These are the scattered notes and quotes from 130+ books I’ve read over the years. I’ve always enjoyed taking notes on my reading, whether to track factoids or save interesting quotes for reference. I put them all on this one page to make browsing and searching easier, and in case they might be of use to someone else. Bracketed notes are my own commentary/reflections.

Use the links in the Table of Contents to jump straight to a specific book, and hit the ↑ at the end of each section to jump back up here.

Table of Contents

10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries by Anders Rydell

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs

Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA by Amy Shira Teitel

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller

But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee

Children’s Imagination: Creativity Under Our Noses by Ursula Kolbe

The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham by Ron Shelton

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert W. Merry

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) by Christian Rudder

Death by Living: Life is Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson

The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids by Alexandra Lange

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George H.W. Bush by Jon Meacham

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters by Lynn Maria Laitala

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer by Steven Johnson

Fishing for Fun: And to Wash Your Soul by Herbert Hoover

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

From Jesus to Christianity by L. Michael White

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by William Trotter

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas Reeves

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Becky Kennedy

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty by Brett McCracken

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Herbert Hoover in the White House by Charles Rappleye

Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life by Donald Miller

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black

Index: A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from the Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe by Kathy Peiss

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Smith

Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age by Megan Prelinger

James Madison by Ralph Ketcham

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life by Paul Nagel

John Tyler by Gary May

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry

Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitchel Resnick

Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious by David Dark

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination by Susan Douglas

Love Wins: At the Heart of Life’s Big Questions by Rob Bell

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings by Josh Larsen

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums by A. Kendra Greene

Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination by Robert Jourdain

The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in the Digital Age by Damon Krukowski

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World by N.D. Wilson

Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen Ambrose

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair—A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

Nurtured by Love: The Classical Approach to Talent Education by Shinichi Suzuki

On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert Merry

The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs

Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood

The Purpose-Based Library: Finding Your Path to Survival, Success, and Growth by John J. Huber and Steven V. Potter

Quisling: A Study in Treachery by Hans Fredrik Dahl

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Stephen L. Brusatte

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Rising Strong by Brene Brown

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President by Ari Hoogenboom

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Sex, Freedom, Economy, Community by Wendell Berry

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford

Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church by Philip Yancey

Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America by David Kamp

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

Temp: How American Work, Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See by Seth Godin

This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles Cobb

A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Gordon

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

Truman by David McCullough

Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future by Abby Smith Rumsey

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams

Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Notes from Montana by Rick Bass

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon

A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester

Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents by Robert Strauss

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick

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10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen

• “Everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children. They too take up space, are of no immediate practical use, are of interest to only a few people, and present all kinds of problems. They too must be warehoused efficiently, and brought with as little resistance as possible into the Digital Age.”
• “A developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought.”
• To stifle imagination, “we can encourage laziness by never insisting that young people actually master [things] … Then we can allow what is left of the memory to be filled with trash.”
• “To have a wealth of such poetry in your mind is to be armed against the salesmen and the social controllers. It allows you the chance of independent thought, and independence is by nature unpredictable. We prefer the predictable.”
• “Structure—a “grammar” that orders every part in its appropriate place—is important not only for the physical sciences, but for every kind of intellectual endeavor. It allows us to do more than weave a fancy from bits and pieces of our private experience. We can, by the power structure, weave a whole artistic universe.”
• On Tolkien: “Without the habit of seeking out structure in language, he never would have had the skill to endow his fiction with it.”
• “A fact may not be much, by itself, but it points toward what is true, and even the humblest truth may in time lead a mind to contemplate the beautiful and the good.” ↑

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

• “We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”
• “There is only one way to learn. It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.”
• “The wise men understood that this natural world is only an image and a copy of paradise. The existence of this world is simply a guarantee that there exists a world that is perfect. God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom. That’s what I mean by action.”
• “The desert will give you an understanding of the world; in fact, anything on the face of the earth will do that. You don’t even have to understand the desert: all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation.”
• “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” ↑

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis

• Selected as alternate to Virginia delegation to Continental Congress (Randolph elected to stay).
• His pamphlet “A Summary of Rights…” was meant for Virginia delegation but was too radical and went viral; claimed Parliament had zero authority over colonies (Adams agreed).
• Hated Patrick Henry cause of his emotional oratory style which moved the public and could undo behind-the-scenes work.
• Took extensive notes in readings, copying them but adding own revisions, called it “commonplacing”
• Colonies were at once already at war with Britain and also insisting they wanted to avoid all-out war.
• Summer of 1775 drafted “Declaration of Causes and Necessity” which acted as dress rehearsal for process of compromise in drafting Declaration.
• Most delegates assumed state constitutions and matters were much more important priorities than federal ones.
• Writing Declaration was almost afterthought because of war raging; Jefferson basically rehashed his previous writings and Virginia constitution.
• Resented Adams’ consistently undercutting realism.
• Was a Francophile but denounced European/French decadence.
• Talked up emancipation abroad in spite of his and Virginia’s politics.
• Hated conflict; hence duplicity was just politeness—pleasing many audiences at once.
• Head and heart wired independently; deaf to doubt and irony
• Was overly optimistic in his assessments of pre-revolutionary France.
• Drafted Declaration of Rights for Lafayette for National Assembly in 1789.
• Fantastical “generational sovereignty” repudiated all the Constitution work (new laws and no debts after about 20 years); “the earth belongs to the living” a repudiation of French feudalism
• Truly hated England and everything about it.
• Truly hated Hamilton; different styles and opposite ideologies.
• Began speaking for the Country Party (anti-Federalism) and referred more to “the people” than “the public.”
• His debt came largely from inheritance, wartime inflation, declining productivity of land in his absence, and his own spending.
• Started a nailery to produce income; not very Jeffersonian.
• Monticello under construction for basically his whole life
• Jay Treaty got him back into politics.
• Was still OK with Adams in 1796 when he won.
• Wrote a nice letter to Adams but Madison nixed it; both men chose party over friendship
• Inauguration Day: didn’t like or trust Marshall or Burr.
• Learned more examples of Washington than from Adams.
• A “textual presidency,” mostly invisible but powerful in ideas and text.
• Thought Federalists and Indians would survive by ceasing to be themselves.
• Louisiana Purchase resulted from L’Ouverture revolt and mosquitoes.
• James Callendar = Matt Drudge
• Distinguished between Adams the man and Adams’ politics.
• Each challenged the other’s ideology and beliefs in the letters.
• Kept pushing Spirit of ’76 while Madison did Spirit of ’87 re: Supreme Court’s judicial review.
• Adams and Madison informed Jefferson of needs for liberation and limits; harness the energy released for independence.
• University of Virginia had no president until 1904 per Jefferson’s utopian vision of self-government. ↑

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands

• Jackson’s father Andrew died working their new land before his birth.
• As a boy, deprived of education, supervision, standard of living, self-esteem.
• At 13 fought the British in the Revolutionary War and was taken prisoner after a defiant show, and after seeing British destroy his caretaker’s home.
• His mother died after getting him home from British and trying to extricate his cousins.
• Got inheritance from a Scotch relative, which he parlayed into studying law at 18, though his immaturity still showed.
• Probably eloped with Rachel before her divorce had been finalized.
• Worked as North Carolina’s Western solicitor (in nascent Tennessee).
• Started trading land and slaves in the 1790s.
• Attended Tennessee’s constitutional convention and had a hand in the state’s naming.
• Served as Tennessee’s first and only representative until joining the Senate.
• Cheered on Napoleon and despised John Adams and the Federalists.
• Thomas Jefferson later said Jackson was unfit for presidency due to his passions.
• While state judge, he sought major general of militia, tying in votes with Sevier; Jackson insisted the vote go to the governor, who was a friend.
• Friends with Aaron Burr after duel, though not after secession plot.
• Called as witness in Burr trial; Jefferson pushed hard for conviction, but Marshall got acquittal.
• Got shot in a duel over a horse-racing fracas; survived the shot and killed the guy Dickerson.
• Andrew and Rachel adopted one of the Donelson newborn twin boys as their own.
• Led militia to Natchez but didn’t fight, so let them back on his own dime.
• Got into another fight/duel, with Thomas Hart Benton.
• Became major general of Army and negotiated surrender of Creeks.
• Kept the British at bay from New Orleans and slaughtered them again to end it.
• Suffered constantly from intestinal diseases and chronic pain (bullet).
• Subdued the Seminoles in Florida under questionable Constitutional orders.
• After Florida fracas went back to Tennessee to retire, but duty called him.
• Election decision went to House; hated Henry Clay because he thought there was a bargain for the Secretary of State position in exchange for votes for Adams.
• Rachel died of heart attack two months before inauguration.
• Defended Eaton’s new wife Peggy against attacks from Calhouns and others.
• Jackson’s “second son” Donelson’s wife wouldn’t associate with Peg, so Jackson kept her, and therefore him, from the White House.
• Houston was the Tennessee heir apparent, but his marriage quickly collapsed and he fled.
• John Calhoun secretly authored South Carolina nullification document that caused stirs.
• Clay and Biddle plotted when would be best for Bank’s recharter, vis a vis Jackson’s reelection; they opted to apply before it and risk a veto.
• Strong response to South Carolina’s secession talk; put forth simultaneous bills authorizing force and modifying troublesome tariff when averted fighting.
• Withdrew funds from Bank unto state banks to challenge Biddle and Bank’s stronghold; economy stumbled but recovered.
• Two pistols misfired in assassination attempt by Lawrence.
• Houston returned from self-imposed exile and re-earned Jackson’s support.
• James Polk the Jacksonian eclipsed Martin Van Buren with his stronger pro-annexation of Texas in 1844. ↑

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

• “For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.”
• “Aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
• “I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between us.”
• “A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself.”
• “Every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.”
• “All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I’m stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You’d think that would be sad, but it isn’t. It only makes me grateful.”
• “What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.” ↑

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

• Gigantism among mammals = cold. Warmth produces smaller bodies that expel heat, while cold encourages layers and fat
• Wisconsin Ice Age ended ~10,000 years ago, lasted ~100,000 years
• North and South America had no humans or early tools: too far from source
• 48,000 years ago humans reached supercontinent Sahul: Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea
• “We have all but forgotten how to inhabit this kind of fear. We gave up spears and skins and the weather on us day and night for cup holders and cell phones and doors that close behind us. What, I wonder, was lost?”
• First priority in Paleolithic minds: don’t get eaten
• Increased genetic presence of dopamine receptor D4 correlated with restless behavior and novelty-seeking: genetic study of prehistoric people found it in 32% in North America, 42% in Central, 69% in South
• Pleistocene human brains 5% larger: domestic animals have smaller brains as result of atrophied aggression
• “We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to stand for the best view? The love for the panorama comes from memory, the earliest form of cartography, a sense of location. Little feels better than knowing where you are, and having a reason to be there.”
• Earliest known shaman from ~12,000 years ago: burned with animals parts
• North and South America separate until 3 million years ago
• Clovis name from town in New Mexico where first Ice Age mammoth kill site found with tools; much more abundant in Florida or Maryland
• on Clovis being named after random town: “Science is useful, it fills in the blanks with precision, but history is ultimately more about stories and the unfolding of human whims.”
• “Am I sentimental to hold on to our familiar age? Who is not in love with these blue skies pillared with clouds, and the many species around us, the way more oxygen comes out of the ocean than methane, the deep breathing of the forests and grasslands? I do not want this party to end, yet another one seems to be starting, pushed onstage with zeal.” ↑

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

• “Success is the product of daily habits—not once in a lifetime transformations.”
• “You get what you repeat.”
• Valley of Disappointment at early or middle stage, frustration at ineffective change
• Plateau of Latent Potential: tectonic pressure, heating an ice cube from 25-31 degrees
• The work isn’t being wasted; it’s being stored
• Systems, not goals; goal is direction but systems are progress; symptom vs causes
• “Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.”
• Identity-based habits start from identity → processes → outcomes, not other way
• “True behavior change is identity change.”
• Identity comes from Latin repeatedly+being
• “Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity.”
• 1. Decide the type of person you want to be. 2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
• Ask yourself “What would a healthy/smart/talented person do?”
• Point-and-call method for noticing unconscious behavior
• No good or bad habit, just effective ones; all habits serve us somehow, which is why we repeat them (smoking)
• Implementation intention: plan you make beforehand about when and where to act (“When X arises, I will perform Y”; “I will [Behavior] at [Time] in [Location]”)
• Diderot effect: one purchases leads to another
• Habit stacking: adding new habit to current one (“After [current habit], I will [new habit]”)
• Design environment to avoid or encounter cues
• “One space, one use”: different contexts and environments for specific habits
• Bad habits are autocatalytic: watching TV makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more TV because you’re too tired
• “Self-control is a short-term strategy”
• “It is the anticipation of reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.”
• Temptation bundling: link an action you want to do with action you need to do
• We imitate the habits of 1. the close 2. the many 3. the powerful
• Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior
• “A craving is the sense that something is missing”
• Motivation ritual: do something you enjoy before a difficult habit
• Shift and repurpose brain to view hard habits as positive opportunities
• Motion ≠ action
• Planning ≠ practice
• We slip into motion to avoid failure and judgment
• Repetition physically changes the brain depending on the skill
• Prime your environment for future use: proactive laziness
• Reduce friction with good habits, increase it with bad
• Good habits cost you in the present but benefit you in the future (bad habits vice versa)
• Tie good habit to immediate reward to turn instant gratification to your advantage
• Habit stacking + habit tracking (“After [current habit], I will track [new habit]”)
• Never miss a habit twice: something > nothing
• It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss habits; not all-or-nothing
• Measurement shouldn’t be target (“nonscale victories”)
• Pick habit/interest that already suits you: fun to you but work to others, achieve flow state, greater returns than average
• Combine interests to specialize and create your own expertise
• “Just manageable difficulty”; 4% outside your abilities
• You have to fall in love with boredom (love the process) ↑

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson

• Shift of manufacturing from house to shop or factory: altered function of families from production to consumption; took men out of homes (created gender “spheres”); made families more child- and love-centered; opened doors for women through teaching, writing, etc.
• Mexican War was mainly Democratic doctrine (as was Manifest Destiny); Whigs didn’t want to show example by force
• Wilmot Proviso about no slavery in new Mexico, annexation first step leading to the conflict
• Southern justifications for slavery: civilized African savages, provided security poor Europeans didn’t have, elevated white labor, eliminated class conflict, established upper class for whites
• Free Soil Party of 1848 a coalition of anti-slavery Democrats and Conscience Whigs
• Gold rush in California brought lots of people, helping to spark sectional crisis with California and slavery
• Wilmot Proviso wouldn’t work as many wanted; California and New Mexico admitted as full and free states
• Pres. Taylor once thought the Yankees the aggressors, but soon saw the southerners were “intolerant and revolutionary”
• By 1850, Calhoun and other southerners already saw very little hope for avoiding disunion
• Clay’s 1850 proposal – First pair: admit CA as state and organize remainder of Mexican cession without restriction on slavery. Second pair: settled Texas-NM boundary dispute and assumed Texas’ debts from time as independent republic. Third pair: abolish slave trade in D.C. but guaranteed slavery. Fourth pair: denied congressional power over slave trade and called for stronger fugitive slave laws (compromise)
• Compromise of 1850 averted crisis but only postponed trauma
• Calhoun’s case: equilibrium had been destroyed. North had grown faster in population, wealth, power. Discriminatory laws (NW Ordinance and Compromise of 1820) had favored the North (yet Calhoun had supported them).
• Webster’s case: bury the hatchet. Nature would keep slavery out of New Mexico. Warned southerners disunion just couldn’t happen
• Seward’s case: Condemned the compromise, saying slavery was unjust and backward. Appealed to Higher Law in God over Constitution.
• Taylor dies in 1850 and Fillmore takes over and pushes through the Compromise in pieces, with help from Stephen Douglas; Most measures passed on sectional not party lines, which showed weight of slavery
• Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 – The only part of Compromise favored by the South. During 1850s, 332 slaves returned and only 11 freed. Northern resistance fueled southern resentment
• South wanted U.S. to purchase Cuba to add another slave state but it didn’t work because of the 1848 Whig victories; Two different militia forces tried invading Cuba but failed
• Gadsden Purchase initially was $50 million for 250,000 square miles of land by Santa Anna only gave up 46,000 for $15 million
• William Walker eventually declared himself president of Nicaragua, losing support from Pierce, so he legalized slavery in a bid for Southern support
• Navy stopped him from doing it again, angering South. On his fourth try, he was caught and hanged in Honduras
• 1852 election – Pierce, dark horse candidate, was the only one the South could agree on. He defended Fugitive Slave Law and opened rest of Louisiana Purchase north of 36”30’ to slavery
• Kansas-Nebraska Act eventually finished off Whigs and birthed Republicans; South in no hurry to settle it because it was north of 36”30’
• Northerners feared Dred Scott case as a Pandora’s Box that would allow slavery to spread into free states; Taney used it to justify slavery as a whole and defend it
• Difference of social systems: North’s allowed for upward mobility and free labor while South’s didn’t; South survived Panic of 1857 with King Cotton but over-boasted
• 1860 election – Seward perceived as too radical and came from New York machine; Lincoln had fewest weaknesses and most strengths; he could win in lower North states; Old Whigs emerged in Constitutional Union party, unhappy with Lincoln but wasn’t taken seriously because it didn’t address slavery
• Secession happened quickly because it was state by state; earlier attempts at consensus had led to caution and delay
• “Cooperationists” wanted unity before secession but followed anyway, “Ultimatumists” wanted to send demands to Lincoln, but didn’t have support
• Debate whether secession and/or revolution were Constitutional; the first was debatable, the latter not so
• Secessionists rallied non-slaveholders with white supremacy arguments (the slaves will take over everything if we don’t fight, etc.)
• Secession fit model of “preemptive counterrevolution,” where they exaggerate magnitude of threat and strike first
• Fear of domino effect; talk of NYC secession
• States didn’t exist outside of union, no state sovereignty wasn’t more powerful than federal; Couldn’t secede through laws, only through revolution
• South didn’t have just cause; event that triggered it was legal election of president
• Rather than immediate coercion, cooperation, or departing, the Union decided for “watchful waiting” to wait things out. Lincoln saw action as constitutional, while South saw it as act of war on foreign country
• Crittenden Compromise gave South basically everything they wanted in repeal-proof constitutional amendments; Lincoln saw it as surrender to those who had lost election, and foresaw future like “compromises” in favor of bullying South
• Confederate Constitution omitted the general welfare clause and “a more perfect Union”, forbade government aid for internal improvements
• Jefferson Davis elected for his abilities and credentials; Alex Stephens, as a one-time Whig, to project moderate image
• Major Anderson at Fort Sumter was a Southern sympathizer, but his duty was ultimately to flag and country
• Seward told South independently that Sumter would be evacuated; wanted to be “premier” of Lincoln administration
• Soldiers tried to burn Harpers Ferry and other armories before Confederacy took over but were salvaged
• Lee was antislavery, learned of promotion to Union commander the day Virginia seceded
• Maryland remained neutral due to its dual loyalties but Lincoln had many arrested for subversion; Taney denied Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, but Lincoln ignored him
• Andrew Johnson was only U.S. senator from seceding state who remained loyal to the Union
• Lee and Sherman were sidelined early in the war due to initial failures
• Had all eight border states seceded, South would have won, vice versa for North; about half of all Confederate soldiers came from there; 15% of Union troops
• Lincoln saw three phases of experimental government: establishment, administration, and (now) maintenance against internal foe
• Key point: South saw war as defense against invasion, North saw it as defense against rebellion
• Slavery was a plaguing contradiction; Both sides shoved slavery under the rug initially to garner more war support
• Non-slaveholding whites fought for South in spite of slavery; made defining aims to foreign governments difficult
• James Bulloch built up CSA navy via ships from Britain
• “Privateering” Southern ships were captured and treated as pirates; Lincoln backed down because of blockade that recognized conflict as war rather than domestic thing; “pirates” also became POWs
• Davis threatened to kill a Northern POW for every Southerner hanged for piracy
• Davis’ martial expertise helped speed South’s mobilization in 1861
• Governors hoarded muskets seized from federal arsenals to the detriment of frontline soldiers
• War secretary Cameron had lots of contracts through home state of Pennsylvania; soon shipped to Russia as foreign minister
• U.S. war department overcomes initial stumbling and becomes very efficient at provision and production; Quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs unsung hero of War Dept.
• Davis wanted to pursue strategy of attrition, but political pressure forced him to spread defenses; Politicians wanted to protect every inch of Confederacy
• Bull Run: initial Union surge countered by Southern push. Both armies disorganized afterward; controversy over not taking D.C. afterward. Result led to cockiness in South and determination in North, plus more troops. Also gave South esprit de corps for further victories but maimed North with inferiority complex (McClellan)
• After Bull Run, abolitionists spoke up about slavery question
• Frederick Douglass: cannot fight slaveholders without fighting slavery
• Arguments for emancipation as war aim changed from moral to martial: take away slaves to cripple South’s machine
• South wasn’t protected by fugitive slave law because they claimed they weren’t in Union
• Contraband law allowed slaves to be taken by Union; some border-state criticism
• Lincoln wouldn’t allow them to be free simply by proclamation
• Cameron published report asking for slave soldiers, gets fired; Lincoln distances himself from radical Republican wing
• George McClellan: boy wonder. Never had experience despair of defeat or humiliation of failure, nor adversity nor humility; Napoleonic self-image. Democrat with lots of Southern friends (General Johnston).
• Davis ranked Johnston and Beauregard lower than Lee, which insulted vet and winner Johnston
• Davis wouldn’t forgive Johnston’s angry reaction; contrast with Lincoln
• Union navy acquired seaports in North and South Carolina as bases for fleets; Started building ironclads three months later than South and finished two weeks before
• Monitor and Merrimack (Virginia) fought to a draw
• Blockade runners used Nassau, Bermuda, Havana as bases
• Blockade failed to stop most ships, but did help stem military transports and overall number of ships and supplies into South
• Britain and France debated intervening for cotton’s sake, but didn’t want to get involved and resented South’s economic blackmail; Britain didn’t want blockade-breaking to boomerang on them in a future war
• Backfired on South too because Europe used reserve cotton instead and open market led to development in Egypt and India; other industries too. Eventually kept Britain neutral and they benefited from Northern crops, wool, etc.
• By declaring neutrality, Britain automatically recognized CSA. Seward/Lincoln told C.F. Adams to break ties with Britain if they officially recognized CSA. Adams was cool about it
• New CSA ministers arrested off British ship; geared up war. Crisis averted by letting CSA ministers go and acknowledging they’d been captured with instruction
• Halleck and Buell more administrative than Grant, bickered out West while Grant wanted to act; didn’t complain or quarrel
• Grant learned enemy was just as afraid of him as he of them
• Probably didn’t drink much during the war (rumors probably from jealous gossipers)
• Alcoholism a moral weakness at the time, gave Grant a quiet humility other generals didn’t have. Had no reputation to protect, so he could risk failure and act boldly
• CSA enacted first conscription law in U.S. history in January 1862. Could buy a substitute, but practice was abused by poor men who sold themselves repeatedly and deserted.
• Davis declared martial law in Richmond, suspended habeas corpus
• Illustrated paradox: need for Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends
• Seward had been in charge of internal security; by February 1862 the harsh methods of crackdown were eased and Stanton entered
• During first year, CSA economy funded 75% by printed money, almost 25% by bonds, less than 2% on taxes
• Finances primarily by paper dollars that were immediately depreciated. States, counties, cities, businesses printed their own money; counterfeit often better
• CSA coming into being so quickly both good and bad. On one hand, it was ready to fight and unified. On the other, it had no time to develop self-sufficient economy or government. Blockade, invasion, paper money made agrarian economy unbalanced with shortages and inflation.
• Economy in North floundering after Panic of 1857; dependent on loans and tariffs
• Instituted first federal income tax in August 1861, which exempted most lower-income people (tariff hit them more)
• New tax laws worked but forever changed national economy
• Missouri had its own civil war, with CSA government in exile
• Kentucky neutral at first, became shipping lane to Tennessee; Lincoln didn’t blockade out of respect for pro-Union forces and his own history. Also had provisional government accepted by CSA
• Habeas corpus arrested changed from pro-Confederate Northerners to northern Democrats throughout the war
• Emancipation (and Proclamation) was Lincoln’s means to victory, not yet an end itself in 1862. Advocated colonization in 1862 because it was politically expedient (elections)
• Distrust between Britain and France helped delay diplomatic recognition of CSA; suspicious of each other’s designs. Antietam also pulled British back from brink of recognition
• With Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln acted under war powers to seize enemy resources; to declare all slaves free would have been unconstitutional.
• Use of black regiments turned war from preservation of Union to full-on revolution to overthrow old older
• Burnside arrested former representative Vallandigham for treason on shady grounds; Lincoln ultimately banished him. Vallandigham negotiates with Southerners while in exile
• Food shortages in South due to drought, breakdown in transportation, and Union conquest of prime agricultural regions
• Success of Chancellorsville bread overconfidence in the Rebs and in Lee, who would overextend them at Gettysburg
• Party politics helped in North as it channeled political activity into helpful action; Lack of it in South gave Davis few options for mobilizing party patronage or disciplining the other politicians
• Lincoln’s “as little change as possible” concerning readmission equitable to McClellan’s “do as little damage as possible” strategy on battlefield
• Lincoln almost surrendered abolition as a peace term in the summer of 1864, but thought against it
• Democrats’ 1864 platform emphasized peace over union and probably would’ve won if not for Atlanta
• Soldiers didn’t dislike McClellan as much as his company (Vallandigham) and the idea of peace without victory
• Lincoln received about the same percentage vote in 1860 and 1864
• War redistributed wealth greatly (generally) from South to North; 1860s least productive economic growth decade until 1930s
• February 1865: secret conference between Seward and Lincoln and Confederate commissioners to iron out peace deal. CSA suggested armistice and convention to states but Lincoln demanded full surrender
• Sherman considered his march through South Carolina more important than the one through Georgia
• CSA sent an envoy to Europe in early 1865 to offer abolition for recognition; Britain refused for want of CSA military successes
• Lincoln had three-fourths Republican majority in Congress after 1864 election
• Seward lobbied lame-duck Democrats to vote for Thirteenth Amendment; it barely passed
• Day after ratification, Chief Justice Chase swore in first black lawyer to practice before Court
• Sherman issued Special Order to give captured slaveholder lands to freedmen for settlement
• Lincoln tagged along with Grant’s army as they took Richmond and sat in Davis’ recently vacated chair
• Owner of Appomattox surrender home previously lived in Manassas where the war had begun
• Reasons for CSA defeat: internal conflict mostly; states’ rights conflict between governments and Richmond, opposition to necessary measures (conscription, etc.), lukewarm support of CSA by Whigs and Unionists
• Changes to country because of Civil War: taxation, IRS, national banking, paper currency, draft, expanded federal jurisdiction, first 11 amendments limited government while next few expanded it; first social welfare system (Freedman’s Bureau)
• [Before war, the North was the exception, pushing toward a radical future most of the world did not share. After the war, the tide turned the other way. The South, by seceding, launched a pre-emptive counterrevolution against what they saw as a Northern affront to the America that the Founders had made. But since the North won, it was the South that would become the Other of the two, and less dominant in politics and business thereafter.] ↑

Bewilderment by Richard Powers 

• “Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.”
• “A child’s question was the start of all things.”
• “From Alpha-beams to the Omega Point, I lived in a parallel place that spawned scenarios of such infinite variety that they made a laughingstock of the little parochial rock in the galactic sticks where I lived. Nothing could hurt me so long as consensual reality was just a tiny atoll in an ocean without shores.” (Earth)
• “Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.”
• “They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.”
• “That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.”
• “Fascination had made him invincible.”
• “Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.”
• “Robbie was right: we needed universal mandatory courses of neural feedback training, like passing the Constitution test or getting a driver’s license. The template animal could be a dog or a cat or a bear or even one of my son’s beloved birds. Anything that could make us feel what it was like to not be us.”
• “If some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there.” ↑

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

• (on short assignments): “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”
• “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.”
• “Perfectionism means you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.”
• “Some of us tend to think that what we do and say and decide and write are cosmically important things. But they’re not. If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple.”
• “It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right.”
• “Unacknowledged truth saps your energy and keeps you and your characters wired and delusional. But when you open the closet door and let what was inside out, you can get a rush of liberation and even joy.”
• “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.” (Cool Runnings)
• Key points: butt in chair, short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frame, tell the truth, give it all. ↑

Blankets by Craig Thompson

• “Sometimes, upon waking, the residual dream can be more appealing than reality, and one is reluctant to give it up. For a while, you feel like a ghost—not fully materialized, and unable to manipulate your surroundings. Or else, it is the dream that haunts you. You wait with the promise of the next dream. But the act of waking is dependent on remembering. We use ritual as a mnemonic device, holiday as a ritual with meaning, and the seasons as increments of measurement.”
• “How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement, no matter how temporary.” ↑

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

• Serturner derived morphine from thickened sap of opium poppies in 1805
• Merck began selling in 1827, and after injections invented in 1850 was used in Civil War
• Drinks containing morphine and cocaine available at drugstores
• Hoffman, chemist at Bayer Company, synthesized Aspirin from willow bark and heroin, a derivative of morphine
• With small operations and low overhead, business boomed especially in Germany, with high stock of engineers, chemists, and education system
• Germany lost colonial sources of stimulants after Versailles, so had to produce synthetic ones and soon became global leader
• The Nazis “hated drugs because they wanted to be a drug themselves”; stigmatized and severely punished drug use after 1933
• Hitler mythologized as anti-drug teetotaler without personal needs
• Strict anti-drug measures used to deepen surveillance state and prevent addicts from marrying so as not to reproduce faulty genes
• Jews depicted as pathogen or disease poisoning the Reich needing to be exterminated
• Celebrity doctor Morell pioneered use of vitamins mixed with stimulants; Hitler made him personal physician
• Inspired by US’s amphetamine Benzedrine at Berlin Olympic games, pharmacist Hauschild synthesized new methamphetamine Pervitin, like adrenalin but gentler and longer lasting
• Meth’s long lasting effects kill nerve cells, and once it runs out the hormones take weeks to resupply, leading to lack of drive and joylessness
• Pervitin became widely used, assumed safe; marketed as slimming agent because it curbed appetite (meth chocolates: “Hildebrand chocolates always delight”)
• Appeasement wouldn’t work because Hitler, a morphine addict, always needed more
• Morell revived Czech president Emil Hacha, who had a heart attack before signing papers of capitulation, so he could sign them
• According to studies Pervitin kept people from sleeping but didn’t make them cleverer, so it was considered ideal for soldiers
• Blitzkrieg in France fueled by meth, including Rommel; French and British unprepared for constant attack
• Propagated idea that Germans were superior beings reinforced by meth’s symptom of arrogance
• Hitler’s inferiority complex made him distrust success of smarter generals
• Luftwaffe’s Göring a morphine addict and felt victory shouldn’t be left to army, so convinced Hitler to halt Dunkirk advance
• “Gröfaz” German soldiers’ derogatory acronym for Nazi propaganda’s term for Hitler as “greatest commander of all time”
• Morell created new vitamin combo Vitamultin, which had unremarkable elements but was marketed solely to Hitler and generals; when Luftwaffe medical chief rejected them Morell got Goring to fire him
• Word about Pervitin spread in late 1940 and Reich health fuhrer Conti fought to have it eradicated under Reich opium law, but war needs made it essential
• Pervitin of no use on Russian front, which was attritional
• Hitler had “severed relations with geopolitical reality” by declaring war with US; out of touch in bunker
• Mid-1943 started taking Eukodal (oxycodone), twice as powerful as morphine, created euphoric state higher than heroin
• Hitler was doped up for Valkyrie explosion so didn’t have pain despite busted eardrums and splinters
• Giesing, ear nose throat specialist summoned after Valkyrie in July 1944, prescribed cocaine, which “erases self-doubt and encourages megalomania”
• Hitler consented to full-body examination to get more cocaine from reluctant Giesing
• Erected “pharmacological barricade” around himself, within “deluded totalitarian system”
• “His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions. Hitler was always the master of his sense, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and a flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane.”
• Used death camp prisoners to test new endurance pills and cocaine-spiked gum, kept awake and marching
• Started running out of supplies and withdrawing in early 1945 ↑

The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries by Anders Rydell

• Free corps literature emerged as critics of Weimar modernism; vented bitterness of Versailles and idealized war, manliness
• Romanticization of violence, national honor, and revulsion at modern world incorporated into Nazi ideology
• Remarque’s All Quiet punctured combat-inspired romanticism and thus was burned
• So called “Legend of the Dagger Thrust” implicated home-front communists, Democrats, Jews, etc in losing WWI rather than soldiers
• Thomas Mann, initially a promoter of a nationalistic state Third Reich, saw violence in early 1920s
• Libraries had become extremely popular since the First World War due to depression and inflation in Germany during the interwar years
• “Wolfgang Herrmann, a librarian who had involved himself with right-wing extremist student groups as early as the 1920s, had been working for several years on a list of literature ‘worthy of being burned.’ The first draft only listed 12 names, but this was soon expanded to 131 writers, subdivided into various categories.”
• “The image of burning books has been altogether too tempting, too effective, and too symbolic not to be used and applied in the writing of history. But the burning of books became so powerful a metaphor for cultural annihilation that it overshadowed another more unpleasant narrative, namely how the Nazis did a great deal more than simply destroy books—they were also driven by a fanatical obsession to collect them.”
• “[The SS and Himmler’s] war was not only fought by means of arrests, executions, and concentration camps. It is certainly no coincidence that Heinrich Himmler saw his organization as a National Socialist equivalent to the Jesuit order, which, after the spread of Protestantism in the 1500s, functioned as the spearhead of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. According to Himmler’s view of the world, the SS would in the same way form a bastion against the enemies of Nazi ideology.”
• “There is a tendency to view the Nazis as unhinged destroyers of knowledge. It is also true that many libraries and archives were lost while under the control of the regime, either through systematic destruction or indirectly as a consequence of war. Despite this, a question that needs to be asked in the shadow of Himmler’s library is the following: What is more frightening, a totalitarian regime’s destruction of knowledge or its hankering for it?” ↑

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan

• Johnny Appleseed apples were used more for hard cider.
• Apple seeds contain a small amount of cyanide as defense, and each one is genetically different
• Apples were main source of sweetness for Americans.
• The more perfect the symmetry in a flower (or human), the healthier and sweeter it will be.
• The Dutch had a brief tulip craze in the 1600s similar to the Internet bubble; faded quickly.
• Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus represent the opposing yet attracting nature of tulip; order versus chaos.
• The federal crackdown on marijuana pushed the growers indoors, which helped unlock the drug’s potential.
• Plato and other Enlightened people were possible high when they wrote about their stuff?
• Cannabis received an “otherness” stigma that caused the ill will, which medicine slowly is trying to “pharmaceuticalize”
• His theory: the tree in Eden represented nature’s real power over humans that God acknowledged but ruled over.
• Potatoes brought to Europe from the New World and caught on among the Irish poor because of its easiness and salubrity.
• Potato threatened human independence from nature.
• Shift to biotech may lead to more bio rather than chemical pollution. ↑

BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman

• “Patriarchy would, without a doubt, bring significant unearned privilege to my sons and their peers throughout their lives, but increasingly I was also realizing that this would come at a high cost. It all seemed like some kind of soul-compromising bargain from a Greek myth. Boys and men automatically receive substantial material life advantages by virtue of their maleness, but at the cost of their morality, their freedom to access the full range of human feeling and connection.”
• “The last thing I wanted was to align myself emotionally with the men’s rights activists, the right-wing “boys are the real victims,” #HimToo apologists. Was there a way to square this and offer real empathy to boys, give them a more expansive story about their own possibilities, without betraying any feminist principles?”
• “We want to give our sons a more inspirational narrative about their own lives and possibilities: To thrive and feel pride, not shame, in their boyhood. To find their tribe and their identity. We want to raise them to understand and acknowledge their many, many advantages and privileges as young males and to learn to navigate those with awareness and compassion. We want to hold our boys accountable but not make them feel so defensive that they get angry or depressed. And I especially want to do all this with both my feminist principles and my mental health intact.”
• “The most consistent findings are not just that boys are more aggressive or rambunctious or anything else particularly “boyish.” They are also—by almost every measure-more sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.”
• “The realities of male vulnerability mean that the more nature there is in the mix, the more nurture boys actually need. Because of their innate fragility, boys need more parenting than girls, not less. They need more opportunities to build relationships and engage with their emotions than girls do. In their early years, boys also need more care from responsive caregivers, and they need it for longer. Sadly, however, research shows clearly that, on all of these counts, they actually get significantly less.”
• “At a gut level, it’s hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability, and a big ask for many women to muster much sympathy for boys and men. Centering harm to men seems to minimize the countless social obstacles and injustices that women and girls have always faced. It’s tempting to be punitive rather than sympathetic, to try to somehow even the score and hold young boys accountable for the sins of their fathers, But operating from a place of punishment or shame or lack of empathy for boys is counterproductive in creating empathetic well-adjusted men. For boys, vulnerability and privilege coexist in a complex rela-tionship, Masculine norms and expectations confer countless advantages, but they also bring significant harm. The two come together in male socialization to create a contradictory and strangely destructive combination of indulgence and neglect.”
• “While girls are admired for engaging in traditionally male pursuits, for a boy or man to enjoy anything coded as feminine is still somehow shameful, and the same applies to relationship-driven stories.”
• “Stories matter. They are our emotional and social blueprints, what we come to expect of ourselves and others and how we engage with our lives. And through the stories they are told, boys and girls are tracked into two subtly but significantly different value systems: one that centers relationships, emotions, and complex social dynamics; and another that largely ignores them, depicting human interaction as essentially oppositional and competitive.”
• “Emotional labor can be taxing, for sure, but it is also one of the fundamentals of human intimacy. Without it, boys are missing out on internalizing concepts and learning skills that are crucial to a full, connected, psychologically healthy life. Our failure to teach boys these skills and give them role models for a more intimate and emotionally focused kind of friendship has left many of them struggling to form the kinds of deep and supportive connections they need and crave.”
• “With their lack of emotional intensity and fervor, I find my sons’ friendships alien. More than anything, this fundamentally different approach to human intimacy is at the heart of any grief I feel about not having a daughter. I feel worried for my sons, and at some level I fear that they are missing out on the best thing in life. And I feel the loss for myself, a sadness that I won’t get to witness that particular joy unfold for my own children.”
• “Relational skills are hugely complex. If a marketing team was trying to brand them for men in a way that would remove the trivializing stigma of femininity, they would call the skill set something along the lines of “complex live-action social data processing,” or “military-grade emotional surveillance.” It’s not just about sharing your feelings. Strong relationships involve an intricate moment-to-moment balancing of our own needs versus another person’s. We all have a built-in capacity for this, but it’s also something that can be learned and nurtured.”
• “In addition to being more open about their own emotions, boys also need to learn how to listen to other people’s: to take an interest in others’ lives and experiences, ask the right questions, judge the right moment for a conversation, and figure out how to respond appropriately to someone else’s vulnerability. Just telling boys and men to be more vulnerable without modeling and teaching all the other complex skills of social and emotional give-and-take isn’t enough, and could easily just end up generating more emotional labor for the women in their lives.”
• “The stories we hear and tell help us determine what is possible for us, how we should be showing up in the world. And in the vast majority of situations we are likely to encounter in the course of a lifetime, there is no hero and no villain, no death and no glory, but just a bunch of needy humans kvetching over who said what. Learning to navigate that with grace and skill is the beating heart of human connection.”
• “How much we are all prepared to admit, even to ourselves, depends heavily on who we are talking to. It makes me realize again just how much of the nature-nurture debate comes down to politicized tribalism, and how little room it leaves for nuance.”
• “The stories we tell boys about what it means to be a man—that life is a series of battles to fight, that relationships are about competing rather than cooperating, that they must be stoic and tough and not share their emotions or validate other people’s—all work against building strong relationships. Masculine norms don’t help boys become healthy adults. They stand in the way.”
• “Relationships with friends, family, and community are the best inoculation for boys against the pull of the misogynistic influencers online. The more connected and loved boys feel, the more community they have in their own lives, and the more empathy they feel from their loved ones, the less need they have to search for belonging in these spaces.”
• Re: hero’s journey – “Boys are socialized to see themselves as the hero on his journey and the main character in any story, and to see everyone else, and especially women, as minor characters or narrative foils. As such, boys subtly absorb the idea that women and girls are not quite actual people with their own true agency or interiority, but rather abstractions that exist to further a man’s narrative.”
• “The hero’s story creates impossibly punishing expectations for boys of what a man should be: physically invulnerable, emotionally bulletproof, and ideally, superhuman. Actual boys and men, with human flaws and vulnerabilities, will always fall short. Failure is built into the project.”
• Greek concept of kleos, a kind of fame and glory and eternal renown – “With all this in the background, it makes sense that men might avoid the boring tasks of adulthood. If you are shooting for eternal renown, doing the laundry or studying for your social studies test might well feel a little beneath you. The model of quiet diligence and cooperation that girls are encouraged to emulate can easily read as emasculating when compared to the glorious feats of the hero.”
• “Boys don’t need more masculinity, but freedom from that paradigm; they need permission to be fully human without the pressure to conform to oppressive masculine norms.”
• For girl academic performance, emphasis is on social factors instead of biology, but it’s the reverse for boys 
• Main academic gap between boys and girls now is reading, which “might be driven as much by the social messages we give boys, that reading is a feminized activity.”
• UCLA gender studies professor Juliet Williams: “If you teach boys that activity and aggression are good and passivity and quietness are bad, they’re not gonna read. And a student who doesn’t read is not going to be a good student.”
• Incel online communities ironically much more emotionally open than other male spaces due to their inability to participate in systems of masculinity 
• Gender theory holds masculinity as a hierarchy, with high-status men at top, then less powerful and more effeminate men below, and women at bottom; incels demeaning women then makes sense within that context
• “Men have systemic power, without a doubt, but that framework is perhaps of limited use when trying to understand, say, the issues of a traumatized young man barely out of adolescence with no financial or social capital and serious mental health issues. For someone such as James, it can start to feel as though male emotions get dismissed from both sides. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to man up, there is a voice from the left telling him that to voice his problems is to take emotional airtime away from a woman, whose suffering is more valid. These are not morally equivalent, of course, but in practice the impact can be similar. It’s not hard to see why incel forums and manosphere spaces can start to feel like the only place that a troubled young man might find a sympathetic ear, or a sense of belonging or empathy.”
• “The same people who urge men to be more emotionally expressive are often also the ones who take a principled stand against hearing how men actually feel.”
• “In the post-#MeToo era, at some level the only message about sex that seems reasonable to give to boys is one of harm reduction. The wider cultural narrative around male desire is so steeped in a history of wrongdoing that it can easily end up casting boys as little more than predators-in-waiting. In this story, the best we can hope for from boys’ emerging sexuality is to minimize the damage it is likely to cause. Of course we need to educate boys about consent, but I wonder what this is doing to boys psychologically, to have their own sexuality and desires framed from the outset as inherently harmful.”
• “With the looming threat of cancel culture on the one hand, and the lingering pressure to be dominant and masculine on the other, boys are now caught between two contradictory sets of expectations, which at times can seem impossible to reconcile.”
• “Boys are working within two conflicting systems: one that demands they be sensitive, cautious, and emotionally nuanced, while the other encourages them to be domineering, emotionally stunted, and borderline aggressive. And the consequences of failure can be severe in both systems. Stray too far in one direction, and you are a pussy. Stray too far in the other, and you might be canceled.”
• Teenagers having significantly less sex than previous generations; for boys, biggest factors are fear of cancel culture/sexual assault and ease of porn use 
• “As they grow up, masculine norms harm boys in other ways, telling them to value competing over relating, winning over connecting, fighting over cooperating. Our ideals for masculinity teach boys that vulnerability is humiliating, that they need to be physically and emotionally untouchable. Shame is built into the foundations; the expectations are by definition impossible to meet, leaving men and boys living with the constant prospect of humiliation and failure.”
• “Tweaks such as “healthy masculinity” or “aspirational masculinity” are not really challenging the basic idea that a boy needs to be masculine in order to be seen as worthy. Instead, they subtly reinforce the idea that masculinity itself is non-negotiable. I would rather see a world in which “aspirational masculinity” rings as sexist and regressive as “aspirational femininity.”
• “We have tended to frame “Smash the patriarchy!” as a punitive measure, a loss for men and boys, rather than a gain. But really, they only stand to benefit from throwing off these debilitating norms and pressures. This is not about losing power but about gaining freedom and connection, an opportunity to become more fully human. This is a hopeful project for all genders, and we should sell it as such.”
• “Just as we aim to do with girls, we should try to resist biological essentialism and limiting language about boys, such as “Boys will be boys”; “Boys can’t sit still”; “Boys are reluctant readers”; and “Boys are like dogs.” These stories don’t just normalize bad behavior and perpetuate low expectations; they limit boys’ horizons and sense of self. For too long we have seen the biological differences that do exist between young boys and girls as evidence that as parents there is nothing we can do. But instead, we should be seeing these differences as a reason to do more. We need to give boys a more expansive, less suffocating story about their own possibilities and place in the world.”
• “Personhood lives in the particulars.” ↑

