Poor Americans seem so perplexing to rich Americans because they live in different worlds.
We have two housing and two banking systems. We ask why don’t poor people make different choices but the whole point is they don’t have other choices.
“The system isn’t broken. It’s bifurcated,” writes journalist Matthew Desmond in his 2023 book Poverty, By America. Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How poverty in America worksToo often we seek big, dramatic and comprehensive change when the far more common and effective way to make change in a democratic system is through a grinding and collaborative approach.
One way that’s the case is because making real change requires three stages (the politics, the policy and implementing the practice) but we commonly forget that third step. All told, incrementalism gets a bad rap. Nearly all lasting change has happened gradually, not boldly. The world is complex, no coalition is ideologically cohesive and those implementing change are flawed.
That’s the case made in the 2023 book “Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age,” written by two longtime advocates in criminal justice reform, Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman. Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical AgeHumanity is at a crucial moment in which our technologies are advanced enough to have created our own existential risks and secure enough to consider a longterm enough future in which natural risks pose true threats. This moment can be called the Precipice, the name of a 2020 book by Toby Ord.
I enjoyed it, came to it around organizing I’ve done toward longtermism, and another buzzy book on the topic.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Humanity is on ‘The Precipice’: How can we think about lasting a million years more?Late in his fall 2022 book Inciting Joy, essayist and poet Ross Gay confronts criticism he’s received for the writing he’s done on Joy. Most of it amounts to, the author says: how can a black man write about flowers in a time like this?
Earlier on, he gives his answer: Sorrow doesn’t need any help; “I think sorrow’s gonna be just fine.”
It’s an energizing and beautiful collection. I strongly recommend it. I share my notes for future reference below.
Continue reading Inciting JoyOne of the most celebrated music producers alive can’t play an instrument.
Instead he follows and teachers creators to create. Rick Rubin published back in January a charming book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It reads like a book that any creator could pick up and source inspiration. I strongly recommend it.
My notes for future reference are below.
Continue reading Advice on ‘the creative act’ from Rick RubinThe debate about whether private equity provides any real value to the economy comes down to whether they force worthwhile business efficiencies. Or are instead, as it was memorably put in 2010 “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Little question the stance from the 2023 book “These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America” by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial policy analyst Joshua Rosner. It’s thorough and puts into context the people effected by private equity, a murky financial industry that owns businesses that employ something like 12% of all American jobs.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—AmericaIn 2018, before he had become an unexpected avatar of the American culture war, then-56-year-old Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson published 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
It took a conservative tack on discipline and relationships, inspired by his clinical practice, his teaching and his politics. I certainly didn’t agree with all of it back then, but the framework of spinning a specific even prosaic rule-of-thumb into a bit of wider philosophy seemed like fun. Friends and I created our own lists.
In the years since, Peterson became an unexpected lightning rod, and a near cartoonish hero or villain depending on your politics. It was time to go back and read his breakout book. So I did just that. It’s too long and does dip into strange pseudoscience at times. I also think it presents a worldview that looked fresh and productive to many, especially young men.
My notes for future reference below.
Continue reading 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan PetersonTrees communicate in ways we don’t entirely understand. They form a forest society.
That’s the big them from the 2021 book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Book by Suzanne Simard. She spent a career in this work, and was long sidelined as on the fringes of research. But credibility has come her way.
Older trees appear to know which other trees are their direct descendants, to which they send more nutrients too, though they share with all. Her work is all around “Mychorzzal fungal network”
It got deeper than I needed to get on the topic but others might appreciate it. As she writes “This is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”
Framing intelligence as either the extractive corporate technological determinism kind or the pure human uniqueness kind is too limiting an understanding of intelligence. The world has far more kinds.
Artist and technologist James Bridle published in 2022 a compelling book called Ways of Being that reviewed research, themes and experiments in expanding our understanding of what technology can be. I recommend the book for others interested in a wider lens on AI and other advancements.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading What would it mean to build AI like octopuses, fungi or forests?In 2010, political organizer and web entrepreneur Eli Pariser introduced a new term with his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You.
That an increasingly personalized web would create vastly different views of the world has felt more prescient over time. Though I’ve been familiar with Pariser and the book’s premise, I only now read this as a foundational text. It’s still worth the read, even to know where we were a decade ago.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The Filter Bubble
