genuinely energized by the topics the book covers.

I was somewhat energized by those topics too. Or, maybe I was calmed; either way I came away from the book with a more confident sense of the forces at play in American political culture, and now feel a bit more prepared to understand (if not to accept) what the next year might look like.

The other thing I’ve been ruminating on while consuming Ezra Klein (both in this book and on his actual podcast, which I listen to infrequently) is the remarkably small distance between my life and his. I believe Klein lives about a mile from me; we also went to the same university at about the same time; it wouldn’t be crazy to think that we have a second-degree connection between us. I suppose this isn’t all that surprising, and to the extent that I’m writing this for other people to read, I feel a bit strange bringing it up at all. But I find it confusing and weird.

Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation by Nick Seaver.

I would not have read this book without the nudging from SOW’s Reading Group, but I enjoyed and found it thought provoking. It was less technical and significantly more academic than I was expecting, and referenced an impressively broad range of sources, from Derrida to Marc Andreessen.

In our Reading Group’s chat with author Nick Seaver, I mentioned that the book surprised me, which strikes me now as something that might be worth explaining. I think I was expecting the book to critique or at least explain the ways in which recommendation systems affect our taste, consumption habits, and the economic conditions under which music is made. It certainly touched on these topics, but the more prominent theme was the way in which the people who build recommendation systems conceive of their own work. Which was an interesting theme, and in retrospect an unsurprising one considering the book’s title — but somehow I was still surprised by it.

Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces by Ian Frazier, read by Ian Frazier.

Ah, I really enjoyed listening to this. I find Ian Frazier to be a delight — both to read and to listen to. His writing can be incredibly touching, funny, informative, and exciting. The topics he writes about are sometimes mundane, sometimes grand, sometimes expected and almost always thought-provoking.

What else can I say about this book? Well, I had read at least a few of the pieces in it previously. Frazier seems to respect every single person he comes into contact with, though to be fair he chooses which people he describes to us. Frazier’s humor often feels like an inside joke, like he’s whispering to you alone while all along the action plays out in front of him. His delivery on the audiobook is deadpan, but it feels somehow like he’s grinning — and doing so in such a way that everyone present would grin back at him and even nod along with what he’s saying. Frazier comes across as completely honest, but his honesty is always paralleled and matched by tenderness towards both his subjects and his audience. He is gracious, and observant, and incredibly entertaining, and I can’t wait to find something else of his to read.

Three books

This website is basically a list of books I’ve read now. Anyway, here are three more:

Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett; read by Daniel Everett.

This book has been on my bookshelf for at least a few years, and on my hypothetical reading list since John Colapinto’s 2007 New Yorker Profile of Daniel Everett. Everett was a missionary stationed among the Pirahã, a group living along the Maici River in northwestern Brazil. He lived there for decades, studying the Pirahã language in order to eventually produce a translation of the New Testament. During this time, the Pirahã — who do not have creation myths and are apparently happier than just about any other group of people — managed to avoid conversion to Christianity, and in fact ended up converting Everett to atheism.

In the meantime, Everett made a series of remarkable and highly controversial discoveries about the Pirahã language, which struck at one of the core tenets of modern linguistics. Namely, Everett called into question the concept of Universal Grammar, the idea that certain aspects of linguistic syntax are baked into human genetics. This idea, popularized by Noam Chomsky and extremely influential in mid-twentieth century linguistics, includes the stipulation that the syntax of human languages is recursive; that is to say, sentences can have other sentences embedded inside of them. This is apparently not the case in Pirahã, and Everett’s claims to that effect were hotly contested in the halls of linguistic departments in the late aughts.

(As something of an aside, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes was published about a year after I graduated with a degree in linguistics from the University of California. My studies focused on syntax, largely due to my early encounters with Geoff Pullum during the class he taught on Chomsky. Pullum was highly critical of Chomsky, but he also clearly had a deep appreciation for Chomsky’s contributions to the field. I enjoyed the class — and the other classes I took from Pullum — very much. And, Pullum apparently advised Everett as he was writing Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.)

As a book, Don’t Sleep is somewhat odd. It vacillates between travelogue, and ethnography, and linguistic research. Everett’s reading of the audiobook is somewhat awkward, but it’s also quite helpful to hear his pronunciations of the Pirahã, which I would not otherwise be capable of following. I was probably most interested in Everett’s commentary on linguistic determinism (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), which suggests (compellingly but contestedly) that language actively shapes our understanding of the world. But I also saw a more meditative point in Everett’s experience: That separate and apart from language, there are other ways to experience life. Take, for instance, the book’s title, which is apparently a common way to wish someone goodnight in Pirahã. It is meant literally, i.e. that you should not sleep much, and reflects a Pirahã cultural belief that sleep instills weakness. I may disagree with this, but I should also note that it is a valid way to live, and I would be well advised to consider the conditions under which it might be worth adopting myself.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us about the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff; read by Michaeleen Doucleff.

I approached Hunt, Gather, Parent with openness, but still was surprised at how convincing it was. I dare say that it has produced a more pronounced change in the way I parent than anything else I’ve read.

Hunt, Gather, Parent was the subject of a series of long threads in SOW’s Members’ Slack, and while come critiques were made, the overall tenor was positive. The book is essentially one person’s journey towards a more supportive and less conflict-ridden parenting experience; the author, a reporter for NPR’s Science Desk, traveled with her three-year-old kid to visit three hunter-gatherer societies. These experiences changed her parenting style dramatically, and she proposes that western parents could benefit from similar shifts.

I cannot do Doucleff’s arguments justice here, so let me highlight a few takeaways:

• Doucleff argues that western parenting traditions are only a few generations old, and are out of step with human evolution and childhood development. We evolved in hunter-gatherer communities, and children are well-suited to the family structures and rhythms of hunter-gatherer communities. So, perhaps we should try to understand how those communities support childhood development, and replicate them where doing so is practical.
• The lesson I was most struck by was on kids’ roles as helpers. My kids, who are four and seven, are constantly asking to help me with things, and I have often either rejected them outright or sandboxed their efforts so tightly that they could no longer truly be called “help.” I think this was a mistake, and today I’m making a much more concerted effort to enlist and actually rely on my kids’ help — with all manner of tasks.
• I also have been attempting to drastically reduce the number of instructions I give my kids. Doucleff suggests topping out at one to three instructions per hour, a number that I regularly exceed by at least one order of magnitude. One way I’m working to reduce this is by acknowledging my kids’ actions and predicting their consequences. Instead of telling them not to climb our lawn furniture, I tell them that if they do climb, they might fall off and hurt themselves. Instead of telling them not to rip leaves off all the trees on our block, I tell them that our neighbors put a lot of time and energy into maintaining those trees, and that they’ll be offended and upset to find the trees hurt. These explanations may sound soft or lax, but in all honesty they’re at least as effective as the constant scolding and commands that I might otherwise issue — and the reduced conflict definitely makes me happier and more pleasant to be around.