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs

• Temporal bandwidth – the width of your present 
• “I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.”
• “Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not. It stands in the middle, partially completed but not over, poised between radical otherness and utter likeness.”
• Reading old books for the accumulation of personal density 
• “The future can not reach us because *we* are the ones who must imagine it.”
• “Something terrible links, without erasing the differences between, the heights of ancient Troy and the cold beaches of Normandy. That linkage illuminates, reveals, the strange continuities of history, but only by keeping otherness before us as well.”
• “Isn’t this strange mixture of vices and virtues, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight, simply the human condition?”
• Informational triage – our cognitive limitations mean we can’t think about or form beliefs about everything; can’t judge ancestors 
• John Dewey: “It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners for minors and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.”
• Positive selection vs. negative selection
• “If it is foolish to think that we can carry with us all the good things from the past—from our personal past or that of our culture—while leaving behind all the unwanted baggage, it is a counsel of despair and, I think, another kind of foolishness to think that if we leave behind the errors and miseries of the past, we must also leave behind everything that gave the world its savor.”
• Chesterton: “The mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.“
• Old books as a friend: want addition of development or pushback, not just agreement
• John Dewey’s definition of education: “Reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.”
• “Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.“
• Genesis story of Jacob wrestling with figure: “I will not let you go until you bless me”
• Temporal bandwidth to increase personal density 
• Distance and difference
• The Big Here and Long Now—how distance in time and space don’t stop people from being affected by others’ work
• Frederick Douglass’ “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” speech a model of “negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight”
• Francis Spufford: “You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”
• Need for a disposition to love 
• “What I counsel is to give the dead the blood of our attention for our own sake, to enrich and strengthen our identities, to make ourselves more solid and less tenuous—and then… to use the solidity we have gained to help us make meaningful promises to the future.”
• “We cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighbors—and then, ultimately, as kin.”
• “The argument that I have made here for the cultivation of personal density is also an argument for serving as links in the living chain that extends into the distant past and also into the distant future. It is an argument for a genealogy of love.” ↑

Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA by Amy Shira Teitel

• Loophole in Versailles allowed Germany to rearm via rocket development
• A young von Braun hired by army and master’s work in rockets 1932
• Project Hermes in White Sands, NM, to get V-2 rockets flying: von Braun in the army air force
• Blossom, a modified V-2, followed Hermes, used rhesus monkeys
• Moved from White Sands to Huntsville, AL, for more room
• Korea spurred Ike and Army to action and development
• Yeager and Crossfield battling for fastest title
• Bids for contracts, rocket-powered aircraft
• Along with aircraft improvements came innovations in pressure suits
• Project Manhigh, Simons and test pilot Kittinger
• Balloons couldn’t exit the atmosphere and rockets couldn’t launch payloads fast enough into orbit, so satellites
• International Geophysical Year: “coordinated research effort into various aspects of atmospheric science affected by the sun’s activities”
• In 1952 Von Braun published a series for Collier’s about space exploration, which caught the attention of Disney, who was building Disneyland and Tomorrowland. Von Braun featured in episode about rocketry, spaceflight, and missions to the moon and Mars — advocated political power of putting first satellite into orbit
• Navy’s Vanguard plan vs. von Braun’s Project Orbiter: Orbiter sidelined and Sputnik won in 1957, spurring Vanguard’s rushed into disaster
• Explorer I first American satellite in space ↑

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

• Between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, energy gained from tenderizing and cooking food led to bigger brains, which grew to weakened jaws, protruding noses, and smaller sinus cavities
• As humans developed speech, larynx sank down and made choking easier; but early humans enjoyed a nose, a voice, and a supersized brain without breathing issues 
• “Strangely, sadly, the same adaptations that would allow our ancestors to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlive other animals—a mastery of fire and processing food, an enormous brain; and the ability to communicate in an vast range of sounds—would obstruct our mouths and throats and make it much harder for us to breathe.”
• Nasal cycles: nostrils switch congestion back and forth; influenced by sexual urges and lined with erectile tissue
• Left and right nasal cavities work like HVAC system of regulation
• Breathing through right “gas pedal”: activates sympathetic nervous system, meaning higher heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol
• Breathing through left “brake pedal”: parasympathetic system to lower and cool
• Mucous membranes body’s first line of defense, collecting debris and moving it down to the stomach via cilia where acid sterilizes it
• “The nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions.”
• “Everything you or I or any other breathing thing has ever put in its mouth, or in its nose, or soaked through its skin, is hand-me-down space dust that’s been around for 13.8 billion years. This wayward matter has been split apart by sunlight, spread through the universe, and come back together again. To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.”
• We can grow bone at any age as long as we have stem cells; chewing with molars triggers masseter muscle behind ears, which produces stem cells
• “The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.”
• Proper posture and hard chewing help open airway and strengthen face to allow for better breathing 
• “Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system”
• Parasympathetic nervous system stimulates relaxation and restoration (“feed and breed” system); sympathetic system triggers action
• Lung nerves connect to both sides of autonomic, but parasympathetic nerves are in lower lung lobes (why long and deep breaths are relaxing) and sympathetic nerves are at top (short hasty breaths like a 911 call)
• Sexual arousal (soft and easy breaths) controlled by parasympathetic but orgasm (fast and short breaths) is sympathetic 
• Amygdala generates fear and emotion, but even without one the physiological fear and anxiety of not being able to breathe still happens
• “What distinguishes inanimate objects like rocks from birds and bees and leaves is the level of energy, or the ‘excitability’ of electrons within those atoms that make up the molecules in matter. The more easily and often electrons can be transferred between molecules, the more ‘desaturated’ matter becomes, the more alive it is.”
• “The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the principle has remained the same.”
• Wim Hof tummo breathing
• “Nature is simple but subtle.”
• “The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.” ↑

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

• “Many of our technology-related problems arise because of the unforeseen consequences when apparently benign technologies are employed on a massive scale.” – Melvin Kranzberg
• Stench and disposal of horse manure and urine increasingly difficult to manage by end of 19th century;
• Metal horseshoes and iron-rimmed wheels created cacophony 
• North America 1872 equine influenza incapacitated economy and stark reminder of the reliance on animal power [COVID]
• Providing hay and oats for horses took up vast farmland 
• “Paradoxically, the advent of the steam locomotive and the construction of intercity railway links, starting in the 1830s, had helped make the problem worse. Faster and more efficient transport between cities increased the demand for rapid transport of people and goods within them, which required a greater number of horse-drawn vehicles. The result was more horses, more manure and steadily worsening congestion.”
• Debate about whether wheels originated in Mesopotamia or Europe or in between
• Ljubljana Marshes Wheel in Slovenia dated to around 3200 BC one of earliest known wheels; made of wood for mine carts in that area and depicted on clay drinking vessels
• In Europe wagons were used primarily for agriculture over small distances (carrying manure, harvests, firewood within community); around the Black Sea were used by nomads; in Mesopotamia for military transport and ceremonial use
• “It was the idea of the wheel, rather than the specific knowledge of how to make it, that spread from its original birthplace. Once you’ve seen a wheel, after all, you can describe it to someone else or try to make your own something that is not possible with, say, novel metallurgical or agricultural techniques based on specialist knowledge. Even so, wheels were only adopted in situations where the time and effort needed to make them could be justified. And that explains the surprising fact that, for thousands of years after their invention, wheels were not widely used.”
• Ancient Egypt knew of the wheel but didn’t use it because they had the Nile for transporting large loads, and levers and rollers for overland 
• Two-wheel carts evolved into chariots around 2000 BC; spoked rather than solid wheels were lighter, faster, and could be made with less wood
• Hittites pioneered fast, lightweight military chariots by 1700 BC, soon adopted by Egyptians 
• War chariots could reach unprecedented 25 mph, took 600 man hours to build, expensive and high-tech weapons for elites
• Chariots became obsolete due to progress in horse breeding for cavalry and ineffectiveness in uneven terrain, but still used by Romans for racing and to signify royalty 
• Pompeii used alternating one-way streets to accommodate traffic in narrow streets
• Mistaken belief that modern railway gauge of 1.43 meters) descended from Roman road ruts; since first wheeled vehicles gauge has been consistently between 1.3-1.6 m with average of 1.45, and multiple gauges in use for farm wagons in Britain before railroads invented 
• Roman roads fell into disrepair after end of Roman Empire, with camels and horses then becoming the default 
• For Rome, Persia, Assyria, horseback was the dignified way for men and rulers to travel; post-Rome carts and wagons held on in Europe for agriculture but considered shameful 
• Horses separated noblemen and commanders from commoners or soldiers literally by height and by stature
• By 1500, majority of wheeled vehicles (whenever still being used at all) were two-wheeled agricultural carts 
• Late 1400s Hungary started using wagons in battle equipped with gunports and proving their appeal; Hungarian village Kocs (pronounced “coach”)
• By 1560 Antwerp had more than 500 coaches (two in London and three in Paris), which spread in popularity among royalty 
• New willingness to ride and hire coaches led to long-distance services on fixed routes with regular stops; gave rise to “stagecoach”
• As popularity spread in Europe, streets were widened and straightened, parks included large carriageways
• “That some countries ended up driving on the left, and others on the right, is an example of path dependency—the way decisions made in the past can constrain behaviors and choices in the future, making change difficult. The history of transport is, appropriately enough, full of path dependencies.”
• Desire for smoother roads led to inverting the custom of large stone slabs atop bed of smaller stones; Scottish engineer John McAdam developed surface of small, sharp-edges stones packed together (macadam surface), and once tar was added by 20th century become tarmac
• French philosopher Blaise Pascal pioneered concept of shared transport system of carriages on fixed routes in 1660s, but fizzled out when bourgeoisie didn’t want to admit they couldn’t afford their own 
• Revived in 1820s by Stanislaus Baudry to encourage visits to public bath on city outskirts; soon popular and expanded to large “omnibus” vehicles open to all throughout Europe and New York City by 1830s
• Subsidies offered to poorest workers in form of “commuted” fares 
• “During the nineteenth century, new materials and propulsion technologies made possible entirely new kinds of vehicle, and the technology of human transport changed more in one hundred years than it had in the previous five thousand.”
• Railway emerged in 1820s England, first connecting Liverpool and Manchester 
• Railroads made getting in and out of cities quicker, allowing people to live farther away from work and thus spurred urban expansion and railroad cities 
• America had laid 30k miles of track by 1860, more than the rest of the world combined 
• “Cities linked by rail were suddenly closer together, in effect, redefining national geography.”
• Connecting New York to Philadelphia in 1834 reduced journey time from two days to five hours 
• Increased railroads also increased demand for horses to supplement 
• 1810s early versions of pedal-less bicycles emerged as velocipedes, which didn’t catch on as replacement for horses 
• Breakthrough of pedals in 1860s, followed by tubular steel frames and wire spokes, rubber tires, chain drive of rear wheel, improved brakes by 1880s
• “Steam trains had shown that horseless transport could be fast. Bicycles had shown that it could be personal. Could it be both? Was it possible to build a vehicle that was as fast as a train, as convenient and personal as a bicycle, and could travel on existing roads like a horse?
• Internal combustion engine developed throughout mid-1800s; in 1885 attached to a bicycle for first motorcycle 
• German engineer Benz developed combustion engine and built large tricycle around it, patented in January 1886 as Motorwagen
• Starting in 1880s, cyclists lobbied for better roads and removal of road restrictions 
• Increased hostility toward (wealthy) motorists at turn of century 
• Woodrow Wilson in 1906 as Princeton president: “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.”
• Model T had the power and ruggedness of a touring car without being as large, heavy, or expensive; used vanadium steel to make engine and all other metal light yet powerful
• Ford marketed Model T as “the universal car” for its durability and range; captured 11% of American car market its first year in 1908 to 46% in 1914
• Assembly line brought production time for a single vehicle down from 12 hours to 93 minutes 
• Starting in 1914 Ford paid $5 for eight-hour day (double the industry rate) which cut costs; before this, 71% of new hires left within five days 
• By 1922 the Model T accounted for 57% of world automobile production 
• Car ownership skyrocketed in America due to higher incomes, cheaper cars, lower fuel taxes
• GM emerged as Ford’s opposite: variety of makes at different price points, offered installment payments and trade-ins, yearly design tweaks (“dynamic obsolescence”)
• Auto fatalities rose from 36 in 1900 to 11k in 1920; regulations and street furniture established in 1920s persist to today
• Manufacturers added ignition keys and door locks around 1912, letting owners leave them unattended on the street; parked cars a rarity in photos before 1910 then commonplace by 1915
• First traffic light was installed in Cleveland in 1914; green for go, white for caution, red for stop
• Meaning and order of lights became international standard in the 1920s with the help of the League of Nations; US didn’t participate but acted as de facto standards-setter
• Public opinion against reckless drivers as cause of fatalities, but industry groups and AAA teamed up for new campaign focusing on careless pedestrians 
• “Jay” was a slang term for a clueless country bumpkin unsure of how to behave in a city; jaywalkers term by traffic officers starting in 1915
• Hitler inspired by America’s car-heavy culture and sought to make car ownership easier, developed the Volkswagen for affordable small car for the masses
• William Levitt a navy veteran who applied GM assembly line techniques to home-building; Levittown established in 1947 Long Island with homes built every 15 minutes
• Thanks to Robert Moses’s building spree, Levittown had highway connections to all the NYC boroughs; “this new suburban lifestyle was, in other words, doubly indebted to the car.”
• Streetcars, once the only form of public transport in many American cities, had all but vanished by 1937
• Smartphones are the new car with the freedom it grants to socialize, shop, transport 
• Alcohol initially a viable alternative to gasoline and derived from crops, but gasoline cheaper and more plentiful in America as new oil fields discovered
• “The experience of the twentieth century suggests that it would be a mistake to replace one transport monoculture with another, as happened with the switch from horses to cars—and would happen again if, say, autonomous cars became the dominant mode of transport in the future. A transport monoculture is less flexible, and its unintended consequences become more easily locked in and more difficult to address. With a mixed, flexible system there is much less danger of path dependency—where decisions made in the past make subsequent change harder to bring about—and more scope for experimentation.” ↑

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller

• don’t force customers to burn calories trying to figure out what we do and how we solve their problem
• reduce confusion and noise
• music vs. noise: “story makes music out of noise”
• character → has a problem → guide → gives plan → calls to action → either fails or succeeds and is empowered
• anything that doesn’t serve the story has to go (music or noise?)
• 3 key questions: What do I offer? How will it make my life better? What do I need to do to get it?
• companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but people buy solutions to internal problems
• National, CarMax aim at frustrations
• philosophical problem use “ought” or “shouldn’t” “deserve”
• guides: empathy + authority/competence (we understand how it feels to… nobody should have to experience… we care about…)
• Express authority: testimonials, statistics, awards, logos of other businesses
• first impression: can I trust this person? Can I respect this person?
• Give them a plan: removes risk and/or clarifies purpose of business
• Process plan: describe steps customer needs to take to use product, or post-purchase steps (alleviate confusion)
• Agreement plan: list of agreements you make with customers to help them overcome their fear of doing business with you (list all potential concerns and counter them) (our quality guarantee, customer satisfaction agreement)
• direct call to action: order now, call today
• transitional call to action: free trial, testimonials, samples (on-ramp)
• What will the customer lose if they don’t buy our product? What are you helping customers avoid?
• where is your brand taking people?
• make an offer above the fold
• a single statement relevant to customer needs to explain what we do: character, problem, plan, success
• newsletter: offer something valuable so they’ll sign up
• “nurturing emails”: talk about a problem, explain a plan to solve the problem, describe how life can look for the reader once the problem is solved, with PS.
• testimonials: questions about their problems and frustrations before product and life and transformation after product ↑

But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

• “History is defined by the people who don’t really understand what they are defining.”
• “We are not the first society to conclude that our version of reality is objectively true. But we could be the first society to express that belief and is never contradicted, because we might be the first society to really get there. We might be the last society, because—now—we translate absolutely everything into math. And math is an obdurate bitch.”
• “The United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomfiting.”
• “It’s bizarre how angry voters get at non-voters. “It’s your civic responsibility,” they will say. Although the purpose of voting is to uphold a free society, so one might respond that a free society would not demand people to participate in an optional civic activity. “But your vote matters,” they argue. Well, it is counted, usually. That’s true (usually). But believing your one voter makes a meaningful difference reflects unfathomable egotism. … “But what if everybody thought that way,” they inevitably counter. This is the stupidest of arguments—if they nation’s political behavior were based on the actions of one random person, of course that person would vote, in the same way that random person would never jaywalk if his or her personal actions dictated the behavior of society as a whole. “Okay, fine. But if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Actually, the opposite is true—if you participate in democracy, you’re validating the democratic process (and therefore the outcome). You can’t complain if you vote.”
• “I don’t think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they’re right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.”
• “The conscious decision to replace one style of thinking with a new style of thinking, despite the fact that both styles could easily coexist. I realize certain modes of thinking can become outdated. But outdated modes are essential to understanding outdated times, which are the only times that exist.”
• “We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).”
• “The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong.”
• “There are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder. It’s good to view reality as beyond our understanding, because it is. And it’s exciting to imagine the prospect of a reality that cannot be imagined, because that’s as close to pansophical omniscience as we will ever come. If you aspire to be truly open-minded, you can’t just try to see the other side of an argument. That’s not enough. You have to go all the way.” ↑

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library by Edward Wilson-Lee

• “We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists [catalogues, inventories, etc.], documents that at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list maker imagines the place for which he has packed the items, his way of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.”
• Columbus’s second son Fernando/Hernando from mistress Beatriz Enriquez de Arana
• First memories as five year old were father’s return to Spain in September 1493
• “Man of destiny” narrative later formed around Columbus obscures more practical contexts: Spain’s need for gold, pressure for European expansion, similar contemporary voyages
• “Given the deeply ingrained beliefs of the time the only possible conclusion was that Columbus had triggered an event not just of geographical and political expansion, but one in the providential history of the world: a beginning of the return of man to paradise and the end of secular history.”
• “The observations on these voyages and those that followed were increasingly incompatible with the writings of Pliny, Aristotle, Plato, and others. If they had been wrong about this—the very shape of the world—what else might the ancient authorities have been wrong about?”
• Joined court of young Spanish prince Infante Juan as a page but didn’t fit into aristocratic pastimes of hunting and hawking; studious, bookish, solitary
• One of the special duties of the pages was keeping the household’s books: Manual (tracked everything incoming and outgoing household), The Book of Jewels (database of treasures), Great Book (reconcile and index everything in Manual and Book of Jewels), Book of the Inventory (track correspondence)
• “From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando’s world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost, and location.”
• Columbus drew up entail of his estate with Spanish monarchs based on projected income, but named Hernando and Diego as legitimate heirs
• Third Voyage ended with Columbus returning to Spain half-blind and shackled by order of Bobadilla, leader of Spain’s second inquest into New World, though Columbus arranged for the shackling as symbol of he who had “broken the chains of Ocean”
• Hernando joined Columbus’s fourth voyage in 1502 as a 13-year-old
• Learned of manatees in Caribbean
• Ran aground off Jamaica so sent a group of men on canoes 100 miles to Hispaniola to organize rescue mission
• Mutiny developed after several months of silence, and soon Columbus was abandoned with a skeleton crew
• As trade with locals dried up, Columbus summoned the island’s leaders for a feast and predicted (using an almanac) a lunar eclipse that night from “wrathful God” for not trading with them; a nerve-wracking gamble but worked
• Eventually rescued and arrived back in Spain hobbled and bedridden in 1504; Amerigo Vespucci one of few to visit him in final days
• “The hollow created in Hernando’s life by the death of his father would become apparent in the decades to come, as he slowly removed the Admiral’s weakness and madness from the historical record, allowing his own life to become like a New Testament to Columbus’s Old, changing its patterns and its meanings.”
• In Hispaniola for 21st birthday and inventoried everything he’d bought; notable for including everything (not just valuables) and being such a record so far in the past
• Hernando’s library demonstrates “the extraordinary variety of Hernando’s interests, and how as well as being an ark of civilization in the New World the library was a field laboratory, a survival kit, and a scheme of immense ambition for expanding the intellect of its owner.”
• His culture and contemporaries “saw all things of the world as integrally linked and did not think of these as separate fields of thought.”
• Proposed circumnavigation trip to Ferdinand in 1511: “for Hernando, closing the circle of the unknown world meant gaining the ability to control it.”
• Escalating book purchases around same time signify intellectual conquest too
• Fashionable among intellectuals at the time to learn Ancient Greek, though Hebrew was more esteemed as language of Old Testament, Moses, Kabbalah
• Bartolomé de Las Casas foremost historian of New World and champion of native peoples, yet still held lifelong affection for Hernando and Diego
• Hernando paused circumnavigation planning to argue Diego’s case against his bastard son’s mother in Rome, where it was moved for a fair trial
• Prestigious libraries in Italy “emphasized the sacredness of their contents by excluding all but the most prestigious texts—perfect libraries rather than universal ones, and perfect by means of this exclusiveness.” Most books were manuscripts and in Latin or Greek
• Hernando witnessed unveiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting in 1512
• Most likely commissioned earliest and most credible portrait of Columbus in 1519 by Sebastiano del Piombo
• Created his own indices for books, which were still fairly rare especially in manuscript age
• Also created cataloging system for his 3,000+ printed image collection: first divided by subject (with internal hierarchy for prints with multiple subjects), then size of paper and other defining qualities
• “All systems of order involve hierarchy… But even if the hierarchy is arbitrarily selected… after a time it comes to seem natural, inevitable. And once these hierarchies are written into the tools we use to navigate the world, this step becomes ever harder to undo… if God was revealed, according to medieval theologians, in the order of the world, orders imposed upon it could come to seem godlike. God is the name we give to the possibility of order.”
• Embarked on detailed encyclopedic gazetteer of Spain, which led to new Spanish King Charles commissioning official map for Spanish ships to the West Indies
• Spain/Portugal rivalry led Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) defecting to Spain to offer voyage services, claiming (falsely at the time) of a Panama strait connecting the oceans
• Embarked on a Latin dictionary project in addition to geographical data gathering, family legal matters, Atlantic navigational charting; “drew together examples of how each word had been used by the best writers of antiquity”
• Latin “crudely documented” at the time
• “A map of language alive to the organic creature it was creating, a creature that is constantly evolving and can only be charted in its movements, rather than pinned it down to a particular set of meanings.”
• “Hernando’s dictionary belongs in the long history of attempts to establish language as something with a solid and definite relationship to the world of things, rather than simply being a conventional tool that only works because we all agree on what each word means.”
• Saw off Diego in 1520 back to Hispaniola as reinstated governor thanks to Hernando’s lobbying Charles with vision of expanded Spanish presence in Americas
• Document drawn up by Diego awards Hernando lifetime pension but without direct claim to Columbus’s patrimony; Diego held the worldly goods but Hernando the “sublime spirit that had allowed their father to change the shape of the world”
• Created “Abecedarium” (alphabetical list of authors and book titles within library) which helped create the very notion of an author in era of anonymous works; also inseparably joined character of author and his works
• In 1520 began including in book purchase notes the exchange rates between local currency and home money; serve as time machine and “resurrect a lost world of trade networks and fluctuating relationships between societies, recorded in the language of currency exchange.”
• Charles, now Holy Roman Emperor, gifts Hernando a salary and grant, which he uses to go book-buying in Venice
• (228) Developed custom alphabet of biblioglyphs to concisely describe books in his library (inspired by invented alphabet in More’s “Utopia”)
• Alphabet indicated size, length, columns, chapters, index, manuscript or print, etc; variations on a few basic shapes (circles, squares, triangles) bisected to form other characters – “it seemed the surest way to fix a face, a landscape, or a language was to link it to the pure and simple universal truths of geometry”
• At 33 his nearly 6,000 titles was one of the biggest private collections in Europe
• One of Magellan’s five ships returned from circumnavigation in September 1522: found strait through Patagonia into Pacific Ocean (which they named), Magellan didn’t survive
• Over 1,600 of his books shipwrecked on voyage from Venice to Spain during same period Description of Spain and his Latin dictionary halted; created new catalogue with updated list and description of biblioglyphs, along with “catalogue of shipwrecked books” he intended to replace
• “The bringing together of books and shipwreck, of the struggle for memory in the face of fast-eroding loss.”
• Strove to put down roots to better safeguard his library; “it was a library of flesh and blood—or rather paper, ink, and vellum—and needed to be housed, guarded, ordered, and arranged, tended to like a garden that must be restrained from the wildness to which it always wishes to return.”
• Circumnavigation and the actual size of the world questioned the Spain/Portugal treaty re: Castile islands, so Hernando chosen to lead Spanish side of negotiations
• Difficult to determine size of longitude, and one of Hernando’s five suggested methods included observation of eclipses (which was successfully used more than 200 years later)
• Erasmus: “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from this swarm of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning.”
• Catalog for titles and authors, but for contents Hernando hired “sumistas” to summarize each volume into a few sentences for Book of Epitomes; helped call bullshit on publishers’ ostentatious and misleading titles, and showed Hernando was considering the universality of his library in terms of shape as well as size (denser rather than larger)
• “As Hernando‘s collection grew, he seems to have conceived a misery familiar to all lovers of learning: the feeling that for every step one advances, a million paths to further understanding open up—a world of opportunity, of course, but also something that makes a mockery of the pathetic progress you have made so far.”
• Created subject index Book of Materials, which wrestled with which terms to use and where to file titles; used most common terms, which countered the contemporary goal of language as perfectly unambiguous and abstract perfection
• 1537 made final journey to Hispaniola with Columbus’s exhumed remains and planned library in will (“Biblioteca Hernandina”)
• Largest collection in Europe with over 15,000 volumes, and largest printed image and music collections
• In letter to Charles V: “It is one thing to build a library of those things found in our time: but entirely another to order things in such a way that all new things are sought out and gathered forever.”
• Instructed his librarians and collectors to avoid large booksellers and manuscripts, and instead acquire everyday pamphlets, one-sheets ballads, and other ephemera
• His “profound intuition” that “the invention of print had upended the world of information, replacing one in which a few authoritative and venerable manuscripts held sway with one flooded by an endless supply of the new.”
• Verses he asked to be inscribed near the door of the library: “The wise care little for widely held views / As most people are easily swayed / And that which they throw from their houses / Is later thought to be of highest value.”
• Plan was for one enormous room with a metal grate at center for readers to read but not take volumes: “a doomsday vault that would prevent human culture from being lost again on the scale it had at the end of the classical period. This central, read-only data bank would also guarantee there was somewhere in which matters of great doubt could be resolved: a complete library, with a copy of every book by every author”
• Book of Epitomes and Book of Materials meant to be copied and distributed through Spain to allow unlimited readers to navigate the locked-down collection from a distance
• “As a counterpart to his global memory vault, Hernando had created a search engine.”
• Table of Authors and Sciences a prototype of card catalog with annotations for browsing
• Nearing death, created an inventory of all his things to be appended to his will and assigned his estate to Diego’s son Luis, who’d lose interest in it
• Funeral monument he designed for himself uses Columbus’s coat of arms but with his four catalogs (Book of Authors, Sciences, Epitomes, Materials) as supporters of the shield instead of beasts
• Fewer than 4,000 volumes of his library remain today after decay, neglect, and the Inquisition
• Some of Hernando’s ideas taken up later: magnetic variation by Edmund Halley, longitude by John Harrison’s marine chronometer, searchable global repository by the Internet
• “The great Renaissance historian Flavio Biondo likened this process, of bringing hidden parts of the past back into view, to the act of bringing up planks from a shipwreck, making visible what once was drowned in oblivion, submerged beneath the waters of time. Though most of Hernando’s great vessel has been wrecked, the pieces we are able to gather tell a story of someone who set out before us into the unknown. They are relics of a vision that is with us once again.” ↑

Children’s Imagination: Creativity Under Our Noses by Ursula Kolbe

• “When you do manage to tune into children’s thinking and free yourself from feeling the need to comment and label, your horizons begin to expand in surprising ways. The more you can learn about children’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas—and take pleasure in doing so—the more clearly you realize what you can do to encourage curiosity and nurture imagination.”
• “You can’t begin to respond supportively to children’s spontaneous play unless you believe in its value. Understanding what play is for a child and being able to stand back is what matters. Being aware that play is a source of wonderful possibilities, which only become apparent once play has begun, can lead you to fascinating discoveries.”
• “The warmth of a listening presence does much to keep young children engaged in whatever they’re playfully doing. I become more in tune with the children and more aware of their potential, while my attention encourages them to persists in whatever they’re doing far more effectively than words of praise ever could.” ↑

The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham by Ron Shelton

• “The director has to listen and accept and fight back—it’s a curious behavioral contortion to have all your nerve endings open for discovery while you circle the wagons to defend your vision.”
• “And while it can’t be explained by film science, the simple truth underlying all great onscreen chemistry is this: two characters must occupy different emotional and physical spaces.”
• “But after the team tied it in the bottom of the tenth, our hometown hero hit a towering two-run homer to win the game. A great weight lifted up out of the room, my father looked around, his shoulders lightened, and we started going to church less and less. The seed for the Church of Baseball was planted.”
• “Around this time it was becoming clear that I was living in two different worlds—the intellectual (or at least academic) world and the sports world—but it made no sense to me that they were distinct. They were dependent, connected, they fed off each other. At least I thought so.”
• “Camus said he got tired of debating Roman Catholic seminary students because he wanted them to convince him that their Judeo-Christian ontology was the only path forward, but he usually ended up convincing them of his bleaker view. Besides, if I could’ve added a footnote to his words, I would have said that it’s more life-giving to be in the midst of a game stopping shots on goal and then going out for some beers to relive the game with your colleagues.”
• “I began to think that Camus and Beckett were labeled “absurdists” not in spite of loving sports, but because of it. Sports is both absurd and ordered, and full of unknown consequences. A game means nothing and it means everything.”
• “I’d played enough sports by then that I felt sports films got it all wrong. Their attempts to be inspirational felt cloying and false. When you actually play the game, there is little that is inspirational going on. It’s a competition; it’s physical; it’s a chance to test yourself.”
• “A baseball life is fragile and absurd. It’s also wondrous and thrilling. It also produces expressions like “cock-high, half-assed cheese,” which means, of course, “weak heat in the zone.”
• “The ensuing discussions about the quality of the movie we’d just seen were without nuance. Reactions were binary—“The movie was a piece of crap and I hated it” or “Great fuckin’ flick.” Thumbs-up or thumbs-down and no discussion in between. Never was heard “I need some time to sit with this awhile” or “I have complicated and perhaps contradictory feelings about this that I need to sort out.”
• “There’s a kind of film education in going indiscriminately to movies, whatever the rating, whatever the reviews. Rio Lobo to Russ Meyer to Alain Resnais, they were all a way to get from one o’clock in the afternoon to the ballpark. Settling into a cool, dark theater was already a reward. I had no expectations. I was a generous audience.”
• “Scenes in a screenplay need a turn, a moment when the scene suddenly isn’t about what it was about up until that moment. A scene shouldn’t be about the same thing at its end as it was at the beginning. The scenes we remember in movies are those that turn and sometimes turn more than once and keep revealing themselves.”
• “I have a private rule that writer’s block cannot be acknowledged. When I’m stuck, I keep writing even if it all hits the trash can for a while. I write to make discoveries, not to connect the dots.”
• “Superior athletes are cut a lot of slack by management and media. If Ty Cobb hit .267 lifetime he’d have been in jail. Instead, he hit .367 and was in the first group inducted into the Hall of Fame. Appalling behavior is explained away and forgiven endlessly—if you’re a winner.”
• “Another reason I resist detailed outlines before beginning to write is that they don’t allow for dramatic sequences to appear just because they feel right. Scenes that make no sense in a linear construct, that seem to come out of nowhere, and yet are the perfect tonal shift as the story unfolds, cannot be imagined beforehand.”
• “The biggest mistake a sports movie can make is to have too much sports in it. A movie can’t compete with television showing sports action, but it can and must reveal all the moments that television can’t touch.”
• “The road leads back to Sam Peckinpah again. In reference to his Westerns, he said: “I love clichés because clichés establish an immediate connection with the audience. Clichés reside in the collective unconscious. And what is a film? A film is just a collection of clichés. The work of the director is to love the cliché, adopt the cliché, and then work against it. You have to remake the cliché in a way that nobody has ever made it before. That is the work of the director.” Peckinpah knew it was also the work of the writer.”
• “In the dramatic terms of watching a baseball game, these moments are boring. As a player, the boring moments are fully engaging—you better catch the damn pop-up in foul territory or you’re back on a bus headed home.”
• “The world is made for those who aren’t cursed with self-awareness.”
• “It has been said that a movie is like a hot-air balloon carrying a basket full of narrative information and it’s necessary to start throwing the cargo overboard until the balloon takes off. I like that metaphor—but Annie’s monologue? The most important scene in the movie? The revelation that leads to the reckoning? Gone, and nobody cared!”
• “Studios have been known to pull movies from their scheduled release dates and postpone them, sometimes in-definitely, or shovel them into the “straight to video” bin. But why were people laughing and where did the spontaneous applause come from? The notes said the movie was paced too slowly and was too long. Too fucking long? The running time was one hour, forty-four minutes, plus end credits. Hadn’t they seen Berlin Alexanderplatz, for crissakes? Fassbinder released his fifteen-hour masterpiece in two seven-and-a-half-hour screenings—and there aren’t a lot of laughs. Did NRG run numbers on Fassbinder? Genius or not, how did he play in Palo Alto?”
• “The more highly educated the crowd, the more severely critical will be its analysis. Even—maybe especially—when the movie-watching experience is good. It’s a mistake to hand a pen and paper to professionals with multiple degrees and ask them to critique their experience. There seems to be a built-in expectation that the brain should overrule the heart, that the left side of the brain must dictate what the right side of the brain just processed—even when it contradicts that experience. The note cards were legible, neatly written, and expressed their critique in absurd detail compared to those of more working-class crowds, which tend to be of the thumbs-up, thumbs-down variety. In the heartland of emerging Silicon Valley—high-tech, the venture-capital center of the nation, with Stanford and all its tentacles of research—the audience had to deny its experience. What I thought of was: All I want is your reaction, not your fucking self-conscious notes.”
• “We remember our failures and our losses. Why that is so is something I’ll probably never understand, which makes it something to write about. It also makes it ripe for humor.”
• “My interest in baseball isn’t analytical, romantic, or even patriotic. I like the game—it’s nuanced and difficult and physical—but it has an appealing vulgarity, an earthiness, and I’ve never quite understood the excessive lyrical prose that grows out of it. I’ve never understood the sentimentality it seems to inspire.”
• “Perhaps Bull Durham has resonated all these years because it is about loving something more than it loves you back. It’s about reckoning. It’s about loss. It’s about men at work, trying to survive in the remote outposts of their chosen profession. It’s also about the women they fall for, and who fall for them. It cannot be dismissed that it’s also about the joy of playing a game for a living. It’s about team and connections and risk and reward. It’s about hitting the mascot with a fastball just because you want to, it’s about running and jumping and sliding around in the mud, it’s about interminable bus rides with a bunch of guys who are as lost as you are, and feeling lucky you’re on that bus. It’s romantic, and it’s supposed to be funny, and despite what most fans of the movie say, it is also about baseball.” ↑

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

• Went on African safari after presidency, collecting hides and other stuff for Smithsonian.
• Believed illness, fear, self-doubt, and grief were weaknesses.
• Indifferent to religion and non-nature-based spirituality.
• Met with Wilhelm II and his friends, but foresaw war.
• Worshipped and well-wished with steerage on ship back to the states.
• Return to politics/advocacy in 1910 generally a failure.
• Discussed with LaFollette his skepticism of the recall, referendum, initiative additions in 1911.
• Wanted less prosecution and more regulation: not advocating socialism merely wanted democratic government and moral economy.
• Was realistic about his chances in 1912 but went for it anyway. Wanted to “rescue the reform” programs Taft had screwed up; also saw not running as cowardice.
• Needed to appeal to populist, non-establishment Republicans to win.
• Despite outward demeanor, didn’t enjoy campaigning in 1912.
• Continually accused of being drunk because of his effulgence.
• Was very tired and worn when shot and shouldn’t have been there. Showed crowd his wounded chest, spoke for 80 minutes.
• Big money troubles after campaign, with wedding and libel suit.
• Won the libel suit with help from his famous friend witnesses.
• Troilus story: “Life is short—let us spend it together.”
• Got rid of Father Zahn on Amazon expedition for proselytizing too much.
• Got abscesses, dysentery, and malaria yet survived.
• Felt neutered and useless as public voice when war broke out.
• Each of the World War I belligerents thought they had TR’s support.
• Volunteered to command brigade cavalry in war.
• Had a few surgeries for abscesses stemming from Cuban and Brazilian fevers.
• Quentin died in a place battle, but the other brothers were promoted and highly decorated.
• Health got steadily worse as the war winded down.
• Criticism: more interested in fighting for fighting’s sake than for any cause.
• Man of action and war who “scoffed” at philosophical scruples.
• TR Jr. fought on Utah Beach on D-Day and got Medal of Honor.
• Kermit slowly devolved into drink and killed himself in 1943.
• Archie fought in the Pacific but postwar turned paranoid and rebelled against the family name. ↑

Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

• First election paid attention to was Harrison vs Cleveland in 1888 as sixteen year old
• Sister Abbie died in 1890, probably of appendicitis
• Went to Amherst College, founded by grandfather of Emily Dickinson, and attended by Melvil Dewey
• Students without a fraternity were called oudens, Greek for “nothing.”
• Most of Amherst in 1892 was for Cleveland, who was an aggressive vetoer compared to Harrison, under whom federal budget went over $1 million for first time
• After college got a clerkship at a law firm in Northampton; saw from afar TR’s progress as NYC police commissioner
• Started his own law business that struggled a bit, but soon became city solicitor general, which helped
• Taciturn style and brevity won people over because they weren’t overcharged for oratory
• Ran and lost for school committee post, but was able to save money in lieu
• Deposited money in several institutions as a way to connect with fellow citizens and avoid consequences of bank crashes
• Served in state legislature in Boston, then as mayor of Northampton in 1909, then as state senator
• Coolidge was a Roosevelt Republican but aligned against him for the third term for breaking tradition and suggesting recall of unprogressive judges
• Appointed chairman of committee to negotiate labor strike in Boston
• President of state senate when WW1 started; wanted GOP to unite and support Wilson and avoid what Copperhead Democrats did to Lincoln in Civil War
• Delegates wanted him for president in 1920; Wisconsin senator Lenroot was favorite but didn’t gain traction
• Wilson’s VP Marshall telegram to Coolidge after nomination: “Please accept my sincerest sympathy.”
• Ponzi’s security exchanges company in Boston was investigated by Coolidge’s attorney general; state treasurer was mixed up in the scheme
• Harding established Veterans Bureau, but it was a money waster that clashed with his austerity message
• Sworn in by his father who was a notary
• Brought on new AG, who hired J. Edgar Hoover
• Son John died of staph infection from blister from White House tennis court
• VP Dawes caused trouble and missed confirmation vote
• Hosted Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight
• Made South Dakota his summer White House in 1927, where Borglum was starting Rushmore and he surprisingly announced he wouldn’t seek a third term
• Stayed on the Brule in summer 1928 to avoid RNC; Hoover came by and they fished together
• Wrote newspaper column after leaving, then died of heart attack right before 1933 inauguration ↑

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert W. Merry

• Wasn’t baptized because father Sam fought theologically with Presbyterian minister
• University of NC, then clerk for Grundy, Nashville lawyer
• Became lawyer in 1820; first case was his father for public fighting
• Bantered with Houston as lawyers, and state rep Crockett, both of which very different from Polk
• Sarah’s family close with the Jacksons, which helped him side with Jackson for senate in 1823
• Clay elected speaker as freshman (had represented Burr during treason trial)
• Became Tennessee governor but then lost reelection in 1841 and failed to recapture in 1843
• Schemed at 1844 convention to become Van Buren’s VP against other contenders; had to consolidate Tennessee delegation power without alienating Van Buren against him
• Van Buren and Cass were top vote-getters, but after 8 ballots shifted away from Van Buren and Polk emerged as compromise
• Vote difference was 39,000 out of 2.7 million; if antislavery Birney hadn’t run Clay probably would’ve run
• Dual diplomatic fronts of Britain in Oregon and Mexico for Texas: war possible against both depending on how stubborn with land they were
• Mexico’s latest government collapse signaled low chances of compromise, so Polk sent Gen. Taylor to Rio del Norte
• Secretary of State Buchanan schemed to deny votes for Polk’s Court candidate because he wanted the job himself ↑