To me, this is Doucleff’s strongest argument: Being in conflict with my kids sucks, and it really isn’t that effective, and at the end of a day of conflict I often feel like shit. And ultimately my kids are pretty capable: of starting the bathtub, and putting their laundry away, and learning — not from my instruction but from their own experimentation — how their actions, and their effects, are received by the community in which we live.

The Non-Jewish Jew: And Other Essays by Isaac Deutscher.

This book took me a while to get through, and large portions of it were beyond my full comprehension. Its title essay, The Message of the Non-Jewish Jew, is available to read online for free, and should be reasonably accessible to modern audiences, but much of what Deutscher discusses in the rest of the book is in discourse with ideas which are now three-quarters of a century old, and I often found it difficult to remain engaged and excited to proceed.

That said, much of Deutscher’s message remains relevant. A self-described Marxist of Jewish origin, Deutscher was born in Poland in 1907 and was on a Rabbinical path before becoming an atheist. Prior to World War II he was an outspoken anti-Zionist, though his opinions on Israel evolved (he calls it “a necessity” in light of Nazism); in the end he took the stance that it was silly to begin a Jewish nation “in the middle of this century in which the nation-state is falling into decay.” From my perspective, in 2024, this viewpoint is hopelessly naive and idealistic: The nation-state remains alive and well, and it feels rather impossible to imagine how Zionism — or the broader Jewish exodus from Europe, which Deutscher clearly sees as necessary — would have existed outside of the nation-state paradigm.

But I did not come to Deutscher for commentary on Israel; I came to him for commentary on atheistic Jewish identity. Here his views are also a bit idealistic and probably anachronistic as well:

Are we now going to accept the idea that it is racial ties or ‘bonds of blood’ that make up the Jewish community? Would not that be another triumph for Hitler and his degenerate philosophy? If it is not race, what then makes a Jew? Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore, a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated.

I say this is anachronistic because while it might have felt reasonable for Jews to claim at least partial ownership over persecution and extermination in the 1950s, much has occurred since then. Nevertheless, I find the idea about as compelling as any that I have access to when I consider my own ethnic identity. I am twenty-five percent Ashkenazi, but religious Judaism has not be a part of my family’s story for more than a century. But I would like to think that I stand in solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated, whatever their origins and beliefs. I’m not sure exactly how calling myself a Jew would aid me in that solidarity, but having that as an option feels like it could aide my internal discourse.

Three books

Notes on three books I’ve read recently:

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie.

I came into Not the End of the World thinking that it was about climate change. I had, however, not taken the title literally enough: The book is literally a series of arguments that amount to such and such problem is not the end of the world. I came to determine that Ritchie had not written this book with me in mind; I think that climate change is really bad, but I don’t think that it’ll cause my children’s lives to be shortened or filled with misery. And the other issues that Ritchie discusses (which range from ocean plastics and air pollution to biodiversity loss and deforestation) feel even less like the end of the world to me — a feeling which was only heightened by the book’s structure, which involves repeatedly debunking strawman arguments.

This is not to say that I thought NTEOTW was a bad or unconvincing book. But I don’t think it really convinced me of anything either. I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m older than her target audience (Ritchie is ten years younger than me, and seems to be writing to people even younger than her), or because I’m more well-informed about the topics she discusses (among the issues that Ritchie debunks is the idea that recycling can be seen as an effort to end climate change — a conflation that I don’t think I’ve ever made), or because of some idiosyncratic reaction I had to Ritchie’s argumentative style (I found the “debunking dumb ideas” structure... annoying?). Regardless, there are probably people who I’d recommend NTEOTW to — I just wouldn’t recommend it that full-heartedly.

Oh — just to summarize, Ritchie’s main recommendations in NTEOTW seem to be:

• Don’t eat meat, especially beef and lamb
• Drive as little as possible
• Try however we can to lift people out of poverty

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, narrated by George Saunders et al.

I enjoyed A Swim in a Pond in the Rain very much — enough to purchase a paper copy after having finished the (excellently produced) audio version. Let’s do this in bullet points:

• The structure of this book is that Saunders introduces some ideas, then a Russian short story is presented in full, then Saunders reacts to and analyzes the story. Saunders’ reactions are thoughtful and funny, and the stories range from the tender and philosophical to the comically bizarre.
• In the audio version, Saunders narrates the portions that he wrote. Each short story is narrated by an actor, many of whom are recognizable — Nick Offerman, Rainn Wilson, and Glenn Close among them.
• The net effect (of the audio version in particular) is of being in an MFA writing seminar, which of course the book is adapted from (Saunders teaches writing at Syracuse University). Saunders holds your hand as you walk through these stories, none of which I had been aware of previously.
• Saunders’ observations and analyses are convincing, interesting, and resonant. He gives practical advice, and frames reading as a tool with which to hone one’s writing. In many ways he offers suggestions that are similar to those in Lydia Davis’ Essays, but he does so with a bit more wit, and the format of the book is a little more entertaining than Essays.
• I think the takeaway that I found most useful is that I should try to hone my own writing so that it feels increasingly like me, and that I should strive to make each line that I write compelling enough to make the reader want to read the next one.
• Also, Gogol’s The Nose (which you can read in full here) was just wild!

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross.

I came to Eating Animals from a conversation in SOW’s Reading Group in which we were discussing Not the End of the World. Among NTEOTW’s main recommendations is to reduce beef and lamb consumption, which is something that my family has done to a reasonable extent over the past ~8 years. That said, there seems to be a good case to be made for strict vegetarianism based on climate change alone, and Eating Animals was recommended as making an effective argument for immediate and decisive action.

I have not, yet, made such an action; I ate bacon last night and am reasonably likely to eat fish for lunch. But Foer’s arguments are, indeed, quite convincing. He argues primarily against factory farming, which encompasses effectively all of modern meat production in the US — including the “sustainable” and “free range” and otherwise touchy-feely options available to me in gentrified (and by all means consumer-conscious) Brooklyn. Foer describes factory farming in detail, though even the broad strokes are pretty horrible, and ultimately he determines that consuming factory-farmed animals (which, again, encompass virtually all of the options available to me) is not a reasonable or conscionable thing to do.

So, why have I not converted to strict vegetarianism? I do not have a good answer to this question, except that I find myself with limited emotional bandwidth, and converting to strict vegetarianism feels like something that will require more than zero emotional effort. That said, I would recommend Eating Animals to basically anyone, and I do think that it’ll have an effect on my eating behavior. The book is funny, and touching, and I find Foer’s arguments both comprehensive and well formulated. However you engage with your food, or the climate, or the ethics of our relationship with animals, Eating Animals will only make your decisions more well-informed.

NYIC equipment for sale

The New York Industrial Collective, which I have run in various forms since 2018, is shutting down in the coming months. As a result, I’m selling a fairly extensive collection of tooling and equipment. A spreadsheet is available upon request, which you can send to me here; you can also see some (hastily taken and minimally staged) photos of some of the available equipment below.

Three books

Three books I’ve read (all on audio) recently:

The Periodic Table; by Primo Levi, read by Neville Jason.

I feel as if I am reading Levi in reverse: Starting with Other People’s Trades a few months ago, then moving to The Periodic Table, perhaps soon arriving at If This Is A Man. In the first, Levi’s own life is relatively abstract; in If This Is A Man, (whose title in the US was Survival in Auschwitz) I assume I would come to understand what must have been formative experiences for him. The Periodic Table is somewhere in the middle. He refers to Auschwitz obliquely in a few chapters, and writes about his time in the Monowitz Buna Werke at the end of the book. But other chapters resemble allegory, and others are simply charming vignettes from his youth. I will admit that I was not as enamored with the book’s structure as I had hoped, but I did feel as if I came closer to the parts of Levi’s life that I clearly want to learn about.

The Year of Magical Thinking; by Joan Didion, read by Barbara Caruso.

I have never read Joan Didion, and I’m told that The Year of Magical Thinking is perhaps a distinct element in her writing career. I found it to be a compelling listen, and blasted through it in a few meditative sessions. Didion both shows and tells the reader what she experienced during said Year — which, if you weren’t already aware, included the death of her husband and also a series of intense medical tribulations endured by her daughter. Didion tells through uncannily precise self-reflection, which I take it is something she was known for. She shows through the choral repetition of a string of out-of-context phrases and quotations, all of which add up to a feeling of dissociative fugue.

Everything Is Illuminated; by Jonathan Safran Foer, read by Robert Petkoff.

I have read this book at least twice before: Once in paper when I was in college, and once on audiobook sometime in my later twenties or early thirties. I have found it incredibly affecting every time.

I am not very Jewish. I have barely stepped foot into a synagogue, have only been to a Seder once, and was told repeatedly, by my one arguably Jewish ancestor, that he did not consider himself to be Jewish. And yet I am, ethnically, twenty-five percent Ashkanazi, and it feels as if there is within me a cultural hole where my Ashkanazi ancestors (who were murdered, in pogroms, around the turn of the twentieth century) once were.

By that same token, Jonathan Safran Foer (either the author or the ostensibly fictionalized protagonist of Everything Is Illuminated) is not very Ukranian. In an interview with the New York Times, Foer said that writing Everything Is Illuminated “was a way of coming to peace with an absence in my life.” About the real trip to Ukraine which he took in 1997, Foer had this to say: “What I found was nothing but nothing. There weren't even people to ask questions of, or gravestones to light candles by. What I found was one, huge hole.”

I think that it is this which I have found so affecting: The knowledge that no matter how much I dig, a big part of my own family history — and of all of our histories, as the Alex character so poignantly shows in Everything Is Illuminated — will remain mostly an absence.

Three books

More books completed!

Beowulf: A New Translation; translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, read by JD Jackson.

I thought this book was pretty cool. Recommended to me by a reader for its (prolific) use of the word bro, Headley’s translation (and JD Jackson’s reading) is brash and yet somehow hospitable. It brought me in; it kept me interested; it energized me. I didn’t know the story beforehand: At a high level, it is about a Swedish (Geat) hero who kills a monster, is almost killed by its mother, and [spoiler alert] later dies in an epic fight with a dragon. Transcribed from oral tradition in around 1000 AD, the poem exists today in a single (partially burned) manuscript. Headley’s translation made it accessible in ways I would not have expected, and I blasted through the four-ish-hour reading in a couple of days.

In Praise of Shadows; by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.

I believe I have read this book twice before, and at one point I owned two copies of it; I have since given one away. Its content is somewhere in between The Unknown Craftsman and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but I found its approach more honest, in the sense that Tanizaki seems to be communicating his opinions on aesthetics (and women, and jade, and pooping) rather than attempting to define and argue for a unified objective theory of them. His narrative wanders; I found his thoughts on architecture the most compelling and least problematic, though his descriptions of persimmon leaf sushi and black lacquerware soup bowls are also appealing. But perhaps my favorite line in the book came from the afterward, in which the Tanizaki’s wife recounted an anecdote about him after his death. He had decided to build a new house; the architect arrived for a meeting and proudly announced that he knew In Praise of Shadows and was prepared to build a house that fit Tanizaki’s desires perfectly. “But no, I could never live in a house like that,” Tanizaki replied. In Praise of Shadows is a rant, muttered by a self-described old man who is mourning the traditions of an earlier Japanese culture. There is truth in it, but it shouldn’t be taken as a guide to live one’s life by.

The Paris Review No. 246; various authors.

I purchased this issue of The Paris Review after much deliberation at a surprisingly charming book store in Miami, Florida. Ada and I had walked, then biked, then taken a car to get there, partly to buy books (between the flight down and a little time on the beach, I had finished both Eastbound and Need for the Bike that weekend) and partly to get the fuck out of South Beach, with its charmingly old-fashioned architecture and its not-quite-NYC-cool restaurants. When we arrived at the book store — Books & Books, in Coral Gables — we were both hungry and got a snack at their restaurant. We successfully ordered the hummus we wanted, but they were out of both the curried chicken salad and then the baba ghanoush, so we got some rather unsatisfying labneh instead. It was a warm afternoon in January, and we were sitting in the courtyard, and Ada ordered a white wine. I ordered a kombucha but received the same white wine, which I drank obediently and without displeasure.

After our snack we paid, then went inside to look for books. Ada decided promptly; she was nearing the end of a loaned copy of a “fiercely romantic, irresistibly sexy” fantasy novel, and wanted the next book in the series for when she was done. I undertook a more intense search. I thought about getting a copy of Dante’s Inferno, and was egged on by a college-aged kid who overheard my deliberations, but decided I would fare better with a different translation. I poked around the nonfiction section but was uninspired; I thumbed through almost their entire literary fiction collection but couldn’t commit. Finally I returned to the cafe (by this time Ada had paid for her book) and peered past a customer working on their laptop to scan the periodicals. A glossy magazine wouldn’t do, and we already had copies of The New Yorker and The Atlantic at home, but the blood-red cover of The Paris Review — a publication that I was vaguely aware of but wouldn’t have been able to describe in any detail — stared passively out from the shelves, indifferent to my interests but presumably capable of teaching me something.