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose

• Custer from lower class family; loved his parents and hanging with siblings
• Crazy Horse had rebellious streak, even in less disciplined culture; prematurely went out to get vision
• Custer underperformed at West Point, figured out how to just evade dismissal; class cut-up
• Saw Civil War as play, friends with fellow West Pointers on both sides, except competing generals; 23 years old when general
• Custer received Lee’s white flag and got the Appomattox desk, was at every major battle
• Was BFF with McClellan, but honored Lincoln and Union
• Crazy Horse and others refused shitty peace offering from government and continued to fight
• Custer reassigned to Texas occupation after the war and was reduced to captain and sent home
• [ceased note-taking] ↑

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

• “To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam. What you make doesn’t have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art. Through the ordinary state of being, we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.”
• “Regardless of whether or not we’re formally making art, we are all living as artists. We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience for ourselves and others based on this information set. Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing process of creation.”
• “To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead. Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
• “Think of the universe as an eternal creative unfolding. Trees blossom. Cells replicate. Rivers forge new tributaries.nThe world pulses with productive energy, and everything that exists on this planet is driven by that energy. Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse.”
• “Look around you: there are so many remarkable accomplishments to appreciate. Each of these is humanity being true to itself, as a hummingbird is true to itself by building a nest, a peach tree by bearing fruit, and a nimbus cloud by producing rain.”
• “We are all antennae for creative thought.”
• “As children, we experience much less interference between receiving ideas and internalizing them. We accept new information with delight instead of making comparisons to what we already believe; we live in the moment rather than worrying about future consequences; we are spontaneous more than analytical; we are curious, not jaded. Even the most ordinary experiences in life are met with a sense of awe. Deep sadness and intense excitement can come within moments of each other. There’s no facade and no attachment to a story.”
• “The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available. … There are tiny fragments of the vastness of Source stored within us. These precious wisps arise from the unconscious like vapor, and condense to form thought.”
• “Clouds never truly disappear. They change form. They turn into rain and become part of the ocean, and then evaporate and return to being clouds. The same is true of art. Art is a circulation of energetic ideas. What makes them appear new is that they’re combining differently each time they come back. No two clouds are the same.”
• “The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.”
• “Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it.”
• “The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible.”
• “We aren’t creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world.”
• “The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.”
• “The things we believe carry a charge regardless of whether they can be proven or not.”
• “Pay particular attention to the moments that take your breath away—a beautiful sunset, an unusual eye color, a moving piece of music, the elegant design of a complex machine. If a piece of work, a fragment of consciousness, or an element of nature is somehow allowing us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It awards us a glimpse of the unseen.”
• [left off at Practice] ↑

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown

• Rumble: “a discussion, conversation, or meeting defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving, to take a break and circle back when necessary, to be fearless when owning our parts, and to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.”
• vulnerability is “having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome”
• “If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in or open to your feedback.”
• Clear is kind
• Elements of meeting minutes: date, meeting intention, attendees, key decisions, tasks and ownership
• “Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.”
• Strong back (confidence and boundaries), soft front (vulnerable and curious), wild heart (fierce and kind) ↑

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) by Christian Rudder

• “Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth.”
• “A thirty-two-year-old woman will sign up, set her age-preference filters at 28–35, and begin to browse. That thirty-five-year-old man will come along, set his filters to 24–40, and yet rarely contact anyone over twenty-nine. Neither finds what they are looking for.”
• “These patterns exemplify a mathematical concept called variance. It’s a measure of how widely data is scattered around a central value. Variance goes up the further the data points fall from the average.”
• “The Internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that’s one thing that’s always stood it in good stead with me: it’s a writer’s world. Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing. I honestly feel there’s a certain epistolary, Austenian grandness to the whole enterprise. No matter what words we use or how we tap out the letters, we’re writing to one another more than ever.”
• “Asking a person what “ten years” means is like asking him or her to describe a color—you get impressionism where you’re looking for facts. But looking at writing over time gives us a sense.”
• “The two essential patterns of male-to-female attraction are plain: men tend to like women of their own race. Far more than that, though, they don’t like black women.”
• “There is a broad, site-wide ethos of open-mindedness. And an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answer this match question … Would you consider dating someone who has vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people? in the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It Depends”). In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OkCupid would not consider dating someone on OkCupid.”
• “If you’re reading a popular science book about Big Data and all its portents, rest assured the data in it is you.”
• “In a digital world that’s otherwise compulsively networked, there’s an old-school solitude to online dating. Your experience is just you and the people you choose to be with; and what you do is secret. Often the very fact that you have an account—let alone what you do with it—is unknown to your friends. So people can act on attitudes and desires relatively free from social pressure.”
• “On OkCupid—as on Match, as on Tinder—a prime divide, perhaps the deepest, is between the beautiful and the rest. These are our haves and have-nots, our rich, our poor, and when it comes to sexual attention, the haves reap the benefit of their inheritance just as surely as any heir, while the have-nots largely go without. Not unlike race, beauty is a card you’re dealt, and it has huge repercussions.”
• “The medial orbitofrontal cortex of the brain is involved in rating both the beauty of a face and the goodness of a behavior, and the level of activity in that region during one of those tasks predicts the level during the other. In other words, the brain … assumes that cheekbones tell you something about minds and hearts.”
• “Data is about how we’re really feeling—feeling about one another, yes, but also about ourselves. If it finds divides in our culture, our politics, our habits, our tribes, it finds divides within us, too. And that’s a hopeful thought, because for anything to be made whole, the first step is to know what’s missing.”
• “There is strength in collective guilt, and guilt is diffused in the sharing. Extirpate the Other and make yourselves whole again.”
• “So much of what makes the Internet useful for communication—asynchrony, anonymity, escapism, a lack of central authority—also makes it frightening.”
• “It’s that “pizza” and “the” appear to be mentioned almost the same number of times. Granted, pizza is the king of foods, but “the” is the absolute most popular word in the English language.”
• “Zipf’s law, an observed statistical property of language that, like so much of the best math, lies somewhere between miracle and coincidence. It states that in any large body of text, a word’s popularity (its place in the lexicon, with 1 being the highest ranking) multiplied by the number of times it shows up, is the same for every word in the text.”
• “Where people can’t find satisfaction in person, they create alternative digital communities. On a dating site, that means communities with similar sexual interests. On other sites with more diverse aims, where the users aren’t just there to flirt in groups of two (and occasionally three), you get something richer.”
• “The goals of personal branding are the same you’d find in any empowerment seminar or in any prosperity gospel sermon from any decade. The end has always been wealth and power.”
• “Reduction is inescapable. Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. It’s a by-product of the basic physical nature of the microchip: a chip is just a sequence of tiny gates.”
• “We focus on the dense clusters, the centers of mass, the data duplicated over and over by the repetition and commonality of our human experience. It’s science as pointillism. Those dots may be one fractional part of you, but the whole is us.”
• “That’s what I always want to remember: it’s not numbers that will deny us our humanity; it’s the calculated decision to stop being human.”
• “It’s hard to believe in information coming to you on a “need to know basis” from an entity that doesn’t think you need to know anything. The concern becomes less about what they’re saying than why.”
• “But the people spying on us are extremely, extremely smart. We can hope that they, like Feynman and Einstein before them, are able to temper their work with a farsighted humanity, but we can know, for sure, that, like Feynman and Einstein before them, what they’re working on is inhumanly powerful.”
• “From only the barest information, algorithms are already able to extrapolate or infer much about a person; that’s after only a few years of data to work on. Soon the half measures provided by menu options as you “manage your privacy settings” will give no protection at all, because the rest of your world won’t be so withholding. Companies and the government will find you through the graph. This whole debate could soon be an anachronism.”
• “The examples I’ve laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.” ↑

Death by Living: Life is Meant to Be Spent by N.D. Wilson

• “If you think it, live it. If you don’t live it, you don’t really think it. You are not what you think (or what you think you think). You are not what you say you are. You are what you do. You are Adam, charged to name yourself. But you cannot do it with words made noise—only with words made flesh.”
• “Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars. You stand in history with stories stretching out both behind and before. We should want to live our chapters well, but doing so requires that we know the chapters that led up to us in our time and our moment; it requires that we open our eyes and consciously begin to shape those chapters that are coming after.”
• “Stories are the closest our own words can ever come to being made flesh—gifts unwrapped in the imagination.”
• “C.S. Lewis talks about northerness, about an overwhelming bittersweet yearning that bleeds into joy. For him, that sensation was triggered by cold, clear nights and stars and wind in moonlit trees—it was connected to something stark and harsh and beautiful. Thus, northern. … Those moments in life when we realize that we are standing in open jaws, when we feel so small that is arrives with a dominating immenseness—when the stars are suddenly no longer twinkly things, but massive seething explosions punctuating an unimaginably cold and near-infinite nothing—those are the moments when we feel our true size, our true pitiful dependence.”
• “Take up your life and follow Him. Face trouble. Pursue it. Climb it. Smile at its roar like a tree planted by cool water even when your branches groan, when your golden leaves are stripped and the frost bites deep, even when your grip on this earth is torn loose and you fall among mourning saplings. Shall we die for ourselves or die for others?”
• “No matter how many pictures we take, no matter how many scrapbooks we make, no matter how many moments we invade with a rolling camera, we will die. We will vanish. We cannot grab and hold. We cannot smuggle things out with us through death. … But this shouldn’t inspire melancholy; it should only tinge the sweet with the bitter. Don’t resent the moments simply because they cannot be frozen. Taste them. Savor them. Give thanks for that daily bread. Manna doesn’t keep overnight. More will come in the morning.”
• “Our futile struggle in time is courtesy of God’s excessive giving. Sunset after sunset make it hard to remember and hold just one. Smell after smell. Laugh after laugh. A mind still thinking, a heart still beating. Imagine sticking your fingers on your pulse and thanking God every time He gave you another blood-driving, brain-powering thump. We should. And we shouldn’t, because if we did, we would never do anything else with our living; we wouldn’t have the time to look at or savor any of the other of our impossibillions of gifts.”
• “Grabbing will always fail. Hoarding always fails. Living to live always reaches inevitable and pointless Darwinian burnout—bigger fears, deeper moral panic. Live to die. If you do, inevitable success awaits you. If you were suddenly given more than you could count, and you couldn’t keep any of it for yourself, what would you do? That is, after all, our current situation. Grabbing will always fail. Giving will always succeed. Bestow. Our children, our friends, and our neighbors will all be better off if we work to accumulate for their sakes. If God has given you a greater banquet than you can possibly eat, let it go. Set it on the altar. Collect a ragtag crew and seat them. Don’t leave food uneaten, strength unspent, wine undrunk.”
• “Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.” ↑

The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids by Alexandra Lange

• “To have a child is to be thrown suddenly, and I found rather miraculously, back into the world of stuff.”
• “Simple shapes and sturdy materials encourage free play and meet the child at their level.”
• In 20th century as middle class women became primary caregivers without household help, sought toys that teach
• Froebel’s first kindergarten classes (inspired by Pestalozzi) forego rote one-directional learning for children’s innate curiosity and object lessons; “touch was to lead to thought, thought to learning”
• Pestalozzi’s 4 essential elements of his educational theory: children learn best when they follow their own interests; perception is the source of all learning; children learn bear through activity (physical education); ethical and moral education come from love and trust, which first comes from mother
• As kindergartens spread and viewed as supplement rather than replacement for home child-rearing, became career path for women
• Froebel’s key contribution was to add set of standardized materials to Pestalozzi’s theories, which made it replicable
• Helped change perception of children to something other than “small, stupid people engaged in useless activity”
• Transcendentalist and early childhood education crusader Elizabeth Peabody viewed kindergarten as “commonwealth or republic of children” rather than as previous model of absolute monarchy
• Peabody enlisted printer Milton Bradley manufacturing Froebel’s original 10 wooden teaching objects (“gifts”)
• Second gift (a cube, cylinder, and sphere made of maple) became symbol of kindergarten
• Third gift eight wooden cubes, meant to tap into children’s natural tendency to take things apart; contrasted with didactic letter and number toys of the time
• Frank Lloyd Wright exposed to Froebel’s blocks early; “the virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to the rhythmic structures in nature”
• “Interlocking building cubes” debuted at English toy fair in 1947 while LEGO founder introduced “automatic binding bricks” in 1949 in Denmark
• LEGO eventually settled with Kiddiecraft over trademark in 1980s
• LEGO’s expansion coincided with postwar booms and influenced house design to make playrooms more centralized
• Tube-and-stud design gave LEGO “clutch power” but easy to disassemble; patented in 1958
• To keep up with narrative-based toys like Playmobil, changed from “quiet construction to character-filled action”
• LEGO’s 1960s marketing tension between “creative play and realistic architecture” continues to today ↑

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George H.W. Bush by Jon Meacham

• Prescott served in artillery in WWI
• Wrote home facetious letter about heroics that was picked up by newspapers: chastened him from prankster to more more serious and sober minded
• Will to win tempered by outward humility and self-effacement; legacy from parents, especially Dorothy
• Childhood split between Kennebunkport, NYC, and SC plantation
• Privileged during Depression, but “for unto him much is given…” principle reigned; privilege entailed service
• At Andover during Pearl Harbor; was 17 when he wanted to sign up for Air Force
• Met Barbara at a country club Christmas dance in 1941
• Aged 19 when became Navy officer in June 1943
• Plane went down after bombing mission; his two crewmates died but he rafted and paddled away from Japanese island until sub picked him up
• Didn’t want to work for Yalie law firm so used family connection to join oil company in Odessa; joined by Bar and George
• Prescott elected to Senate in 1952 as moderate Republican, criticized McCarthy
• Ran for Senate as Texan in 1964 but got smashed along with other Goldwater Republicans
• Elected to Congress in 1966 and first freshman to win seat on Ways and Means since 1904
• Ran for Senate again in 1970 but lost; offered job as Nixon’s aide in 1972 but angled for UN Am which he got
• Appointed head of RNC in 1973 until after Nixon resigned, then appointment envoy to China
• Considered for Ford’s VP but went with Rockefeller instead
• Offered head of CIA in 1975, possibly schemed out of Commerce by Rumsfeld who was looking toward 1976
• Out of CIA with Carter, then started campaign for 1980 and won Iowa, but overtaken by Reagan
• Was in Fort Worth to dedicate plaque of JFK’s last night when on flight to Austin got word of Reagan being shot
• 1989: Tiananmen Square, Berlin Wall, Panama/Noriega deposed
• Clean Air Act, ADA, raised minimum wage, banned importation of semiautomatic rifles
• Believed in “sound governance”; “Have-Half” Poppy
• 1990: budget deal to raise taxes and decrease deficit, nominated Souter, Kuwait invasion
• Willing to risk impeachment to kick Saddam out of Kuwait if didn’t get Congressional resolution; felt had to show power, not appeasement
• Hoped Saddam Hussein would be toppled by Iraqis to finish off war but didn’t happen
• Grounded in Brookfield, WI, on 9/11
• When Jeb and W. elected/reelected in 1998, made clear that they go their own path ↑

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

• Dad died at 2 years old; in high school worked on Erie canal, came back and went to school while working as janitor (Western Reserve Eclectic Institute): janitor to assistant professor to president in less than 5 years
• Became Ohio senator in 1859 after incumbent’s death, then colonel of Ohio 42nd regiment
• Took Congress seat in 1863 at Lincoln’s request to fight legislative battles
• Ardent abolitionist, John Brown admirer
• Conkling pressured two Garfield cabinet nominees to quit
• Buds with Ainsworth Spofford, librarian of Congress, who kept Garfield updated on current lit
• As congressman had affair with young reporter but confessed it to Lucretia and their relationship blossom from coldness to love
• Arthur, Conkling’s toady, openly critical of Garfield
• Conkling resigned in a stunt to protest Garfield’s nominee for the NY customs house, but wasn’t reinstated by NY legislature as planned
• Guiteau visited Garfield’s church and would have shot him but didn’t want to do it with Lucretia present
• Shot in the arm and then back, but not fatally; doctors’ fingers and other infections did him in
• One doctor was Charles Purvis, first black man to examine president
• Ulysses Grant, though still bitter from 1880 election, visited Lucretia in New Jersey to offer encouragement
• Youngest sons headed back to Ohio for summer but the passengers shielded them from fast-moving news of assassination
• Dr. Bliss commandeered control over Garfield’s care and blocked out other doctors; intrusive prodding accelerated demise
• Alexander Graham Bell invented induction balance but simple malfunction and lack of full-body check yielded failure from examination ↑

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

• Digital minimalism: a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
• Philosophy of technology use: “something that covers from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under which constraints.”
• “By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they’re losing control to their screens.”
• Principles of digital minimalism: 1. Clutter is costly. 2. Optimization is important. 3. Intentionality is satisfying.
• Thoreau’s “new economics”: “The cost of a thing is the amount of which I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
• Minimalist Technology Screen: 1. Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). 2. Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). 3. Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.
• Don’t click ‘Like’. Ever. — it teaches your mind that “connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation.”
• Leisure Lessons: 1. Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. 2. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. 3. Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
• Fix or build something every week. Schedule your low-quality leisure. Join things.
• Seasonal leisure plan (fall, winter, summer): objectives and habits
• Tips: Delete social media from your phone, turn your devices into single-purpose computers (Freedom) ↑

The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• (mystical union) “Far from implying some idea of attenuation, we use the term to mean the strengthening and purification of the reality and urgency contained in the most powerful interconnections revealed to us in every order of the physical and human world. … By virtue of the powerful Incarnation of the Word, our soul is wholly dedicated to Christ and centered upon Him.”
• “How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the synthesis of successive influences in which we are for ever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.”
• “To cleave to God hidden beneath the inward and outward forces which animate our being and sustain it in its development, is ultimately to open ourselves to, and put trust in, all the breaths of life. We answer to, and ‘communicate’ with, the passivities of growth by our fidelity in action. Hence, by our desire to undergo God, we find ourselves brought back to the lovable duty to grow.”
• “As in the matter of the saving value of our human endeavor, our mind wants a justification for its hopes in order to surrender itself to them more completely.”
• “A religion which is judged to be inferior to our human ideal—in spite of the marvels by which it is surrounded—is already condemned.”
• “If he is to practice to the full the perfection of his Christianity, the Christian must not falter in his duty to resist evil. On the contrary, he must fight sincerely and with all his strength, in union with the creative force of the world, to drive back evil—so that nothing in him or around him may be diminished.”
• “To find and to do the will of God (even as we diminish and die) does not imply either a direct encounter or passive attitude. … I can only unite myself to the will of God (as endured passively) when all my strength is spent, at the point where my activity, fully extended and straining toward betterment, finds itself continually counter-weighed by forces tending to halt me or overwhelm me.”
• “The formula for renunciation, if it is to be total, must satisfy two conditions: 1) It must enable us to go beyond everything there is in the world; 2) And yet at the same time compel us to press forward (with conviction and passion) the development of the same world. Speaking in general, Christ gives Himself to us through the world which is to be conserved in relation to Him.”
• “Nemo dat quod non habet. How would man give himself to God if he did not exist? What possession could he transfigure by his detachment if his hands were empty? … Your essential duty and desire is to be united with God. But in order to be united, you must first of all be—be yourself as completely as possible. And so you must develop yourself and take possession of the world in order to be.”
• “It is a truly Christian duty to grow, even in the eyes of men, and to make one’s talents bear fruit, even though they be natural.”
• “In the general rhythm of Christian life, development and renunciation, attachment and detachment, are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they harmonize, like breath in and out.”
• “Matter is not just the weight that drags us down, the mire that sucks us in, the bramble that bars our way. It is simply the slope on which we can go up just as well as go down.”
• “Immersion and emergence; participation in things and sublimation; possession and renunciation, crossing through and being borne onwards—that is the two-fold yet single movement which answers the challenge of matter in order to save it.”
• “The man who abandons himself to the divine milieu feels his inward powers clearly directed and vastly expanded by it with a sureness which enables him to avoid the reefs on which mystical ardor has so often foundered.”
• “God pushes to its furthest possible limit the differentiation among the creatures He concentrates within Himself. At the peak of their adherence to Him, the elect also discover in Him the consummation of their individual fulfillment.”
• “A first step is to see the divine omnipresence in which we find ourselves plunged as an omnipotence of action. God enfolds us and penetrates us by creating and preserving us.”
• “What is the supreme and complex reality for which the divine operation moulds us? It is the quantitative repletion and the qualitative consummation of all things: it is the mysterious Pleroma, in which the substantive One and the created many fuse without confusion in a whole which, without adding anything essential to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalization of being.”
• “All the communions of a life-time are one communion. All the communions of all men, present, past, and future, are one communion.”
• “Nothing is more concentrated or more fleeting—more fused with things or at the same time more separable from them—than a ray of light.”
• “The perception of the divine omnipresence is essentially a seeing, a taste, that is to say a sort of intuition being upon certain superior qualities in things.” ↑

Down from Basswood: Voices from the Boundary Waters by Lynn Maria Laitala

• “Charlie called Ira “bourgeois”, or big shot, because he sat between them in the middle of the canoe. In the fur trade days, the bourgeois were the men who didn’t want to work. The Indians laughed at them because paddling is the joy of traveling.” (Ch 2)
• “When Aunt lay dying she said to me, “Don’t harden yourself to death, Mary, because if you do, you will harden yourself to life.” (Ch 2)
• “Frogs were singing along the riverbanks and the great cloud of sorrow that enveloped me lifted just enough for me to realize that Matt must be lonely.” (Ch 4)
• “I was wounded in the Battle of Mukden. Over 8000 men were killed, more than 50,000 wounded. It’s hard to imagine, when you hear those numbers, that each was a man who once delighted in the freshness of spring.” (Ch 5)
• “As I carried gear into the tents, Magie jerked his head in my direction. “Finlander,” he said. One of the officials laughed. “Weak minds but strong backs.”
• “Spring peepers trilled their shrill evening song and I heard them with my heart.” (Ch 7)
• “I would never find happiness if I had to change the world in order to be happy but that didn’t mean that I had to accept persecution and abuse. I found happiness doing what I knew was right. When I defied people who abused their power—the steel trust, the clergy, the deputies, my brother, my father, my husband—I had felt God’s grace. “You’re smiling,” Arvo said to me one day, angrily, reproachfully. I smiled more broadly.”
• “There’s nothing I like better than a meal of fresh fish—but fight fish for sport? If you look at it one way, it’s torturing creatures for fun. Look at it another, you’re playing with your food. (10)
• “There’s more to living up here than paddling and portaging. It takes skill for a man to provide for others. It’s not as simple as paddling through, catching a few fish, maybe shooting some ducks. A man gets his honor by taking care of other people, being generous. That was the Chippewa way.” (10)
• “In school, the teachers talked about a great America beyond the woods and lakes, beyond men in ragged overalls who worked on rock farms and in lumber camps, beyond women who spoke Finnish and danced to accordion music on Saturday nights. America, the land of opportunity, was somewhere else.” (11)
• “My cheek pressed into the rough wool shirt. I smelled spruce and woodsmoke, heard the thumping of Jake’s heart. “Do you have to go home today?” he asked. “No,” I said. I was home.” (12)
• “Legend has it that a Finnish man once loved his wife so much that he almost told her.” (14)
• “Only sometimes, when I sit near the shore at my cabin watching the waves ebb in the waning light of the midsummer sun, does my heart fill with old yearnings.” (18)
• “My parents say the immigrants were fools who expected to find streets paved with gold. They got hardship and misery. But if you go out walking in the early spring when the marsh marigolds run riot, you will find the woods carpeted with gold.” (20)
• “On Basswood they say they’re restoring the past and here they’re supposed to be clearing for the future, but it looks the same. Making wilderness—places where man passes through and does not remain.” (21)
• “It’s easier to find two sides in history than in life.” (23)
• “The sounds that break the silence of the north are haunting sounds—the crying of the wolves, the loons, the wind.” (24)
• “Things seldom turn out the way we expect them to.” (26)
• “You know what I liked about the culture? Tolerance, frugality, humor, generosity. How do you restore that with funding? Those are the things that money destroys.” (26) ↑

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

• Two types of behavior from evolutionary mistakes: hangover (once helpful, not anymore: sugar) and hijack (using for unintended reasons: masturbation) 
• “The cost of indulgence has to be balanced by specific, targeted benefits.”
• “This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.”
• “The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication.” 
• Alcohol is “unchallenged king of intoxicants”: simple molecule, easy to make and consume, storable, precisely doseable, complex but predictable cognitive effects, quickly eliminated from body, pairs with food
• Ethanol is produced in ripe fruit by yeast cells and can travel far in the air; smell attracted primates to ripe fruit and therefore high-quality nourishment (unproven theory)
• Biologist Robert Dudley’s argument that alcohol makes us feel good because evolutionary it led to a large caloric and nutritional payoff
• Fermentation of grain to beer nearly doubles its nutritional and vitamin content; valuable part of otherwise bad diet 
• Fruit flies seek out fruit with high alcohol content to ward off wasps from colonizing their eggs
• “Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk.”
• “Humans are powerful in groups precisely because we are weak as individuals, pathetically eager to connect with one another, and utterly dependent on the group for survival.”
• Precocial vs. altricial birds; born fully equipped and ready to survive vs. blind and fully dependent on parents
• Humans’ extreme ecological niche demands us to be creative, cultural, and communal 
• Brain maturation occurs through “neural pruning” of unnecessary connections; results in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility 
• Just as thoughts are an emergent property of neural networks, so are innovations of humanity’s “collective brain” vis a vis culture 
• Humans are the Labradors of the primate world: “bizarrely tolerant of strangers, open to new experiences, ready to play”
• Play allows practice for important adult skills, social hierarchy structures, and trust (dogs wrestling)
• “It is virtual youth—a childlike state of kind in an otherwise functional adult—that is the key to cultural innovation.”
• Humans have developed tools for temporarily but powerfully enhancing childlike creativity and receptiveness in otherwise fully functional adults: meditation, prayer, chemical substances 
• Alcohol affects entire body like a “pharmacological hand grenade” compared to scalpels of cocaine and LSD
• Compared to other drugs, alcohol quickest and easiest way to neutralize prefrontal cortex and enhance mood
• Apollo vs. Dionysus; grim wolves vs. playful Labradors 
• “Being human requires a careful balancing act between Apollo and Dionysus. We need to be able to tie our shoes, but also be occasionally distracted by the beautiful or interesting or new.”
• “Cultures throughout time and across the world implicitly understood that the sober, rational, calculating individual mind is a barrier to social trust.”
• Communal intoxication allows us to “cognitively disarm” in the presence of others; handshakes
• “Bridal” comes from Old English “bryd ealu” or “bride ale” exchanged between families at wedding
• Frederick the Great of Prussia’s 1777 message: “It is disgusting to notice the increase in quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.”
• “Intoxicants—above all alcohol—appear to have been the chemical tool that allowed humans to escape the limits imposed by our ape nature and create social insect-like levels of cooperation.”
• “There is considerable anecdotal evidence that, by freeing up individual minds, lubricating the flow of ideas from person to person, and reducing self-consciousness and inhibition, communal alcohol consumption is a key driver of cultural innovation.”
• “We might see the ‘spirit world,’ in a modern context, as the wildly diverse, fragmented, technicolor, non-linear landscape of the human brain radically freed of cognitive control.”
• Increase of business travel despite videoconferencing related to the puzzle of why we like to get drunk; “Neither makes practical sense unless we discern the cooperation problems to which they are a response”
• “Efficiency, the central value of Apollo, is the enemy of disruptive innovation.”
• UK study found four variables on reported feelings of closeness with dinner-mates: number of diners (about four seemed optimal), presence of laughter, presence of reminiscences, and consumption of alcohol
• “Moderate social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks.”
• Mild intoxication makes you physically appear more attractive to others, probably related to becoming more relaxed, confident, unselfconscious, and happy 
• Michael Ing: “Friendship nullifies the limitations of self and time. It encourages the loss of oneself in another, and heightens an awareness of this other, more communal, self.”
• “Human selves do not, in fact, come pre-installed with a mute button, which is precisely why we reach for the bottle or joint.”
• “We remain uncomfortable talking about our need for embodied pleasure for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of more respectable, abstract connoisseurship. This is a hang-up that we need to get over.”
• “It is our deeply seated, and so typically invisible, mind-body dualism that causes us to systematically, and unfairly, denigrate the role of chemical intoxication in any vision of the good life.”
• Charles Baudelaire: “You must always be drunk. Everything depends upon getting drunk, it is all that matters. In order to not feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and pushes you to the ground, you must be drunk, perpetually drunk. Drunk on what? On wine, on poetry or virtue, whatever your taste. But get drunk.” ↑

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour

• “Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In one hear during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with your your life long?”
• “A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.”
• “Somewhere along the line I had fallen in love with learning, and it became a lifelong romance. Early on I discovered it was fun to follow along the byways of history to find those treasures that await any searcher. It may be that all later decisions followed naturally from that first one.”
• “Education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, for increased appreciation of all one sees or experiences. It should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness.”
• Sir Richard Francis Burton: “Do what thy manhood bids thee do, / From none but self expect applause; / He noblest lives and noblest dies / Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
• “It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
• “A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”
• “I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.”
• “I believe adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble. What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home.”
• “Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will.”
• “Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that had happened is leading to now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archaeologists of the future. … Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading.” 
• “It is not enough to have learned, for living is sharing and I must offer what I have for whatever it is worth.”
• “One does not forget the dark, lonely nights, or the odd little memories that linger for no specific reason.”
• “Upon the shelves of our libraries, the world’s greatest teachers await our questions.”
• “We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” ↑

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

• “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” ↑

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne

• Sherman almost raided by Kiowas in 1871 Texas as chief of army
• Quahadis subset of Comanche most feared, even by Comanche; led by Quanah Parker, didn’t trade or treaty with whites
• Gen. Mackenzie dispatched to kill Comanche in reversing frontier, used Comanche rivals as scouts
• Mexico encouraged white settlement in Texas for buffer against Comanche territory
• Horses (from Spanish) key to Comanche power; mounted Indians were rare, and Iberian mustang bred in Asia and Africa and Mexico to suit arid plains
• Called ‘Nermernuh’ initially, Comanche were obscure, feckless tribe until Spanish arrived
• Name ‘Comanche’ came from Utes “Koh-mats” or Komantcia meaning “anyone who is against me all the time”
• Kidnapping allowed for ransoms and helped supplement low fertility rates, induced by horseback lifestyle miscarriages
• “The land alone stood a good chance of killing you. The fact that is was inhabited by Comanches and other mounted Indians made death something of a certainty.” p. 40
• Since women prepared buffalo hides for trade and tended horses, were more prized as captives
• Thousands of years behind on civilization, North American tribes viewed as “premoral” backwards barbarians compared to more cultured and learned settlers
• Organized in discrete bands rather than tribes; whites would negotiate with headmen and assume they spoke for whole tribe
• Republic of Texas launched Indian war in 1839; began using rival Indians as scouts
• By 1840s, disappearing game plus Texan warfare killing them steadily, but nothing more than disease: smallpox, syphilis, cholera
• Parker clan came from Illinois in 1833 with land grants
• Texas in a hard place: wouldn’t be annexed in 1836 by US, not recognized as independent by Mexico, attacked by Comanches from west and north; neither would accept peace or surrender
• Ranging companies established by Daniel Parker: self-supplied, young, structure-less
• Rangers, led by legendary John Coffee Hays, started using Colt revolving six-shooter, mounted; big change from on foot with cumbersome Kentucky rifles
• Texas population 15,000 in 1836 and 604,000 in 1860.
• “The outcome of nearly every treaty was the same: White civilization advanced, aboriginal civilization was destroyed, subsumed, pushed out. The government made claims it could never enforce and never intended to enforce, and Indians died. This is a dreary history.” p. 162
• Army failed to adopt Ranger tactics after Hays success
• Cynthia Ann recaptured in Battle of Pease River, where husband Peta Nocona was killed and young sons Quanah and Peanuts escaped; taken in with daughter Prairie Flower and paraded by uncle Isaac Parker and family
• Civil War evaporated western resistance briefly; after the war the army stuck between massacring Indians and neutering frontier for whites
• Belief in Office of Indian Affairs that frontier troubles were white men’s fault wrongheaded given Comanche all-around aggression; besides wouldn’t get behind stopping American expansionism
• Treaty conference in Wichita 1867, with reps from remaining tribes and US government, Gen. Sherman; tribes signed but were quickly betrayed or neglected
• Corruption and graft in Indian Affairs led to terrible food and clothing and Leavenworth walking off the job in 1868, anarchy
• Office of Indian Affairs replaced with Indian Bureau by Grant, run by Quakers to reduce corruption
• Mackenzie a class behind Custer at West Point, graduating in 1862; serious, smart student (opposite of Custer); ascended to brevet major general, wounded six times
• Grant’s new peace policy ended up rewarding aggression, as Indians realized warpath led to treaties/gifts and goods
• Buffalo extermination in 1870s for commerce but also to eliminate Indian livelihood
• By 1874 Quanah’s raiding led to abandoning peace policy and reservation safe haven; Mackenzie’s forces pursued them en force but couldn’t find them
• Quahadis starved out winter of 1875 before they resigned to reservation; Mackenzie’s respect earned them better treatment
• Meager food and goods on reservation; weak cattle released for warriors to kill
• Quanah remade himself, in 180 took “white man’s road” and abandoned past; Mackenzie tutored him in white ways and took interest in his family history
• Quanah dispatched to bring in renegade Comanche band, using his optimism and killer credentials to convince them of better life
• Cattle business under Quanah blossomed, led to increased status and influence via reservation land leasing; some opposed leasing as a way to lose land, but Quanah played the game well
• Wanted to build house but needed funding. Petitioned for subsidy but denied by Baptist commissioner against Quanah’s polygamy
• Mackenzie gained acclaim within ranks after cleaning up the Custer mess and subduing other skirmishes, but after promotion to brigadier general in 1881 he rapidly declined and died in obscurity in insane asylum in 1889
• Dawes Act of 1887 allowed gov’t to parcel reservations for individual allotments; Quanah hectored Jerome Commission for specifics and got some concessions before Senate ratification but lost land
• Relationship with Roosevelt brought him to Star House in Cache, Oklahoma, for a publicized wolf hunt, and later Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge
• Rejected Ghost Dance revival, revived peyote as religious ritual, and fought for better reservation school district; contrast with neighbor Geronimo, self-promoter but not well-liked
• Tracked down Cynthia’s grave and lobbied successfully to re-inter her in Oklahoma ↑

The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman

• “Nontrivial schooling can provide a point of view from which what is can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility. What this means is that at its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.”
• “A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative, one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to organize one’s life around it.”
• “My intention here is neither to bury nor to praise any gods, but to to claim that we cannot do without them, that whatever else we may call ourselves, we are the god-making species. Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future.”
• “The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically. The measure of a narrative’s “truth” or “falsity” is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of a community life, a basis for moral conduct, explanations of that which cannot be known?”
• “We are unceasing in creating histories and futures for ourselves through the medium of narrative. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.”
• “The great story of science … is a story that exalts human reason, places criticism over faith, disdains revelation as a source of knowledge, and, to put a spiritual cast upon it, postulates that our purpose on Earth is to discover reliable knowledge. Of course, the great narrative of science shares with the great religious narratives the idea that there is order to the universe, which is a fundamental assumption of all important narratives.”
• “The great strength of the science-god is, of course, that it works. … Its theories are demonstrable and cumulative; its errors, correctable; its results, practical. … It is a mighty god and, like more ancient ones, gives people a measure of control over their lives, which is one of the reasons why gods are invented in the first place.”
• “[Science] places itself at the service of both the beneficent and the cruel, and its grand moral impartiality, if not indifference, has made it welcome the world over.”
• God —> Son & Holy Ghost; science —> technology
• “Whereas the science-god speaks to us of both understanding and power, the technology-god speaks only of power. It demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic.”
• “I wish to stress that all gods are imperfect, even dangerous. A belief too strongly held, one that excludes the possibility of a tolerance for other gods, may result in a psychopathic fanaticism.”
• “To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism.”
• “What makes public schools public is not so much that the schools have common goals but that the students have common gods. The reason for this is that public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.”
• Not good century or two for gods: Darwin with evolution, Marx against nationalism/capitalism, Freud against reason, Einstein against Newton’s science-god
• On research on the engineering of learning: “The evidence for the superiority of one method over another, usually given in the language of statistics, which, in spite of its abstract nature, is strangely referred to as “hard evidence.”
• Theodore Roszak: “Too much apparatus, like too much bureaucracy, only inhibits the natural flow [of teaching and learning]. Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.” A problem that’s metaphysical, not technical 
• The god of Economic Utility tells the story that “we are first and foremost economic creatures, and that our sense of worth and purpose is to be found in our capacity to secure material benefits.”
• The god of Consumership basic moral axiom is “whoever dies with the most toys, wins” 
• “The majority of important television commercials take the form of religious parables organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education. In these parables, the root cause of evil is technological innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress. This is the primary source of unhappiness, humiliation, and discord in life.“
• “At some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?”
• “In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities.” — not just informational instruction but philosophical inquiry
• “I am not arguing against using computers in school. I am arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it.”
• School not primarily about transmitting information; about teaching how to behave in groups, social cohesion, responsibility
• H.L. Mencken, 1918: “There is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.”
• “Narratives are not exactly histories at all, but a special genre of storytelling that uses history to give form to ideals.”
• Claude Lévi-Strauss: “The purpose of myth is to provide a model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
• The god of Separatism/Multiculturalism (as opposed to cultural pluralism) in school curriculum divides, leads to Balkanization, privatizes schooling and the mind (instead of creating public mind), and engenders hate
• “Who writes the songs that young girls sing? Or the tales that old men tell? Who creates the myths that bind a nation and give purpose and meaning to the idea of a public education? In America, it is the advertisers and, of course, the popular musicians and filmmakers; maybe even the hollow men gathered around swimming pools in Beverly Hills, inventing stories we call television sitcoms.”
• “At any given time in the symbolic universe of a community, there dwell multiple narratives, some shining at the forefront, vivid and unmistakable; some in the background, indistinct and half-forgotten; some sleeping, some recently awakened, and many in uneasy contradiction to others.”
• “Our citizens believe in two contradictory reasons for schooling. One is that schools must teach the young to accept the world as it is, with all of their culture’s rules, requirements, constraints, and even prejudices. The other is that the young should be taught to be critical thinkers, so that they become men and women of independent mind, distanced from the conventional wisdom of their own time and with strength and skill enough to change what is wrong.”
• “For us to believe that we are godlike, or perfect, is among the most serious sins of which we are capable. The Greeks called the sin hubris. The Christians call it pride. Scientists call it dogmatism.”
• “We may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a “subject”—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.”
• “The American Constitution is not a catechism, but a hypothesis.”
• On humans: “We are the world makers, and the word weavers. That is what makes us smart, and dumb; moral and immoral; tolerant and bigoted. That is what makes us human.”
• Recommends changing major school subjects to archaeology, anthropology, and astronomy
• “Archaeology is among the best subjects we have for helping to cultivate in the young a sense of earthly perspective.” 
• “[Anthropology] presents to us living cultures that differ widely in their worldviews and therefore helps the young to defend themselves against idolatry and false absolutes.”
• “Anthropology is clearly a subject of global dimensions, and its early introduction to our young and its continued study throughout schooling would help to give them an awe-inspiring sense of humanity’s range of difference, as well as a sense of our common points. In learning about difference, we become less afraid and therefore more courageous. In learning about commonalities, we become more hopeful.”
• “Astronomy is a key subject if we wish to cultivate in our young a sense of awe, interdependence, and global responsibility.”
• “Astronomy is a human story, filled with the same emotions, drama, triumphs, and tragedies one finds in Shakespeare’s plays. There is ambition, greed, deceit, superstition, nobility, wonder, and, always and above all else, curiosity.”
• William James: “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.”
• Teachers should occasionally have to teach a subject they hate to be forced to be a learner again, sympathize with struggling students, and get new ideas
• “We can improve the quality of teaching and learning overnight by getting rid of all textbooks.” Badly written, imply subject is boring 
• On textbooks: “There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.”
• ”Textbooks are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.”
• Right-wing group monitoring media and academia for left-wing bias (Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media/Academia) stumbled upon “the best idea yet invented for achieving what every teacher longs for: first, to get students to pay careful attention; second, to get them to think critically.”
• The “story” that infuses so much schooling: “You come to school to learn important facts and enduring truths. Your teacher knows many of these, your textbooks still others. It is not your business to know where they came from or how. It would, in any case, be a waste of valuable time to burden you with the mistakes of those who thought they had discovered important facts and enduring truths. School is not a place for documenting error, but for revealing the true state of affairs.”
• “Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians.”
• All subjects should be taught from an historical perspective as a means of educating students to be error detectors – “I can think of no better way to demonstrate that knowledge is not a fixed thing, but a continuous struggle to overcome prejudice, authoritarianism, and even “common sense.”
• Re: William James on subjects becoming “humanistic” when taught historically: “His point almost certainly was that there is nothing more human than the stories of our errors and how we have managed to overcome them, and then fallen into error again, and continued our efforts to make corrections—stories without end. Robert Maynard Hutchins referred to these stories as the Great Conversation, a dynamic and accurate metaphor, since it suggests not only that knowledge is passed down from one thinker to another but modified, refined, and corrected as the “conversation” goes on.”
• “To teach about the atom without including Democritus in the conversation, electricity without Faraday, political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, astronomy without Ptolemy, is to deny our students access to the Great Conversation.”
• Cicero: “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child.”
• “When we incorporate the lives of our ancestors in our education, we discover that some of them were great error-makers, some great error-correctors, some both. And in discovering this, we accomplish three things. First, we help students to see that knowledge is a stage in human development, with a past and a future. Second, we acquaint students with the people and ideas that comprise “cultural literacy”—that is to say, give them some understanding of where their ideas come from and how we came by them. And third, we show them that error is no disgrace, that it is the agency through which we increase understanding.”
• 5 narratives “that contain sufficient resonance and power to be taken seek as reasons for schooling”:
  • Spaceship Earth: the great human heritage and responsibility
  • Fallen Angel: importance of error
  • The American Experiment: continuous argument
  • The Law of Diversity: differences in language/custom/religion/etc increase overall vitality, excellence, and unity 
  • The Word Weavers / World Makers: language as an act of creation and formation of worldview 
• “Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong. Far from creating cynics, such a story is likely to foster a healthy and creative skepticism, which is something quite different from cynicism. It refutes the story of the student learner as the dummy in a ventriloquism act. It holds out the hope for students to discover a sense of excitement and purpose in being part of the Great Conversation.”
• “In steering clear of patriotism, educators miss an opportunity to provide schooling with a profound and transcendent narrative that can educate and inspire students of all ages. I refer, of course, to the story of America as a great experiment and as a center of continuous argument.”
• Four important arguments/experiments that characterize American culture: 
  • “Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture that allows the greatest possible freedom of religious and political thought and expression?”
  • “Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture made up of people of different languages, religions, traditions, and races?”
  • “Is it possible to provide a free public education for all citizens?”
  • “Is it possible to preserve the best of American traditions and social institutions while allowing uncontrolled technological development?”
• On the study of American experiment: “This is a powerful story that is at the core of what America is about. The story says that experimenting and arguing is what Americans do. It does not matter if you are unhappy about the way things are. Everybody is unhappy about the way things are. We experiment to make things better, and we argue about what experiments are worthwhile and whether or not those we try are any good. And when we experiment, we make mistakes, and reveal our ignorance, and our timidity, and our naïveté. But we go on because we have faith in the future—that we can make better experiments and better arguments. This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story, and I should not be surprised if students are touched by it and find in it a reason for learning.”
• “American English is especially well suited to a celebration of the virtue of diversity, since the multicultural influences on it have been continuous and powerful. There is no group that ever came to America, or was here before anyone came, that has not contributed words, and therefore ideas, to the language.”
• “Go to any museum in the world, even one that serves only as an archive, and ask, “What is this museums definition of humanity?” You will be rewarded with some kind of an answer. In some cases, the answer will be timid and even confused; in others, bold and unmistakable. Of course, it is folly to say which museums convey the right answers. All of them are correct: We are toolmakers and symbol makers and war makers. We are sublime and ridiculous, beautiful and ugly, profound and trivial, spiritual and practical.”
• “Any canon can be added to, modified, or even discarded if it no longer serves, in part or whole, as a model of excellence. This means that any canon is a living, dynamic instrument, and it is certainly not limited to those artists who are dead, and long dead.”
• “A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.”
• Definitions, questions, and metaphors are “three of the most potent elements with which human language constructs a worldview.”
• 10 principles of technology 
  • 1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
  • 2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
  • 3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
  • 4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview.”
  • 5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
  • 6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, different technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.
  • 7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different technologies have different political biases.
  • 8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases.
  • 9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different technologies have different social biases.
  • 10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technologies have different content biases. ↑