And, I enjoyed reading it. It felt a little more focused on the writing than The New Yorker, whose house style is distinctive and literary but which also puts a lot of effort into being informative, entertaining, and stylish. To be clear, these traits make The New Yorker singularly great to me, but The Paris Review felt a little more angular, challenging, and focused — in a way that I liked. The first piece in this issue, by Sean Thor Conroe, excerpts journal entries he made during a failed attempt to walk across the country after having dropped out of college. Both ecstatic and deeply anxious, Conroe’s piece left me on a hopeful note, but also gave me the sense of looking over someone’s shoulder as they made a series of dubious life choices. A few pages later, an interviewer (who is named in the introduction, but who is listed only as “INTERVIEWER” above question after probing question) talks with Yu Hua, who Wikipedia claims is “one of the greatest living authors in China,” about life experiences spanning from the Cultural Revolution to today. The questions are almost painfully short (“Do you often cry when you write?”), a pattern that seems like it might be The Paris Review’s house style (it repeats in a later interview with the poet Louise Glück). At one point Hua’s interviewer (who had worked as a translator for the English version of Hua’s most successful novel) mentions, almost in monosyllables, that they had yet to receive a single royalty payment for their work.

I felt distinctly sophisticated reading The Paris Review in public. Around the middle of the 200-ish-page paperbound text, whose back cover advertises a list of upcoming book titles from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the writing became almost shockingly edgy in Tony Tulathimutte’s Ahegao, which deals with its protagonist’s sexual repression and ultimate humiliation with humor, empathy, and little apparent concern for its readers’ potentially puritanical proclivities. Which is to say that it’s graphic as fuck. But somehow fun to read! The next story is a tender and heartbreakingly remembered pseudo-romance between a pair of retired flight attendants; then comes the aforementioned interview with Glück; finally comes (I’m skipping the poetry and full-color visual art, though I enjoyed them as palette cleansers) another sexually graphic, then achingly romantic, then touching and meditative story called Two Men, Mary by Jamie Quatro.

It would be a little presumptuous of me to say that I’ll pick up the next issue of The Paris Review, and while I did poke at the subscription page (the quarterly costs $59 per year) I eventually closed the tab. But I do find The Paris Review’s founding editorial statement to be compelling:

The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.

Three books

Three books I’ve read recently:

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

“Get off my lawn,” yells Benjamin. “I’m painting here.” I’m not sure what to make of his subsequent argument; I can only say that never before have I drawn as many question marks in a book’s margins, and this book is only forty-nine pages long, and almost half of them are blank (or were, until my pencil had its way with them). Benjamin is Very Upset About Film and Photography, which today feels totally quaint. In the course of berating those two artistic modes and praising live theater and painting instead, he gets quite sloppy with his rhetoric, making claims like “if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes” — a conditional statement which does not seem to follow from anything Benjamin offers about “the aura,” “its social causes,” or “the medium of contemporary perception.” He later defines “the aura of natural [objects]” as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, wile resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Benjamin does, in due course, make a few interesting points — and his line of argumentation finds parallels (echoes?) in modern discourse on media. But I find it difficult to engage seriously with his argumentation, and its whimsey and lack of rigor indeed feel designed to quash counterarguments before they’re even made.

Essays One by Lydia Davis, read by Janet Metzger.

Listening to this book on audio was tough at times, as much of it is in verse or about subjects that I am a bit lost in. Davis analyzes Proust, Barthes, and Edward Dahlberg (all authors I have not read) at length, as well as a number of her own poems and those of other writers she admires. But she also issues a series of what I found to be convincing pieces of advice, among them the idea that writers should take notes often and on a wide range of activities. Davis seems just as likely to play with language, writing things purely for the pleasure of doing so, as she is to inspect it with the utmost care, attention, and diligence. Reading her essays was inspiring, exciting, and engrossing, and it made me want to address my own work in a more earnest — and experimental — manner.

Night by Elie Wiesel, read by George Guidall.

This is an intense book. It was made a little less intense, I think, by the fact that I listened to it on audio; then again, George Guidall’s narration was expressive, desperate, pleading. Wiesel writes his story plainly and with haste (the audiobook, which includes Wiesel’s subsequent Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and an essay about Wiesel by a French author, comes in at just over four hours), the tension and anxiety building and then slackening just enough every time Wiesel repeats the word “night.” The reader, of course, knows that the story will be horrible until the bitter end (Note: Night is about the Holocaust). Wiesel doesn’t seem to soften, heighten, or foreshadow any part it, and the book feels more effective as a result.

Three books

Three books I’ve read recently:

Other People’s Trades by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. I have more to write about Levi, who notably was imprisoned (enslaved? abused? treated as utterly disposable?) at the Monowitz Buna factory — a synthetic rubber factory, the first of its kind, located in the Auschwitz complex. This book, though, was relatively quick to read and digest. Built out of a collection of columns he published in Italian newspapers in the later half of the twentieth century, Other People’s Trades is not, as its title might suggest, an anthropological or ethnographic study of labor. Levi’s writing here resembles foremost that of a commentator, looking out at the world from inside his own mind. He spends considerable time reflecting on his childhood, and his occupation, and then in maybe a third of the book he turns to an industry with which he has some curiosity but not much (any?) first-hand knowledge. In this way Other People’s Trades is filled with the kind of writing one sees regularly on the internet, and it takes some work for a modern reader (or, it took some work for me) to remember that Levi didn’t have access to Wikipedia, and JSTOR, and for that matter ChatGPT to give him hints about entomology, or linguistics, or whatever other topic he wanted to expound upon for a few thousands words. My favorite part of the book appears in the introduction:

The essays collected here...are the fruit of my roaming about as a curious dilettante for more than a decade. They are ‘invasions of the field’, incursions into other people’s trades, poachings in private hunting preserves, forays into the boundless territories of zoology, astronomy, and linguistics: sciences which I have never studied systematically and which, for just this reason, affect me with the durable fascination of unsatisfied and unrequited loves, and excite my instincts as a voyeur and kibitzer.

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal; translated by Jessica Moore. I found this book on the steps of the Coignet building, which I mentioned in a piece in 2021 and which still stands, unsold and partially restored, across the street from a large converted factory that apparently houses the offices of a not-for-profit press which is “devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.” I am not in the habit of picking books up off the street, but something about this one grabbed me, and when I found myself on a three-hour flight to Miami a few weeks later with no kids and no desire to purchase wifi, I grabbed it back — and spent the next hour and a half hanging on as it shot me across most of continental Asia, turning page after furious, breathless page until the compact and engrossing story inside of it was exhausted. I was captivated with Eastbound — a novella which describes the brief and intense intersection of a few people’s lives. I found its writing especially enjoyable; it complemented the story’s ample tension perfectly.

Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel; translated by Allan Stoekl. This book was nearly as short as Eastbound, and was constructed out of even smaller pieces than Other People’s Trades. The author is, I have learned, a member of Oulipo, “a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques.” At times this book’s form feels distinctly like the thing which is driving it forward. But also, Fournel clearly loves bikes, and finds things to write about them that are at some moments personal and idiosyncratic, and at others inviting and energetic. Fournel expounds his opinions as if they should be gospel, and while many of his thoughts on French cycling culture are admittedly lost on me, I found multiple opportunities to relate to him strongly — most notably his recommendation that people who are not employed as professional athletes (which is to say, basically all of us) should, at some point in their lives, find a way to inhabit their bodies fully, devoting serious energy their sport or movement and then taking the time to appreciate the way preparation and physical action blend merge into a thoughtless, transcendent experience.

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Of these three books, the one which I found most compelling was Eastbound. It did something that I didn’t expect, and it did it urgently and without caring whether I was prepared for it. It sucked me entirely into its tiny, paperbound cover, and then pushed and dragged me around inside itself.

Recently I have been thinking of Ben Thompson’s definition of a subscription business model, which hinges upon “the consistent delivery of well-defined value.” As a writer, my abilities are rather inconsistent; I am not, as Fournel would say, “in shape” as a writer, capable of seamlessly jumping into action and delivering well-defined value to readers. I’m also not in the habit of the kind of formalistic experimentation that Eastbound employs, and am unsure how one would employ de Kerangal’s immediacy and breathlessness in the kind of semi-technical nonfiction which SOW is known for. That said, I think it’s incumbent upon me to make more attempts at it, and generally to spend more time reading — and reflecting upon what I’ve read, as I’ve done here in about 800 words.

A blog post

This evening, while sitting at the kitchen counter eating the sugar cookies that we had painstakingly and somewhat sloppily decorated there a day before, my four-year-old daughter recited the self-affirmational blessing that her pre-k class apparently chants before starting their lunches. She wanted me to repeat it, line by line, and I obliged her – up until the moment where she said, in her sweet little drawl, “I have a purpose in life.”

It is on-brand for me to bristle at the things chanted in groups which I already feel like a marginal participant in – which is to say, basically every group I’ve been a part of. But I’m not a part of my daughter’s pre-k, and I’m not sure I was bristling at her little affirmation. I was thinking, but I couldn’t possibly have a purpose in life.

Admittedly, it has been a weird couple of months. A weird couple of years! The reasons aren’t worth going into; they’d drag on for pages, and anyway it wouldn’t serve my purpose to divulge them. The point is, I think, that a large part of my life feels as if it’s been shaped largely by chance. The way I spend my time; the places from which I derive meaning; the places where try to make my mark -- I arrived at these things not via a well-executed plan but by bumbling about, barely looking where I was going.

Recently, while I was saying something about my relationship with writing, someone asked me if I thought I suffered from imposter syndrome. I honestly can’t tell; it’s not so much that I mistrust my abilities as a writer, but that I find myself more compelled by the physical problems around me.

An example: A few hours before I equivocated about my purpose in life with my four-year-old, I gave myself a half-hour break from editing (a task which makes up a significant portion of my actual job) to go and clean out the bathroom sink drain. It was a perfect task: The sink was draining like crap, and I fixed it. The biggest factor in my favor was the fact that I was willing to get just a little bit messy; once I accepted that fact and put on a pair of gloves, the project was basically finished.

One thing I’ll give myself is that when a problem is physically in front of me and not an immediate crisis, I’m reasonably resilient to the hurdles it presents. The issue is that I’m addicted to non-crisis physical hurdles.

Time

A couple months ago I tried to write something about Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time for an issue of The Prepared that I was writing. In the end I scrapped it; it was random and kind of wacky and just hard to parse. Nevertheless, I have repeatedly returned to the ideas in that book; it has helped to sculpt many of the things I’m thinking about in my most meditative (least meditative?) moments. So in the interest of just pressing publish, here goes:

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In March, I wrote here about time-keeping systems. I was feeling frustrated by “daylight saving time” (which I put in scare quotes to remind the reader that no daylight is actually saved under DST), but in the end I think I came to a peaceful conclusion. “Time is our tool,” I wrote. “We may as well use it in a way that suits our needs.”

It turns out that time is a great deal more than that, though, and today my relationship with time is somewhat less peaceful. As Carlo Rovelli writes in The Order of Time, time is both intuitive and obscure, both universal and incredibly specific. We all know what it feels like to observe the passing of time, but it is not at all evident why it passes, and it would appear that the way in which it passes bears little resemblance to the way I, for one, have experienced my life thus far.

I’m not sure how these facts should change the way I approach life, much less how to talk about them with people who have not read a couple hundred dense and very heady pages written by a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. But if this newsletter is about anything, it is about things that might change the way you look at the world, and The Order of Time has certainly had that effect on me. So hang on, friends: the bits I’ve snuck in below are both outlandish and kind of obscure, but they’ve made for great mental chewing gum for me over the past few months.

• There is no fixed, objective concept of “the present” – a moment at which all of the stuff in the universe is happening right now. The present is a local phenomenon – technically a single point in spacetime, in practice extending to encompass a city, or a country, or all of earth. But as Rovelli writes on page 41, it makes no sense to ask “what is happening on Proxima b right now?”

• Time appears to be, as Rovelli writes on page 132 of The Order of Time, “not part of the elementary grammar of the world.” But never fear:
  A cat is not part of the elementary ingredients of the universe. It is something complex that emerges, and repeats itself, in various parts of our planet.
  In my experience thus far, I was under the impression that time was this fundamental thing; it has been core to my understanding of the world. It turns out, though, that time is like cats. They definitely exist, and we may love them, but if we learned of an alien species who had never before heard of cats, we wouldn’t bat an eye. If you had never experienced a cat, you could still observe and understand and enjoy the universe. 

• I was aware of the idea, theorized by Einstein as special relativity and then subsequently observed many times over, that time slows down when you speed up. But I had forgotten, or had not fully processed, the somehow weirder general relativity: that time also slows down in areas where the space-time continuum is curved. Time dilates as gravitational potential decreases – this is why time slows to a halt at the horizon of a black hole. But it’s everywhere around us, too: A clock on the floor runs slower than a clock on the table; time passes slower at your feet than it does at your head. As Rovelli writes on page ten of The Order of Time:
  Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later: the one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold…. Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude.

• Time is not directional; the only difference between the past and the present is that in the past, there was low entropy. 

• One of the implications of quantum mechanics is that, as Rovelli writes on page 83 of The Order of Time, “a minimum scale exists for all phenomena.” To you, time may feel fluid; I experience time as passing seamlessly and continuously. But there is actually a minimum value for time: Planck time, or 10-44 seconds. “In other words, a minimum interval of time exists. Below this, the notion of time does not exist—even in its most basic meaning.”
  Of course, the same could be said of distance – Planck length – “the minimum limit below which the notion of length becomes meaningless. Planck length is around 10-33 centimeters.”
  This blows my mind: Distance is granular! There is a point at which distance just can’t get any smaller. Wild.

• Rovelli writes on page 98 that:
  The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
  The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones…
  The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.
  This has, for me, a somewhat astounding implication: I am not an entity. I am a string of events, distributed across spacetime, separated from one another by Planck time and Planck distance. The only thing that connects me with the person who wrote this newsletter in March is the fact that I remember writing this newsletter in March; the experience of doing so made a footprint in my memory, and that footprint’s outline is still visible.
  