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

• Late 1590s parliament’s Vagrancy Act sought to eliminate homelessness through coercive punishment; also empowered press-gangs to dragoon young men into Royal Navy
• future pirate Henry Every of Devon joined navy in 1670
• West Country of Devonshire shaped by seafaring/piracy life: Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, “Black Sam” Bellamy, Blackbeard all from there, and pirate-speak inspired by West Country vernacular
• Sea Peoples of 1170s BCE the first pirates, memorialized in Egyptian hieroglyphics but otherwise undocumented
• Lawless, rootlessness on Mediterranean; “mark the point of origin for piracy as a form of self-identity”
• 13th and 12th centuries BCE experienced Late Bronze Age Collapse triggered by Sea Peoples’ extreme carnage to “great palace societies of Greece and the Levant”
• “Terrorism” dates to 1795 letter from Monroe to Jefferson about French Revolution
• Pirate mantra “dead men tell no tales” dual meaning of killing enemies but also sparing a few to tell “tales of terror on the seas”
• Pirates made a point of publicizing their barbarity and madness so their reputation could strengthen and spread
• Golden Age of piracy coincides almost exactly with the emergence of print culture
• Jeanne de Clisson the “Lioness of Brittany” pirate along English Channel in 1300s
• India’s immense natural resources and technical ingenuity not matched by an appetite for global seafaring trade; Islam much more economically “extroverted” and dominated
• Afghani sultan Mahmud of Ghazna began crusade of India in 1001; Islamic control continued for five centuries
• 1658 last Muslim ruler of India without contest was Aurangzeb
• Legal classification “Hostis humani generis” (enemies of all mankind) usually reserved for pirates for atrocious crimes against humanity committed in international waters
• Chief difference between pirate and privateer was state’s sanction to attack vessels of official state enemies, and got cut of profit
• Privateering emerged in 1500s as England-Spain grew hostile and legitimate trade commingled with aggressive mercantilism and piracy
• Drake’s privateering while circumnavigating made him a hero and prototype
• Barbary pirates routinely pillaged English coast and kidnapped into slavery
• East India Trading Company first-ever joint-stock corporation, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 first as voyage-specific but then permanent stocks
• Spice was its initial goal but cloth (calico, chintz) eventually overtook
• “Hitting the head” originated from toilet hole suspended over bowsprit of ship
• Dysentery known as “bloody flux”
• Labor “strike” from sailors striking/lowering sails from anchored ship as a sign of their refusal to work
• Most pirate voyages began by establishing “articles of agreement” for profit-sharing; “floating democracy”
• Quartermaster the judicial branch and Congress to Captain’s president or CEO
• Extra compensation for pirates suffering serious injuries a la insurance policy
• Pirate ship of late 1600s early 1700s outside the law of European nation-states and ahead of them; workers collective to the East India Trading’s multinational corporation
• Popular pirates like Every not just charismatic rogues but advancing unprecedented populist values
• Every led mutiny of Charles I ship after voyage to West Indies stalled in Spain; first documented record from a 1694 sung ballad “Every Verses”
• As printing technology expanded, sung ballads accompanied by text with woodcuts (broadsides); musical accounts of current events with headlines as popular song refrains hawked by balladmongers
• Unusually, Every Verses framed Every as hero rather than criminal; also developed his mythical identity
• Wives of remaining expedition crew petitioned court for contractual pay that sponsor Houblon refused; Houblon submitted Every Verses as official evidence
• East India Trading controlled news from India so manipulated to buy low sell high; bribed King James II court to maintain exclusive charter but 1688 Glorious Revolution upended that
• Every’s plan for dangerous trip to Madagascar then Red Sea to plunder treasure ships bound for Mecca and the wealthy Mughal empire
• Probably half of all pirates present in spring 1695 at Bab-el-Mandeb strait leading to Red Sea and Mecca where Aurangzeb’s treasure ships converged for hajj; six pirate ships agreed to alliance and Every commander instead of more experienced Thomas Tew
• Pirate armada waited at strait but merchant ships slipped by at night and most made it to Surat; Every and the Fancy pursued and commandeered Aurangzeb’s far larger Gunsway
• “Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.”
• Khafi Khan’s account of Gunsway raid from Surat based on survivor testimony provided counternarrative to heroic English ballads
• Plunder in addition to gang rape of women returning from hajj, including relatives of Aurangzeb, made attack beyond the pale and Every a wanted man
• Assumption was East India Trading was behind attack to double-dip, and Indian uproar and lost goodwill made Aurangzeb look to expel them
• Three distinct categories of pirates, corporations, and nations exploring their boundary conditions and defining new roles
• By 1696 pro-wool protectionist movement in England against calico/cotton importers and wearers lobbied Parliament and slashed East India Trading stock value
• Fate of multinational corporation most vulnerable in this period of bribery scandal, Every attack, siege of Bombay, and calico backlash
• East India Trading put out bounty on Every, endorsed by England, which encouraged other pirates to capture or kill him
• Loot distributed then Every sailed to Bahamas
• East India Trading reps negotiated with Aurangzeb to become his fleet’s bodyguard at sea and pirate hunters; in alternate history it could have been expelled from India and collapsed but instead on the path to global superpower
• Every’s men scattered, including to American colonies, which had reputation for nurturing and tolerating piracy; Every and 20 men returned to Ireland and UK and several arrested
• Hunt for Every united England and East India Trading, with trial and executions as opportunity to counter England’s image as nation of pirates
• Two Every pirates flipped, giving prosecutors two witnesses and evidence
• Long list of potential charges, but focused on piracy-specific ones against Aurangzeb
• Jury returned not guilty; most likely due to popular Every myth and lack of empathy for foreign emperor
• Acquitted of piracy, but prosecutors reframed and retried for mutiny and stealing Houblon’s ship but still reused evidence; guilty and executed
• August 1686 last historical trace of Every
• Ocean in the Age of Exploration forced constant experimentation, both technological (better maps) and political (distributing wealth)
• After Aurangzeb died, a string of failed successors before East India Trading assumed official control in 1757 ↑

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer by Steven Johnson

• “The unavoidable fact about the history of human health is that the innovations that have driven progress are themselves almost always enmeshed in symbiotic relationships with other innovations.”
• “Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.”
• Climate change wouldn’t be a problem if we were powered by fossil fuels but with 1800 levels of global population
• We managed to double life expectancy within a century; additional 20,000 days 
• 1660s haberdasher John Graunt analyzed London’s Bills of Mortality as a hobby; published pamphlet that foretold demography, actuarial sciences, statistics, probability 
• Graunt’s work and Nancy Howell’s analysis of African hunter-gatherer tribes in 1960s both revealed an enduring median life expectancy of 35 years 
• “Human beings had spent ten thousand years inventing agriculture, gunpowder, double-entry accounting, perspective in painting—but these undeniable advances in collective human knowledge had failed to move the needle in one critical area. Despite all those accomplishments, we were no better at warding off death.”
• Life expectancy of British aristocracy lower than general population from 1500s to early 1700s; access to doctors actually caused more harm given quack remedies (Mad King George III may have been arsenic poisoning)
• Age of “heroic medicine”—“full of grand schemes and bold interventions that clearly did more harm than good”
• Doctor Thomas McKeown’s “The Modern Rise of Population” and McKeown thesis: people were living longer not because of medical interventions but because of an overall improvement in the standard of living (agriculture)
• “Whatever positive effects were caused by genuinely useful knowledge or medicine the doctors had accumulated before [World War II] were canceled out by the lingering delusions of leeches and arsenic, all the ludicrous interventions of heroic medicine.” and unhygienic conditions of hospitals
• “The surprisingly long life of heroic medicine, and all its absurdities, should serve as a useful reminder that “Western” medicine—for all of its recent achievements—had a miserable track record for most of its existence.”
• Variolation (deliberate exposure to variola minor/smallpox disease) began in Asia around 15-1600s; “a radical break from the methods of heroic medicine”
• “In the age of smallpox, childhood was inextricably linked to sudden and catastrophic illness. Being a child was to forever be on the brink of death, and being a parent was to forever be haunted by that imminent threat.”
• Smallpox called “the speckled monster” for the pockmarks it left
• Mary Montagu a British royal who survived smallpox in early 1770s, then lived in Turkey where inoculation (“engrafting”) had basically eradicated smallpox; inoculated her children and brought practice back to England 
• “Ideas are like viruses. For an idea to transform a society, the institutions and agents who transmit the idea are in many ways just as critical as the original minds that conceived the idea.”
• Lone genius vs. network collaboration 
• “Many great ideas die out before they can have a wider effect because they lack other key figures in the network: figures that amplify or advocate or circulate or fund the original breakthrough.”
• Mary Montagu a connector and amplifier 
• Jefferson was early adopter of smallpox vaccine, inoculating his extended family and neighbors while President in 1801
• Mid-1800s saw rise of anti-vaccination movement with three prongs: late-Victorian homeopathy/spiritualists, those who thought it distracted from fighting unsanitary conditions/miasma, and personal liberty crowd
• Mandatory vaccine laws enacted throughout late 1800s; British law had exemption for conscientious objection (first instance of the concept)
• “In many ways, mass vaccination was closer to modern breakthroughs like organized labor and universal suffrage: an idea that required social movements and acts of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root.”
• International Sanitary Conference started in Paris in 1851; led to International Office of Public Health in 1907 and then WHO in 1945
• Last smallpox case was a Bangladeshi girl in 1975 
• Smallpox eradication was global cooperation even during Cold War (contrast to competition of space race)
• WHO spearheaded global eradication program starting in 1966; “Global eradication was as dependent on the invention of an institution like the WHO as it was on the invention of the vaccine itself.”
• Smallpox lost ability to survive outside of human bodies, making it uniquely vulnerable to eradication
• “Ring vaccination” technique vaccinated people/villages around outbreak area, creating an immunity firewall to snuff out virus
• British doctor and statistician William Farr founder or public health statistics throughout Britain and Wales in early 1800s
• “The use of data to understand patterns of life and death had been almost exclusively a commercial interest during the eighteenth century, a science developed largely for the mercenary aims of the insurance companies. But Farr and some of his peers saw the potential of vital statistics as a tool for social reform, a means of diagnosing the ills of society and shining light on its inequalities.”
• Farr: “Facts, however numerous, do not constitute a science. Like innumerable grains of sand on the sea shore, single facts appear isolated, useless, shapeless; it is only when compared, when arranged in their natural relations, when crystallized by the intellect, that they constitute the eternal truths of science.”
• Farr’s 1843 life tables comparing mortality between metropolitan London, industrial Liverpool, and rural Surrey showed Liverpool highest; negative effects of industrialization and population density
• London East End cholera epidemic of 1866 turned out to be beginning of end of industrial-age mass mortality; Henry Whitehead (of The Ghost Map) recruited by Farr and investigators to help source the outbreak, the last ever recorded in London
• W.E.B. Du Bois first African American to complete PhD at Harvard, in 1890
• Du Bois recruited in 1896 by UPenn to study Philadelphia’s rising crime and poverty of black-dominant 7th Ward; resulting book The Philadelphia Negro a seminal work of urban sociology
• “As a sociologist, Du Bois was working at the vanguard of his field; as a social epidemiologist, analyzing and explaining the disparity in health outcomes between white and black populations, he was at least a half century ahead of everyone else.”
• Few memorials for public health breakthroughs (Broad St. pump and plaque for Du Bois’s work exceptions); difference of lives lost (war memorials) vs. saved 
• By 1840s infants and children were more than half of all deaths in New York City
• Zachary Taylor died after drinking contaminated milk
• With NYC farmland disappearing through 19th century, farmers turned to used wheat from distilleries (slop, mash, swill) to feed cows; produced “unappetizing, blue-colored milk” that could at least be delivered fresh
• Increased demand for milk spurred in part by more women joining workforce and breastfeeding less beyond first few months 
• Reduced costs and horrific cow conditions produced copious cheap milk, branded as “Pure Country Milk” despite being “adulterated with chalk, flour, and eggs”
• “We remember the casualty rates of military conflicts from the period—the Civil War most prominently—because those events concentrated the killing in episodes of sudden violence. But the steady, incremental losses of children dying one by one in the slums of the industrial city do not stay fixed in our historical memory.”
• Mid-19th century France, Louis Pasteur initially focused on beer and wine, detecting microbes that caused spoiling; experiments in 1865 showed heating to 130 degrees prevented it
• Pasteurization didn’t become standard practice in milk industry until 1915, costing millions of lives; “the lag happened because progress is not merely the result of scientific discovery. It also requires other forces: crusading journalism, activism, politics. Science alone cannot improve the world. You also need struggle.”
• Swill milk took decades to end given influence of milk industry (muckraking investigations plus persistent promotion and political cartoons brought legislation by mid-1860s); swill only part of larger problem 
• In early 1880s Pasteur rival Robert Koch identified tuberculosis and cholera bacteria thanks to advances in microscope lenses
• By mid 1800s mechanical refrigeration allowed for advances in public health via perishable foods and vaccines
• Could test milk for tuberculosis and certify sanitary conditions, but pasteurization made milk less flavorful 
• Chicago became first American city to require pasteurization in 1909; New York followed in 1914 and elsewhere by early 1920s
• Chlorine is poisonous except in very small doses for killing bacteria; doctor John Leal secretly added it to public reservoirs in Jersey City 
• From 1900-1930 U.S. infant mortality dropped by 62 percent
• Pasteurization pioneer Nathan Straus: “I have always only considered how best and quickest to enlighten the world in a practical manner. To attain this I sought the help of the press, and it is due to its ever ready cooperation that my work and its results have been made known and broadcast.”
• Cholera treatment “oral rehydration therapy” (ORT) was simple combination of water, salt, and sugar that could be administered by amateurs en masse; developed in third-world field and extraordinarily effective but delayed acceptance due to Western bias against simplistic/inferior treatments
• Milk pasteurization and ORT for cholera: breakthroughs emerged from crisis, inventive publicity strategies, slow mainstream adoption
• Some breakthroughs behind their time: ORT, typewriters bicycles, the wheel
• Beginning of 1900s had electricity, radio, cusp of flight, but still bogus medicinal cures
• “Added all together—the lives extended versus the lives shortened—the medical profession barely broke even.”
• “Before the outbreak of World War II, the overwhelming majority of medicine on the market was useless, if it wasn’t actively harmful.”; pharmaceutical industry almost entirely unregulated
• Placebo effect and immune systems doing their job were two factors that kept ineffective drugs on market
• 1962 Kefauver-Harris Drugs Amendments forced drug companies to prove efficacy not just safety; wouldn’t have been possible before then without advent of random controlled double-blind trials (RCT)
• RCT “emerged as a confluence of several distinct intellectual tributaries” as far back as 1740s scurvy study by James Lind; statistician R.A. Fisher’s randomization studies in 1930s influenced epidemiologist/statistician Austin Hill’s 1948 study of experimental antibiotic tuberculosis cure (first to use RCT)
• “It is likely not a coincidence that the first true miracle drugs and the first true RCTs were developed within a few years of one another.”
• Hill also co-author with Richard Doll of 1940s study linking smoking with lung cancer; 1950 paper initially dismissed because medical establishment assumption at the time was bacteria-focused given recent discoveries 
• Hill & Doll did another long-term study with doctors to predict lung cancer; so successful they published early in 1954; 10 years later Surgeon General report 
• “The partnership between RCT design and government regulation—the experiments revealing threats that governments then outlaw or restrict—led to a quiet but profound revolution in the health of millions of people around the world. … It was a revolution jump-started not by spectacular technological breakthroughs or protestors in the streets but instead by different kinds of agents: artful experiment designers, government regulators.”
• Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered antibiotics in 1928 after leaving a Petri dish of staphylococcus bacterium exposed, with subsequent mold inhibiting growth of bacteria; penicillin 
• “The triumph of penicillin is actually one of the great stories of international multidisciplinary collaboration. It is a story of a network, not an eccentric genius.”
• “For penicillin to graduate from a brilliant accident to a true miracle drug, three things needed to happen: someone had to determine whether it actually worked as a medicine; someone had to figure out how to produce it at scale. And then a market had to develop to support that large-scale production.” — World War II
• “Vaccines had fought off pathogens by triggering our immune systems. Public health had done it by building external immune systems. Penicillin was a new trick: manufacturing a compound that had its own pathogen-killing powers.”
• In 1941 Dept. of Agriculture’s lab in Peoria began large-scale search for other strains of penicillin: in soil for natural and abundant bacteria/antibacteria, and moldy fruit (one cantaloupe begat nearly all of today’s penicillin)
• U.S. soon mass-producing stable penicillin with help from Pfizer/Merck; distributed to military hospitals and with GIs in ETO
• Nazis unable to produce penicillin at scale, already had (dangerous and less effective) sulfonamides, brain drain of scientists
• After Valkyrie bombing shrapnel, Hitler’s doctor treated him with penicillin confiscated from captured American soldiers, likely saving his life
• At turn of 20th century tuberculosis was third leading cause of death in U.S.; by 1950s it was automobiles
• Safety Appliance Act of 1893 forced railroads to install power brakes and automatic couplers, cutting mortality rates of rail workers in half; first law primarily focused on workplace safety 
• “Measured over the course of the 20th century, only the machine gun rivals the automobile as a mass killer.”
• Car manufacturers argued driving was fundamentally dangerous, and were conceptually limited about making modifications to cars themselves; no seatbelts, rearview mirrors, head rests, etc
• Former pilot Hugh DeHaven injured in crash and through egg drops researched impact of collisions on human body and effectiveness of right “packaging” to avoid death
• Col. John Stapp created linear decelerator (“rocket sled”) to demonstrate effect of deceleration from high speeds; proved it wasn’t fatal but safety didn’t sell cars
• Volvo engineer tinkered with seat belt design in 1950s, eventually awarded patent for now-standard three-point system but didn’t enforce patent 
• Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed inspired GM to hire investigator for dirt on him
• “Real change often requires a first step of convincing people that the existing problem is not inevitable; and devising a solution requires a diverse network of talents, building on one another’s work.”
• Slow, incremental decrease in automobile deaths in last few decades 
• “New scientific breakthroughs changed the world not just through the new functionalities they introduced, but also in the ways they expanded the adjacent possible: through the lateral effects they created, the new ideas that suddenly became thinkable because of them.”
• Global death in 1920s from famine exceeded war fatalities; only flu did more damage 
• Irish potato famine of 1840s, Little Ice Age in 1300s Europe, Mayan civilization collapse after drought AD 1020-1100 
• McKeown’s thesis that we started living longer in 1800s because of better farming and feeding rather than medicine 
• Over 1900s famine deaths per capita decreased from 82/100K to 0.5
• Nitrates used for soil growth became highly prized when discovered in bat guano; huge deposit discovered off Peru coast in 1840
• Guano from caves in US was the Confederacy’s primary resource for gunpowder 
• Nitrogen was as useful to farmers as bomb makers; artificial ammonia nitrate developed by Germans in World War I led to invention of artificial fertilizer 
• Roughly 2 billion people on earth in early 1900 and 7.7 billion now; despite explosive growth starvation and malnutrition have plummeted 
• Concept of factory farming started on 1920s Delaware family farm with Cecile Steele, who accidentally received far too many chickens but decided to scale up
• “Each time we take that antibiotic that kills off a lingering infection or stop short of a car accident because our antilock brakes kick in, we go on with our lives, barely even registering what has just happened. But in an alternate time line without those protections, we might well have ceased to exist.”
• Advances grouped by lives saved:
  • Billions: artificial fertilizer, toilets/sewers, vaccines
  • Hundreds of millions: antibiotics, Bifurcated needles, Blood transfusions, Chlorination, Pasteurization
  • Millions: AIDS cocktail, Anesthesia, Angioplasty, Antimalarial drugs, CPR, Insulin, Kidney Dialysis, Oral Rehydration Therapy, radiology, refrigeration, seat belts
• Few of the “pantheon” advances originated in private sector, though most of them relied on private sector production and distribution 
• Less tangible innovations: ways of seeing (microscopes and cholera map); ways of counting (urban density/mortality, epidemiology); ways of testing (randomized controlled trials); ways of connecting (penicillin development before WWII); ways of discovering (penicillin); ways of amplifying (evangelists for vaccines and pasteurization)
• Astonishing speed of identifying, sequencing Covid virus and producing vaccine; HIV took 3 years just to identify
• Cancer treatment evolved from surgical removal to “bombing” of chemotherapy and radiation, and now immunotherapy teaching immune system to take cancer cells offline
• After humanity’s transition to agriculture, mortality rates skyrocketed thanks to malnutrition, increased infectious disease, and backbreaking labor compared to hunter-gatherers
• “Extending our lives gave us the climate crisis. Perhaps the climate crisis will ultimately trigger a reversion to the mean.” ↑

Fishing for Fun: And to Wash Your Soul by Herbert Hoover

• “Fishing is a chance to wash one’s soul with pure air, with the rush of the brook, or with the shimmer of the sun on the blue water. It brings meekness and inspiration from the scenery of nature, charity toward tackle makers, patience toward fish, a mockery of profits and egos, a quieting of hate, a rejoicing that you do not have to decide a darned thing until next week. And it is discipline in the equality of man—for all men are equal before fish.”
• “Contemplation of the eternal flow of the stream, the stretch of forest and mountain, all reduce our egotism, soothe our troubles, and shame our wickedness.”
• “The Declaration of Independence is firm that all men—and boys—are endowed with unalienable rights, which obviously include the pursuit of fish.”
• “A good fisherman possesses much faith and hope or he would not fish. He gains even in charity when he listens to other fishermen.”
• “Fishing is not so much getting fish as it is a state of mind and lure for the human soul into refreshment.”
• “Fishing seems to be one of the few avenues left to Presidents through which they may escape to their own thoughts, may live in their own imaginings, find relief from the pneumatic hammer of constant personal contacts, and refreshment of mind in rippling waters. Moreover, it is a constant reminder of the democracy of life, of humility and of human frailty. It is desirable that the President of the United States should be periodically reminded of this fundamental fact—that the forces of nature discriminate for no man.” ↑

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

• Capra formed his own production company after Mr Smith but Meet John Doe flopped and so did the company
• Some of Cary Grant’s family in Bristol died in the Battle of Britain
• Huston had an open affair with Olivia de Havilland and Ford a thing with Hepburn
• Ford answered only to Donovan and was at Midway to shoot a documentary when the battle happened; he hid the footage from the feds and showed the short to studio chiefs and FDR who loved it
• Congress had hearing before Pearl Harbor about Hollywood’s Communist sympathies; once the war began and initial flurry of wartime filmmaking dissipated, studios were summoned again to question use of government-sanctioned propaganda
• Senator Truman chaired committee that oversaw wartime expenditures
• Wyler flew on dangerous Air Force missions into France and Germany for footage that became Memphis Belle
• Capra’s “Hey Soldier!” morphed into Private SNAFU, which helped recruit Theodore Geisel
• Ford and Stevens were part of D-Day; Ford’s Field Photo crew had cameras on boats but were destroyed, but got beach footage that was too graphic for the public
• Stevens joined the Free French troops to film the liberation of Paris; told de Gaulle and the German governor of Paris to reenact official German surrender in better lighting
• Ford resented John Wayne’s lack of service and belittled him for it
• Wyler lost his hearing while filming in a plane over Italy and had to leave the air force
• Stevens’ crew documented Dachau camp; he went on to Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s grave
• Huston made documentary of soldiers’ postwar treatment as Wyler did Best Years; Army later rescinded clearance and spiked it
• Ford like Capra went independent after the war, not wanting to be subservient to studios
• Ford and Stevens documentaries on Germany and the concentration camps were shown at the Nuremberg trials ↑

For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan

• ​“Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology.”
• “We needn’t resort to myth to get that spine-chilling thrill of being of being part of something grander than ourselves. Our vast universe provides us with enough profound and beautiful truths to live a spiritually fulfilling life.”
• “Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. … My view is that all over the world and across time, these are all a form of art, an elaborate performance or a secret poem, all vital in their ability to help us face the nature of time and change, life and death, and everything else we cannot control.”
• “Every single one of us appears seemingly from nowhere and then, eventually, returns to nowhere. We are conceived, we grow, and we die, but what happens beyond that is a great, haunting mystery. We grapple with it by marking how and when things change here on Earth, both cyclically and permanently.”
• “An old tradition is not intrinsically better than a new one. Especially when it is such a joy to make new ones up—ones that reflect exactly what you believe, ones that make sense of your life as you experience it, ones that bring the world a little closer to the way you wish it could be.”
• “Religion, at its best, facilitates empathic, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams.”
• ​Spring legends are “about suffering and heartbreak giving way to joy”
• Protagoras of Abdera: “Concerning the gods, I have no way of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what they are like in form. There are many things that impede my knowledge, both the obscurity [of the subject] and the brevity of human life.”
• “For many, reading passages from their holy text offers daily enlightenment and answers to the endless questions that run through our minds. For us, it was the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries. Every day I gained a deeper sense of the workings of the world and the universe.”
• “Every piece of trivia is a small clue to something else, a glimpse at how we fit into the universe.”
• “I already knew that just being alive at all is astonishing and beautiful, but I don’t know if I had ever really felt it fully before. I started telling myself that no matter what tomorrow brought, each little moment on Earth was still meaningful. And that if life went on forever it would not be as precious.”
• “Some of the stars we can see at night are already dead. Starlight is a kind of time travel. A vision of the past.”
• Yiddish “death day” (yahrzeit) light candles to commemorate deceased; “like a miniature version of dead stars that appear to twinkle even after they’re long gone”
• Birthday candles originally a Greek celebration of Artemis as “light bringer” like moon and, subsequently, for birthdays as goddess of birth
• “All our best rituals are a kind of performance about what we need or want most.”
• “We are powerless over so many of the most thrilling elements of life: the changing of the seasons, sunrises and sunsets, falling in love. These offer us a taste of the grandeur of being alive, a reminder that we are part of nature.”
• Message in Rome’s Capuchin Crypt bone rooms: “What you are now we will be; what we are now you will be”
• “We pretend [death] rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.”
• “Every loss you withstand in your life reopens all the others. Every goodbye is every goodbye.”
• “No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos.” ↑

From Jesus to Christianity by L. Michael White

• Judas the Galilean rebellion sparked by new Roman direct ruling.
• Great change in Jewish life from 300 BC to 200 AD.
• First destruction of temple helped cultivate feeling of need to reform and repent, which fostered messianic expectancy.
• No historical evidence of Herod’s mass slaughter of firstborns.
• After Herod died, Judean region (with Jerusalem) given to his son Archelaus, whose ineptness led to military/procurator rule.
• Jesus was victim of Pax Romana’s centrifugal force, which pushed Roman influence outside to conquered regions; Paul worked in centripetal force, which drew things to Rome.
• Syncretism: flowing together of different currents of thought and practice.
• Piety in Greco-Roman sense was civil/social duty and virtue to gods.
• Popularity of magical arts result of desire to control fate’s fickleness.
• Apostrophic magic: use of spells and incantations to ward off or exorcise demons.
• Pharisees had little power, emphasized Torah and tradition.
• “Christians” name possible originally derogatory from Romans.
• Aramaic-like “abba” sneaks into the otherwise Greek New Testament.
• The Jesus movement was at once a Jewish sect (separatist, relative to other Jews) and foreign cult (with Paul its purveyor around the Roman Empire).
• Q (or the Synoptic Sayings Source) an independent sourced called by Gospels.
• Paul may have seen himself as fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy as divinely appointed messenger.
• Paul clashed with Peter and Jews in Antioch regarding Gentiles in the movement.
• Gospel of Mark written after temple destruction to correct misunderstandings about Jesus.
• Matthew reiterates that the early Christians were still a Jewish sect. ↑

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by William Trotter

• Sweden and Russia fighting over Finnish land since 1700s, when Peter the Great established St. Petersburg
• Finland ceded to Russia in 1809 during Napoleonic Wars, left mostly autonomous until 1894 when Nicholas II ascended
• World War I provided opportunity for overthrow, but alignment with Germans and Bolsheviks would haunt them
• Lenin recognized new Finnish government three weeks after Declaration of Independence in 1917; in ensuing civil war the upper class faction (Whites, vs Reds) enlisted Germany’s help and won
• Lenin and later Stalin colored by quick capitulation to Finland and attacks on Reds; recognized strategic importance of Baltics
• In 1930s launched “pan-Scandinavian” policy of neutrality, which Hitler supported for shipping and ore purposes, but Stalin was suspicious
• Attempted detente between ministers in 1938, realizing Finland’s value in a Germany/Russia war; Russia wanted some valueless islands and Finland was woefully underprepared for war
• Seeing Germany’s advance and its past relationship with Finland, signed tenuous pact with Hitler (to give both time to consolidate power) and made annexation demands to Finland; neither thought other was sincere or transparent
• Finland thought the demands were too harsh and suspected further ones; Stalin thought was asking realistic needs and didn’t want to invade?
• Politburo assumed Finland wouldn’t put up much fight, and Finnish proletariat would rise up
• Old Finnish general Mannerheim warned of Russian sincerity but patriotic confidence won out
• Final Russian ultimatum in November 1939 rejected, followed by fabricated Finnish shots to publicly justify war
• Imperialist anti-Bolshevik Mannerheim led White Terror payback of Red Terror after independence; executions and camps galore on both sides
• Suomenlinna used for Red prisoners and killings
• Mannerheim awarded Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm for anti-Red campaign
• Mannerheim elected president in 1944; in and out of government circles given his old ways, anachronistic style. Spoke 6 languages but not Finnish; required translator
• Favored monarchy for new government but went with parliamentary democracy; ran for president but was trounced by Stahlberg
• Once war started sabotage, booby traps, diversions caused big delays for cumbersome Red Army
• Russian estimates for campaign was 10-12 days; General Meretskov thought much longer, saw Finland’s terrain hostile to blitzkrieg
• Mannerheim’s plan wasn’t total victory but attrition and stalemate: “the most honorable annihilation”
• Had two big monitor ships that shot down two planes over Turku but otherwise remained icebound
• Puppet government “People’s Republic of Finland” established, granted every Stalin demand
• After stonewalling Russians at Mannerheim Line, launched counteroffensive that failed miserably due to poor planning, communication, weather
• Finns better prepared for winter: white camouflage, anti-freezing gun cleaning lubes, natural adaptation to wilderness, layers, warm and sheltered bivouacs
• Russians called it “White Death”: either extreme cold or invisible snipers in woods
• Finnish tactic developed at Battle of Suomussalmi called “motti”, named after pile of logs held in place and destined to be chopped into firewood: encircle enemy, use quick sharp attacks to split into isolated fragments, then destroy each pocket starting with the weakest
• Benefited by lumbering, inefficient, road-bound Russian army; lacking firepower, Finns couldn’t capitalize on mottis decisively
• With nothing but Phony War happening, Winter War sparked international support, including Kermit Roosevelt recruiting Finnish Legion who arrived mostly unfit
• Russian propaganda leaflets dropped, which were on bad paper Finns didn’t even use for toilet paper
• Stalin surged war in earnest late December, was told would be quick and easy
• Russian army lacked coordination between infantry, armored, artillery; professional officer caste had been purged by Stalin
• Churchill: “Finland alone, in danger of death—superb, sublime Finland—shows what free men can do.”
• Mannerheim knew Finland could have power in peace talks only if they appeared unbeatable, so insisted on holding “every inch” until last possible moment
• Kuusinen puppet government erased about 100 days after created once peace talks opened up
• As a result of working with Germany against Russia in Continuation War, urged on by Soviets, Great Britain technically declared war on Finland but never acted on it
• After more aid from Germany helped Finland fight Russia to a standstill, armistice signed in September 1944. Had to fight Germany out of the north, who torched everything
• Finland only Baltic state to remain independent and resist Soviet aggression ↑

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

• “Most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up.”
• “Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from the effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.”
• “The confrontation with limitation also reveals the truth that freedom, sometimes, is to be found not in achieving greater sovereignty over your own schedule but in allowing yourself to be constrained by the rhythms of community.”
• “This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead.”
• “Existential overwhelm” feeling of having too much to do is a secular modern phenomenon due to loss of afterlife and progressive view of history; the pain of “our own little lifespan”
• “The world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities.”
• Internet: “the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it.”
• “The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.”
• “Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.”
• “Smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.”
• “You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
• “Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth. But it’s a stultifying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.”
• “Bright sadness” (Richard Rohr); “stubborn gladness” (Jack Gilbert); “sober joy” (Bruce Ballard)
• “If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.”
• “Maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.”
• David Cain: “I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.”
• “When you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook.”
• “Making a choice—picking one item from the menu—far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation.”
• Principle #1: pay yourself first when it comes to time (do what truly matters first and schedule time for it)
• Principle #2: limit your work in progress (no more than three)
• Principle #3: resist the allure of middling priorities 
• “Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.”
• “We tend to think of [boredom] merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control.”
• “The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.” [M. Scott Peck’s “life is difficult”; “the obstacle is the way”]
• “There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated.”
• His baby was “sheer presence, participating unconditionally in the moment in which he found himself”
• “The capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life. … We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives.”
• “Spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refreshing from using every spare hour for personal growth.”
• Three principles of patience: develop a taste for having problems, embrace radical incrementalism, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality
• “Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can.”
• Carl Jung: “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way. … If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” ↑

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

• “In twenty-five years, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years.”
• “In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.”
• On a modern map Kahn’s conquests include 30 countries and over 3 billion people 
• Entire Mongol tribe numbered around 1 million, with 100,000 warriors 
• Born in 1162 into Old World of regional civilizations without knowledge of the others; by death in 1227 had connected them with diplomatically and commercially
• Last ruling descendant was emir Alim Khan of Uzbekistan until deposed in 1920 by Soviet revolution 
• Buried secretly in unmarked grave per Mongol tradition; soldiers sealed off area for several hundred square miles and guarded area for 800 years 
• During Soviet rule, area kept highly secure to prevent nationalist movement coalescing 
• “The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery, or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next.”
• Probably built more bridges than any ruler in history, spurning castles, forts, etc, to move armies and goods quicker
• “The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
• In Europe Mongols “slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent” but didn’t bother conquering the cities or expanding the empire due to the poverty compared to Chinese or Muslim countries
• Once Soviets left, Highly Restricted Area surrounded by technological and military wasteland but internally was pristine forest and mountains 
• Mongol army traveled without supply train, instead bringing engineering corps to fashion available material into needed tools
• When invading citadel of Bukhara, used siege weapons like catapults and trebuchets in conjunction with miners digging under walls 
• People who surrendered treated with leniency and protection, while defiant were brutally killed
• “Genghis Khan’s ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined mind and focused will.”
• “For the Mongols, fighting functioned as more of a cyclical system of raiding than of true warfare or even sustained feuding.” Only raided goods mattered, not the kills 
• Hunting, trading, herding, and fighting the subsistence activities of early Mongol tribes  ↑

Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur by Thomas Reeves

• One of three first-generation American presidents
• Father a traveling preacher in New England; fiercely antislavery
• After Union College taught school and studied law
• Considered sensitive and sentimental
• Whig throughout 1840s and 50s; first presidential vote was Winfield Scott
• Learned about holding power by seeing Weed’s New York machine
• Married Nell Herndon, captain’s daughter, in New York 1859
• Promoted to NY quartermaster general during war by NY governor
• Good reviews from others of his role during Civil War
• Wife and family sympathetic to Confederacy, while Arthur was in Union Army
• Lost 2.5 yo son to “convulsions” in 1863
• Conservative Republican in 1864; supported Johnson for VP, against Greeley’s radicals
• Dealt with Tammany Hall and Tweed in late 1860s, but tarnished once Tweed fell
• Appointed to NY Customhouse in December 1871 in midst of civil service reform movement
• Reappointed to customhouse in 1872 with support from Grant and Conklin
• Supported Conkling’s presidential bid in 1876 but then switched to Hayes when got the nomination
• In 1878 suspended from the Customhouse after he disclosed John Sherman letter about patronage; left him free to do party work exclusively
• Constant late nights and working away from family, so was in Albany when Nell caught pneumonia in NYC; he returned but she never regained consciousness
• Once Grant’s push for third term hit roadblock at convention, Garfield emerged as compromise candidate; Arthur a consolation to Conkling wing, who was for Grant
• During 1880 campaign accused by Democrats of being foreign-born in Canada
• Once Arthur sworn in there was no VP, President of the Senate, or Speaker of the House because Congress hadn’t convened yet
• Expected to select Conkling for Secretary of State but didn’t want to be seen as corrupt in new role
• Youngest sister Mary served as First Lady
• When president, daughter 10 years old and lived in NY until 1882; son a freshman at Princeton
• Indifference to foreign affairs during the Gilded Age: “From Appomattox to the sinking of the Maine the nation was preoccupied with its own internal developments.”
• Visited his “little dwarf” correspondent Julia Sand in 1882
• Suffered from Bright’s disease in 1882, debilitating, refused to run in 1884
• Republicans slaughtered in the 1882 midterms; civil service reform bill passed soon after, along with tariff bill and rehabilitation of navy
• Traveled out to recently tamed Yellowstone park in 1883
• Blaine and Cleveland got 1884 nominations easily; GOP independents Mugwumps fled GOP to support straight-talking Cleveland
• Gave speech at finally completed Washington memorial in December 1884
• Last act as president with minutes to spare (they wound back congressional clock) was designating broke and dying Grant on army retired list
• Died in November 1886 of cerebral hemorrhage
• Fearful, disdainful of press and cherished privacy; hiding illness and lack of desire for position
• Provided calm and reassurance after Garfield assassination; no public appetite for big moves ↑

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

• Book is “the story of a map created to help make sense of an experience that defied human understanding”
• Water-flushing device invented in sixteenth century by Sir John Harington for Queen Elizabeth, but didn’t take off until late 18th and early 19th century
• “The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on break through ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well.”
• “How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.”
• “Epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, cut the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.”
• “Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you’d be dead in forty-eight hours.”
• Cholera bacteria need to be ingested in order to colonize small intestine and trick it into expelling water rather than absorbing it; dehydration reduces blood volume, which triggers organ shutdown (though brain remains aware)
• Victims can lose more than 10% of body weight within 24 hours
• New bacteria in copious water BMs and sweat allow for quick transmission; cholera needs excrement eating to thrive, so for most of history didn’t travel well beyond “brackish waters of the Ganges delta” until densely populated urban areas with contaminated drinking water became commonplace 
• Water injection was effective cure but drowned out by quack remedies amplified by newspaper advertising 
• London doctor John Snow saw first public demonstration of ether for anesthetic in 1846; soon deduced importance of room temp for efficacy and built delivery device
• Snow administered chloroform for Queen Victoria’s eighth birth in 1853
• “In a city like Victorian London, unchallenged by military threats and bursting with new forms of capital and energy, microbes were the primary forced reigning in the city’s otherwise runaway growth, precisely because London had offered cholera (not to mention countless other species of bacterium) precisely what it had offered stockbrokers and coffeehouse proprietors and sewer-hunters: a whole new way of making a living.”
• Confluence of urban living and discovery of alcohol created massive selection pressure on genes of humans that abandoned hunter-gatherer lifestyle for city living, where alcohol was only safe alternative to water
• The Times ran series on existing theories about cholera, none of which were waterborne or microscopic
• “It’s not just that the authorities of the day were wrong about miasma; it’s the tenacious, unquestioning way they went about being wrong.”
• Why miasma was so persuasive: social prejudice, convention, conceptual limitations, failures of imagination – “a kind of perfect storm of error”
• “Malaria” derives from Italian mal aria, “bad air”
• Brain primed to use smell as alarm, and smell is a lot easier to detect than microbes
• Modern city was “an industrial-era city with an Elizabethan-era waste-removal system as perceived by a Pleistocene-era brain”
• “The river of intellectual progress is not defined purely by the steady flow of good ideas begetting better ones; it follows the topography that has been carved out for it by external factors.”
• Snow unique resistant to miasma assumptions given his work with ether/chloroform, which responded predictably across patients unlike miasma vapors
• Snow observed cholera’s effect on gut, but nothing on respiration 
• Snow’s nearness to outbreak and upbringing with working poor gave him unique insight into investigation, and no bias towards “moral failing” view of afflicted poor
• “Snow’s theory was like a ladder; each individual rung was impressive enough, but the power of it lay in ascending from bottom to top, from the membrane of the small intestine all the way up to the city itself.”
• On great intellectual breakthroughs: “It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”
• Florence Nightingale of the nurses at the local hospital dealing with the influx of cholera patients 
• Snow argued to local Board of Governors to shut down the Broad Street pump and its handle was removed on Friday, exactly a week after rampage started; met with derision
• Local reverend Henry Whitehead had been visiting victims all week and vowed to disprove waterborne theory, but gradually the data won him over
• No local sewers or cesspools had access to famously pure Broad Street well water, so had to be “index case” (original cholera victim) whose evacuations made their way to the well
• Whitehead looking through records at Registrar-General’s Office when stumbled upon record of baby Lewis, whose sickness, soiled diapers, and death lined up perfectly as index case (lived right by pump)
• Cesspool at 40 Broad (Lewis residence) was feet away from the well and had seeped into the decaying well
• Snow created map to illustrate spread based on nearness to pump (Voronoi diagram); triumph of information design but also marketing that helped waterborne theory find audience eventually
• Snow and Whitehead solved local mystery that led to global solutions that “transformed metropolitan living into a sustainable practice”
• “The Broad Street case was certainly a triumph of epidemiology, scientific reasoning, and information design. But it was also a triumph of urbanism.”
• Germ theory ascendant by end of 19th century, as was establishing sanitary water supplies and waste removal; arguably more important than electrical grids of the same time
• London’s system eliminated outbreaks, though still happened elsewhere into the 20th century
• Whitehead: “In any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for ‘something to be done,’ but by patient study of the eternal laws.” ↑