43 minutes of me making a kickstand

This summer I spent a bunch of time working on my bike. I’ve been riding it almost every day for about two years now, and it needed both aesthetic and functional upgrades - from its powder coat job to its lighting system to the bike seat I built for my daughters to ride in. It also needed a new kickstand, the design of which is rather specialized and unique.

The kickstand ended up being an involved process: its main component is a CNC’d aluminum block, into which two stainless steel legs are secured. It was the first custom CNC’d component I’ve bought in a few years, and also the first TIG welding I’ve done in a while, and in the end it represented a huge upgrade to the functionality of the bike.

Anyway. Here’s me, building a new kickstand, for your viewing pleasure :)

Why is This Interesting - the maritime right of way edition

Recently I had the chance to guest write Why Is this Interesting, an excellent newsletter on Substack. I wrote about maritime right of way and how I think it can (and should) be adapted for our streets; a slightly reformatted version appears below.

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When humans choose to live by sea, they do so in a largely self-regulated way. Admiralty law does, of course, cover the big stuff: injury, theft, and certain types of contract disputes. But the vast majority of what people do in the water is travel, and traveling by water is a decidedly laissez-faire enterprise.

The international rules of the maritime “road” were set in 1972 in the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, commonly referred to as 72 COLREGS. The full rules are 226 pages, but the vast majority are distilled down into the US Coast Guard’s Amalgamated International & U.S. Inland Rules—a 35 page document. It’s incredibly straightforward stuff. Take, for example, Rule 18, which covers right of way between boats:

(a) A power-driven vessel underway shall keep out of the way of:

• (i) a vessel not under command;

• (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver;

• (iii) a vessel engaged in fishing;

• (iv) a sailing vessel.

(b) A sailing vessel underway shall keep out of the way of:

• (i) a vessel not under command;

• (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver;

• (iii) a vessel engaged in fishing.

(c) A vessel engaged in fishing when underway shall, so far as possible, keep out of the way of:

• (i) a vessel not under command;

• (ii) a vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver.

Boats have a lot to worry about, but a complicated set of right-of-way laws is not one of them. If you’re in a motorboat, you need to stay away from sailboats, fishing boats, disabled boats, and “vessels not under command”—basically, anyone that’ll have a hard time staying away from you. The rules for sailboats are similarly simple: just knock “a sailing vessel” off the list above and you’re good to go. Ditto for fishing boats, who only need to remember to avoid unmanned boats (makes sense) and boats that are clearly having a hard time moving around (ditto).

Why is this interesting?

Life at sea is too complex to be bogged down in minutiae. In order to survive there, humans have created logical frameworks for behavior—ones which usually fall back to something like “stay away from boats that look like they might have a hard time staying away from you.” They are expressions of ethics and common sense: it would be wrong for a motorboat to run over a canoe, and it would be wrong for a pleasure yacht to play chicken with an oil tanker. Rule 18 reflects that.

Of course, life in and around automobiles is too complex to be bogged down in minutiae too. Cars are shockingly dangerous, and their impact is both dramatic (car crashes have been by far the leading cause of death for children since at least 1990) and diffuse (roads make up 27% of NYC’s land mass—roughly 52,000 acres, which at $5M per acre makes the land they’re built on worth over $260B). 

And yet we do a terrible job encoding our ethics into our traffic laws. 

New York State’s vehicle code defines right of way in Article 26, which drawls on for 2500 words and takes care to mention that drivers should “give warning by sounding the horn when necessary” while passing “domesticated sheep, cattle, and goats”—while separately specifying that they *shouldn’t* blow their horns when approaching horses (what this has to do with right of way, I don’t know). Article 26 does direct drivers to “exercise due care” not to hit cyclists and pedestrians, but the vehicle code provides scant guidance on how, other than not killing them, drivers should interact with light vehicles and unprotected people on the street. 

The picture becomes notably worse when you view the New York State vehicle code for what it is: just one part of a patchwork of overlapping instructions. If you live in the US and drive to work, it’s likely that you pass through multiple jurisdictions—each with their own legal carve-outs and enforcement regimes. The result is often a sense of uncertainty for everyone—does the car with Maryland plates know it can’t turn right on red in Manhattan? All of this is compounded by the fact that, ultimately, nobody follows every law while moving through the streets, and so everyone can reasonably (at least in their minds) claim moral superiority when they’re inconveniencing someone else. This leaves the streets less safe and everyone less happy.

Aside from the microstates of San Marino and Monaco, the US has more motor vehicles per capita than any other country in the world. Even New York City, which is in many ways the most bike/ped friendly place in the country, there are regularly dozens of cyclists and hundreds of pedestrians killed by cars every year. And yet, we have failed  to define a coherent, unified perspective on how different modes of transportation (including feet) should relate to one another.

Our roads are where life happens. We spend almost ten percent of our waking hours on the road; we interact with police on the road more than anywhere else; we’re injured and killed on the road at alarming rates. And yet our ethical approach to life (and death) on the road is complex and internecine. Perhaps if we want our streets to be more ethical, we should do a better job of encoding our ethics into the rules that govern them.

Walker-Turner

UPDATE: As of 2024-05-17, I’m selling my restored and upgraded drill press. If you’d be a good parent for it, and can pick it up in NYC before the end of the month, shoot me a note here.

Late last summer I took on what at the time seemed like a reasonable project: Restoring an old (1940s) Walker-Turner 15” drill press. I had acquired it for an attractive price (free) but it had a number of issues, including:

• A pretty bad repaint job, on top of a pretty old original paint job, resulting in paint chips everywhere

• A missing belt guard, which I was able to replace with an unpainted (and cracked) belt guard

• A step pulley drive system, which made for laborious speed changes & general annoyance

• …and 80 years of general wear & tear

Nevertheless, it was a functional drill press and that’s infinitely better than no drill press at all. I got to work.

Few things are less fun than stripping paint, and this project had lots of paint to strip - from irregular and rough (cast iron) surfaces, no less. Much time was spent on this: First with scrapers, then with sandpaper, then with (ew) paint remover, Simple Green, and *lots* of time with stainless steel brushes. It was, to be honest, exhausting, and were it not for the fact that I had already announced the project on Instagram it may have destroyed my resolve. Perhaps the lowest moment was when I wheeled a bunch of these parts - a load weighing probably 150 lbs - to a friend’s shop a few blocks away to use his sandblaster. I spent a few hours there hunched over listening to podcasts, and then left with less than half of the parts in a paintable state.

Defeated, I turned to aircraft paint remover - a deeply disappointing surrender, and one with its own set of challenges. Paint remover is no more foolproof - and much more toxic - than mechanical means of removing paint. I used it years ago once, and did not enjoy the experience.

There was one satisfying interlude here, which was cleaning (with a degreaser and then a wire wheel) all of the non-painted parts in the drill press.

For most of the parts, prep continued with two additional steps. First, everything got a light coat of PickleX, a conversion coating. Second, everything was dried out really well using some hacky methods: A hot plate and a heat gun.

The drill press’s head got one additional step: Bondo, which was rather satisfying to use but didn’t contribute all that much to the final product.

After probably a week’s worth of work (spread out over a month or so), I finally got a brush out. The primer I was using was horrid, a product that was reduced with methyl amyl ketone and was both thin and extremely fast drying. It went on like water, until it turned to a weird slurry just a few minutes later - a rather unnerving transition.

Finally, the drill press was ready to go back together. At this point I had begun to seriously question whether this project would produce results commensurate with my efforts; the 900 series is after all a relatively small drill press, and I had a growing feeling that it might have made more sense to restore a more capable machine. Regardless, it was satisfying to finally see something more or less functional:

At this point there was one remaining issue: The belt cover. The part, which I bought on eBay, had a crack in it that I wanted to repair and reinforce. I drilled a hole at the end of the crack, cut a piece of low carbon steel to fit on the inside, drilled through the belt cover and tapped the reinforcing plate, and epoxied and screwed the whole thing in place. I then used bondo to smooth everything over, and primed + painted like the rest of the drill press.

And voila: A working, 80-year-old drill press, painted baby blue and equipped with more or less modern fittings. The result was emotionally restorative, and I’ve got a few key takeaways:

• Paint is never the color you think. It may be pretty, but it’s not what you thought it would be.

• It really is amazing when replacement parts are easily available 80 years later.

• If you can avoid repainting something, you should. A new paint job won’t turn out that nice, and it’ll take you forever to finish.

• This Walker-Turner isn’t the drill press I might have wished my life on, but it’s way more of a drill press than no drill press at all. In other words: It’s pretty nice to have it working.

Hunts Point

In late 2018, I had the opportunity to tour the Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx, NYC. Sprawling over a million square feet, Wikipedia calls the Hunt’s Point Market “the largest food distribution center of its kind in the world,” and it was one of my long-wished for NYC infrastructure tours.

The market is visually captivating. Located in the poorest congressional district in the US, it paints a striking portrait of working class New York City - especially on a cold winter day like the one I visited on. I’m told that it’s most active at night (most of NYC’s green markets receive grocery deliveries in the early morning, and buyers typically want to be at the market after midnight to avoid traffic), but even mid-morning there was a steady stream of activity on the docks.

The tour was somewhat broad, covering both specialty and commodity produce suppliers. But my favorite shop was a Mabijo Packing Corp, a small shop that appeared to be doing only one thing: Moving potatoes from one bag to another.

On the input end, potatoes were unloaded from 50lb sacks from Wada Farms. On the output end, they were loaded into sacks of five 10lb bags (i.e. sacks containing 50lbs of potatoes, but divvied up into 10lb bags) marked with the brand name “Marc and Bill.”

The work this shop was doing was a tiny little part of our industrial food supply chain - and a glimpse into the way that a commodity product is branded and rebranded as it makes its way to consumers. It was mundane, yes, but it’s also true that the work being done would constitute “value added.” This may sound odd - after all, the potatoes arrived at Hunts Point in 50lb bags to begin with - but the reality of our supply chains is that work is often undone and redone. It’s difficult for a grower to estimate what consumers will want, and sometimes it’s just easier to put everything in 50lb bags and let local resellers deal with it.

I hope to return to Hunts Point someday soon. It’s a critical node in the system that feeds me, and a lot can be learned from it - even in mundane operations like this one.

Everything is ready

From the whiteboard that I sat immediately in front of back in like 2012:

At the time I was designing & managing production of robot doors, and the goal of this note was to get the entire shop (a multi-use space for design, prototyping, and production) clean and orderly every day. We all agreed that it was okay, on occasion, to leave parts & tools out overnight. But when our workday began at 7:00, everyone was committed to cleaning and organizing for up to 45 minutes - so that every single morning, the whole shop was reset back to a neat and orderly condition.

I found this habit to be totally fruitful, but I’ll admit that since I left that job I haven’t really found a way to replicate it. Today (especially under quarantine) my work is largely digital, and aside from making an attempt to clear out my inbox every morning (a Sisyphean task that I find less satisfying than sweeping the floor) it’s not totally clear what in my work life needs to be reset every day.

Regardless, the physical practice of cleaning up is something I aspire to. If anyone out there has developed a digital analog I’d love to hear it.

Three things you should know before starting a Patreon page

For the three years starting in April of 2017, I ran much of The Prepared’s (and ultimately my family’s) income through Patreon. I started doing so as an experiment - one that by any measure has been a success. But while Patreon was instrumental in that process, I recommend that creators not structure their incomes and careers around Patreon. Here’s why.

Patreon’s creator analytics are opaque and unpredictable

Like many creators, I chose Patreon’s “pay by the creation” (rather than “pay by the month) mode. This directly incentivizes creators to continue doing the actual work, and keeps them accountable to the commitments they make.

But what Patreon doesn’t tell you is that fans can optionally set a monthly cap on their spending, and that cap can be arbitrarily low - even less than your per-creation commitment level. In other words, a reader of my weekly newsletter could pledge $5 per newsletter, but then set a $2 monthly cap. The worst part about this is that there’s literally nowhere in the Patreon backend that I can see this cap. I spoke to Patreon’s product team about this in late 2018, and they told me that the best thing I could do is to look at my creation-by-creation analytics at the end of the month and see which of my patrons paid for which creations; if a person doesn’t show up at the end of the month, then they must have set a cap.

This is a totally unscalable solution, and it makes the process of issuing patron rewards excruciatingly hard to manage. Creators need the ability to quickly and easily determine who is paying them for what; Patreon makes this impractically hard.

Further:

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Declined pledges were a big problem on my account, and Patreon makes it unnecessarily hard to figure out whose charges are declined.

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These numbers do not represent earnings.

• Patreon provides email alerts for when a new patron makes a pledge, but has no email or push notifications for when patrons delete pledges.

• Patreon has no creator-side notification system for declined charges or charges that are flagged for fraud. Worse yet, their patron-side notification system appears to be totally ineffective; many long time patrons (and personal friends of mine) were genuinely shocked to hear, many months later, that their monthly charges had been declined - leading to their pledges being automatically canceled by Patreon. Even worse, Patreon’s “Declines” page, which shows the total declined amount on a month by month basis, has no way of showing which patrons’ pledges were declined - you instead need to go into the “Relationship Manager” and filter by “Declined” to see whose charges have gone through, and when.

• If you, as a creator, go through all of the effort to find charges that have been declined or marked as fraud, it can then be really difficult to recoup that revenue. This is mostly a result of the fact that most Patreon creators charge a small amount of money (a couple dollars) per month. In theory you could email or message the patron when their charge doesn’t go through, but in practice it feels a bit weird to be hounding someone over (say) $4. If the pledge was billed on an annual basis, though, it might be a big enough sum to warrant the effort.