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

• “The trouble with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do. … When it comes to assessing the value of labor and leisure, the mind’s eye can’t see straight.”
• “Automation complacency takes hold when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. We become so confident that the machine will work flawlessly, handling any challenge that may arise, that we allow our attention to drift.”
• “Automation bias creeps in when people give undue weight to the information coming through their monitors. Even when the information is wrong or misleading, they believe it. Their trust in the software becomes so strong that they ignore or discount other sources of information, including their own senses.”
• “Technology changes, and it changes more quickly than human beings change.”
• “When we carry out a task or a job on our own, we seem to use different mental processes than when we rely on the aid of a computer. When software reduces our engagement with our work, and in particular when it pushes us into a more passive role as observer or monitor, we circumvent the deep cognitive processing that underpins the generation effect. As a result, we hamper our ability to gain the kind of rich, real-world knowledge that leads to know-how. The generation effect requires precisely the kind of struggle that automation seeks to alleviate.”
• “Automation too often becomes an impediment to automatization. In relieving us of repetitive mental exercise, it also relieves us of deep learning. Both complacency and bias are symptoms of a mind that is not being challenged, that is not fully engaged in the kind of real-world practice that generates knowledge, enriches memory, and builds skill.”
• “The kinds of effort that give rise to talent—characterized by challenging tasks, clear goals, and direct feedback—are very similar to those that provide us with a sense of flow. … Automaticity is the inscription the world leaves on the active mind and the active self. Know-how is the evidence of the richness of that inscription.”
• “What really makes us smart is not our ability to pull facts from documents or decipher statistical patterns in arrays of data. It’s our ability to make sense of things, to weave the knowledge we draw from observation and experience, from living, into a rich and fluid understanding of the world that we can then apply to any task or challenge.”
• Oakeshott’s rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.”
• “To never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are. It is also to love in a state of dependency, a ward of your phone and its apps.”
• “Problems produce friction in our lives, but friction can act as a catalyst, pushing us to a fuller awareness and deeper understanding of our situation.”
• “Flawlessness remains an ideal that can never be achieved. Even if a perfect automated system could be designed and built, it would still operate in an imperfect world. … The conviction that we can build an entirely self-sufficient, entirely reliable automated system is itself a manifestation of automation bias.”
• “As society becomes ever more computerized, the programmer becomes its unacknowledged legislator. By defining the human factor as a peripheral concern, the technologist also removes the main impediment to the fulfillment of his desires; the unbridled pursuit of technological progress becomes self-justifying. To judge technology primarily on its technological merits it to give the gadgeteer carte blanche.”
• “The attempt to avoid human errors by removing personal responsibility ends up making the errors more likely. An ignorant operator is a dangerous operator. … The human and the machine, operating under conflicting assumptions, end up working at cross-purposes.”
• “The tools demand little of us and, cognitively speaking, give little to us.”
• “Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?” ↑

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Becky Kennedy

• “Many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need. What if we saw behavior as an expression of needs, not identity? Then, rather than shaming our kids for their shortcomings, making them feel unseen and alone, we could help them access their internal goodness, improving their behavior along the way.”
• “Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”
• “Multiplicity is what allows two people to get along and feel close—they each know that their experience will be accepted as true and explored as important, even if those experiences are different. Building strong connections relies on the assumption that no one is right in the absolute, because understanding, not convincing, is what makes people feel secure in a relationship.”
• “Our ability to experience many seemingly oppositional thoughts and feelings at once—to know that you can experience several truths simultaneously—is key to our mental health.”
• “At our core, we all want someone else to acknowledge our experience, our feelings, and our truths. When we feel seen by others, we can manage our disappointment, and we feel safe and good enough inside to consider someone else’s perspective.”
• “Children are more able to experience strong feelings than they are to regulate those feelings, and the gap between experiencing strong feelings and regulating those feelings comes out as dysregulated behavior (think hitting, kicking, screaming).”
• “Boundaries are what we tell kids we will do. Boundaries embody your authority as a parent and don’t require your child to do anything.”
• Without boundaries, behavior usually escalates further because they feel a lack of containment 
• Boundaries, validation, empathy
• “Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment.”
• “Once you understand the roles of a family system, you can reframe how you think about your child’s difficult moments. Viewing their struggles as job fulfillment will help you remember that these are good kids doing their jobs, not bad kids doing bad things.”
• “Before they can talk, children learn, based on interactions with their parents, what feels acceptable or shameful, manageable or overwhelming. In this way, our “memories” from early childhood are in fact more powerful than the memories we form in our later years; the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.”
• “Feeling satisfied with oneself, tolerant of failure, firm in boundaries, capable of self-advocacy, and connected with others … all of these important adult dynamics come from our early wiring. The first years of life set the stage for the next hundred.”
• “Remember, children are learning how relationships work at the same time that they’re locked into a relationship with us, the parents. They’re utterly dependent on us for survival and they know this, deep in their bones, so they collect data on their environment and then wire themselves accordingly to maximize attachment and keep their parents as close as possible.”
• “A child who sees a parent as his secure base feels a sense of safety in the world, a sense of “someone will be there for me and comfort me if things go wrong.” As such, he feels capable of exploring, trying new things, taking risks, suffering failures, and being vulnerable. There’s a deep and critical paradox here: The more we can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative we can be.”
• “Reminding ourselves, “Connect! Connect!” encourages us to first be present in our child’s experience instead of leading our child out of his own experience.”
• “Unhappiness certainly isn’t my goal for them, but here’s a deep irony in parenting: the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more we set up them up for an adulthood of anxiety. Setting happiness as the goal compels us to solve our kids’ problems rather than equip them to solve their own.”
• “Parents don’t so much need to protect kids from having tough feelings as much as we need to prepare our kids to have those feelings. And the best way to prepare our kids is through honesty and loving presence.”
• “Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story,” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.”
• Shame: “the feeling that this part of me is not connectable—no one wants to know or be with this part.”
• “Shame is an evolutionarily adaptive feeling. Being alone as a child is synonymous with being in danger, so shame works, within the attachment system, as a signal to a child to hide the part of them that does not successfully gain attachment. Shame feels so awful because it awakens our body to a painful but important piece of information: You will not get your needs met if you keep on being who you are right now.”
• Connection first; antidote to shame
• “Shame has never been a motivator of positive behavior change at any time, in any place, for any type of person.”
• “Connection is when we show our kids: “it’s okay to be you right now. Even when you’re struggling, it’s okay to be you. I am here with you, as you are.”
• Unformulated experience: the feeling that something’s not right, without a clear explanation of what’s happening 
• “Confirming our children’s perceptions sets them up to recognize when things don’t feel right later, and it will empower them to trust themselves enough to speak up.”
• “We disconnect from the parts of ourselves that receive negative attention early on.”
• Did I ever tell you about the time…?
• “I see you didn’t clean your room yet… hmm, all right, I’m going to get dinner started and I trust you to keep your promise to put your clothes away before you come downstairs.”
• “Listening is really cooperation, and cooperation comes from connection.”
• “Tantrums are biological states of dysregulation, not willful acts of disobedience.”
• “By returning to the scene of the emotional fire and layering on connection, empathy, and understanding, you add key elements of regulation on top of the moment of dysregulation. Then, the next time your child has a hard time, these elements will be easier to access.”
• Telling the story: reviewing a chaotic meltdown moment in order to build coherence
• “Remind yourself, your job is to slow down the situation so your kids can regulate their bodies and have access to their own problem-solving skills; your job isn’t to solve this as quickly as possible. Here, you’re helping your children learn the process that leads to problem-solving; when we fix things for our kids, we just lock them into needing us to problem-solve, and this becomes frustrating to everyone.”
• Whining = strong desire + helplessness ↑

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

• became a vegetarian in mid-80s
• studied Catholic mysticism, Buddhism, Judaism in addition to Christianity
• tax attorneys had to pressure nonprofit to pay Rogers more to be credible under tax laws
• didn’t merchandise or expand internationally
• parents very wealthy but generous around town
• overprotective mom and Lindbergh kidnapping caused him to be isolated, playing with puppets and piano in attic
• shy loner in high school until befriended by football player who vouched for him
• went to Dartmouth to study languages but wasn’t good fit; transferred to Rollins in Florida to study music and met Joanne there
• discovered television after graduating college and decided to pursue it
• was a PA at NBC in New York for a few years before starting at WQED in Pittsburgh when it began
• strongly desired to make serious educational television, elevated above the typical slapstick of the time
• started The Children’s Corner with Josie Carey; daily hour-long show, mostly improvised, where puppets began
• grew in popularity and acquired by NBC; Fred flew to New York every Saturday to film but didn’t allow ads to kids or merchandising, so canceled after 39 weeks
• enrolled part time at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary while doing the show, then had 2 kids and got an M Div
• skewed to progressive side of Presbyterian Church, but needed help convincing conservative elders to approve of television ministry
• ended work at Children’s Corner in last year of studies to finish degree and work with Dr. Margaret McFarland in child development and storytelling
• others saw parallels to Jesus with supreme kindness, no ego, storytelling
• McFarland’s instructions for exposing children to art: “I don’t want you to teach sculpting. All I want you to do is to love clay in front of the children.”
• got opportunity to produce daily 15-minute segments for the CBC in Toronto 1963-67 as “Misterogers”
• did psychotherapy, focusing on Oedipal complex and boyhood challenges of navigating his parents’ styles
• traumatic surgery for son John haunted and inspired him to help kids and parents deal with fears
• returned to Pittsburgh in 1966 without a job but family wealth sustained him
• Horne department store in Pittsburgh sponsored thirteen 15-minute episodes of what would be prototype of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
• Cobbled together funding to get back on WQED in 1966 with half-hour show, quickly popular then underwritten nationally by Sears
• first episode in February 1968
• Rogers: “You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”
• took hiatus in late 70s to do more family- and adult-oriented interviews but didn’t last; went back to MRN for week-long topic tackling
• family would only watch The Waltons, then Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, but also Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• swimming and piano his main hobbies; would sometimes swim naked at Pittsburgh club ↑

Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty by Brett McCracken

• Food
  • Slow down: prepare it and savor it
  • Give thanks: to God, the land, the preparers
  • Show hospitality: invite others to dine and share with strangers
  • Eat in community: unifying source of social pleasure
  • Enjoy food: eating is a sensuous activity; enjoy taste buds
  • Eat justly: eating affects others; support ethical practices
  • Fight global hunger: keep others in perspective
  • Develop taste: expand your palette and appreciate quality food
  • Eat humbly: eat with thanksgiving and awe for the beauty
• Music
  • Kuyper: there is no sacred/secular divide; God is in everything
  • Calvin’s “sensus divinitatis”: implanted understanding of God in all of us
  • Ways to support artists: spread the word, allow for commercialization, invest in their word
• Alcohol
  • Drink until you hit sweet spot: after sober but before drunkenness where connections happen
  • Having no alcohol can make us rigid and legalistic, while too much cedes control to addition and escape
  • Receive it (from God) rather than use it
  • Ask how this [blank] communicates beauty
  • Not just about what I get but about what God gives
  • Christ, culture, and community ↑

The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter

• “No man is happy who does not know his own mind.”
• “Memory comes in to fill the spaces of whatever isn’t there. … Memory has a way of growing things, of improving them. The hardships get harder, the good times get better, and the whole damn arc of a life takes on a mystic glow that only memory can give it.”
• “It also had goddamn kind of beauty, in the same way anything is beautiful when it is beyond all scope of sheer tremendousness.” ↑

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

• 5 “Our story is the story of our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again while we lived in it; how we raised our children here, and worked and hoped and paid the mortgage, and made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and then almost forgotten; how we continued, making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war—Nathan seeing it, as I now think, as if from inside a fire; how we got old, and Nathan died, and I have remained on for yet a little while to see how such lives as ours and such a place may fare in a bad time.”
• 13 “Though she could not have known it, and she never knew it, the things she taught me were good seeds that sprouted and grew.”
• 14 “We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn’t have.”
• 28 “It is entirely clear to me now. We were coming together into the presence of something good that was possible in this world. I have to see it now as a sad hope, because we were able to use up so little of it, but it was no less a beautiful one.” ↑

Herbert Hoover in the White House by Charles Rappleye

• Geologist by training and engineer by trade
• 444 to 87 electoral count in 1928; took Smith’s NY
• Chief difference with wet Smith was Prohibition
• Mutually antagonistic relations with press
• Didn’t give Attorney General to Donovan; lesser Philippines post offered but refused
• Feared being construed as “superman”, problem solver
• First president to have telephone on desk
• Debate at Fed about raising interest rates to dampen wild speculation, but raising would hurt little guys
• Hoover recommended to friends to get out of market in April; saw it early but hamstrung by Fed
• For a leader rooted in the public will, unable to connect personally
• Could have recovered from initial crash of stocks, but job losses and layoffs (fear?) mounted
• Hoover’s Farm Board created to steady prices, which spurred production – the surplus being an unintended consequence and killer after crash
• Senator Bond, a supporter, turned on Hoover, who wouldn’t fight for increased agriculture tariffs, which industry got instead
• Signed compromise bill for veterans benefits, after vetoing bonus-laden bill
• Initial shocks from crash seemed to fade: previous market breaks had been deep but quick, so overall optimism for a time before the “whole mosaic” of the situation came together
• Hoover’s focus on optimism clouded reality and made him brasher and combative with Congress
• Response to flooding in South more vigorous and reminiscent of old Great Humanitarian
• Opposed public aid: thought it would reward shirkers and discourage enterprise, and stifled American local impulse to charity
• Repeatedly downplayed effects during the crisis
• Combination of severe drought and economic dislocation motivated Congress to do more than usual private charity
• Hoover deeply committed to voluntary giving and individual impulse to help one’s neighbor, and saw government as inefficient
• Credit crunch of 1931 spread around the world and triggered proposal to suspend reparation payments from WWI
• Creation of Reconstruction Finance Corporation in December 1931 the largest peacetime government intervention into private credit market in history; (perceived aid to institutions, subsidies to bankrupt railroads reminiscent of 2008 bailout)
• Hoover feared Smith in 1932 more than Roosevelt
• Appointed liberal Democrat Benjamin Cardozo to Holmes’ vacant Supreme Court seat to compromise and not fight with Congress
• Despite the economy, Prohibition was big campaign issue; repeal vs. enforcement
• Bonus Army ragtag vets camped in DC; Hoover brought it MacArthur and Maj. Eisenhower to quell, which turned into overreaction and completed picture of “cold and heartless president”
• constitutionally gloomy, aloof, The Great Humanitarian, The Master of Emergencies, absent-minded professor, gregarious hermit ↑

Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life by Donald Miller

• “Meaning is something you experience in motion.”
• Victor Frankl: Post-adventure restlessness “existential vacuum”; we distract ourselves with pleasure when we can’t find a sense of meaning.
• Frankl’s formula to experience a life of meaning:
  • Take action creating a work or performing a deed.
  • Experience something or encounter someone that you find captivating and that pulls you out of yourself.
  • Have an optimistic attitude toward the inevitable challenges and suffering you will experience in life.
• “Jesus said Follow me rather than figure Me out.”
• “Meaning is not an idea to be agreed with. It is a feeling you get when you live as a hero on a mission. And it cannot be experienced without taking action and living into a story.”
• “Life tends to meet you as you get moving; and the more you move, the more opportunities life throws your way.”
• “We do not find meaning in the wanting; we find meaning in the pursuit of the thing we want.”
• “Meaning is centered in love. We’ve got to find something that pulls us out of ourselves.”
• “Asking ‘what if?’ can drive incredible change in your life and give you a terrific reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
• [what if I strove to be a strong, confident person?]
• “Nihilism and a haunting sense of fatalism are luxuries people experience when they are mostly sedentary. A surgeon does not ponder the futility of life while they are transplanting a heart.”
• “Act. Build something meaningful. Plan your mission and fight distractions so you can put something on the plot of your life story.” ↑

His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

• History finds him a young soldier with growing command.
• Witnessed assassination of French ambassador in French & Indian War
• Loved (probably) Sally Fairfax but she was married, so married up with Martha instead, and still remained friends with the Fairfaxes.
• Took stringent interest in his business dealings, much more than Jefferson and other Virginia planters elite; took others’ failure to meet expectations as affront.
• Mount Vernon started putting him into debt and out of control; both he hated.
• In 1766 moved away from tobacco toward wheat, fish, corn; first prominent guy to start producing linen and wool (economic freedom).
• Pursued land in Ohio River Valley against British wishes and realized Indians fate before others (anti-idealism and sentimentalism).
• Selected to command army before army was created.
• Marrying Martha was most important decision to shape his life, but accepting Army command shaped his place in history.
• Rejected slaves as soldiers initially but soon changed his mind.
• Responded quickly to smallpox epidemic with inoculations.
• Was illogically aggressive at New York, so after Trenton-Princeton surprise victories he got more selective and defensive.
• John Marshall and Marquis de Lafayette served under him, as did Hamilton and Monroe.
• Letters to Lafayette revealed humor and human side.
• German volunteer Baron von Steuben injected uniformity and discipline into Continental army.
• Others had fear Washington wouldn’t give up power a la Rome and England because he wanted to keep standing army.
• Cared more about land than money or stocks because was the only tangible measure of success.
• The war got rid of monarchy and British rule, but not the world of privilege and rank, which Washington still liked.
• Made some noise about abolitionist ideas, but didn’t follow up.
• Feared a weak Congress more than Britain-esque excessive federal power.
• Didn’t want to come out of retirement and lead something that would fail after his glorious exit.
• Presided for Constitutional Convention and spoke only once.
• Didn’t like the vagueness in the Constitution because it seemed like a failure.
• Earned quasi-king status rather than inherited; big difference.
• No republican government had ever tried to reign over land and people so large and diffuse.
• Slavery and monarchy: the ghosts at the banquet at Constitutional Convention.
• Personally led army out to crush Whiskey Rebellion.
• Distributed his personal wealth to entire family so his family name wouldn’t live forever but only as father of country.
• Life was episodes of self-denying decisions resulting in later successes. ↑

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter

• 1979 gas shortage a combination of sudden price hike by OPEC to exploit strikes in Iranian oil fields against teetering Shah
• By 1980 inflation was 12 percent, unemployment 7 percent, interest rates 19 percent 
• Announcement on White House roof of solar panels; eventually removed in 1986
• Some adjectives: disciplined, incorruptible, omnivorous mind, friendless, stubborn, acerbic, cold, awkward, persnickety
• Some accomplishments: nation’s first comprehensive energy policy, doubled the size of the national park system, first civil service reform in a century, established two new Cabinet-level department Education and Energy, diversified federal judiciary times five, legalized craft breweries, established full diplomatic relations with China 
• “He shared Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationist ethic and championing of health and safety regulation; Woodrow Wilson’s diplomatic courage and global ideals; Calvin Coolidge’s personal and budget austerity; Herbert Hoover‘s engineering background and humanitarian impulses; FDR’s longheaded concern for future generations; and John F. Kennedy’s “idealism without illusions.”
• Childhood through Depression; no running water or electricity until he was 11, but did have telephone and radio 
• Grew up in small house in Archery, outside of Plains; all but his and another family was black and dependent on his father for work
• Father was a farmer, merchant, and much more hands-on tasks
• Nicknamed Hot Shot or Hot by his father; sisters said it was fitting because “his emotions ran deep, and he was always in a rush to do something significant”
• Desperate for father’s approval, which rarely came; got his “basic integrity and contempt for lying” from him but also harsh competitiveness
• Dad frugal to the extreme; Jimmy forced to wear old women’s shoes that didn’t sell to school 
• Electricity and plumbing came to the farm in 1935
• Wanted to join the navy at 6 to get an education and see the world 
• Got to Annapolis in 1943; brutal hazing instilled stubbornness and repressed anger; as upperclassman was encouraging of plebes
• Graduated 60th out of 820 in class; didn’t excel in anything besides cross country; few impressions from classmates except loner
• “Like Barack Obama at the same age, Carter was already self-contained and unneedy—rare qualities in politicians.”
• Carter’s class included James Stockdale and produced 34 admirals (also Annapolis’s only president and Nobel Peace Prize)
• Jimmy and Rosalynn crossed paths in Plains during his leave in summer 1945; she was his sister’s friend; double date movie and kiss on ride back 
• They married in July 1946, two weeks after Jimmy’s graduation and commission as ensign, at 21 and 18
• Quickly soured on Navy life, but stuck it out and later applied to submarine school
• Was in sub patrolling east coast of China in 1949 when Mao’s Communist insurgents fought Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to Taiwan; last Americans in China until 1972
• Opted to read or study on board rather than bond with men or play poker, so failed to form friendships; diligent and detail-oriented a good fit for duties 
• Carters lived in Honolulu and planned to retire there
• “For the rest of his life, he generally avoided prominent people as companions in favor of ordinary folks—often conservative or uninterested in politics—who could teach him a hands-on skill.”
• In 1952 promoted to lieutenant and third and final boy born; 3 boys under 5
• Gained security clearances as nuclear engineer, working on new nuclear submarines 
• Dad Earl died in 1953 in debt, so Jimmy at 29 left the Navy (understanding his career rise would be limited) to take over family business in Plains
• Didn’t consult Rosalynn; she was furious, didn’t want to get trampled on my mother and mother-in-law and Plains lacked opportunities for kids
• Needed special dispensation from congressman and senator to get honorable discharge; remained enrolled in navy reserves for a decade
• Moved into public housing in Plains and took over business; $12K in debt initially but grew successfully 
• A joiner of seemingly everything; main motivation was business, but also would help his political network 
• Only 20th century president besides Truman not to golf in office 
• While a quiet progressive, didn’t oppose racial discrimination in public until governor in 1971
• Joined county school board months after Brown vs. Board but reasserted segregation 
• Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia Farm outside Plains a model of interracial pacifist communal living that inspired Martin Luther King but was too radical
• Repeatedly refused to join the Plains Citizens’ Council, though was friends with vicious sheriff Fred Chappell
• 1962’s Supreme Court enshrinement of “one man one vote” allowed invalidating of undemocratic legislative districts, which opened up Jimmy to run for state senate
• Promised to fully read every bill as senator, which gave him outsized influence as freshman with recommendations and amendments, but his refusal to politic and being a loner meant his own bills struggled
• In 1963 SNCC moved into Americus
• (unfinished – start with ch 10) ↑

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan

• Low entropy vs high entropy thinking, overbearing ego, flexibility vs rigidity
• Sense of oneness bring back to infant state which doesn’t have differentiated identity
• Rerouting brain pathways for new connections
• Have tea with a 4 year old to experience expanded consciousness
• Babies and children are basically tripping all the time
• Opposite of spiritual is not material, but egotistical
• Jung’s “experience of the numinous”
• “I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight… Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.”
• “Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.” ↑

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

• “We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.”
• “Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.”
• “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?”
• “To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.”
• “It’s only now that I fully understand where a life of sustained attention leads. In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me—and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility.”
• “To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”
• “This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention.”
• “Perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions.”
• Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
• “The practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
• “What I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.”
• “To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.”
• “When I try to imagine a sane social network it is a space of appearance: a hybrid of mediated and in-person encounters, of hours-long walks with a friend, of phone conversations, of closed group chats, of town halls. It would allow true conviviality the dinners and gatherings and celebrations that give us the emotional sustenance we need, and where we show up for each other in person and say, “I am here fighting for this with you.” ↑

How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill

• Mediterranean – “sea of middle earth”
• Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each one representing a century, meant due to end by end of 400s
• Debate about whether Rome fell due to internal weakness or external forces (barbarians)
• Tax collectors (curialis) usually small landowners without hope of escaping caste; personally responsible for whatever they couldn’t collect
• Roman upper class and senators exempt from taxes, so tax base shrunk as great landowners acquired others; prototype of medieval fiefdoms 
• Army harder to maintain, with more non-Romans and mercenaries sent instead of wealthy
• Visigoths, led by Alaric, invaded northern Italy in 406 (sack of Rome in 410) – beginning of the end
• In late antiquity the Catholic bishops were the remaining legal/moral authorities so saw their power grow
• Augustine, inspired by Plato and Paul, formulated doctrines of original sin, grace, Trinity; writes first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error (Inquisition)
• Irish part of larger ethnic group of Celts; one branch settled in present-day France and became Gauls; Another become Iberian Celts
• Third-century BC Celts invaded Greek world and settled in present-day Turkey and became Galatians 
• Siblings of Gaulish Celts crossed to Britain in 400 BC; nine centuries later pushed by Angles and Saxons into Cornwall (Cornish) and Wales (Welsh); King Arthur and Round Table legends sprang from there 
• Welsh and Breton in same linguistic group as Gaulish
• Celtic tribes that reached Ireland a mix of Briton and Iberian, but Iberian became ascendant, with different language 
• Ireland “a land outside of time” from 400 BC to 500 AD – “illiterate, aristocratic, seminomadic, Iron Age warrior culture, its wealth based on animal husbandry and slavery”
• On the early Irish: “Fixity escape these people, as in the end it escapes us al. They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art—poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one’s person and possessions. All these are worth pursuit, and the first, especially, will bring the honor great souls seek.” 
• Patricius a British teenager enslaved by Irish pirates where he worked as a shepherd and became devoutly Christian; after returning home had a vision of a letter headed “The Voice of the Irish”
• Patrick first missionary after Paul, 400 years later
• Latin pagus (pagans) for uncultivated countryside of rustic and threatening bumpkins
• Patrick first person in history to speak out unequivocally against slavery
• Patrick: earthy, warm, caring, courageous, loyal, generous, humorous; “the Irish found Patrick admirable according to their own highest standards”
• Patrick “had transmuted their pagan virtues of loyalty, courage, and generosity into the Christian equivalents of faith, hope, and charity.”
• Of Patrick’s vision of the world has holy: “In this tradition, there is a trust in the objects of sensory perception, which are seen as signposts from God. But there is also a sensuous reveling in the splendors of the created world, which would have made the Roman Christians exceedingly uncomfortable.”
• Ritual human sacrifice was still common; Patrick’s message (via Paul) was that Christ was the final sacrifice
• Patrick’s humor and love for the world put him at farther distance from serious self-obsessed Augustine
• Despite Edict of Milan that legalized Christianity in 313, Christianity never transformed Roman culture like it did Ireland
• “The Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy.”
• “Patrick, the incomplete Roman, nevertheless understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.”
• Since Ireland is only land inculcated with Christianity without violence and martyrdom, Irish of 5th-6th century created Green Martyrs: “those who, leaving behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods, or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island—to one of the green no-man’s-lands outside tribal jurisdictions—there to study the scriptures and commune with God.
• Green Martyrs gave way to monasteries unconcerned about orthodoxy or uniformity: “In their unrestrained catholicity, they shocked conventional churchmen, who had been trained to value Christian literature principally and give a wide berth to the dubious morality of the pagan classics.” … “It was not that the Irish were uncritical, just that they saw no value in self-imposed censorship.”
• Irish scribes copying Greek, Latin, and Hebrew works: “They did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today’s jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual—glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him.”
• “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page, shining in all the little oratories of Ireland, acted as a pledge: the lonely darkness had been turned into light, and the lonely virtue of courage, sustained through all the centuries, had been transformed into hope.”
• On the decorative aspect of literacy: “For their part, the Irish combined the stately letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets with the talismanic, spellbinding simplicity of Ogham to produce initial capitals and headings that rivet one’s eyes to the page and hold the reader in awe.”
• The shape of the modern codex was determined by the dimensions of a sheepskin, taller than wide to be cut into double folded pages
• Lacking cities, Ireland changed religious-political structure of Christianity from bishoprics and Roman-influenced dioceses to abbots and abbesses ruling over increasingly powerful monastic communities/city-states
• Larger female presence “contributed to the teeming variety of Irish religious life—a variety that would have distressed the Romans, had they known of it.”
• Confession and penance in ancient church was public and limited, but “Irish innovation was to make all confession and completely private affair between penitent and priest—and to make it as repeatable as necessary.”
• As Europe’s cities and libraries fell in sixth century, “Ireland, at peace and furiously copying, thus stood in the position of becoming Europe’s publisher.”
• Pagan Saxon settlements of southern England had cut Ireland off from easy commerce with Europe, so “while Rome and its ancient empire faded from memory and a new, illiterate Europe rose on its ruins, a vibrant, literary culture was blooming in secret along its Celtic fringe.”
• Columcille/Columba , spiritual son of Patrick and missionary of monasteries, founded popular abbey of Iona; “warrior-monk” who had “created by his singular determination a literate, Christian society” among the Scots and Picts of northern Britain
• Irish the first vernacular literature to be written down
• Hebrew Bible would have been preserved by scattered Jewish communities and Greek by Byzantines, but Latin literature would have been lost
• “Both the Celtic and the Saxon myths and legends were becoming, in fact, secular Old Testaments, histories that lacked the direct revelations of Abraham and Moses, but symbolic salvation histories nonetheless, where one could read of a people journeying, by trial and error, prophecy and instinct, toward the truth, propelled forward through darkness and death by their own innate goodness.”
• Charlemagne’s coronation as king of France and Holy Roman Emperor in 800 led to “medieval Europe’s first Renaissance, a short-lived cultural flowering that barely outlasted his reign”; gradual revival of literacy spurred by wandering monks
• Iona and other monasteries raided and sacked repeatedly by Nordic Vikings throughout 800s; books and treasures buried or sent inland
• Repeated invasions throughout the next millennium: Normans in 1100s, Calvinist Cromwellians in 1600s, anti-Catholic Penal Laws in 1700s ↑

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs

• “To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.”
• “One of my consists themes over the years—one I will return to in this book—has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people. … using the existing rules against your opponents, or formulating news ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them, without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair, or even whether they might be turned against you someday, when the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.”
• “To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices. These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with them.”
• “When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.”
• Roman poet Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
• “There’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.”
• Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”
• working toward the truth ↑

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

• Italian glassmakers experimented and monasteries used chunks of glass as reading aids (called lenses from Latin lentes for lentils); no one realized need except scholars because of illiteracy
• Gutenberg’s press—>cheap and portable books—>rise in literacy—>exposed farsightedness—>created market for glasses
• Stacked lenses became microscopes from Hans and Zacharias Janssen in Netherlands in 1590; 1600s British scientist Hooke used it to discover cells; telescopes and Galileo followed
• Strong glass fibers allowed for fiberglass and fiber optics, which fuel the Internet: the web is made of glass – “silicon dioxide all the way down the chain”
• Murano glassmakers combined tin and Mercury to coat glass for a mirror
• As glass lenses extended our vision to the stars or cells, glass mirrors allowed us to see ourselves for the first time
• Chunks of glass found in Tut’s tomb needed furnace: turns out could have been from shards of comet strike
• Bostonian Tudor wanted to ship ice to Caribbean but they had no use for it without storage; had never experienced anything cold
• We take for granted our ability to toggle between temperatures easily
• Tudor used sawdust and air to insulate ice blocks (ice, sawdust, and empty vessels sent to pick up cargo were free things he capitalized on)
• Traveling ice enabled Chicago beef industry and spurred on invention of refrigeration, which exploded after Civil War
• Birdseye experimented with flash-freezing in northern Canada to preserve flavor; idea came as “slow hunch” over decades
• Refrigeration example of “multiple invention”: several people with same idea at same time due to ripe conditions and “network of ideas”
• Carrier hired to prevent printers’ ink from smearing and accidentally invented air conditioning that expanded to theaters and other public spaces
• Scott invented phonautograph that transcribed sound waves like shorthand, but didn’t have playback – meant to be another language
• AT&T held monopoly on phone service but 1956 antitrust agreement said they could keep profit and monopoly but had to free licenses of stuff from Bell Labs
• Turing and Bell Labs created SIGSALY machine that converted human speech into mathematical expressions: digital copies in binary; used to transmit secret transatlantic phone calls during WWII
• De Forest’s gas-powered radio tubes turned into vacuum tubes by Bell Labs and into transmitter and receiver
• Radio in 1920s helped jazz emerge from New Orleans and provincial limits: also better suited for radio’s tininess than the symphony (De Forest’s favorite)
• Boston engineer Chesbrough employed to give sewage to Chicago’s flat terrain by raising the buildings up to install sewer lines
• Prevailing wisdom up through 20th century was that water was bad for drinking and bathing
• New Jersey doctor Leal experimented with chlorine and secretly added it to Jersey City reservoirs to test efficacy; experiment worked and was soon adopted elsewhere patent-free
• New filtration systems drastically reduced mortality rates (infant and general) and make water safe: pools and fashion emerge thence
• Dennison used standardized, interchangeable parts in his watchmaking to create cheap, unadorned “Wm Ellery” watch that Civil War popularized
• Railroad agent Sears sold discarded watches to station agents and teamed with businessman Roebuck to launch mail-order watch catalogs
• Faster transportation and communication (telegraph and railroad) exposed need for standardized time as books exposed need for glasses
• Railroad engineer Allen proposed time-zone plan in 1883 – lines zigzagged to correspond to railroad junctions: November 18 EST was set and telegraphed across country to sync clocks
• Radiometric dating (“deep time”) gave time meaning from raw data
• Invention of lightbulb occurred over 50 years, but Edison had better PR
• Riis read about Miethe & Gaedicke’s development of the photo flash in newspaper and immediately used it for his slum photos
• “A laser is to ordinary light as a broadcast signal is to static.” John Pierce, Bell Labs
• Barcodes emerged with lasers in 1970s and allowed for management of large inventories and thus big-box chains
• Good to mix intellectual fields to provoke uncommon or unplanned insight: staying in same field can lead to tunnel vision — “time travelers” made cognitive leaps by stepping outside zone
• Ada Lovelace’s “intuitive perception of hidden things” ↑

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black

• Hollerith punch cards for prisoners were identified with nationality, DOB, reason for incarceration, reason for departure
• Cards sent to SS department of statistics in Oranienburg to determine work needs
• General Oswald Pohl created “Extermination by labor” program
• IBM founder Hollerith of German descent, born in Buffalo 1860
• Hollerith inspired by specially punched tram tickets indicating passenger physical characteristics
• Prototype in 1884, won contest for automated counting device to be used for 1890 census
• Leased machines to government for census and sold them to other governments
• Hollerith outspoken, abrasive, paranoid; obsessed with his privacy and German heritage
• Finally incorporated in 1896, initially as Tabulating Machine Company
• In 1911 sold to capitalist Charles Flint, who combined it with computing and time clock companies into conglomerate Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, then put Thomas Watson in charge
• Renamed to IBM in 1924; cult-like devotion and culture under Watson
• Watson cultivated myth of Leader around himself; autocratic and paternalistic; 7100 company songs
• As German offshoot Dehomag declined post World War I, and Watson bought it out as subsidiary
• Anti-German boycotts starting in 1933 didn’t dissuade Watson from investing in Germany: Watson and IBM names not obvious in Dehomag and opportunity was great with government in transition needing monitoring tools
• Hitler initiated census in 1933 after taking power
• Census results cross-indexed by religion and location to prepare for removal
• Watson moved in to fill the space of fleeing companies in Germany and restructured to avoid corporate profits tax
• Watson allowed Dehomag to circumvent IBM agencies around Europe and create hegemony for expanding operations (i.e. annexing)
• Public didn’t realized Dehomag was IBM subsidiary
• Watson openly admired Hitler and Mussolini for fascistic style
• Tabulation required millions of one-time-use cards per week
• Dehomag advertised Hollerith machines’ surveillance capabilities
• Deployed for race science, eugenics, and sterilization beginning in 1934
• U.S. Social Security Act passed in 1935 without budget appropriation or infrastructure because didn’t think tech existed, but IBM’s new collating machines allowed for it
• IBM funded by Nazi Germany and United States; became “quasi-governmental”
• Watson a friend of Roosevelt and titan of industry; contacts at State and international Chamber of Commerce
• Watson awarded the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star by Hitler
• Arranged for Chamber meeting in 1937 to be in Berlin to counteract boycotts and anti-German sentiment
• IBM/Dehomag was already in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland when annexed, so Jewish discrimination began immediately
• Census completed in Greater Reich in 1939, for racial data
• Watson chief proponent of trade of raw material to Axis powers
• FBI started investigating IBM-Nazi connections and subversives within U.S. in May 1940
• In June 1940 Watson finally wrote Hitler to break it off and return medal; Dehomag outraged and wanted to sever from IBM, but monopoly power made it difficult
• IBM responsible for 90% of punch card technology in the world: cartel through leasing and trademark control
• Justice Department began investigating in 1942-43 via Economic Warfare department
• Holleriths recruited for manufacturing weapons, cryptography, draft records, weather monitoring on D-Day
• Census Bureau created maps with population density dots to mark Japanese population after Pearl Harbor; same tech used to organize transfers to concentration camps
• Both Axis and Allies needed IBM
• Labor Assignment Offices in camps issued daily work orders and processed inmate cards ↑

Index: A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from the Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan

• Indexer as mediator between author and audience
• Like library catalog, index distills source work to create something new and separate
• Table of contents follow order of work and reveal its architecture 
• “It is not hard to see why the index is an invention of the codex era, and not the age of the scroll. It is a truly random-access technology, and as such it relies on a form of the book that can be opened with as much ease in the middle, or at the end, as at the beginning. The codex is the medium in which the index first makes sense.”
• Anglicized indexes v. Latinate indicies – Shakespeare used former
• Galileo grumbled about armchair philosophers who, instead of venturing into the world, would “retire to their studies and glance through an index or a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said anything about them”
• “Reading does not have a Platonic ideal (and, for Plato, as we will find out, it was far from ideal.) What we consider to be normal practice has always been a response to a complex of historical circumstances, with every shift in the social and technological environment producing an evolutionary effect in what ‘reading’ means.”
• “The ideal index anticipates how a book will be read, how it will be used, and quietly, expertly provides a map for these purposes.”
• Alphabetical order considered in Middle Ages to be “antithesis of reason”, abdication of scholarly responsibility to discern God’s harmonious order of universe 
• In library of Alexandria, scrolls labeled with parchment tag sillybos (syllabus) to describe contents; Cicero used indices for same 
• Bibliophylax: Keeper of the Library
• Alphabetical order at Alexandria represented “huge intellectual leap” from intrinsic characteristics to arbitrary system 
• Iliad and Odyssey were divided into 24 books for each Greek letter by Library grammarians
• As universities started forming after 1000 AD and emphasis on outward evangelism outside of monasteries, need for “textual agility” and tools for “fast, ordered way of thinking”
• English cleric Stephen Langton chaptering of the Bible by 1204 at behest of his university 
• Distinctio older brother to index – “bite-sized cribsheet on a given theme”, like a dictionary definition’s multiple meanings/senses of a word or theme; often used for preaching; associative “mindmap of a moment of creative reading”
• Robert Grosseteste—13th century English lecturer, preacher, Chancellor of Oxford and Bishop of Lincoln—devised index to cross-reference biblical themes with other verses, church and pagan works
• First Bible concordance started in 1230 Paris at St Jacques friary by prior Hugo
• The monk Werner Rolevinck first to include page numbers, on 1470 sermon
• Anxiety about people who only read index in place of whole book almost as soon as indexes became widespread 
• “The concept of learning itself is an adaptable one, evolving in response to the technology of its time; that what might once seem a diminution, the betrayal of an ideal, can come to be seen as essential, an ideal itself; that scholarship, rather than being timeless and immutable, is shifting and contingent, and that the questions that we ask as scholars have a lot to do with the tools at our disposal.”
• “The professional indexer, learned, vigilant, goes before us, levelling mountains and beating paths so that we, time-poor students at the fingerpost, can arrive swiftly but unruffled at the passage—the quotation, the datum, the knowledge—we need.”
• “Looking to the future, we find that the book, the old-fashioned paper-and-ink book, its pages unreflowable, bound at the spine, has proved an enduring technology in the face of its electronic offspring. For the time being, at least, it retains its place as the dominant symbol of our intellectual endeavors, displayed on our shelves and on the crests of the great universities. As long as we navigate the waters of print, the book index, child of the imagination but as old as those universities themselves, will continue to serve as our compass.” ↑