• Patreon uses accounting terms with little regard for their generally accepted meaning. See the screenshot above, which is titled “Earnings Projections” but then actually lists gross revenue. In accounting, earnings is the same as profit - it’s what a company has left after every expense is paid, whereas gross revenue is the total amount that a company takes in and doesn’t take into account expenses at all. In other words, Patreon is suggesting that the numbers here are what will be deposited into my bank account - but once Patreon takes their platform fees, it’ll actually be significantly less. This kind of sloppy terminology is all over Patreon’s creator backend, and no matter how you slice it is either the result of gross incompetence or a deliberate desire to deceive creators.

Patreon’s fee structure makes no sense

Between credit card processing fees (2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction) and Patreon’s cut (between 5% and a whopping 12%), your earnings will be significantly less than your top line pledged amount. In practice, I saw total fees of between 8-12%. (Note: I signed up for Patreon before they shifted to tiered pricing, and now have a “Founder” Pro plan at a 5% platform fee rate. If you signed up for a Pro or Premium account today, you’d pay Patreon 3% or 7% more than I do, respectively.)

If Patreon were actively bringing customers to me - if normal people were just out there browsing Patreon for awesome things to support - then that might make sense. But the reality is that success on Patreon is inextricably tied to having your own platform and community. All Patreon does is manage recurring payment processing - a commodity service that many companies do for a drastically lower fee structure. Sure, ostensibly you can also be having conversations with patrons, generating some kind of community there, etc - but every step you take to encourage users to interact with you on Patreon, the more you undermine your own platform. In other words, Patreon engages in rent seeking - but they ultimately do it on your platform, and don’t bring a built-in audience with which to raise you higher.

When I transitioned off of Patreon, I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. The result is that my processing fees dropped dramatically. At my peak Patreon earnings, I was spending almost $300/month ($3600/year) on Patreon’s platform fees. My current revenue is roughly 3x what it was then, but I’m paying 68% less than I used to be. My current payments, web hosting, and accounting software outlay is $1,125 a year; if I had remained on Patreon my annual fees would be about $10,000.

Patreon integrates with basically nothing

Okay, you’re saying - so Patreon isn’t the perfect all-in-one platform that will allow me to bill, chat with, and build my audience. But maybe it’s a piece of a larger puzzle?

It’s a great idea, but unfortunately Patreon does a terrible job integrating with the other services that I use to run my business.

The first thing I’d want from Patreon is an easy way to automatically share my content (which most creators distribute elsewhere - for me, it’s Mailchimp) to Patreon. But while Patreon does have a public API, it’s poorly developed (there is no sandbox/testing area, and the most recent updates to their API libraries are from January of 2019) and only allows browsing/looking up data on Patreon; you cannot post content to your Patreon account via the API. This lack of functionality also exists in Zapier’s implementation of the Patreon API: You can use Patreon as a trigger, but not as an action.

What this means is that creators are inherently tied to Patreon’s terrible, horrible, clicky clicky GUI. You are completely tied to the limitations that are built into Patreon’s web product, and don’t have the ability to build automations that’ll speed up your content and customer management.

Patreon also fails to integrate well with accounting software - something that flies in the face of their promise to give creators “the stability you need to build an independent creative career.” Their API (and Zapier’s implementation of it) only provides pledge activity, and is therefore inaccurate (caps, declines, and fraud aren’t factored in - it’s a guesstimate at what you might make in the future) in all of the ways described above.

What Patreon is good for

I really can’t stress this enough: If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon. What Patreon does offer is a quick way to see whether people on the internet will pay you a little money for something that you’re already doing for free.

This is a nontrivial thing, but it’s something that you should really think through before you start a Patreon page. If it’s a success, then it’ll likely make a lot of sense for you to transition off of Patreon at some point in the foreseeable future. That might be fine - especially if you’re really early on and success feels like a longshot - but The Prepared’s transition off of Patreon required a lot of management on my part and resulted in roughly 1/3 of my patrons dropping their pledges.

To be clear: I’m deeply appreciative of all of the people and companies who supported me through Patreon, and it really is true that those first couple of dollars made a big impact in the path of my career. But Patreon as a platform did remarkably little to support me along that journey, even after I became a moderately successful creator and took quite a bit of time to explain my frustrations to both their customer service & user research teams.

What I'm working on

Apropos of keeping myself accountable, here are a few things that are on my plate and in my mind at the moment:

• Doing a good job writing The Prepared’s newsletter. I’m on the hook for personally writing about half of the newsletter’s issues this year, and I want to take advantage of that as much as possible.

• Doing a good job managing guest editors for the newsletter. The newsletter has historically been a solo project, and I’m intensely aware that the onus is on me to communicate a standard of quality to everyone now involved in it - a task that I know I’m doing an imperfect job at.

• Refining the public-facing definition of The Prepared’s Paid Subscriptions, and finding more effective (and non-sleazy) ways of getting more people to join the program. Paid subscribers provide me more psychological payoff than anything else I do professionally, and the program is also a significant portion of The Prepared’s business model. However, I haven’t done a particularly good job at communicating what the purpose of the program is or why readers would want to join it - something I definitely need to change.

• Writing elsewhere. I’ve started and abandoned multiple posts here this year, and generally have not done a good job finding topics and outlets on which I can maximize my impact per word written. Part of this is understandable - it’s good that the newsletter is my primary focus - but it would be good for me to get more reps writing in longer form and for more varied audiences.

• Affiliations. I’ve built myself a good little kingdom, but it would be good for me to find ways to involve myself with larger institutions. This is vague, but feels like it’ll be increasingly important and self-affirming in the coming phases of my career.

• I really need to find ways to get more exercise. In 2011, I kind of flipped a switch on my health and, over the course of a year, lost about 50 lbs. But it required a ton of mental energy and a huge amount of time out of my week - something that, as a self employed person with a family, feels a little out of reach today. I need to find some kind of middle ground here, especially as I age and my kids become more physical.

• Other projects. I like writing for a living, but it works best when I’m also doing other random shit - building a table, writing a little software, refurbishing a machine, editing someone else’s original research. These kinds of things have been particularly hard to take on during the shutdown, and moving forward it’s probably a good idea for me to schedule them out in a more rigorous way - perhaps at a rate of one project a quarter, or similar.

• Prepare myself for something bigger and more meaningful. I want to find a measurable positive impact that I can make on the world and my community, ideally related to sustainability and/or economic development. And while I’m crazy proud of how The Prepared has grown to be a voice for good stuff, it mostly lacks the direct action that I’d like to have in my life.

Also: Being a good partner to Ada; showing my kids how interesting the world is and preparing them for being a part of it; being a better neighbor; finding ways to make my neighborhood more bike and pedestrian friendly; etc.