The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective by Steven Johnson

• Alfred Nobel’s father was an arms merchant in St. Petersburg; first developed obsession with chemistry and gunpowder-based experiments as a teenager in the lab in 1840s
• Nitroglycerin incredibly unstable and deadly; “Humans had been stabbed, poisoned, impaled, burned, shot at, and hung. But getting blown to bits was a novel way to die.”
• Not interested in nitroglycerin as a weapon but as a blast agent for engineering projects 
• His brother died from accidental explosion and his nitroglycerin factor my exploded in 1866
• White diatomite powder in German dunes, when mixed with nitroglycerin created a paste that made it less accident prone; filed patent in 1866 with two names, Nobel’s Safety Powder and Dynamite
• Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin born into aristocratic family in 1840s but wanted to be an explorer and uncovered navigable route through Yablonovy Range
• Encountering Paleolithic remains in dried lakes led him to insight that glaciers had once extended down through Eurasian steppes, “and in retreating had left behind a network of lakes and marshes that had been inhabited by early humans until the changing climate turned them into barren deserts.“ (first scientific attempt to make a case for natural climate change as a prime mover of the history of civilization)
• Kropotkin inspired by Darwin but in Siberia saw struggle not between different organisms in survival of the fittest, but rather shared struggle against environmental conditions; networks of cooperation among and between species which he’d dub “mutual aid”
• Henry Faulds, Scottish doctor and missionary in Tokyo, wrote Darwin in 1880 about studying the “skin furrows of the hand” i.e. fingerprints could offer new insights into evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens
• Darwin not interested in studying fingerprints but passed along Faulds’ letter to his cousin Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement who’d been making measurements of the human body looking for patterns (pseudoscience of anthropometry)
• Galton looking for connections between crime and physiology; found no correlation but did see opportunity to create standardized code of fingerprint properties for reliable identification 
• Simultaneous discovery of fingerprints for identification between Faulds and French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon, who developed approach using systemic series of different body measurements 
• National investigative institutions non-existent and local police were corrupt and inefficient 
• New York City municipal police force created in 1845, but lack of training and corruption made them “glorified security guards” and gathering evidence to solve crimes not part of the job
• Allan Pinkerton a Scottish emigré with progressive and abolitionist roots; rose to national fame providing private security for Lincoln and espionage during the Civil War
• Post-Civil War westward expansion created opportunities for security for transporting cash and other goods through lawless territories; Pinkerton sold services for security and investigating crimes
• Department of Justice created in early 1870s and outsourced work to Pinkertons
• Pinkerton advanced detective work through employment but also storytelling, publishing nonfiction true crime thrillers dramatizing their exploits 
• Alliance with railroads made Pinkerton very wealthy but also was a Faustian bargain
• Trans-Siberian railroad uniting Moscow and St. Petersburg with the mineral-rich Asian steppes created modern Russia 
• Epic engineering projects like railroads required explorers and surveyors but also dynamite to create tunnels 
• “Dynamite turned out to be a peripheral player in the history of warfare. Its primary application proved to be in the realm of engineering and public works, allowing an unprecedented surge in the creation of rail tunnels, sewer systems, and subways around the world—major engineering projects that would have been impossible to pull off without the controlled explosions of dynamite.” London Underground, Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, Panama Canal
• By the mid-1870s, Nobel was selling his explosives in markets all around the world. “The ambitious young chemist had become a titan of industry.”
• Retained his Nordic melancholy and spent hours alone in his Paris laboratory – “the loneliest millionaire”
• Dynamite was cheap, available, easy to use, concealable, anonymous, used from up close or far
• One historian called dynamite “the terrible power of the powerless”
• People’s Will a Russian anarchist revolutionary movement bent on assassinating Czar Alexander II 
• Alexander had emancipated the serfs in 1861, which younger generation of aristocratic students saw as an auger of new constitutional democracy Russia, but it remained stuck in imperial past
• Trial of the 193 in 1877 of alleged subversives backfired when all were acquitted 
• Kropotkin emphasized “propaganda of the deed” after release from prison: “Mere words were not sufficient to incite revolutionary change. You needed an act of spectacular violence also called an attentat—directed against a well-known target, a strike dramatic enough to be picked up and amplified by the global media networks of the day.”
• “Almost every new technology that succeeds in finding a wide audience turns out to have unintended consequences in the long run, new uses or secondary effects that its creator never dreamed of. But the reinvention of dynamite as a terrorist weapon—indeed, as the very origin point of terrorism itself—ranks high in the canon of unanticipated uses of new innovations. Conceived as a tool for engineers intent on building a new industrial age, dynamite ultimately helped empower a movement intent on destroying the very institutions and social structures that made industrialization possible.”
• Emma Goldman arrived in New York City in 1889, decades before cars and steel construction for skyscrapers, so Lower East Side packed with people 
• Pushcarts an emblem of NYC street culture until banned by Mayor La Guardia in 1938; legacy of czarist Russia where Jews couldn’t own property 
• Homestead crisis in Pittsburgh pitted steel labor union against Carnegie Steel; Pinkertons brought in to bust which turned public opinion against them, and lost role as government investigators 
• After dynamiting a Paris cafe, Émile Henry arrested and got mug shot (or portrait parlé, talking picture) and body measurements by Bertillon at Department of Anthropometry; standardized dataset to create unique identifier that would enable police to identify detainees
• Bertillon’s filing cabinets of photos and info had organized system of nested subcategories of measurements to retrieve accurate files; “a low-tech version of what we would now call a search algorithm”
• Bertillon and Henry meeting represented clash of opposite ideologies: stateless egalitarianism vs. anti-subversion surveillance state
• Nobel’s third will (not announced until after his death) established the five prizes 
• 1898 conference in Rome of 21 European nations established Interpol and adopted Bertillon’s portrait parlé system; measurements could be telegraphed across Europe to find potential criminal matches
• Goldman arrested for incitement to riot after rally in Union Square; served 1 year in prison then later returned to Europe to learn midwifery 
• “From the anarchist’s perspective, the true infernal machine that had been unleashed on the world was not Alfred Nobel’s invention; it was James Watt’s steam engine. The industrialists had been blowing people up or dismembering them long before Émile Henry walked into the Café Terminus. It was the capitalists who had armed the Pinkerton men and sent them up the river.”
• Leon Czolgosz assassinated McKinley at 1901 Pan-American Exposition; during interrogation he said he was an anarchist and disciple of Emma Goldman 
• McKinley lived for eight days as gangrene attacked his stomach; wound wasn’t life-threatening but infection was 
• Roosevelt advocated for Immigration Act of 1903 to deport and prevent anarchist entry: “For the first time since the dark days of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, immigration officials were authorized to interrogate immigrants about their political beliefs.”
• Roosevelt also advocated for a federal detective force, an American Interpol, but rebuffed by Congress for too much federal consolidation of power post-Pinkertons
• Joseph Faurot sought to bring fingerprinting to NYPD but new NYC police commissioner in 1906 Thomas Bingham was a nativist and anti-immigrant who dismissed new scientific crime-fighting approaches as fad
• All five NYC boroughs merged in 1898
• Italian immigration exploded between 1891-1906 to 400k; emergence of Little Italy
• Black Hand a loose affiliation of criminals and extortionists sending letters with black skulls and daggers and hand print 
• Bingham needed Italian speakers to infiltrate the Black Hand but NYPD was overwhelmingly Irish and he was anti-immigrant
• Arthur Woods a former teacher and tutor of Roosevelt kids who’d become friend of Theodore Roosevelt and interested in police reform; appointed by Bingham as deputy commissioner to assist Faurot in modernizing archive of criminal photographs and develop undercover team to destroy the Black Hand
• Murder trial in 1910 was first appellate case in U.S. history where fingerprints were accepted as legit form of evidence 
• Trial of thief Charles Crispi in 1911 brought in Faurot as expert witness for prosecution to explain new fingerprint science and link Crispi’s to crime scene
• In 1913 J. Edgar Hoover as a law student at George Washington University took a day job in the Library of Congress order division classifying incoming publications with LCC; inspired by systematized card catalogs for collating info, which would inspire FBI work
• Arthur Woods become police commissioner and started allowing anarchists public protest rather than immediately shutting down; prevented escalation and retaliation
• First police bomb squad announced on August 1, 1914, same day as World War I; dubbed Bomb and Anarchist Squad
• In run-up to World War I, the threat of public terror loomed large and U.S. “descended into a sustained state of anti-radical suspicion that exceeded the future red scares of the McCarthy era.”; not just anarchists, socialists, etc. but individuals and civilian groups
• Postal crackdown on anarchist publications even more impact than surveillance since they were critical for income and dissemination 
• Goldman and Berkman were arrested under new Espionage Act
• Hoover, recent law school grad, started working at Department of Justice which was exempt from draft 
• With new mayor and Tammany candidate, Bomb Squad transferred to military intelligence unit within War Department; ostensibly for war effort but also to protect from Tammany’s corrupting influence 
• Enemy Alien Registration drive of 1918 documented 480k German-born noncitizens; Hoover appointed to run operations in New York along with NYPD
• Bombing of AG Palmer’s DC townhouse in June 1919 part of a national coordinated campaign; in response Palmer appointed celebrity detective William Flynn head of Bureau of Investigation and Hoover as lead of Radical Division
• “When historians catalog the momentous inventions of history—the printing press, the telescope, the steam engine—they rarely include indexing algorithms in their canon of breakthrough ideas. But tools that help us explore ever larger pools of information—and widen the net we can cast in those pools—have often turned out to trigger inflection points in history.”
• Hoover’s Editorial File System an early version of a relational database and national in scope; field reports classified by subject name, location, organizations, ideologies, etc. 
• “Collating information on just a single suspect could take hours, but more complex inquires were prohibitively time-consuming. Reorganizing all that information, and making it searchable, was the sort of problem only a librarian could love.”
• In just two months the Radical Division collected 50k index cards documenting radical activity
• “Hoover had weaponized library science in the service of subduing the revolutionary threat.”
• Faurot introduced the first police radio system in 1922 and oversaw program to fingerprint newborn babies in maternity wards  
• Goldman and Berkman deported to Russia and eventually got an audience with Lenin, but grew disillusioned with the regime “suppressing, debasing, and disintegrating everything”; Goldman allowed back into US for speaking tour in ‘30s and died in 1940
• “The sense of anarchism as a looming threat to the establishment had its final hurrah with the arrest, trial and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti; after that, it was the threat of Soviet-style communism that dominated Hoover’s Editorial File System at the FBI.”
• Ideological battle of twentieth century was between state capitalism, state communism, and fascism
• “Today the means of destruction are more varied—passenger planes, anthrax, AK-47s—but the general tactics of terrorism remain anarchism’s most enduring legacy.” ↑

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe by Kathy Peiss

• “With the growing international crisis, he raised the stakes for books and democracy, calling upon librarians to be not merely custodians of culture but defenders of freedom. Like Donovan, he had perceived the dangers of fascism early and believed in American intervention. As an artist, intellectual, and the nation’s leading librarian, he was convinced, as he later put it, that ‘the country of the mind must also attack.’”
• “The war challenged these librarians, archivists, scholars, and bibliophiles to turn their knowledge of books and records toward new and unpredictable ends. The immediacy and intensity of their experience tested them psychologically and physically. Whether soldier or civilian, American-born or émigré, these people’s lives changed as they engaged in this unusual wartime enterprise. They stepped up to the moment, confronting shifting and perplexing circumstances armed only with vague instructions and few precedents to guide them.”
• Communications scholars studied totalitarian radio and press to understand and counteract propaganda
• Late 1930s development of microfilm enabled better information storage and retrieval
• Library of Congress head MacLeish, June 1940: “The keeping of these records is itself a kind of warfare. The keepers, whether they wish so or not, cannot be neutral.”
• A proposed “microphotographic expeditionary force” to reproduce every book in Europe failed to materialize, but were able to microfilm materials throughout Britain
• Hoover War Library collected war ephemera (Quaker Hoover wanted them preserved “if humanity were to understand what led nations to collective violence and war”)
• Gathering timely and relevant info from war territories proved difficult, but after Pearl Harbor an FDR executive order establish OSS committee to acquire foreign publications via microfilm for war agencies
• “As bookmen and women became intelligence agents, the ordinary activities of librarianship — acquisition, cataloguing, and reproduction—became fraught with mystery, uncertainty, and even danger.”
• Open source works not sufficiently timely or informative to guide military operations, but impact more with information methods of microfilm and info management/access
• T-Force collecting teams descended after D-Day and liberation of Paris to gather documents: to aid war planners, provide evidence of war crimes, get intel about Pacific theater and Soviet postwar plans
• Anticipating bombings, the Nazi party relocated valuable records to countryside homes, monasteries
• Scramble for documents in early 1944 “a particular form of trophy taking, in which knowledge about technical matters, scientific advances, and state secrets were the spoils of war”
• LOC Mission focused on book buying of post-1933 works in Germany and occupied zones
• After V-E Day, acquisition between different zones of occupation between America, British, Soviets proved challenging
• Mission creep of LOC’s “rule of three” collecting mandate spanned published and not, banned Nazi lit, presented political and ethical ambiguities
• Allies Order No. 4 in May 1946 prohibited books that promoted Nazism, fascism, etc, and ordered their confiscation and destruction, but got pushback ↑

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Smith 

• Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist.”
• “Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind—the darkest city of all.”
• Since noir is too diverse to be classified as a genre (it’s more a “mood, a stance, an attitude”), suggests rating movies by noir content (like alcohol is by proof) based on degree of characteristics: crime and deadly sins, convoluted narrative, expressionist style, pessimism
• Noir was born from mating American pulp fiction with Weimar-era German expressionism 
• “Film noir offered something more, a vision of the world in which crime is not an aberration or a marginal profession, but a temptation lurking in every heart.”
• “It was not just the Production Code that noir flouted, but the national character—resilient, optimistic, self-reliant—that American art and literature has traditionally celebrated.”
• “Noir flourishes in marginal places and what Marc Augé calls “non-places”: the outskirts of cities, industrial wastelands, airports and bus stations, motels, trains, and borderlands where identities and loyalties shift like sands.” ↑

Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age by Megan Prelinger

• “This book is a history of electronics that explains the technology through the lens of art.” … “art’s ability to touch the intangible and render it visible.”
• Light bulb first mass-market electric, 1880s
• Electronics magazine (industry standard) founded in 1930
• European artists flee in 1930s and brought European ideas to United States
• Electronics, the process of controlling the follow of electrons, the constituent elements of an electric charge. The technology of electronics is The application of this science toward useful purposes.
• Audion “compelled electrons to move in particular ways”; used electronic energy pulled through the wire to amplify sound (vacuum tubes)
• Cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) “convert an electronic signal into an image that is projected onto the front of the tube”
• “first electronic screens, and also the first electronic eyes.” Made visible radio squeals and radar pings
• “Television images on the front of a kinescope tube are formed by patterns of electrons flash-projected onto the front of the screen by a pulsing cathode-driven electron gun.” Made possible by eye’s “persistence of vision” ability
• Theremin oscillators, invented by Leon Theremin in 1920s, that “converts an electrical impulse to an audio signal alone.” “Plays” an electron flow
• CRTs first electronics to be both component (as in a television) and device (e.g. an oscilloscope)
• Faraday’s theory of atomic electromagnetism in 1830s paired with new observations of latticework patterns of crystals showed that atoms form symmetrical latticework within crystals—“shook science”
• Three energy fields that govern all matter: nuclear binds protons and neutrons inside nucleus; magnetism holds electrons together, and gravity “binds our feet to the ground and planets to solar systems.”
• 1880 Pierre and Jacques Curie discovered crystals emit voltage when pressured. Loosened free electrons within and channeled their movement through latticework of atomic structure and out into the air as charged electromagnetic emission (EM), an electric current—phenomenon called piezoelectricity
• Quartz crystal sliced thicker (lower frequency) or thinner (higher) to transmit radio signals. Set standards for radio frequencies
• “The discovery of lattices of atoms—microscopic networks—introduced a geometric logic to the science of electronics.”
• Transistor harnessed amplification power of germanium crystals, was much smaller, stronger, and controlled than vacuum tubes. Also defied easy graphic characterization due to strange shape, and microscopic inner workings
• “Emergence in 1957 of circuit symbols as graphic design elements marks a significant shift in the relationship between technology and its reputation through design: it was the moment when an abstract symbol became a more potent conveyor of meaning about a new technology than images of the thing itself.”
• “The angular lines of circuit boards made them a natural fit for graphic artists working in geometric forms.” “CBs were also the first electronic component to have a visual appearance that was almost wholly abstracted from its function.”
• the circuit board “became emblematic of the abstract, untouchable nature of the inner workings of electronic devices.”
• Digital: expressed complicated numbers and numerical relations through a simple and irreducible symbolic system (abacus) vs. Analog: numbers and numerical relations expressed through a spatial relation that must be interpreted by person using device (slide rule)
• IBM programmers in 1959 coined “bits” (binary digits) and bytes
• Hollerith’s punch cards longest lasting data processing machines, 1880s through 1980s; his company eventually became IBM
• telegraph code → paper tape code → ASCII → Unicode
• “Artists redefined ‘the machine’ in visual terms that referenced its processes and products over its physicality.”
• New computing industry’s “ur-product was no particular industrial application; rather, it was the capacity of electronic, digital machines to turn data into the new spun cloth of ‘information.’”
• Voyager and Paglen’s “Last Pictures” in EchoStar satellite the nerve system of our “body”—space-based corpus has “allowed us to extend our human sensorium to a degree unimaginable without electronics.”
• Terms bionics, electronics, avionics, nucleonics too different paths between public and industry use ↑

James Madison by Ralph Ketcham

• Technically had two birth dates due to Gregorian calendar switch.
• Survived smallpox scare and French & Indian War in 1760s.
• Had access to more learning than usual through tutor.
• Would have gone to William & Mary like Jefferson et al but wanted to avoid sick region and at-the-time low reputation.
• Playfully engaged in “paper war” at College of New Jersey-Princeton with his Whig Society versus Cliosophians.
• Read influential things in college and after re: resolution and Constitution; Christian emphasis on community and humanitarian ideals helped too.
• Sickly growing up, though never seriously ill; had epileptic/hysteria-type thing post puberty (hypochondria and anxiety?)
• Defended religious liberty after religious friends encountered resistance from Anglican establishment.
• Elected in 1774 to county committee to enforce ban on British trade and call out traitors; targeted pastors too.
• So radical post-college he suspected even Franklin of being a spy after returning from Europe.
• Changed religion clause from toleration to equal and free exercise.
• After 1776 Continental Congress, elected to Virginia state council.
• Admired Patrick Henry, though annoyed by his willful neglect of legislative labor and detail.
• Became BFF with Governor Jefferson on the Virginia council.
• Engaged to a teen Catherine Floyd but she broke it off.
• Skeptical of Articles of Confederation right away and tried to slowly adjust them.
• Formed low opinion of Adams based on his churlish Paris dispatches.
• Two factions formed: one for whom Revolution was culmination of career, and other, the beginning. Adamses and Lees vs. Madison and Jefferson et al.
• Abhorred institution of slavery though wanted it gradually abolished.
• Admired Lafayette but thought him vain; doctored own letters later in life to hide that.
• Revised Virginia constitution with Jefferson in late 1780s; researched historical confederacies as research for future.
• Sought middle ground between Randolph’s states rights and Washington’s federalism.
• Had man-crush on Franklin.
• An enlarged republic only defense against both tyranny and mob rule.
• Weakness of Articles made more delegates friendly to Constitution but even Virginia delegates were divided on ratification.
• In new government Madison tried to influence Washington on behaviors and custom toward republican simplicity.
• Wrote Washington’s inaugural and subsequent speeches, setting tone and precedent.
• “Essence of consent” was for government to not ignore or oppose the people’s will.
• “We must not shut our eyes to the nature of man, not to the light of experience.”
• Sought moderate position on proper mix of democracy and oligarchy.
• Disagreed with Hamilton’s plan to federally assume states’ debts; would have benefited delinquent states and penalized those that sacrificed.
• Hamilton’s plan caused Madison to shift away from strong federalism.
• Washington’s declaration of impartiality at French revolution felt like betrayal of good faith to France.
• Jefferson wanted to send conciliatory letter to Adams in 1796 but Madison didn’t send it for fear it would be used against him later.
• Determined to retire in 1796: turned down congressional reelection and Virginia governor.
• Married widow Dolley in 1794; she had married Quaker lawyer who along with most of her family died (and on the same day as her infant son) of yellow fever in 1793.
• 1800 Virginia report helped kill Sedition Act.
• Louisiana Purchase fit republican ideals of expanded land for yeoman settlement.
• By 1808 Madison and John Quincy Adams both ostracized from bases so worked together.
• Clay and Calhoun led charge for war; Madison followed reluctantly.
• Secretary of War Armstrong disobeyed orders and had generals write them instead.
• Madison tasked Armstrong with fortifying DC against British; didn’t do it but Madison didn’t either—failure of leadership.
• Republican principles didn’t begat strong crisis leadership due to its respect for legislative and citizen responsibility.
• Jackson’s victory at New Orleans solidified hold on Mississippi River and Valley.
• Dolley wanted to travel post-presidency, but Madison just wanted to go home and stay.
• In favor of slave recolonization and against Missouri compromise because state didn’t decide slavery status for itself and he wanted slavery eventually abolished. ↑

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

• “I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.” (garden)
• “I began to live in my losses.”
• “And I saw how all-of-a-piece it was, how never-ending—always coming, always there, always going.”
• “This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. … The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”
• “We couldn’t quite see at the time, or didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.”
• “Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop.”
• “The best equipment he’s got is his wife.”
• “I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered. I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things they could not give away.”
• “What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection.”
• “When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of the place was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and to tears. This would come over you and then pass away, as fragile as a moment of light.”
• “I try not to let good things go by unnoticed.”
• “To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.”
• “The Economy does not take people’s freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.” ↑

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life by Paul Nagel

• JQA watched the Battle of Bunker Hill as an 8 year old.
• Learned French quickly on first trip to Paris.
• Didn’t want to return to Europe on Adams’ second trip, but Abigail insisted in order to keep tabs on John.
• Of all the subjects he studied, language translation and the theater were his favorites, though they weren’t “serious.”
• A two-year diplomatic mission to St. Petersburg disrupted his studies.
• Accompanied the ambassador to Russia at age 14, to speak French.
• Toured Sweden independently and loved it and Swedes loved the U.S.
• Abigail’s overbearing way a reaction to her brother’s shameful profligacy.
• Had to humiliatingly get a tutor to enter Harvard.
• He liked women but had a low opinion of them.
• Got heavily depressed after college entering into law, which uninterested him.
• Had a romance with Mary Frazier, which he had to break because he couldn’t support her and she demanded an official engagement.
• Got vision problems by looking at a solar eclipse in 1791.
• Wrote anonymous essays against entering France/England war.
• Appointed minister to the Netherlands by Washington just when he was wanting to break free from parents.
• Married Louisa finally, just as he was appointed as ambassador to Prussia by President Adams.
• Louisa’s indebted father fled Europe, leaving her and JQA with the creditors; Adams appointed him postmaster of D.C. to avoid insolvency.
• Became state senator briefly, then U.S. senator in 1802.
• Despite other Federalists, JQA would have voted for Louisiana Purchase.
• JQA’s support for Jefferson’s measures expedited his diplomat expenses.
• Took great pains to be independent from parties in politics; he sought to purposefully be a nuisance to show his disdain.
• Repeatedly berated himself for indolence and wasting time with scholarly pursuits, which most fulfilled them.
• Elected to Harvard professorship in rhetoric, for which he demanded and received preferential treatment and allowances.
• Resigned senate seat in sixth year when the Massachusetts (of Federalists) strong-armed him into voting against the embargo he wanted.
• New president Madison appointed JQA ambassador to Russia in 1809.
• Was offered Supreme Court position but declined, citing dislike of law, low pay, and self-realization he was more partisan than he let on.
• Helped negotiate peace between Russia and England in 1814 with Henry Clay.
• Injured his eye and hand in pistol accident; leeches to the eye.
• Accepted Monroe’s Secretary of State appointment while in London and hung out with Jeremy Bentham before returning to the States.
• Took care of deadbeat Tom after Abigail died in 1819.
• Tasked by Congress to report on the standardization of weights and measures.
• Articulated ideas of Monroe Doctrine before Monroe did.
• Took to swimming in the Potomac and working the White House gardens.
• Lost George W. Adams to suicide just after losing presidency; eventually lost two brothers and two sons to alcoholism.
• His defense in Congress of the right to petition and fight against the gag rule was cloaked in the anti-slavery cause in 1836.
• Defended the Amistad slaves and won.
• Talked against slavery so much, southerners tried to censure him but this simply gave him another opportunity to speechify.
• Criticized northern politicians like Douglas for casting lots with southerners.
• Voted against Mexican War; vote was 176-11.
• Collapsed in his House seat in 1848 and died at the Capitol. ↑

John Tyler by Gary May

• At 51 he was the youngest president to take the oath
• Tyler’s father was Virginia governor and friend of Jefferson during Revolution
• Tyler was last Virginian president
• Attended College of William & Mary, then law school by 19 and Virginia House of Delegates in 1811
• In spring 1813 his father died, he married Letitia, and joined militia but didn’t see action
• Elected to Congress in 1816 at 26
• Clay’s “American System” inspired by dismal performance in War of 1812, but states rights advocate Tyler voted against
• Appointed to committee investigating Second Bank of the United States role in 1818’s “bank mania” of speculation and corruption; report was critical but bank survived
• Voted against Missouri Compromise of 1820, which pushed him to not seek re-election
• Law and farming bored him, so he won spot in Virginia legislature at 33, then became Virginia governor at 35
• Virginia senator John Randolph lost favor, so Tyler selected for Senate in 1827
• Hated John Quincy Adams and feared Andrew Jackson; in 1824 went Adams and 1828 Jackson
• Went against Jackson’s despotism in nullification crisis and Bank controversy, despite supporting states rights
• Resigned from Senate in 1836 in protest of resolution to expunge censure of Jackson’s behavior in Bank controversy
• Despised the word “national” and what it represented
• Whigs in 1840 had no official platform so as not to tear apart fragile coalition
• Clay clashed with Harrison assuming he’d be subservient to Congress
• Tyler brought 8 kids to White House, had son as secretary
• Wife Letitia had stroke in 1839 and was invalid; daughter in law and actress Priscilla Cooper acted as First Lady
• Clay, angling for 1844, put Third Bank of United States up for vote but Tyler vetoed
• Whig activist Philip Hone called Tyler’s message “the quintessence of twaddle”
• Second veto of bank triggered Cabinet resignations (orchestrated by Clay) save Daniel Webster; Clay assumed Tyler would resign but instead he found independent Whigs
• Whigs expelled Tyler from party after 1841 special session
• Letitia died in 1842
• Skirmish with Britain in 1830s at Maine/New Brunswick border dispute led to Webster-Ashburton treaty, border resolutions, and slave trade compromises
• Sent first envoy to China to open for U.S. trade
• Ardent expansionist who wanted to annex Texas, but slavery held it up
• In February 1844 was cruising Potomac on new steam-powered USS Princeton when “Peacemaker” cannon exploded; Tyler and fiancée Julia below but casualties and carnage above, including Julia’s father
• Calhoun “never happier than when he was philosophizing on behalf of slavery”
• Antislavery Democratic senator leaked Texas annexation treaty; solely hinges on slavery in election year
• Created his own Democratic-Republican party to act as spoiler; promised to bow out if assured by Polk that Texas would be annexed
• Married Julia in June 1844 in secret; first presidential wedding in office; 30 years her senior
• Funds to improve White House denied by Congress, so Julia’s mother contributed
• First president to decline to seek second term
• Signed annexation resolution on March 1
• Had 15 kids between two wives
• 1848 election split by Free Soil Party nominee Van Buren, and combined with Mexican war spoils states led to Compromise of 1850, which Tyler supported with Clay
• Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and attempt at arming slaves tilted Tyler toward secession
• Even in early 1861 was looking for ways to prevent disunion: participated in “peace convention” in DC but turned when proposed amendment would limit slavery and when Lincoln signaled war
• Oversaw transfer of Confederate capital from Montgomery to Richmond, and served in Confederate House of Representatives briefly before death in January 1861
• Asserted presidential power in era when Congress tried to weaken it; used veto vigorously, showed power even without congressional support or personal charisma
• Improved Britain/American relations through Webster-Ashburton treaty, opened relations with China through Treaty of Wanghia, annexed Texas
• Helped create “imperial presidency” through secret service contingency funds, guarding certain records, dispatching forces
• Belief he was heir to Virginian presidents dynasty led to reckless pursuit of Texas, which led to Civil War ↑

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

• Where humans are concerned, context is everything. (Segway)
• Research to: determine whether you’re solving the right problem; discover your best competitive advantages; learn how to convince your customers to care about the same things you do; identify small changes with huge potential influence; see where your blind spots and biases are preventing your best work
• The better you know the current state of things and why they’re like that, the better you will be positioned to innovate
• Research = systematic inquiry
• Design research: approach familiar people and things as though they are unknown to us to see them clearly
• Research ≠ asking people what they like (superficial and unmoored from behavior); quash all liking and hating
• Focus on gathering useful insights, not sample size and stats
• Generative/exploratory research: “what’s up with __?” groups, users
  • helps discover most commonly voiced unmet needs → hypothesis
• Descriptive/explanatory research: “what and how?”
  • observing characteristics of what you’re studying: what’s the design problem?
• Evaluative research: “are we getting close?”
  • defining possible solutions and trying them; usability testing
• Causal research: “why is this happening?”
  • cause and effect for how people actually use product
• Ask simple questions of stakeholders: how does that benefit the business? Why do you do it that way?
  • cut to the heart of assumptions and open new inquiries
• Research for amateurs: discipline and checklists
• 1. Phrase questions clearly. 2. Set realistic expectations. 3. Be prepared. 4. Allow staff time for analysis. 5. Notes or it didn’t happen.
• Identify your highest-priority questions, assumptions that carry the biggest risk
• Research process: (declarative statements with each)
  • 1. Define the problem with statement: action-based verbs like discover, evaluate, identify
  • 2. Select the approach: will depend if you’re studying organization, users, competition, product
  • 3. Plan and prepare for research: plan for the unexpected
  • 4. Collect the data, and keep it organized
  • 5. Analyze the data: look for meaningful patterns to turn into recommendations
  • 6. Report the results: brief, well-organized summary
• Usability is necessary, but not sufficient
• Design doesn’t happen in the deep, cold vacuum of space. Design happens in the warm, sweaty proximity of people with a lot on their minds.
• Defining scope of project = boundaries and limits
• Business strategy requirements: cohesive, complete, consistent, current, unambiguous, feasible, concise
• User research to “identify patterns and develop empathy”
• Ethnography: what do people do and why do they do it, and what are the implications for the success of what I am designing?
• Assumptions are insults: alienating, risk being wrong
• 4 Ds of design ethnography:
  • Deep dive: learn fewer individuals really well
  • Daily life: observation, natural
  • Data analysis: gain real understanding through useful models
  • Drama: create fictional personas with important goals and scenarios to better understand
• Interviewing users: learn about everything that might influence how users might use product
• People being interviewed want to be liked, demonstrate their smarts
• As interviewer you know nothing
• 3-act interview structure:
  • Intro: small talk, thanking, recording, get demographics
  • Body: open questions, silence, “Tell me more”
  • Conclusion: wrap up, questions
• Convert attention into habit
• Different kinds of questions:
  • User question: “What matters to our customers?”
  • Product question: “How are we better at serving that need than any competition?”
  • Marketing question: “How can we show our target customers our product is superior choice?”
• Personas: represent users in user-centered designs; reference point for decisions
  • include photo, name, demos, role, quotes, goals, habits
• Task analysis/workflow breaks down steps of task into step by step
• You always need to answer ‘why?’ before asking ‘how?’ And you need good answers for both.
• Make friends with reality. ↑

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

• 1. Every day is Groundhog Day
  • “We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.”
  • “What your daily routine consists of it not that important. What’s important is that the routine exists. Cobble together your own routine, stick to it most days, break from it once in a while for fun, and modify it as necessary.”
  • [how to be happy top 10 lists]
  • Two columns: Thanks For and Help Me
• 2. Build a bliss station
  • Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth): “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.” 
• 3. Forget the noun, do the verb
  • Vonnegut: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”
• 4. Make gifts
  • “If you’re bummed out and hating your work, pick somebody special in your life and make something for them.”
  • “Making gifts puts us in touch with our gifts.”
• 5. The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary 
  • “Drawing doesn’t just help you see better, it makes you feel better.”
  • “Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.”
• 6. Slay the art monsters 
• 7. You are allowed to change your mind
  • Like-minded vs. like-hearted
  • Visit the past and read old books
  • “We have such short memories. You don’t have to go that far back into the past to discover things we’ve already forgotten about. Cracking a book that’s only a quarter of a century old can be like opening a chest of buried treasure.”
• 8. When in doubt, tidy up
• 9. Demons hate fresh air 
• 10. Plant your garden 
  • Thoreau: “Live in each season as it passes and resign yourself to the influences of each.”
  • “The people who found the thing that made them feel alive and who kept themselves alive by doing it. The people who planted their seeds, tended to themselves, and grew into something lasting.”
  • “Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful. There’s no time for despair. ‘The thing to rejoice in is in the fact that one had the good fortune to be born,’ said the poet Mark Strand. ‘The odds against being born are astronomical.’ None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”
  • “Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing.” ↑

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek by Howard Markel

• Parents settled in pioneer Michigan in 1830s
• Mother died when three kids were young; father John Preston remarried family friend Ann Janette at 18 soon after
• John was sickly runt suffering from anal fissures among other things; explains his later obsession with colon hygiene
• Parents very involved in apocalyptic Seventh-day Adventist movement and church life
• Religious upbringing and pioneer toil formative for John; despite later flaws, retained Christian spirit and service
• Selection as “printer’s devil” (apprentice) for church’s publication led to skill and appreciation for writing
• Common of era to overeat meat, salt, and sugar, leading to sundry indigestion issues
• Sylvester Graham among prominent Christian health reform advocates, inventor of graham cracker and proponent of extreme sexual purity
• Russell Trall another reformer and founder of Trall Hygeian Home (precursor to Battle Creek sanitarium); more liberal on sexuality (called exercise the “movement cure”)
• John began studying medicine at Ann Arbor, but poor education propelled him to Bellevue hospital college in New York
• Will hated his name but loved 7 numerology; bullied and tattled on by John and put down by father; considered “dull” in school but was actually nearsighted; insecurity and expressionless face compounded by bad teeth
• Will started out as kid doing work in father’s broom factory, then as teenager became traveling salesman
• In 1876, 16% of Bellevue patients died, often by infection or surgery; in ER a sign said “prepare to meet your god”
• John had lightbulb moment of prepared cereals as broke med student in New York
• His dissertation concerned the nature of disease and insistence of avoiding toxic drugs in favor of preventative diet and lifestyle
• Will toiled at broom business before getting accelerated business degree and getting married at 20 in 1880
• John appointed director of what became Battle Creek sanitarium and hired Will as manager of publishing and food businesses
• “The best remedy for “the blues” is to turn one’s face resolutely toward better things.” -John
• Henry Crowell, Christian businessman, began manufacturing Quaker Oats in 1883 in Ohio; Henry Perky (Shredded Wheat) and Charles Post also competitors
• John corresponded with Russian doctor Ivan Pavlov on physiology of digestion
• John’s quest for easy digestibility with Corn Flakes ironically created pre-digested cereal that boosts sugar
• John offered to buy Perky’s Shredded Wheat but then backed out; big regret, but eventually won when sued by Perky for trademark infringement
• John and Ella probably never consummated marriage due to his extreme views on sexuality; fostered and adopted several dozen kids over the years
• By 1902 Battle Creek hosted “gold rush” of cereal opportunists
• Post making millions off corn flakes ripoff and Grape Nuts, but health issues led to shooting himself in 1914
• Will developed corn flakes from flaking grits and added sweeteners much to John’s chagrin
• Will left the San in 1901 to focus on the cereal business, but after it burned down six months later he came back
• Burn possibly caused by Whites, who’d grown resentful of John’s imperial ways
• Rebuilt much bigger San and was severed from the church in 1907
• First hired contractor surgeons but poor work inspired John to develop own skills and in-house, all while running San, writing and lecturing, meeting patients
• Studied other surgeons and adopted gynecologist Lawson Tait’s antiseptic surgical techniques that led to unprecedented streak of infection-less operations; gained acclaim and operated until age 84
• Third to half of his surgery patients weren’t billed due to poverty; would charge rich more to balance
• Would perform womb massages himself often; unknown medical reasons, but women liked them
• Will ran operations of San’s expansive grounds, applying Taylorite scientific management principles
• Business advisor Arch Shaw stumbled upon the San and sold Will ledger system in 1897; later became advisor and board member for cereal
• San audited by bank in 1907: found poor conditions, inefficient employees, and no authority structure after Will left; John a gifted physician and inventor but bad manager
• Ahead of his time on dangers of sitting (had special chairs in the San that promoted good posture), meat (in time of poor manufacturing), smoking (along with Henry Ford), and exercise
• Virulently anti-masturbation, to the point of circumcising recidivists of both genders; STDs and sex-as-dirtiness factors
• Railed against oysters, leading to censure from Maryland legislature, though Will was fan
• Famous friends and patients included Ford, Ida Tarbell, Amelia Earhart, Rockefeller Jr, Barron (WSJ), Coolidge, Taft, WJ Bryan
• Will took out ads in Ladies’ Home Journal and create false scarcity to compel women to have their grocers carry Corn Flakes; same for Rice Krispies in 1928
• Providential that rise of Corn Flakes aligned with increasingly widespread accessibility of clean pasteurized milk
• During Depression Will switched from three 8-hour shifts to four 6-hour to avoid layoffs
• Will stepped down in 1939 at age 79; replacement Vanderploeg introduced sugary cereals Sugar Smacks and Frosted Flakes and hired Leo Burnett in 1949 to create characters
• Sued each other throughout the 1910s over competing cereals and brand names; eventually Will won both
• John a prominent backer of eugenics movement; though well regarded for treatment of Battle Creek African-American population, advocated inferiority of negro race
• Will’s son John invented the wax paper bag inside the cereal box to maintain freshness
• John was more famous than his various businesses, but Will the opposite
• Post-mortem psychoanalysis branded Will with inferiority complex, deep-seated unhappiness, but satisfaction in benefiting humanity
• San board expanded facilities right before Depression against John’s wishes; went into receivership, then reorganized to cut out John
• Irony of their unhealthy rancor contrasted with their “better living” missions ↑

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

• “My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven’t done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done.”
• “My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I’ll probably see, and I know how they’ll probably act. I know there’ll be silence; I know there’ll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don’t. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away.”
• “My tree had its time, and time changed it.”
• “Time has also changed me, my perception of my tree, and my perception of my tree’s perception of itself. Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convince me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”
• “When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.”
• “In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be.”
• “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” ↑

Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition by Wendell Berry

• “Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to “figure it out” or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody’s claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what it going to happen to it, or to us.”
• “One of our problems is that we humans cannot live without acting; we have to act. Moreover, we have to act on the basis of what we know, and what we know is incomplete.”
• “The journalists think it intellectually chic to stand open-mouthed before any wonder of science whatsoever. The media, cultivating their mediocrity, seem quite comfortably unaware that many of the calamities from which science is expected to save the world were caused in the first place by science—which meanwhile is busy propagating further calamities, hailed now as wonders, from which later it will undertake to save the world.”
• The economy = legalized vandalism
• “If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of “the answer.” This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”
• “Believing that whatever is intangible does not exist, Mr. Wilson like many materialists, atheists, rationalists, realists, etc., thinks he had struck a killing blow against religious faith when he has asked to see its evidence. But of course religious faith BEGins with the discovery that there is no “evidence.” There is no argument or trail of evidence or course of experimentation that can connect unbelief and belief.”
• “Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions. We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children. Science does not seem to be lighting the way; we seem rather to be leapfrogging into the dark along series of scientific solutions, which become problems, which call for further solutions, which science is always eager to supply, and which it sometimes cannot supply.”
• “Modern scientists works with everybody’s proxy, whether or not that proxy has been given. A good many people, presumably, would have chosen to “stay out of the nuclei,” but that was a choice they did not have. When a few scientists decided to go in, they decided for everybody. This “freedom of scientific inquiry” was immediately transfixed into the freedom of corporate and/or governmental exploitation. And so the freedom of the originators and exploiters has become, in effect, the abduction and imprisonment of all the rest of us. Adam was the first, but not the last, to choose for the whole human race.”
• “Public sexual revelations and public obscenity are now merely cliches, part of the uniform behavior of modish nonconformity and fashionable bad manners, but always performed by people who wish to be thought courageous. Has it increased freedom? Well, of course, people have become more free when they have earned or taken or been given the right to do what they previously were forbidden to do. But, as always, the worth of freedom depends upon how it is used. The value of freedom is probably not intrinsic and is certainly not limitless. It is generally understood by people who think about it that freedom can be abused, and that it rests, in the long run, on a common understanding of fairness: One should not increase one’s freedom by reducing somebody else’s.”
• “I don’t believe that the connection between art and life can ever be finally or even very satisfactorily resolved, any more than can be the connection between science and life. We join ourselves to the living world by the artifacts of art and science—by made things. And we are always going to be at least somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant and fallible and small; the living world is larger and more complex than our works.”
• “The world and its neighborhoods, natural and human, are not passively the subjects of art, any more than they are passively the subjects of science-industry-and-technology. They are affected by all that we do. And they respond. The world does not exist merely to be written about, any more than it exists merely to be studied. It is real, before and after human work. What we write is finally to be measured by the health of what we write about. What we think we know affects the health of the thing we think we know.”
• “What I am against—and without a minute’s hesitation or apology—is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.”
• “The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stopping over these with a magnifying lens. Beyond any earthly reason we experience beauty in excess of use, justice in excess of anger, mercy in excess of justice, love in excess of deserving or fulfillment. We have known evil beyond imagining and forgiveness beyond measure. And all of this is in excess of what Mr. Wilson means by “religion” and of what he means by “ethics.””
• “If innovation (the “qualitatively new”) is a primary requirement for art, then why are we still interested in works that are no longer new?”
• “The complicity of the arts and humanities in this conquest is readily apparent in the enthusiasm with which the disciplines schools, and libraries have accepted their ever-growing dependence (at public expense) on electronic technologies that are, in fact as all of history shows, not necessary to learning or teaching, and which have produced no perceptible improvement in either. … It is the clearest demonstration so far that the cult of originality and innovation is in fact a crowd of conformists, tramping on one another’s heels for fear of being the last to buy whatever is for sale.”
• “We should value familiarity above innovation. Boomer scientists and artists want to discover (so to speak) a place where they have not been. Sticker scientists and artists want to know where they are. There is no reason that familiarity cannot be a goal just as worthy, demanding, and exciting as innovation—or, as I would argue, much more so. It would certainly give worthwhile employment to more people. And in fact its boundaries are much larger. Innovation is limited always by human ingenuity and human means; familiarity is limited only by the limits of life. The real infinitude of experience is in familiarity.”
• “Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well. What can’t be explained? I don’t think creatures can be explained. I don’t think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don’t think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained. The arts are indispensable precisely because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation.”
• “The response is to ask if science and art are inherently at odds with one another. It seems obvious that they are not. To see that they are not may require extracurricular thought, but once we have cracked the crust of academic convention we can see that “science” means knowing and that “art” means doing, and that one is meaningless without the other. Out of school, the two are commonly inter-involved and naturally cooperative in the same person—a farmer, say, or a woodworker—who knows and does, both at the same time. It may be more or less possible to know and do nothing, but it is not possible to do and know nothing. One does as one knows. It is not possible to imagine a farmer who does not use both science and art.” ↑

Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitchel Resnick

• A students vs. X students: good grades vs. risk-taking and problem solving
• 4 P’s of Creative Learning: Projects, Passion, Peers, Play
• Creative Learning Spiral: imagine, create, play, share, reflect, repeat
• “Creative thinking” > creativity
• Eureka moments are few and fleeting
• Can’t teach creativity but can nurture
• Alan Kay: Technology is whatever was invented after you were born.
• Project-based learning leads to fluency, which develops: thinking, voice, identity
• For a technology to be effective: low floor, high ceiling, and wide walls to allow space for different passions and projects
• Hard fun: learning within projects your care about
  • Dive in and immerse; step back and reflect; repeat
  • Immersion without reflection can be satisfying but not fulfilling
• Intrinsic motivation > extrinsic motivation; reward or gamified payment seems to narrow focus and restrict creativity
• Good teachers:
  • Catalyst or spark for learning process: ask questions
  • Consultant: guide on the side
  • Connector: facilitate learning between people
  • Collaborator: working with others
• Play = curiosity, imagination, experimentation
• LEGO = contraction of Danish lege (open-ended play) and godt, meaning “play well”
• “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” William Bruce Cameron
• Loris Malaguzzi poem “The Hundred Languages”
• 10 tips for learners:
  • Start simple.
  • Work on things you like.
  • Fiddle around.
  • Don’t be afraid to experiment.
  • Find a friend.
  • It’s OK to copy stuff.
  • Document in a sketchbook.
  • Build, take apart, rebuild.
  • When things go wrong, stick with it.
  • Pay attention to your own learning.
• Ten tips for parents and teachers:
  • Imagine: show examples to spark ideas.
  • Imagine: encourage messing around.
  • Create: provide a wide variety of materials.
  • Create: embrace all types of making.
  • Play: emphasize process, not product.
  • Play: extend time for projects.
  • Share: play the role of matchmaker.
  • Share: get involved as a collaborator.
  • Reflect: ask authentic questions. (How did you come up with the idea for this project? What’s been most surprising to you? What did you want it to do?
  • Reflect: share your own reflections. ↑

Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious by David Dark

• “When I go no further in my consideration of my fellow human, I betray my preference for caricature over perception, a shrug as opposed to a vision of the lived fact of somebody in a body.”
• “Religion is a controlling story. … Stories change but the fact of story doesn’t.”
• “It is certainly often an opiate for the masses, but it can also function as the poetry of the people.”
• “When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations.”
• “Witness is simply the evidence of my output. My witness is the sum of everything I do and leave undone.”
• “It’s exceedingly difficult to discuss religion with people who are absolutely certain only other people have one.”
• “Broad is the path of dismembering, and narrow is the gate of righteous remembering. … True religion, remembering well amid the haste, hurry and distraction of the average day, requires a conscious effort. Being an ecstatic affirmer, a noticer supreme, is a full-time job.”
• “The act of self-expression, putting our stories, our jams, our beloved enthusiasms on the table, isn’t just an essential practice of self-preservation, it also creates the possibility of neighborliness, a meaning-making exercise in the work of being a human being among human beings.”
• “People come to consciousness in relationship. This is the phenomenon—oh, how it enlivens a heart!—of shared meaning.”
• “Like brainwash, ideology isn’t something anyone is likely to knowingly avow any more than we would think it kind to congratulate people for how thoroughly conformist they are.”
• “The delight of…anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable jot is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.”
• “Poetry happens when I’m made to really see something I’ve overlooked, something needful, something that might bring me back to myself.”
• “The old way can begin to feel like the only way cultural treasures might go on being treasured by someone somewhere somehow whether it’s reading a book all the way through or placing a needle on vinyl. The slow labor of discovery and the patience real amazement require is otherwise in danger of being lost.”
• “We love our labels as ourselves even as they don’t—and can’t—do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else’s. It’s as if we’ll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice.”
• “We begin to take up the task of empathy when we’re susceptible to the sense that the inner lives of others might be as real and as realistic as our own.”
• Geoffrey Hill: “Tyranny requires simplification.”
• “Good religion cherishes bodies, and it is evident in any practice that restores, reinforces, reconsiders and redeems the human form, locating it, in Thoreau’s phrase, as “a part and parcel of nature.””
• “To be whole is to be part. None of us gets to have our meaning alone.”
• “Your religion is the story you tell yourself about yourself to others. As it happens, it doesn’t always coincide with what we think—or say—we believe.”
• “According to the prevailing delusions, to see all human activity as religious is to see the world illegally.” ↑

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

• Day felt the San Francisco earthquake was God speaking to her as a child
• Day was heavily influenced by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; went radical in NY and reconverted to Catholicism in jail
• Lots of suicide and death in Percy’s family
• Percy highly influenced by Brothers Karamazov: pursed medicine instead of writing like Ivan
• As preteen Percy became BFFs with Shelby Foote
• Day hung and drank with the homeless in wartime, a Llewyn Davis kind of life. Friends with Eugene O’Neill, whose poetry readings inspired her back to Mass.
• Both Merton and Day left out exploits from their memoirs
• Day worked as nurse in Brooklyn during flu epidemic and learned value of work and discipline
• Sacco/Vanzetti trial caused rift between Day and her man, and drove her to be catechized
• O’Connor’s adolescent journal cover: “Mind your own bidnis”
• Catholic Worker pacifism re: Spanish civil war cost subscribers who favored just-war theory
• Merton on the Holy Ghost: “Although He is right with is and in us and out of us and all through us we have to go on journeys to find him.”
• All found counterparts through correspondence: Percy with essays to the world, Merton through imaginative identification with distant writers, O’Connor by casting her partner as an adversary to be won over, Day in stirring epistles to the community that had gathered around her.
• Day, in fundraising column: “It is always a feast where love is, and where love is, God is.”
• From O’Connor’s correspondence: religion is not a ‘blueprint’ but an act of faith: “When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief…”
• Merton: “For wisdom cannot be learned from a book. It is acquired only in living formation … It is ‘lived.’ And unless one ‘lives’ it, one cannot ‘have’ it.” ↑

Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination by Susan Douglas

• “The most pivotal development, Anderson argued, that transformed hunks of populated territories into imagined communities of nations was the newspaper. Every morning, at roughly the same time, people read of the same stories about the nation, its leaders, and some of their fellow citizens in the newspaper. It was this daily ritual of taking in the same stories, the same knowledge, at the same time as you knew those who shared your country where, that forged this sense of comradeship with unseen others.”
• “We can passively hear, but we must actively listen.”
• Absence of imagery forces brain to generate own dream world; immediate and transitory power
• Listening is centripetal; looking is centrifugal
• Auditory system feeds into limbic system, which generates associations and emotional states
• Types of listening: informational, dimensional (imagining space, and music), and associational (creating memories tied to audio)
• FM waves travel to horizon then off into space (50 miles); AM waves follow curve of earth, can be bounced back by ionosphere and land hundreds of miles away
• Aurality linked to cosmology: religious experience; “ether” helped bridge widening gap between machines and spirituality
• “Radio burrowed into this unspoken longing for a contact with the heavens, for a more perfect community, for a spiritual transcendence not at odds with, but made possible by, machines.”
• Post WW1 craze of séances and ether experiments to communicate with dead
• Edison: “Centuries after you have crumbled into dust, [the phonograph] will repeat again and again to a generation that will never know you, every idle thought, every find a fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.”
• Ether helped people imagine electromagnetic propagation; also made radio seem inherently magical
• Mix of voices, static, dots and dashes a “new sonic dimension”
• Radio first called wireless telegraphy, then wireless telephony, before settling on radio in 1920s
• Required assembly and exploration to find stations; men and boys brought into home
• Listening stages:
  • Early 1920s: DXing: tuning into faraway stations
  • Mid 1920s: music listening
  • Late 1920s: story listening (Amos & Andy)
• Early enthusiasts enjoyed the challenge of assembly and tinkering despite hassles
• Early 1920s all stations and programming were local so DXers captured regional flavors
• “DXing brought contradictory pleasures: the smugness of regional superiority blended with the pleasure of imagining a national entity, something grand, with a life of its own, of which you were part. It affirmed both hopes, that America was some kind of culturally cohesive whole but one that resembled a jigsaw puzzle of unique, definable pieces.”
• “The coincidence of jazz and radio married an aural technology with the fruits of a primarily oral culture.”
• re: race “With the radio as auditory turnstile between cultures, there were enormous enrichments, illusions, and delusions for both sides.”
• By 1930s a standardized diction for commercials contrasted with wilder pronunciations in programs
• Radio comedies (Amos & Andy) linguistic slapstick, vaudevillian, anarchic counter to Victorian sensibilities, and relief during Depression
• Social sciences began during Great Depression trying to understand mythology of American dream
• In 1925, 10% had radio, 1933 62%
• World War II an audio war, despite modern emphasis on visual elements
• Marot and other war correspondence used everyday speech and informalism
• “FDR had hardly ignored the fact that in the 1936 campaign most of the country’s editorial pages had opposed his reelection. Support for him and for the new deal had been achieved very much through his administration’s adroit and calculated use of radio. But by 1940 more than one-third of the country’s radio stations were owned by newspapers. FDR regarded this as a direct threat to his policies. The FCC in 1938 began an investigation into monopoly practices — what was called chain broadcasting — in the industry. Privately, the president in 1940 asked the new FCC Chairman, Lawrence Fly, “Will you let me know when you propose to have a hearing on newspaper ownership of radio stations?” Publicly, through his press secretary, Steve Early, Roosevelt told broadcasters that “the government is watching” to see if they air any “false news.” Radio, Early warned, “might have to be taught manners if it were a bad child.” Network executives understood “false news” to be news critical of the administration’s policies.”
• Masculine pastimes like baseball and boxing brought into the home, build a nationalistic feeling
• Sportscasting began in 1930s in baseball and boxing
• Baseball listening a “sensory intertwining of public and private life”, associative memories of summer, youth, and America’s past
• Louis/Schmeling fights a proxy war between Germany and United States; though Louis was black, better him than a Nazi as a world champion
• Away games weren’t broadcast so announcers recreated based on telegrams coming in
• Rock and pop radio in 1950s for cool teens who like “race music”
• FM Revolution, build on the success of transistors, enhanced sound into stereo and high fidelity
• Author links talk radio boom of the 1980s and 90s to backlash against feminism and Vietnam syndrome weakness, and abandoning Fairness Doctrine
• Major deregulations in ownership limits in 1980s lead to consolidations by conglomerations
• Stern, Imus, and Limbaugh the chief figures of male radio backlash; NPR the counterpoint, but still all showcases for non-mainstream voices
• Talk radio and NPR where about “using the airwaves to reinvigorate democracy” by giving “nonmonied classes” their say too
• Ham radio pre-dominantly male, nerdy niche but necessary in emergencies
• “Ham” originally term for sloppy telegraph operators; pejorative turned into name of pride
• Democratic, meritocratic tribe; emphasis on altruism and comity
• “Buried today as we are under the avalanche of visual slag, many people seem to want increased input in shaping the often top-down meanings of the media. I think we want our imaginations back. I think we want—and need—to listen.” ↑

Love Wins: At the Heart of Life’s Big Questions by Rob Bell

• Accepting Christ requires verbs (accept, admit, believe), so how does free grace work?
• “Heaven” often substituted for “God” by Jesus
• Rewards are dynamic rather than static: Wealth and possessions mean something only with verbs
• Dragging the future into the present: participating now in the life of the age to come
  • Clean water in the future, so work towards it now
  • “On earth as it is in heaven”
• “Reign”: actively participate on the ordering of creation
• Heaven/eternal life begins now… experiences of joy, peace, love in this life in connection to God
• Gehenna (hell) referred to city dump where fire and dogs gnashing teeth represented death
• Jesus spoke of hell to devout Jews to warn of consequences of straying from God’s calling
• Olam means forever but is used to reference particular period
• God, basically, isn’t gutsy enough for eternal punishment. Calling his bluff.
• If God can forgive, why wouldn’t he? If Jesus already died for us, why do we have to accept?
• Restoration and reconciliation bring glory to God, not eternal damnation
• Jesus had always been present and is bigger than any one religion
• Jesus “leaves the door way, way open” for salvation through him ↑

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

• “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
• Prisoners looking at sunset: “How beautiful the world could be”
• “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”
• “Self-actualization is possible only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence.”
• “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt” (But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare) read the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask, whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” ↑

Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset 

• “Diversion” usually indicates only comfortable situations, to the extent that, used carelessly, it connotes ways of life completely free of hardship, free of risk, not requiring great physical effort nor a great deal of concentration. But the occupation of hunting, as carried on by a good hunter, involves precisely all of those things.”
• “The life that we are given has its minutes numbered, and in addition it is given to us empty. Whether we like it or not we have to fill it on our own; that is, we have to occupy it one way or another. Thus the essence of each life lies in its occupations.”
• “The fact is that for almost all men the major part of life consists of obligatory occupations, chores which they would never do out of choice. Since this fate is so ancient and so constant, it would seem that man should have learned to adapt himself to it and consequently to find it charming. But he does not seem to have done so.”
• “All this indicates that man, painfully submerged in his work or obligatory occupations, projects beyond them, imagines another kind of life consisting of very different occupations, in the execution of which he would not feel as if he were losing time, but, on the contrary, gaining it, filling it satisfactorily and as it should be filled. Opposite a life which annihilates itself and fails—a life of work—he erects the plan of a life successful in itself—a life of delight and happiness.”
• “All men, in fact, feel called on to be happy, but in each individual that general call becomes concrete in the more or less singular profile in which happiness appears to him. Happiness is a life dedicated to occupations for which that individual feels a singular vocation. Immersed in them, he misses nothing; the whole present fills him completely, free from desire and nostalgia. Laborious activities are performed, not out of any esteem for them, but rather for the result that follows them, but we give ourselves to vocational occupations for the pleasure of them, without concern for the subsequent profit. For that reason we want them never to end. We would like to eternalize, to perennialize them. And, really, once absorbed in a pleasurable occupation, we catch a starry glimpse of eternity.”
• “Hunting, like all human occupations, has its different levels, and how little of the real work of hunting is suggested in words like diversion, relaxation, entertainment! … It involves a complete code of ethics of the most distinguished design; the hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witnesses or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal. In this way hunting resembles the monastic rule or military order.”
• “Every time man looks at a past life from his perspective of the present, he sees, alongside the problems that weighed upon it, the solutions which, for better or for worse, these problems received. And so it naturally seems that every past life was easier, less full of anguish, then the present life; it is a charade whose solution we possess beforehand.”
• “This is the reason men hunt. When you are fed up with the troublesome present, with being ‘very twentieth century,’ you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being ‘Paleolithic.’”
• “When we leave the city and go up on the mountains it is astounding how naturally and rapidly we free ourselves from the worries, temper, and ways of the real person we were, and the savage man springs anew in us. Our life seems to lose weight and the fresh and fragrant atmosphere of an adolescence circulates through it.”
• “Man is a fugitive from Nature. He escaped from it and began to make history, which is trying to realize the imaginary, the improbable, perhaps the impossible. History is always made against the grain of Nature. The human being tries to rest from the enormous discomfort and all-embracing disquiet of history by “returning” transitorily, artificially, to Nature in the sport of hunting.“
• Eduardo de Figueroa, 8th Count of Yebes: “There is one of the hunter’s senses which must work indefatigably at all times. That is the sense of sight. Look, look, and look again; at all times, in all directions, and in all circumstances. Look as you go along; look while you are resting; look while you are eating or lighting a cigar; up, down, back over the ground you have just covered, at the hill crests, at the ledges and dells, with binoculars and the naked eye, and always be aware that if you know how to look, the beast that you have not found in eight hours of backbreaking work can appear within a hundred meters, when just at sunset, worn out and cursing your interest, you are taking off your shoes and caring for your aching feet in the door of a shelter or a tent. It’s good advice.”
• “The hunter knows that he does not know what is going to happen, and this is one of the greatest attractions of his occupation. Thus he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style—an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a “universal” attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man.”
• “The only man who truly thinks is the one who, when faced with a problem, instead of looking only straight ahead, toward what habit, tradition, the commonplace, and mental inertia would make one assume, keeps himself alert, ready to accept the fact that the solution might spring from the least foreseeable spot on the great rotundity of the horizon.” ↑

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller

• “I know what it is they say about Finns. Dour, humorless, alcoholic. Tapio could be those things, and he could be something else altogether: fervent, sardonic, deeply principled but awake to his follies. He was mercurial.”
• “Macintyre gave me a gently chiding look. “Do not presume to know just how our Finnish friend may feel from one moment to the next. Finns may have a chilly exterior, but there is often a roiling, volcanic interior. They simply hide it better.”
• “For now, take stock of yourself. This is the chance you waxed about so long ago. Listen for the voice that speaks when all others go silent. Be alone—be entirely alone. I am not saying you will find anything of worth there—certainly no cosmic truth—but maybe you will begin to feel as pared down, efficient and clean as a freshly whittled stick.”
• “You will forgive yourself one day. The Arctic does strange things to people. Or strange people come to the Arctic. It makes little difference.”
• “Bless and curse the man in equal measures, I said to no one. We have no more room in this hut.”
• “Our friendship was one of patience and presence, and that was how it endured.”
• “Below the chalk-white cliffs lies the ocean, and its restive heaving reminds me that there are still forces unfettered by time, older than ruin.”
• “If you put nothing down, the people you love will only remember the skeleton of your experience. Your mind dies with you.” ↑

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• “To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.”
• “It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness.”
• “It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.” ↑

Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings by Josh Larsen

• “Movies offer these sorts of unconscious prayerful gestures, only much louder and on a giant screen. If it helps, imagine stained-glass windows along the walls of a theater. It’s no coincidence, after all, that the spaces have similar architecture. The knee-jerk comparison to make is a pejorative one: that both places are designed for worship, the implication being that good people go to church to worship God and bad people go to the movies to worship everything else. There is some truth to this reductive reasoning; certainly the most shallow and exploitative of our movies can direct our desires in self-destructive ways. But I think a more fundamental commonality between sanctuaries and theaters is the notion of focus. In both instances, we’ve set aside our time and our space to gather in community and join our concentration. Often the intention is simply to escape the world (and don’t forget, church serves this function too), but frequently we gather to apply our intellectual, emotional, and artistic prowess toward considering the world and our purpose within it.”
• “In bringing together these two practices—theological reflection and film criticism—I’m engaging in what is perhaps best described as a work of cultural refraction. Just as holding a prism against a slit of sunlight reveals a variety of colored beams, this book might help our understanding of both God and the movies to shimmer in a new way.”
• “I can offer lament to God, and often do. But sometimes the movies do it for me.”
• “Films that function as confessional prayers are, instead, those that capture epiphany moments for their characters: instances when they admit and fully bear the weight of the reality that they themselves are inextricably tied up with the awfulness of the world. It’s when they acknowledge that they’ve messed up because they’re messed up, and that they’re incapable of correcting things on their own.”
• “Beneath the broad humor, crude gags, and sharp one-liners often lies an instinctual intelligence. Comedy can capture the truth of the world in a flash.”
• “Holy nonsense blows on the fading embers of our soul, bringing it back to glowing life. Or, as Walter puts it in The Muppets: “As long as there are singing frogs and joking bears, the world can’t be such a bad place after all.””
• “The types of prayer we’ve been considering have been arranged to follow a creation-fall-redemption- restoration trajectory: the understanding that this world was created good, fell into sin, has been redeemed by Christ’s work on the cross, and now awaits the full return to its original glory.”
• “As we watch films, then, let’s enter the theater as we would a sanctuary where a prayer is about to be offered. Let’s listen to the prayer carefully and graciously before we add our own words. Let’s be a congregation, not a censor board. Let’s be open to the possibility that as movie watchers, we’re privileged eavesdroppers on a dialogue between God and the creative beings he made.” ↑

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums by A. Kendra Greene

• “These are old forces. The magma and the tremors. The famine and the want. The way we love rocks and birds and old boats and brass rings, and the way we survive this world because of the stories we fashion from its shards. We do not just keep and collect things, amass and restore them. We trouble ourselves to repurpose, create, and invent things just to carry, a little easier, those stories we cannot live without.”
• “You would think the old traditions are strange because they’re old. You can easily imagine that they made sense once but have hung around too long, have outlived their purpose and grown anachronistic, vestigial. And surely sometimes that’s true. But if traditions are often strange, perhaps those acts and objects and stories and songs are traditional precisely because they are strange. Is it not the very strangeness, the unique curiosity of a thing, the arresting transformation or the essential contradiction of expectation that makes it worth sharing and repeating and passing along?”
• “With every visit and article and affirming word, collectively and by degree, whole groups of people select for the collections they fancy, the ones that somehow have something to add. And with silence, with indifference, they select against the rest. Museums are the expression of those collective determinations. They are rooted in a network of cooperative affirmation long before anyone whispers the word museum. What a quiet democracy.”
• “There are so many flavors of loss. There is deprivation and disappointment. There is sacrifice and grief. There is trifling. There is needless. There is missing and forgotten. There is, though sometimes it is hard to imagine, necessary. There is, though we hardly need reminding, catastrophic.”
• (Iceland achieved independence from Denmark in 1944, sovereignty in 1918, home rule in 1874; first act by parliament upon independence was to build house for national museum)
• “The museum logs starts from the very first item collected, but in all that time from then to now it has never been the what of the thing that matters, compared to the import of the who and the where. It’s always been the story that mattered most, the connections inferred, the object not as a thing of inherent properties but as a touchstone to who we are and where we come from. In a certain light, these records aren’t even a matter of provenance so much as a kind of alternative genealogy.” ↑

Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination by Robert Jourdain

• “Our brains are able to manipulate patterns of sound far more complex than those of the brain of any other animal can manage.… As our brains encode these relations, the sensations of sound arise.”
• “It is not a waltz’s notes, but rather relations between the notes, that make a body want to dance. It’s these relations that are music, not the atmospheric vibrations of that jiggle out of musical instruments.”
• Outer ear (pinnae) detects only high-frequency sounds, making music a bit “sweeter”
• Ossicles (inner ear bones) remnants from early jaws that boost middle frequencies; they also have muscles that contract to protect against loud sounds
• When speaking or singing we hear ourselves twice: from lips to pinnae and through head to inner ear; explains uncanny valley of own recording
• Some animals have earlids
• Middle and inner ears encased in hardest bone in body, petrous temporal bone
• Inner ear “a labyrinth of chambers and canals lined by membranes”; are “the concert halls of our nervous systems, where music fans out to an eager audience of thousands of neurons.”
• Inner ear coiled three and a half times for compactness: cochlea, Latin for snail
• Humans localize sounds by comparing intensity in each ear and turning head accordingly
• Auditory processing in the brain stem; localized and shapes sounds to help us identify individual notes
• Resonant frequency: point at which object naturally pitches back and forth
• Sound wave is amplified when the wave’s pulses match the object’s resonant frequencies
• A above middle C reference tone: pre-tuning fork in Handel’s day, A was 420 cycles/sec but now 440
• “Auditory cortex is active during the short-term memories in which aspects of auditory percepts are prolonged.”
• Brain 3rd most energy consumptive organ after heart and kidneys
• Melody “a unique invention in sound, a clever machine that tilts and turns the levers of our minds to produce a quintessential sensation. As is true of so many clever inventions, the workings of a great melody are inexplicably simple yet not at all obvious.”
• “A great melody is magic — magic for its sheer power, and magic because somehow a brain has unearthed it from amidst zillions of possible bad melodies.”
• Brain’s “perpetual categorization” allows for interpreting or sounds rather than processing every raw sound
• Octave equivalence: the one universal in scale design; the octaves double the frequency but keep the same note, allowing for musical possibilities and harmony
• “Music brings order to sound, and any underlying factors that contribute to disorder place music at a disadvantage.”
• Many kinds of scales, but not all succeed; Roman numerals vs Arabic numerals; balance between simplicity and possibility
• Contour is central to our experience of melody, using concepts of Gestalt psychology:
  • Law of Completeness: our minds prefer complete patterns
  • Law of Good Continuation: mind will automatically unite two lines along same trajectory
• Textbook rules for melody can point out bad ones but can’t predict good ones
• re: inspiration, imagery is a memory process, and memory is a categorization process: “New categories arise naturally as the brain is challenged by new and larger perceptions.”
• “Older conceptions crumble to accommodate new and more powerful ones. The connections between memories are altered, the basis for new kinds of imagery is formed, and new ideas arise.”
• “Original music arises naturally from minds exercised in it, and not from some muse inhabiting a fortunate few.”
• “The phonograph has made us lazy, made us fat with other people’s music-making, and perhaps worst of all, made us perfectionists about performance.”
• “The more we are surrounded by music, the less we participate.”
• Latter half of 19th century became age of “virtuoso as composer as hero as sex symbol”
• Concerts more like boisterous rock shows until 19th century
• In 1877 Edison invents wax cylinder, then 1897 Victor and Columbia market gramophone discs that could be mass produced
• “Edison had done for music what Gutenberg had done for words, creating mass audiences for musical ideas. His invention would completely alter our relationship with music.”
• “We live in an age of widespread musical obesity.”
• “We listen to music for the experience of its meaning, for what it ‘says’ to us.”
• Expert listeners use anticipations derived from prior experience, bringing “an extensive library of musical ideas to its listening.”
• In contrast to language, our bodies contain no obvious specializations for music; “few people generate musical expressions in the way that everyone constantly generates sentences”
• Programmatic music: written to represent something happening in the world; images or events (“anger” or “sneaking” music, e.g. The Pink Panther theme)
• Ecstasy begins with the flux and fulfillment of anticipations
• “The experience of music is an entirely artificial one, its qualities almost unknown in daily life apart from special moments when things come together just right. It is this perfectibility that makes music art.”
• Stravinsky: “The uninitiated imagine that one must await inspiration in order to create. That is a mistake. … That force is only brought into action by an effort, and that effort is work. … The musical sense cannot be acquired or developed without exercise. In music as in everything else, inactivity leads gradually to the paralysis, to the atrophying of faculties.”
• Music helps Parkinson’s patients overcome symptoms temporarily by transporting brain to higher integration level
• “Music establishes flow in the brain, at once enlivening and coordinating the brain’s activities, bringing its anticipations into step.”
• Music “lifts us from our frozen mental habits and makes our minds move in ways they ordinarily cannot.”
• Early human music used to strengthen social bonds and settle conflicts; “somehow music embodies emotion”
• “Discrepancy theory” of emotion has it as a reaction to unexpected experience; nervous system on lookout for most important activities to respond to
• Emotions arise when experience falls short of anticipation
• Attraction to “intellectual”/orderly music “seems to reside in the elegance of its patterns. We admire it as pure structure.”
• “When trains of anticipation go consistently well, we register the pleasure of well-being. … Only in a handful of activities, including music and the arts, do our minds partake of experience that is so perfectly organized that every anticipation is roundly satisfied, filling us with intense pleasure.”
• “The ‘meaning’ we feel is not in the music as such, but in our own responses to the world, responses that we carry about with us always. Music serves to perfect those responses, to make them beautiful.”
• Music is “artificial world of perfect proportions and exceedingly deep relations, embodied in sound”
• Brain orders a disorderly world, so music is “carefully ordered experience”
• Beauty: “the experience of unsullied order persisting simultaneously at every perceptual level”
• In music’s “perfect world”, brain can perceive deeper and larger experience than everyday existence allows
• How music can be transcendent: “For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we really are, and that the world is more than it seems.” ↑

The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

• “The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.”
• The natural world helps us perceive connections and fine-tune knowledge (sharpness and awareness).
• Muir: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home.”
• Soothing nature relieves the fight-or-flight stress reactions.”
• Solastalgia: pain of knowing that place where one resides and loves is under immediate assault.
• Living without trees or nature causes higher aggression, less civility, more crime, litter, etc.
• Ecotherapy incorporates nature into psychotherapy.
• Biophilia: the human organism needs direct interaction with nature.
• Eutierria: spontaneous feeling of oneness with the earth and its life-forces.
• Transition town adopt a permaculture to mimic sustainable ecologies and jumpstart the independence from oil and imports.
• Work-campers and citizen-naturalists a growing force.
• Nature principle fundamental: not only conserve but create nature by creating native habitats in gardens urban and suburban.
• “The worth of any nature-related gadget should be related to how long it takes to put down that gadget.”
• “Relationship to place is as important as the place itself.”
  • Environmentalism’s motto: to conserve and create. ↑

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

• Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension.”
• “What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could.”
• “The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.”
• “It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.”
• “We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. … We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more senses rooms to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life.”
• “The brain is a good stagehand. It gets in with its work while we’re busy acting out our scenes.”
• “Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it. … Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.”
• “There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.”
• “When we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrications they are. Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.”
• “The charm of language is that, though it’s human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations which aren’t.”
• “Smells are our dearest kin, but we cannot remember their names.”
• “In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tip of our tongues—but no closer—and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness.”
• “Unlike the other sense, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them.”
• “Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.”
• “Stumbling on new smells is one of the delights of travel. Early in our evolution we didn’t travel for pleasure, only for food, and smell was essential.”
• “Smell was the first of our senses, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We think because we smell.”
• “Mainly we value one scent over another thanks to Madison Avenue’s brashness and our gullibility. Aromatic paranoia pays well.”
• “We don’t need [smell] to survive, but we crave it beyond all reason, maybe, in part, out of a nostalgia for a time when we were creatureal, a deeply connected part of Nature.”
• “A campfire wouldn’t be as exciting if it were silent.”
• “Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people.”
• “Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words.”
• “We think of our eyes as wise seers, but all the eye does is gather light.”
• “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far-flung galaxies. We are no longer sun-blind to the star-coated universe we inhabit.”
• “What a strange lot writers are, we questers after the perfect word, the glorious phrase that will somehow make the exquisite avalanche of consciousness sayable.”
• “There’s a sonneteer in our chests; we walk around to the beat of iambs.”
• “The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival.”
• “Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death.”
• “The brain is blind, deaf, dumb, unfeeling. The body is a transducer, a device that converts energy of one sort to energy of another sort, and that is its genius.”
• “[Our senses] bridge the personal and the impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individual with the universe, all of life on Earth.”
• “Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography.”
• “However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us.” ↑

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

• “City and country might be separate places, but they were hardly isolated. Chicago had become “urban,” spawning belching smokestacks and crowded streets, at the same time that the lands around it became “rural,” yielding not grass and red-winged blackbirds but wheat, corn, and hogs. Chicago’s merchants and workers had built their warehouses and factories in the same decades that farmers had plowed up the prairie sod and lumberjacks had cut the great pine trees of the north woods.”
• “I began to see that the word “city” depended for its meaning on its opposition to the word “country,” and vice versa. Unpleasant as it might be to admit, the city helped define—might even be essential to—what I and others felt about the country. My passion for rural and wild landscapes would have lost at least some of its focus without my dislike for Chicago to serve as counterpoint. The city was what the country was not: in loving the one, I expressed a certain contempt, but also a certain need, for the other.”
• “Especially in the years following the devastating fire of 1871, when it seemed that the city had miraculously resurrected itself from its own ashes, Chicago came to represent the triumph of the human will over natural adversity. It was a reminder that America’s seemingly inexhaustible natural resources destined it for greatness, and that nothing could prevent the citizens of this favored nation from remaking the land after their own image.”
• (Garland’s metaphor) “The city was the great ocean, to which all fresh streams must flow and become salt. It was the magnet, projecting invisible lines of force that determined the dance of atoms. By so massing the combined energies of destinies of hundreds of thousands of people, the city, despite its human origins, seemed to express a natural power.”
• “We alter (the wild) with our presence, and even with the ways we think about it. Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of natural relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of human relationships that constitute our common history. And in that fact lies the measure of our moral responsibility for each other and for the world, whether urban or rural, human or natural. We are in this together.”
• “However we draw the boundary between the abstraction called city and the abstraction called country, we must still understand that all people, rural or urban, share with each other and with all living and unliving things a single earthly home which we identify as the abstraction called nature.”
• Originally “Chigagou”, the wild-garlic place
• Potawatomi and Black Hawk fought or bought of land surrounding city, leading to rampant real estate speculation in 1830s before 1837 crash
• Business district south of the river and residential north, with rope-drawn ferries between
• “The forced migration of the Potawatomi was the product not of natural progress but of political choice, supported by the organized violence of an expansionist society.”
• “A kind of ‘second nature,’ designed by people and ‘improved’ toward human ends, gradually emerged atop the original landscape that nature—‘first nature’—had created as such an inconvenient jumble.”
• Lake Michigan ice and storms kept eastern business between May and November; mud clogged roads in spring
• Bad drainage (it being a swamp) led to 1849 ordinances for raising city 4-14 feet over two decades: “another overlay of second nature in Chicago.”
• “Chicago’s advantage in selling such merchandise derived from its favorable price structure. Its merchants could buy goods at eastern wholesale prices in ship-sized quantities with no markup for expensive land transport. For the same reasons, they could also offer the best prices in the region for farm produce moving east. Low prices for eastern goods, and high prices for western ones: the combination was a sure recipe for success.”
• “The railroad left almost nothing unchanged. That was its magic. To those whose lives it touched, it seemed at once so ordinary and so extraordinary—so second nature—that the landscape became unimaginable without it. The railroad would replace the waterways of first nature with the myriad complexities of its own geography, thereby becoming the unnatural instrument of a supposedly ‘natural’ destiny.”
• Railroads divided continent into four time zones and synchronized time, November 1883 – wasn’t officially recognized by government until 1918
• Railroad companies vertically integrated, unlike canal boats and stagecoach companies, so incurred risks and responsibilities of management along with benefits
• “Because investments and costs were enormous, everything that moved by railroad—and every place through which the railroad ran—became linked to the imperatives of corporate capital. The railroad thus became the chief device for introducing the new capitalist logic to the geography of the Great West.”
• No single railroad company operated trains both east and west of Chicago; it was the terminus from both ways
• High fixed costs meant trying to get a minimal income, even if losing company money: “rate setters tried to maintain the highest possible ratio of traffic volume to fixed costs in order to earn the maximum amount from each station along the route.”
• Ships less expensive to maintain, but slower overall; didn’t matter for certain things until railroads improved
• Grain first transferred in sacks, then made more efficient with multistory steam-powered grain elevators in 1840s
• Chicago Board of Trade founded in 1848 as self-regulating group of commercial interests; slow at first until Crimean war demand for grain spurred collective action
• BOT established weight-based grain grading system, but bad grains earned bad rep
• BOT got legal charter in 1859, became “quasi-judicial entity with substantial legal powers to regulate the city’s trade”
• Telegraph arrived in 1848, uniting previously more isolated economies
• “Given its strength, plasticity, and ease of use, wood was second only to soil in its importance to the farm economy. … Wood was the foundation of all previous American prosperity, and of no tree was this more true than the white pine. If prairie was to become farmland, its inhabitants would have to have pine.”
• “The railroads made Chicago, a city located in one of the nation’s most treeless landscapes, the greatest lumber center in the world. In consequence, customers could often buy wood from Chicago more cheaply than from towns whose ‘natural’ advantages—nearness to the pine forests or nearness to prairie customers—seemed superior to Chicago’s.” … “The geography of capital had once again insinuated itself so successfully into the geography of nature that the primacy of the city’s wholesale lumberyards came to seem inevitable—in Bogue’s word, ‘natural.’”
• 1870s-90s lumber market declined as white pine forests vanished and new forested regions began competing
• In 1876 railroad started charging lumber shipments by weight instead of volume; since fresh green wood weighed more than dry, this negated the need to wait to send all the way to Chicago
• By 1880s Mississippi Valley and South started offering yellow pine due to railroad expansion
• “Chicago’s unique role in the lumber trade had been possible only at the intersection of lake and rail, where the products of the first met the needs of the prairie. Now that lumber was leaving the lake, the reasons for Chicago’s dominance were disappearing as well.”
• Demise of bison the result of railroads and perfection of tanning techniques for bison hides
• Like lumber, buffalo industry was destined to collapse from its own self-perpetuating drive
• Glidden’s invention of barbed-wire fencing “hastened the transition from prairie to pasture”
• Meat-packing system a “disassembly line”, forerunner to mass production of the Industrial Age
• Ability to ship and store ice starting in 1860s allowed increased summer hog production, which reduced seasonal variation and allowed factories to use fixed capital expenses more efficiently
• Refrigerated railroad car, like grain elevator, was simple technology with far-reaching implications
• Steep growth in beef-packing in 1870s; change to “meat packing”
• Consumers wary of packed beef due to disease, but cheaper because only beef, not full cattle, had to be shipped
• Chicago packers would try to partner with town butchers to sell dressed beef, but butchers didn’t want competition (chopped themselves), so packers created own market at cut-rate prices to weaken butchers, who would eventually cave
• By 1880s, Chicago packers dominated meat supply by retailing with local butchers
• “As the expanding market economy sheared hinterlands away from the gateway city that had helped create them, Nature’s Metropolis and the Great West both passed into oblivion, joining the ghost landscapes of tallgrass prairie, white pine forest, and shortgrass bison range as past places no longer a part of living memory. But before these things disappeared, they created a good share of the world we inhabit today.” ↑

The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in the Digital Age by Damon Krukowski

• “Thank you for reading this analog book. It requires no additional hardware, uses no power, and is 100 percent recyclable.”
• “The author and publisher of this book do not have any information about you; they do not even know that you have a copy of this book unless they sent it to your personally.”
• “Noise is as communicative as signal.”
• Early 20th century: “playing music” = listening together
• early photographs are loud, without volume control (hence phrase “put a sock in it”
• “An effort to define aspects of the analog that persist—that must persist—that we need persist—in the digital era.”
• Without means of musical escape in public in 1970s, much more of a shared space –> now, “how many riders remain in just a single time and space?”
• We occupy space simultaneously but not together
• Distracted bicyclist with headphones, headphones = signal only. “The problem was that she had stopped paying attention to the noise.”
• Spatial hearing depends on shifting definition of signal and noise—dependent on both
• In “Dial M for Murder”, Milland’s phone call was listening to noise—important
• “Digital black” of cellphone silence = absence of noise
• beamforming: preferential listening from special direction
• Noise created by old analog phone system represented distance, was “an artifact of that distance”
• New phone mics limit range of sounds and flatten voice sounds
• “The voice…can only be heard, never felt.”
• Lack of proximity effect extends to Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram photos
• “Digital media allow for clear communication across great distances, but communicating distance itself becomes a challenge. Everyone is in the same spatial relationship to everyone else. Proximity effect has been eliminated.”
• Sidetone: sensory feedback of our own voice heard by our own ears (monitor)
• “when we can’t hear ourselves we can’t modulate our voices.”
• Noise = nonverbal aspects of our voices
• “Analog sound reproduction is tactile”
• “Friction dissipates energy in the form of sound”
• Surface noise and tape hiss aren’t flaws but artifacts of their use. They are the “sound of time”, like clock gears
• “What is music but sounds in time?”
• Player pianos sued by publishers in 1908 but lost. Copyright (C) only applied to text around the sound (sleeves and labels), not sound itself (P) (phonogram)
• Then Napster sued in 1999 because it had severed the text from the sound, which iTunes then did officially in 2001. “Digital music is all (P): sound you cannot touch.”
• Records: solid slabs of time; tape: cut into pieces
• Death-obsessed Victorians saw sound recordings as preservation—embalming
• Abundance of digital music creates time deficit
• “Thick listening”: alert to depth of layers
• listening to signal framed and enriched by noise
• “Streaming is a medium for ahistorical listening.”
• stripped of context, it’s all (P)
• Pandora created its own taxonomic metadata, trademarked; treat liner notes as noise
• “Simultaneity can only be an approximation in digital media… Analog time is shared history—it is lived time.”
• Noise: the space between us, the distance between us
• “Noise doesn’t want to be free. Maybe it even wants to be expensive.”
• Cocooned in nothing but signal
• Isolated and commodified signal is a “locus of digital power and profit” ↑

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen

• “The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not ‘exact reproductions of the old’) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound those seventy-five words proved themselves one of the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities – usefulness and emotion – to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. ‘Made in China’, on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.”
• “It became commonplace to contrast the old technology with the new. The original Moleskine had launched at the same time as the Palm Pilot, the first hand-held digital organizer, and had from day one faced competition from increasingly powerful devices. The laptop, the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the iPad all seemed to offer far greater functionality than their paper antecedent, but a stubborn constituency of users refused to move over into the digital sphere, and numerous peer-reviewed studies soon showed that their obduracy made sense. Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new. Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted serious inquiry into the workings of the human brain.”
• Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century Roman Bible made of calf and sheepskin parchment
• Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, invented paper with pulp vegetable fibers
• “Over the middle centuries of the first millennium, as the Roman empire waned and the Chinese empire grew, their respective innovations approached each other along the silk roads. The codex moved east, as paper moved west, until finally, around the year 800, they met in the middle at the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital, Baghdad, which was rapidly becoming the world’s largest and richest city.”
• Paper flourished among intellectuals during the Islam golden age, but didn’t spread into Europe; most literate population (clergy) committed to parchment and suspicious of paper’s infidel or recycled origins
• Florentine merchant Giovanni Farolfi set up shop in Provence in 1299, and his bookkeeper Amatino Manucci pioneered use of double-entry bookkeeping through ledgers and notebooks to track accounting, credit and debit, equity and profit, monetary conversion into French livres
• Proximity to large-scale paper manufacturers and merchants another advantage to Florence commercial dominance
• Historian Jacob Soll: “Without double-entry accounting, neither modern capitalism nor the modern state could exist.”
• Silicon Valley another example of “intersection of conceptual innovation, advanced, manufacture, information technology, profitable exports, and plentiful cash”
• Florence between 1300-1500 become common to keep ricordanze (home account book), libri di ricordi (memoirs), and libri di famiglia (family books)
• What we know as a diary pioneered by Gregorio Dati in 1400s, incorporating emotional life with transactional or genealogical
• Zibaldone a Florentine slang for early version of commonplace book that peaked in popularity during 1400s  
• “Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts’. You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.”
• “Keen notebook-keeping was not unknown in London, but the practice never caught on as it had in Italy. One can point to many reasons why: lower literacy rates; less innovative commerce; a more stratified society; more expensive paper; and, away from the court, quieter intellectual networks.”
• “In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary.”
• Ars excerpendi: the art of excerpting
• Angus Vine: “Common-placing is never an end in itself. It’s always about producing something afterwards, or preparing you for public life.”
• Common-placing intellectual benefits: reading with greater concentration towards excerpting, placing under appropriate headword, juxtaposing with previous excerpts, externalized memory
• Commonplace books became fixtures of European classrooms by 16th century, including for young Shakespeare
• Darwin on his notetaking: researchers “ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”
• Diaries of real-time accounts of people’s lives didn’t become common until early 17th century England
• Lined pages arrived in 1770 but remained rare until mid 1800s ↑

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World by N.D. Wilson

• “Listen to your dialogue. Look at your thoughts. Be horrified. Be grateful that God loves characters, and loves characters on journeys, characters honestly striving to grow. If someone else was delivering your lines, would you like them? If someone else was wearing your attitude, would you be impressed?”
• Probabilities: they are prophets of a mechanical god.
• “Tree, God says, and there is one. But he doesn’t say the word tree; He says the tree itself. He’s not merely calling one into existence, though his voice creates. His voice is existence.”
• “My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”
• “There is a crushing joy that crackles in every corner of this world. I am tiny and yet I am here. I have been given senses, awareness, existence, and placed on a stage so crowded with the cast, so teeming with the tiny, that I can do nothing but laugh, and sometimes laugh and cry. Living makes dying worth it.”
• “What is art? Art is.”
• “What is the world? His art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. … This painting is by an infinite Artist. It is a reflection of Himself.”
• “I am here to live my story, to love my story. I will not fail to savor any gift out of a desire for self-preservation.” ↑

Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Stephen Ambrose

• Next to winning Civil War and abolishing slavery, transcontinental railroad the greatest American achievement in 19th century
• Needed democratic political system, skilled engineers, free labor and soldiers honed from Civil War, trees and iron, risk-taking capitalists, teamwork
• Many workers former soldiers who didn’t want to go home after Appomattox
• Workers: “They could not have done it alone, but it could not have been done without them.”
• Thomas Curtis Clarke, 1889: “The world of to-day differs from that of Napoleon more than his world differed from that of Julius Caesar; and this change has chiefly been made by railways.”
• “Poetry of engineering” required both “imagination to conceive and skill to execute.”
• Lincoln an early proponent of railroads in 1830s; defended them in court over taxes and regulations
• Illinois Central largest line in the world in 1850s
• Rock Island bridge over Mississippi first for railroads
• George Washington could travel no faster than Julius Caesar, but Andrew Jackson could go upstream at a fair pace, and James Polk could travel at 20 miles an hour or more overland
• 1862 Pacific Railroad Act chartered Union Pacific Railroad, first corporation chartered by the federal government since the Second Bank in 1816
• Brigham Young was the Union Pacific’s first and longtime only stock buyer in good standing for paying in full
• Chinese workers paid a decent wage and recruited: good work ethic, clean, disciplined, quick learners, cheap labor
• Golden Spike joined east and west as Appomattox had North and South four years earlier
• Americans of the second half of nineteenth century saw greatest change: slavery abolished, electricity, telephone, telegraph, railroad
• Drilling of Golden Spike sent telegraph message instantaneously, the first simultaneous shared event in history
• Reporter compared Golden Spike to first shot at Lexington ↑

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair—A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

• “Chairs are fascinating because they address both physiology and fashion. They represent an effort to balance multiple concerns: artistry, status, gravity, construction, and—not least—comfort. Chairs can be whimsical or blandly practical, luxurious or simple, a frill or a necessity.”
• “A chair is an everyday object with which the human body has an intimate relationship. You sit down in an armchair and it embraces you, you rub against it, you caress the fabric, touch the wood, grip the arms. It is this intimacy, not merely utility, that ultimately distinguishes a beautiful chair from a beautiful painting. If you sit on it, can it still be art? Perhaps it is more.”
• “Every chair represents a struggle to resolve the conflict between gravity and the human anatomy. Sitting up is always a challenge.”
• “The klismos is a sitting tool distilled to its essence. But it is also a cultural artifact of great aesthetic refinement. You can copy it…you can decorate it…Or you can figure out how to mass-produce it. But you can’t really improve it. It’s perfect.”
• “It is easy to understand the Windsor chair’s appeal: it did not use fancy woods; it did not require wood-carving or upholstering skills; unlike a rush chair the seat never had to be replaced; and an old chair needed only a coat of paint to freshen it up.” (furnished Continental Congress and Philadelphia State House for Declaration and Constitution)
• (why new chairs: changes in technology and materials, social conditions, posture, symbolic effects) ↑

Nurtured by Love: The Classical Approach to Talent Education by Shinichi Suzuki

• “Good or bad, however, once born we must live with ourselves until the day we die. There arises, then, the inevitable question of how to live.”
• preparation, time, and environment together stimulate ripening of seed/talent into bloom
• without hurry, without rest
• achievement = energy + patience
• expend energy on improving yourself
• without training, kan (intuition) cannot grow
• education rather than instruction (to educe, bring out)
• if you think it, do it, right away ↑

On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor

• We glorify trailblazers, but followers play an equally important role: shave off bends unnecessary, brush away obstructions, improve the trail with each trip
• “path” in religions: reduces “teeming chaos” to intelligible line; helps people navigate the world
• Paths/trails ≠ complete freedom; are a “tactful reduction of options” (riverine, not oceanic)
• Paths are “made in the walking”
• Desire → use → trails → repeat
• Trails are communal creations, like folktales, jokes, work songs, memes
• Desire lines in dictatorships signify authoritarian failure to predict and police desires
• “bewilderment”: old term for shock of being lost in woods
• Path vs. Trail: dignified/unplanned, august/unkempt, tame/unruly, extends forward/backward
• “Every trail is, in essence, a best guess” which prompts better guesses, which creates a chorus
• Buffalo and elephants made paths that humans turn into trails and roads
• Stephen Blake: elephants use trails as “a form of societal, spatial memory” and “a collective, externalized mnemonic system”
• Trails as external memory, collective intelligence
• Stories “take place” grounded in real settings
• Apaches view the past as a well-worn trail, once traveled by their ancestors and still being traveled today
• Topogeny: the practice of place-listing; “the summoning in the mind’s eye of a mental landscape of constructed lines”
• Trail = connection
• Huxley: we miss something by not being in non-human world: “By failing to be, vicariously, the NOT-SELF, he fails to be completely himself.”
• Driving is a series of freeze-frames and blurred pans, like a wave-particle duality
• Telegraph split dual functions of trails/roads: transport matter, transmit info
• Internet = memex (trails) writ global
• Wisdom: “a time-tested means of choosing how to live” ↑

The Overstory by Richard Powers

• “Makes you think different about things, don’t it?”
• “Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.”
• “A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”
• “They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.”
• “No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.”
• “The car is filled with beings of light. They’re everywhere, unbearable beauty, the way they were the night her heart stopped. They pass into and through her body. They don’t scold her for forgetting the message they gave her. They simple infuse her again. Her joy at their return spills over, and she starts to cry. They speak no words out loud. Nothing so crude as that. They aren’t even they. They’re part of her, kin in some way that isn’t yet clear. Emissaries of creation—things she has seen and known in this world, experiences lost, bits of knowledge ignored, family branches lopped off that she must recover and revive. Dying has given her new eyes.”
• [unfinished] ↑

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins

• “The spread of the nation’s postal system during the second half of the 19th century shaped the history of the region, knitting the American west into a national system of communications.”
• “The US Post was the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion.”
• Took American settlers almost 200 years to occupy eastern half of US; took about 30 for the west between 1860s-90s
• “Despite the popular ‘Wild West’ narrative of self-reliant cowboys and pioneers, the real history of the region is one of big government: public land and national parks, farming subsidies and grazing permits, military bases and defense contracts. Arguably no other part of the United States has been so profoundly shaped by ‘the state’.”
• On lack of US Post history: “When something is everywhere, it can start to become invisible. … It is easy to take for granted both the journeys themselves and the infrastructure that made them possible.”
• In 1889 there were around 59,000 post offices in US and 400,000 miles of mail routes; 2.5x and 3x more than any other country respectively 
• In the west US Post was “at its most sprawling, fast moving, and ephemeral” compared to more stable east
• Lots of postmaster turnover in late 19th century due to political turnover and spoils system
• Post Office Department dependent on local part-time private agents and companies to graft mail service onto a preexisting private infrastructure rather than starting from scratch everywhere; “gossamer network” unstable and fleeting but flexible and wide-reaching [Uber, etc.]
• Railway Mail Service was centrally managed, bureaucratic arrangement that worked in tandem with looser local agents 
• Diffuse administrative structure of agency model challenges assumption of state power as an inherently centralized entity 
• Western postal system dominated by local demands, conditions, politics, and actors; Congress would rubber-stamp requests for new mail routes and Post Office would get them up and running with minimal oversight 
• Postal network lacked intentionality, top-down planning, and centralized coordination; allowed for expansion far greater than more cautious and regulated countries 
• “Without the US Post’s expansive network, the pace of settler colonization would have been slower, its reach more limited, and its prosecution more difficult.”
• Fewer than 2,000 post offices in west pre Civil War due to indigenous blocking expansion (Lakota, Ute, Cheyenne, Comanche, Apache)
• Topographer’s Office within Post Office Department began creating regional postal maps during Civil War; led by professional specialized civil servants as unofficial, neglected project initially
• Two cartographic stages: capturing space (layout and drawing) was “gentlemen’s work” and capturing time (keeping up to date and coloring routes by frequency) was “ladies’ work” and thus far underpaid 
• Female “colorists” made up 2/3 of Post Office employees by end of 1870s; forefront of women into federal workforce 
• Coloring routes made maps useful but was challenging to keep up to date (“bringing up the diagrams”): “These women were, in effect, trying to paint a still life while someone kept rearranging the fruit.”
• “Postal maps were an exercise in capturing transience.”
• Government’s gridded land survey maps imposed spatial order to legitimize state’s authority; ephemeral postal maps didn’t project mastery or control but “a state that was squinting to make out what was actually happening on the ground”
• Pony Express started in 1860 as publicity stunt by freighting firm to secure gov’t contract for mail; lots of overhead and high cost for mail and contract didn’t happen, so sold after 19 months
• Territorial seizures of 1840s greatly expanded land needing postal service (annexation of Texas in 1845, Oregon Treaty of 1846, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848)
• Legislation in 1840s dramatically lowered price of postage, severing relationship between price and geography in favor of universal rates
• Progressive mission of providing accessible and reliable mail service to all citizens clashed with realities of territorial expansion
• Transcontinental railroad completion in 1869 greatly reduced cross-country delivery times from almost a month to 6 days
• “Last mile” problem for most of west, which wasn’t yet near railroads 
• Codependent, public/private relationship between federal government and stagecoach industry
• Post offices often at literal crossroads of towns and social orbit; “Arguably no other institution was so embedded in the everyday lives of so many different people.”
• Lots of battles over location since most post offices were housed inside postmaster’s own business or residence; boon for business
• Even for Gilded Age anti-monolopists, the post office was held as exemplar of “natural monopoly” because it was so central to public good; key appeals: 
  • Didn’t discriminate based on distance unlike telegraph, railroad, or express companies
  • Explicitly tilted in favor of rural and Western areas and away from financial powers in the East
  • Gave local communities a say in public services via PO locations; tied to democratic process
• 1883’s Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act set up framework for more regulated bureaucratic system but didn’t apply to postmasters; regular partisan purges until 1910s 
• “The sheer size of the US Post and its deep well of patronage positions shielded it from civil-service reform, and in an era of razor-thin electoral margins, political parties were loath to give up such a powerful partisan tool.”
• “The Post Office benefited from a national network of politicians who were far more familiar with local affairs than officials in Washington. This allowed them to maintain a massive workforce of part-time agents scattered across the countryside with a comparatively small workforce of centralized administrators.”
• Money orders began in 1864; popular (esp. with Union soldiers), self-sustaining from fees, efficient, though not universal service
• In 1892, under Benjamin Harrison’s postmaster John Wanamaker, PO expanded residential delivery, bolstered railway mail, and extended previously limited money order system to thousands more communities 
• Mail-order companies Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, along with other catalog business, benefited from subsidized/discounted advertising in newspapers, mailing catalogs, and money orders
• Number of POs: 75 in 1789, 76,946 in 1901 (peak), fewer than 28,000 in 2000
• Rural Free Delivery (RFD) established in 1902; shifted away from post office to residence, benefiting rural populations but superseding local postmasters
• Wanamaker an eastern department store magnate but self-described “country boy” who initiated RFD in 1891, which sputtered throughout administration turnover 
• RFD more regulated than POs; required inspection and approval before beginning
• Taft and Wilson issued executive orders strengthening civil service protections and regulations for postmasters ↑

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

• 1. Myth and the modern world
  • “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
  • “When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life.”
  • “The only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.”
  • “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”
  • “Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”
  • “I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow.”
  • “All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.”
  • “There is something magical about films. The person you are looking at is also somewhere else at the same time. That is the condition of the god.”
  • “A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature.”
  • “Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.”
  • Four functions of myth: mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical
  • Pantheism “suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.”
  • “Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.”
• 2. The journey inward
  • “A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream.”
  • “[Mankind’s one great story is] that we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground.”
  • “Poetry gets to the unseen reality.”
  • “The folk tale is for entertainment. The myth is for spiritual instruction.”
• 3. The first storytellers
  • “The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.”
  • “A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.”
• 4. Sacrifice and bliss
  • “The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology. … The landscape, the dwelling place, becomes an icon, a holy picture. Wherever you are, you are related to the cosmic order.”
  • “Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. … In your sacred place you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived.”
  • “I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
• 5. The hero’s adventure 
  • “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”
  • “Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose.”
  • “The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things.”
  • “The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.”
  • “Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he had to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it.”
  • Mythology as the penultimate truth
  • “It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”
• 7. Masks of eternity
  • “Prayer is relating to and meditating on a mystery.”
  • “The tick-tick-tick of time shuts out eternity. We live in this field of time. But what is reflected in this field is an eternal principle made manifest.”
  • “Becoming is always fractional. And being is total.”
  • Moyers: “Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.” ↑

President McKinley: Architect of the American Century by Robert Merry

• Cautious, methodical, “a master of incrementalism”
• Wife’s illness postponed McKinley’s trip to Buffalo from June to September
• 1 of 8 children in anti-slavery Ohio household
• Aged 18 when Civil War broke out; ended up in 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, with Rosencrans and Major Rutherford Hayes
• Achieved reputation as good manager; promoted to commissary sergeant, then lieutenant
• Grew close friends with Hayes, stayed after war
• Entered law after war, met Ida, outgoing and educated but soon developed epilepsy
• Entered Congress in 1876 along with Hayes in presidency; well liked and competent, aimed to become president
• Obsessed with tariff: appointed chairman of Ways and Means in 1888, before tariff debate of 1890
• Federalists/Whigs favored high tariff and public works (Hamilton, Clay), Democrats opposed to federal regulations (Jefferson, Jackson)
• Tariff hot issue bounced him from office in 1890 by 300 votes, but ran for and won Ohio governor in 1892
• Mark Hanna a donor and businessman, political consultant passionate about McKinley
• Economic downturn helped GOP reclaim House in 1896
• McKinley had cosigned loans of friend who went under; people rallied and fundraised for him, putting money together in pay back loans, and McKinley paid back in installments
• GOP bosses assured his nomination if he pledged to put appoint Boss Platt as Treasury secretary; he refused
• Hanna installed Charles Dawes as head of Chicago bureau of campaign; sought to modernize campaign techniques, with literary bureau and Traveling Men’s Bureau to direct campaign message
• Didn’t want to compete with William Jennings Bryan on the stump, or leave Ida, so started Front Porch campaign
• Theodore Roosevelt said Bryan deserved “the contemptuous pity always felt for the small man unexpectedly thrust into a big place.”
• Systemic targeted campaign literature had never been executed in large scale
• Cuban revolution just before inauguration; Hawaii annexation debate also bolstered US sphere of influence
• “Convivial demeanor masked a calculating political operative” “occasional ruthlessness” “unbending resolve” “incremental leadership” “rhetorical blandness” – Elihu Root: “He cared nothing about the credit, but McKinley always had his way.”
• Sought to buck Reconstruction trend of Congressional preeminence
• Increased travel, press relations to show command and sway public opinion
• Ida’s seizures kept hidden; sudden afflictions mixed with sociability as First Lady; was still open about it
• Presidency issues: tariff, bimetallism, Hawaii, opening of China, Philippines, Cuba
• Hesitant to war with Spain, despite inflamed Congress and populace after the Maine explosion
• Acquisition of Philippines from Spain hotly debated; many skeptical of imperialism, including McKinley
• Opening of China enlarged US diplomatic profile and expanded influence
• Roosevelt popular in 1900 but was New York governor and didn’t want VP; Hanna didn’t like him, but Platt wanted him out of New York
• Did he cause the big changes or passively watch them happen and react?
• “moved men and events stealthily but effectively through tumultuous times” ↑

The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity by Nancy Gibbs

• Hoover was a postwar envoy for Truman and later lobbied to raise the presidential salary for poor Truman.
• Hoover kept details of executive inefficiency under wraps for election, seeing the overhaul as more important than an election.
• Truman refused to appear at a HUAC hearing because of executive privilege.
• Bay of Pigs plan was inherited from Eisenhower but tweaked to failure by Kennedy.
• LBJ wooed Ike and Truman hardcore after Kennedy assassination.
• Nixon and Reagan’s letters back and forth during the 1968 campaign was them talking and dancing right past each other.
• Johnson kept Wallace, Humphrey, and Nixon in the loop about 1968 Saigon peace talks, which helped Nixon spike them for his own benefit.
• Nixon formed fake club called Chowder & Marching Society in Congress, of which Ford and George Bush became members.
• Bombing Halt papers and Pentagon Papers got Nixon extra paranoid about security and breaking in to fix them.
• Nixon dragged out the war in 1972 to ensure his reelection.
• Ford blamed Reagan for his 1976 loss, for his primary challenge and for not campaigning for him hard enough.
• Reagan and Ford almost had a co-ticket presidency in 1980.
• Nixon, Carter, and Ford shared a plane ride to Cairo in 1981, where Ford and Carter patched things up and Nixon was himself.
• Carter facilitated fair elections in Panama and Nicaragua and finally won praise for it.
• Carter petitioned U.N. Security Council countries not to support the U.S. invasion of Kuwait, which Bush saw as treasonable.
• Clinton sent Carter as unofficial envoy to North Korea and then to Haiti with Colin Powell to help quell troubles. ↑

Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood

• “The story of any courtship is one of ephemera, dead vehicles, outdated technology. Name cards, canoes, pagers. The roller rink, telegrams, mixtapes. Radio dedications. The drive-in. Hotmail dot com.”
• “What exactly do Catholics believe?” I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”
• “Writers like being bodiless.”
• “Who knows what a freak might do,” my mother hissed, which sounded almost like a philosophical koan. Who DOES know what a freak might do. Could God make a freak so big even he didn’t know what it might do?
• “When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken. I cannot overstate how tiny the sips he was taking were. He looked like a gigantic brownie drinking drops of dew.”
• “What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.”
• “There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.”
• “One of the men of God is pacing back and forth behind the banquet table, addressing the crowd, telling the sorts of jokes you only ever hear at church functions. Often these jokes involve sporting events that are being broadcast that day, and then all the men groan, because they love sports very much and would rather be watching them, but just kidding, because Jesus is a football that all of us can carry down the field for the win.”
• “All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”
• “A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.”
• “There is something about an acceptance. It makes the blood and the brain effervesce; it climbs the ladder of the happiness you felt in the heat of the work.”
• “Favorites are all right. Even God had them. And meaning, after all, is a kind of luck—some things just shine with it, and no one knows why.”
• “The snow falls in cartoonish heaps, and I think blurrily of how forms are destiny: how the rain is destined for its torrents and the snow for its drifts, and the poems for their sheafs and me for the poems.”
• “Being a writer meant my voice was in a different place. There was no rhyme or reason as to why I could make this sound and not the other. Always I felt that I was writing to the tune of some music that I learned very early and did not quite remember.”
• “I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.”
• “At this point, I consider myself on an anthropological mission, much like Margaret Mead. I have discovered that this makes almost anything bearable—it would have been such a salvation in my childhood to think I had been sent on a mission to notice. That would have turned my insubstantiality into something useful, even advantageous.”
• “The natural order is a powerful narcotic. I don’t mean this in the sense of any opiate of the masses. If you sneer at religion as the opiate of the masses, you must sneer also at the brain, because the receptors are there. You must sneer at the body, which knows how to feel that bliss.”
• “The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.”
• “What do I want? I want him to have a job, and be living in your house. I want us to stop selling heaven as the home we don’t get here. I want an afterlife for my anger; I want levitation, perfection, and white wings for it, and I want an afterlife for my question, which is an answer.”
• “I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.”
• “It just seeped out of me, after I left the house. It was like forgetting a language you spoke a long time ago, when you were a child.” ↑

The Purpose-Based Library: Finding Your Path to Survival, Success, and Growth by John J. Huber and Steven V. Potter

• Define desired marketing outcomes (specific and measurable)
  • recruit 100 new library advocates to engage community and spread branding message
  • recruit 20 new business partnerships
  • find 20 new physical locations to advertise message
  • create 25 stories highlighting library’s impact on people’s lives
  • increase traffic to website by 30%
  • host event each quarter for library’s advocates
  • increase library funding for community transformation by 25%
• Develop positive, consistent, concise, and proactive brand message
• Understand your market needs
• Define your market segments (patrons, volunteers, local businesses)
  • Establish your marketing targets
  • Helpers: agents of change invested in library’s success (Signature Club); promote them
  • Businesses: show library can help them (Signature Business club)
  • Social media: short, heartrending stories with pic to cut through the noise; foster conversations
  • Unengaged: opps where small efforts lead to most impact (temp exhibits at job fair, state fair, ballpark, fundraising groups, community events, churches)
  • Promotions: billboards, TV ads, where else unique?
  • Partnerships: schools, discounts at restaurants and cafes
• Establish marketing budget
• Change the conversation with value-based dashboard metrics
  • recruit influential community members
  • promote ownership
• Create portals of education, communication, connection
  • get people to gather, plan, lead, act
  • solicit ideas
  • Community Transformation Center in library
• Celebrate
  • constantly celebrate community achievements
  • regular events to celebrate progress
  • regular email updates
• Create 100-year truth and values plan ↑

Quisling: A Study in Treachery by Hans Fredrik Dahl

• At military academy Quisling had highest average examination in 100 years
• Held high regard for Soviet organizational skills, if critical of Bolshevik policies
• Skills were more organizational and staff-bound rather than executive and creative
• Developed theory of Universism, which combined Christianity with modern natural sciences, especially physics
• Original manuscript over 2,000 pages; final 700-page version from 1920s; dense and ambitious but not good
• Dreamed of establishing Universism as ‘new world religion’, Norway as homeland of Nordic race; like “a combination of the United Nations and the Catholic Church”
• Became a scholar of Soviet Union, studied Russian, and was appointed military attaché of Norwegian legation in Petrograd in 1918
• Present during Terror, and sent back reports that were widely read including by the King, before he was forced home
• Book about Russia shot him to fame in Norway, and began slide toward fascism; founded movement aimed at overthrowing Marxism, enhancing Nordic race
• Defense minister of new Agrarian Party, then new National Union (NS) party
• Little sense of irony, not much humor, crippling shyness, aloof, but highly respected for his mind
• Knew Norway wouldn’t be able to remain neutral in war due to its strategic significance and low defense spending
• Urged cooperation between British naval hegemony and German continental ambitions
• His growing antisemitism signaled ideological sympathy with Hitler; thanked him for having “saved Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination”
• Thought Hitler was wrong to sign pact with Stalin given how advanced Germany already was, and knew Red Army was weakened by purges so wouldn’t be able to conquer Finland
• Envisioned Germany would topple Soviet government and reestablish nation-states with German capital
• Met with Hitler December 1939 while reported Britain to use Norway as transit country to aid Finland; Quisling offered loyalty from his party
• Preferred neutrality but didn’t think it possible, so would act in Germany’s interest to prevent British establishment
• Hitler saw value to occupying Norway before Britain could
• Naval skirmishes between Germany and Britain in April: King and government relocated, but Quisling characterized as fleeing and initiated coup
• Quisling hoped for legal appointment understanding from King, but King refused to accept man twice beaten at the polls
• Wide campaign to get rid of Quisling as he sought legitimacy
• Hitler supportive at first but then in setting up “government commission” put Quisling in reserve; when commission failed Hitler sent Terboven to command Norway occupation
• Miscalculated public’s feelings and sense of morality
• Quisling name almost immediately became international byword for traitor
• Curried Hitler’s favor as they strategized voting in new occupation government; became prime minister due to his warning of Britain
• Quisling’s “New Order” in Norway stamped out “destructive principles of the French Revolution: representation, dialogue, and collegiality”
• Unresolved whether Norway and Germany were at war or peace; Quisling wanted full NS government to provide legitimacy and eventually got it, though with Reichskommissar
• Sincerely believed he was doing the right thing for Norway and eventual Nordic dominance
• Oslo University source of strong anti-NS “Home Front” resistance, along with prominent bishop Berggrav, who had tried to broker peace in Berlin and London
• “Fører Quisling” photo everywhere, became authoritarian state sans functioning legislature and King
• Quisling sought to limit NS membership despite one-party rule to strengthen quality
• Edict to make youth service in NS Youth Organization compulsory backfired, as did new teachers corporation; when backed by bishops, revolt began
• Mass teacher resignations followed by large-scale arrests
• Lobbied Hitler for peace treaty but was denied and remained occupied country, also lost direct contact with Hitler
• Had different ideas of future than Hitler, whose world domination plans were more improvisational
• Began rounding up and registering Jews in 1942
• Hitler refused to negotiate peace because then other occupied countries would want it, and Quisling’s dreams of Norwegian supremacy dashed
• After Hitler died, naively assumed there would be peaceful transition of power back to exiled government
• Arrested May 8; said he knew suicide would be easiest but wanted to “let history reach its own verdict”; thought he’d be deified
• Quisling Clinic in Madison founded by cousins in interwar years; otherwise name has disappeared ↑

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts & Hank Klibanoff

• World War II had same dilemma as World War I for black press: support the war or not? Ultimately used FDR’s Double V campaign to represent victory at home and abroad.
• Truman’s 1947 civil rights commission issued report calling for end of segregation and discrimination vis a vis education, voting, lynching, employment, etc.; (Eventually winnowed.) Carter, anti-bigotry editor in Mississippi still opposed the report because he thought the evils of lynching et al would become too self-evident and die out.
• Southern politicians felt betrayed by Truman, whom they had pushed to replace more liberal Henry Wallace, so they sought alternative.
• GOP’s Dewey’s running mate Earl Warren wouldn’t have been the activist Chief Justice had Dixiecrats successfully dumped Truman.
• Ashmore spearheaded Southern Education Reporting Service to provide unbiased education reporting in the South; broke old race-based journalism customs.
• Ashmore’s “Negroes and the Schools” book released wide the day before the Brown vs. Board decision, which helped keep things cooled.
• In Mississippi, Citizens’ Council popped up to oppose integration and Virginia’s “Defenders”.
• Brown’s decision re: implementation came a year after the ruling.
• White and black reporters joined forces in Till trial to hunt down witnesses; shared resources.
• William Huie, Alabama journalist, paid Milam and Bryants to tell their stories re: Till murder secretly for Look magazine.
• Grand jury in Montgomery in 1956 indicted King and 115 others for “illegally conspiring to hinder a lawful business” by boycotting bus service.
• John Chancellor was at Till trial for NBC when group threatened him; he scared them off with his microphone and threat of publication.
• TV reflected the Negro reality in the South without a filter and put them back in the front row the way newspapers did not (because black reporters had been sidelined).
• Reporters formed Souther War Correspondents Club with “segregated”/“integrated” cards; Southern correspondents formed Reporting Racial Equality Wars with slogan: “involuntary veteran of unexpected combat”.
• March on Washington was TV’s first big seminal event and allowed movement finally to reach the “huge camp of the uncommitted” it needed to advance results.
• Birmingham bombing of four black girls galvanized, along with the March, the greater public. That, plus the JFK assassination followed by Freedom Summer, were the tipping point.
• Footage from Selma march interrupted broadcast of Judgement at Nuremberg, whose parallels brought new outrage and supporters to Selma. ↑

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett

• “Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain.”
• “As children we learn that water is old and constant; we drink the same water the dinosaurs did. But in rain, water feels as new as these drops as they float from the treetops—Earth’s essence reborn in every drop.”
• Seattle and Portland are blanketed by clouds about 230 days a year, compared with 160 in Boston and 120 in sunny Miami.
• “Changizi and Weber hypothesized that smooth fingertips give humans the best grip in dry times, but wrinkly ones might help us hang on when it’s wet. … Magnified, our finger wrinkles look like drainage channels: rain chiseling a landscape for thousands of years.”
• “England’s Great Famine of 1315-1322 is one of the few ascribed largely to unremitting rains. Without harvest, people became so hungry they turned to eating dogs, cats, and horses.”
• Storms kept King James from marrying Anna of Denmark which he believed were conjured by witches; started massive witch hunt in 1500s; Shakespeare became royal company and wrote witch-themed Macbeth accordingly.
• Monotheism of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all grew out of the arid sands of the Middle East. Some historians trace monotheism to agriculturists in these dry lands looking to the sky for lifegiving rainfall. Most of the polytheistic religions were born in the soaking monsoons. … “In the wilderness of the desert, where life struggles to survive, it would seem logical that a divine being would be responsible for the creation of living things out of nothing, and that in due course time and life will end in a final day of Judgment,” writes the geoscientist Peter Clift. “In contrast, in the forested land that has grown under the influence of summer monsoon rains, life is everywhere and abundant. Tropical forests teem with life and the cycle of birth, life, and death are endlessly replayed, resulting in a theology that does not emphasize a beginning or end to creation.”
• The International Cloud Atlas, codified in 1896, is still the official identification guide. “On the 1896 list, the king of clouds—towering cumulonimbus—was listed number nine. This is why, when we feel the highest of high, we say that we are on Cloud Nine.”
• British naval captain Fitzroy in 1859 developed “forecast” to alert public and ship captains to coming weather. Committed suicide three years later amidst pressure to be accurate; led to ban on public forecasts (ship-salvage companies had also complained to Parliament they were being put out of business).
• Charles Macintosh was a counting house apprentice who quit to pursue passion of chemistry and experimenting with substances. Converted pitch substance into “thin, transparent honey” which he spread between two pieces of fabric and pressed together to create first flexible and waterproof mac in 1822.
• Morton salt slogan “When it rains, it pours” meant to signify it would pour even in damp weather due to anti-caking agent.
• Outgoing agriculture secretary Jeremiah Rusk declared in 1893 rainmaking would go down “among the curiosities so-called scientific investigation, in company with its twin absurdity, the flying machine.”
• “Scientists say frogs are bioindicators; their well-being reflects the environment’s. Because they require both land and aquatic habitat, and have permeable skin that easily absorbs toxins, they are faithful signals of ecological havoc.” ↑

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• Adam Grant: “Creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart.”
• “For learning that is both durable and flexible, ‘fast and easy’ is precisely the problem.”
• Generation effect: struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning
• Learning deeply means learning slowly
• “Teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”
• “Knowledge with enduring utility must be very flexible, composed of mental schemes that can be matched to new problems.”
• Power of analogies (relational thinking) helps make familiar new and new familiar
• Einstellung effect: the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available (the negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems) ↑

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Stephen L. Brusatte

• End-Permian mass extinction from volcanic eruptions led to new upright-walking archosaur reptiles in early Triassic—“a landmark evolutionary event”
• Archosaurs split into two major lineages: pseudosuchians that gave rise to crocodiles and avemetatarsalians that gave rise to pterosaurs and then birds
• Prorotodactylus an early archosaur, akin to the Lucy Australopithecus fossil of dinosaurs—technically not a dinosaur but early version 
• Radiometric dating very accurate but only with fossils from rocks that cooled from a liquid melt that solidify from lava; only a handful of well-dated Triassic fossils
• True dinosaurs emerged by 230 million years ago 
• [unfinished] ↑

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

• His father sat out the Civil War, to do good, but it still irked TR years later (his pugnacity)
• Grew up sickly yet with unbounded energy. Didn’t want to waste a moment of the day.
• Loved science and almost went that way but Alice changed him.
• Time as Assemblyman (at 23!) gave him first distaste of corruption in politics and its entanglement with business.
• After his resolution to investigate Gould and judge for corruption, a woman tried to get him to come with her where men were waiting.
• Best-selling book in college, minority leader of House by 24.
• Always underestimated or counted out because of sickness, size, age, etc, so he always had to fight for what he wanted.
• Alice died at 22 after childbirth, Mittie at 50. TR erased Alice from his life and memory.
• Went out West to set up cattle shop in Badlands while also visiting 1884 campaign. Republicans lost, but good for TR because he avoided the cesspool.
• Built Sagamore Hill after coming back from West strong and tanned, etc.
• Almost got into a duel with pseudo-rival Marquis de Mores; also got into a solo skirmish with some Indians.
• Three thieves stole his boat so TR pursued in the cold of winter and got them and brought them to justice rather than killing them (also read Tolstoy during journey).
• Traveled back and forth between Dakota and NYC constantly.
• Wrote biography of Sen. Thomas Benton at 27.
• He disapproved of second marriages in spite of his own.
• In his time out West, TR learned to live with “lower” people and found he commanded respect even as a bespectacled “superior being.”
• By late 1880s, Badlands were devoid of big game; sparked a new desire for preservation. Boone & Crockett Club he started first of its kind to emphasize preservation and exploration.
• Withdrew from politics in 1888 to write, a lot.
• In 1892 he fetched Elliott the alcoholic derelict from Europe and set him on the sober path, but Elliott’s wife Anne died soon after, then Elliott after relapse.
• TR “was” America: “grew into maturity after Civil War, marshaled its resources at Chicago [for World’s Fair], and exploded into world power at the turn of the century.”
• Wanted inferior savages to be civilized so they could challenge the white man in whatever field.
• Continued to have money problems through 1894 Panic.
• Friends with Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis.
• Went on night patrols as police commissioner in NYC to shape up cops; met poor people along the way.
• As assistant secretary of Navy he helped build up naval force in anticipation of war but as a means of peace.
• Got together Rough Riders; mix of cowboys and city folk, and had essentially two major battles in Cuba; became a hero.
• Didn’t want VP slot but eventually bowed to popular will.
• Was VP technically for only four legislative days. ↑

Rising Strong by Brene Brown

• “When we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked.”
• “Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.”
• Reckoning = getting curious about our emotions
• “The opposite of being curious is disengaging.”
• curiosity is a shit-starter, unruly
• delta = difference, between our ostensible stories and the truth (triangle)
• permission slips
• tactical breathing: 4 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds out, 4 seconds hold
• act 2: the rumble —what more do I need to learn about a) the situation, b) the other people in this story, c) myself?
• What if we’re all doing the best we can
• Compassionate people have stronger boundaries, don’t need to be liked; boundaries keep out resentment
• “Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.”
• Brave and broken-hearted, trying to heal while still in the suffering and the rumble
• Elements of grief: loss, longing, feeling lost
• quote on forgiveness: “In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die. If you make a choice to forgive, you have to face into the pain. You simply have to hurt.”
• Term “easy mark” from hobo marks on friendly homes
• “When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping.”
• More likely to trust those who ask for help because they’re being vulnerable
• “Connection doesn’t exist without giving and receiving.” Two way street
• 5 common work “sinkholes”: emotional blind spots, loss leader, uncharted territory, win at any cost, defensive pricing
• BRAVING checklist of trust: Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault, Integrity, Nonjudgment, Generosity
• Aristotle: “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” ↑

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

• Richard Burton: “What nation, either in the West or in the East, has been able to cast out from its ceremonies every suspicion of its old idolatry? What are the mistletoe, the Irish wake, the Pardon of Brittany, the Carnival? Better far to consider the Meccan pilgrimage rites in the light of Evil-worship turned into lessons of Good than to philosophize about their strangeness, and to blunder in asserting them to be insignificant.”
• “The more I study religion, the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.”
• “How melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.’” ↑

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

• “Hollywood and Silicon Valley became, long after these men died, the two industries California is most identified with, the two that changed the world. They changed it, are changing it, from a world of places and materials to a world of representations and information, a world of vastly greater reach and less solid grounding.”
• “Muybridge is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of an atom.”
• Early railroads in 1830s annihilated time and space at 20-30 mph
• Geology was the key science of the Victorian era, physics of modern, and genetics of today
• “The railroad shrank space through the speed of its motion. Geology expanded time through the slowness of its processes and the profundity of its changes.”
• “The art of the hand had been replaced by the machinery of the camera; the travel of the foot, human or equine, had been replaced by the pistons of the locomotive; bodies themselves were becoming insulated from nature by machinery and manufactured goods; and memory had been augmented and partly replaced by photography, that freezing eye whose gaze soon reached the corners of the world.”
• Like Darwin’s evolution theories of same time, photography brought people out of “river of time” onto dry land without current
• New industrial age, with its tightly enforced schedules and machinated production was “a runaway train of consumption driving production driving consumption”
• re: Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad”: “The old world, Hawthorne seemed to argue, was arduous, but it knew where it was going, and it went the slow sure way. Machines made life easier, faster, more predictable, but they led away from an integrity that people missed from the beginning.”
• “Muybridge was a doorway, a pivot between that old world and ours, and to follow him is to follow the choices that got us here.”
• Muybridge went to Yosemite in 1867, after it was set apart in 1864; first government to do
• Golden spike of transcontinental railroad wired to send telegraph message across the country the moment it struck
• Transcontinental railroad was an extensive network, and power drew people into the system, pushed back independence of the frontier, and made Americans feel like cogs in machine for the first time
• “The Europeans had mostly noticed what they were gaining; the colonized who had less to gain kept their eyes on what was being lost.”
• “Cinema would itself be a kind of Ghost Dance. It was and is a breach in the wall between past and the present, one that lets the dead return, albeit as images of flickering light rather than phantoms in the dark or armies marching across the land. Anyone who watches old movies watches the dead, and Edison was not yet insulated as we are against what is macabre about this.”
• “The technological solution called forth by photography and later mutated into film, television, video, computer animations, succeeded so profoundly that it has become the medium in which we live, but it is only a medium of flickering light and darkness, a river of shadows.”
• “They were all technologies of grief, technologies for building a bridge across the painful divide between the living and the dead, between what had been and what is, for defeating the trauma of time itself.”
• Shot and killed his wife’s lover but acquitted by jury of 12 married men
• Panoramas of Yosemite, then transitioned to motion studies using cameras with electrical controls at Stanford, which was built to commemorate son who had died of flu in Europe
• In hindsight, the horse photos were the origin of cinema, but at the time were viewed as breakthrough for photography and motion studies
• Put together exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893; “Zoopraxigraphical Hall” was financial failure (early weeks of fair) ↑

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

• “Discipline is the basic set of tools we use to solve life’s problems.”
• “Problems call forth our courage and wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”
• “Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with.”
• “If a child sees his parents day in and day out behaving with self-discipline, restraint, dignity, and a capacity to order their own lives, then the child will come to feel in the deepest fibers of his being that this is the way to live.”
• “The feeling of being valuable—“I am a valuable person”—is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.”
• “Good discipline requires time.”
• “Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”
• “We must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.”
• (Accept responsibility, dedication to reality, balancing, delayed gratification)
• “Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain.”
• “The life of wisdom must be contemplation combined with action.”
• “By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.”
• “The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained.”
• (re: discipline) “You must start at the beginning and go through the middle.”
• Love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
• “The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
• “Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.”
• “Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”
• “The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.”
• “Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. … It is leadership.” (means requiring judgment)
• “Love is a complicated rather than simple activity, requiring the participation of one’s entire being—the head as well as the heart.”
• “The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting.”
• “True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love.”
• The act of love requires the moving against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage).
• “Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.”
• “The genuine lover always perceived the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity.”
• “Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth.”
• “Individual growth and spiritual growth are interdependent, but it is always and inevitably lonely out on the growing edge.”
• “Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?”
• “When we are reading a book and come across an idea of theory that appeals to us, that “rings a bell” with us, we “recognize” it to be true. Yet this idea or theory may be one of which we have never before consciously thought. The word says we “re-know” the concept, as if we knew it once upon a time, forgot it, but then recognized it as an old friend. It is as if all knowledge and all wisdom were contained in our minds, and when we learn “something new” we are actually only discovering something that existed in our self all along.”
• “The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.”
• “The lazy part of the self, like the devil that it may actually be, is unscrupulous and specializes in treacherous disguise. It cloaks its own laziness in all manner of rationalizations, which the more growing part of the self is still too weak to see through easily or to combat.”
• “Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness.”
• “Love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love.”
• “If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us.”
• (Unconscious=rhizome, large and rich hidden root system that nourishes the tiny plant sprouting temporarily on the surface: “a splinter of the infinite deity”)
• “In my vision the collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them. Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God’s will and the will of the individual.”
• “If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome of the unconscious God can become itself God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.”
• “Everyone wants to be loved. But first we must make ourselves lovable. We do this by becoming ourselves loving, disciplined human beings.” ↑

Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President by Ari Hoogenboom

• Born sickly, his mother Sophia was overprotective and widowed.
• His uncle Sardis bumped into Senator Andrew Jackson en route to D.C.
• Took a break from school and lived at home but grew lazy, which worried his mother and brought sister Fanny back from hers.
• In college he took pride in his self-esteem and common sense.
• Kenyon College’s two literary societies were often divided sectionally, a division Rud sought to heal to promote nationalism and inspire learning.
• Met his hero Henry Clay in 1842 in Dayton at a speech.
• Would test authority but wouldn’t challenge it totally.
• Fanny had postpartum psychosis after second birth, which perturbed Rud.
• Head smart and valedictorian, he was still awkward around ladies and company.
• Entered Harvard law school in 1843, where he saw more politics in Boston.
• Moved to Sandusky for law and sought to enter the Mexican War (which he thought was unjust), but his ill health kept him out.
• Fanny kept campaigning for him to find a wife, but Rud wouldn’t.
• Met Emerson and wasn’t all that impressed; Rud could only latch onto Unitarianism and very liberal Christian orthodoxy.
• Engaged to Lucy Webb but put off the wedding until more money came in; she influenced him toward antislavery, temperance, and religion.
• Offered legal defense pro bono in cases against slavery with fugitives.
• Fanny died in 1856 after complications from a failed childbirth of twins.
• Elected Cincinnati solicitor, supported the burgeoning GOP and Lincoln.
• Seemed OK with secession until he hung with Lincoln more after election.
• Entered war as major, then bumped up to lieutenant colonel.
• Rud and General Garfield shared distaste of McClellan and soft-on-slavery soldiers.
• William McKinley was in Rud’s regiment.
• After loss at Chickamauga, predicted war wouldn’t end until June 1865.
• In postwar Congress, Hayes quickly radicalized against Johnson and with Stevens.
• Chaired literary committee, where he expanded Smithsonian’s space and collection.
• Served two terms as Ohio governor, happy he got 14th and 15th amendments in Ohio.
• Happy to be out of politics in 1872 when Grant’s admin was faltering.
• Reelected governor in 1976 on eve of election, knowing he’d have a run at president; won a close convention versus Blaine.
• Key campaign issues were civil service reform and enforcement of 14th and 15th amendments in the South; Southerners wanted home rule and patronage in exchange for Rud’s election.
• GOP essentially chose presidency over the state GOP governments remaining.
• Rud thought all black males should be able to vote.
• Took aloof federal role during 1877 railroad strikes, to success.
• Had Edison visit with his phonograph at the White House.
• Wanted gold standard after the war, to be more stable.
• South Carolina and Louisiana governors failed to protect blacks in elections despite pledges.
• Criticized for issuing too many pardons.
• Democrats were labeled the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
• Vetoed appropriations bill Democrats attached riders to banning use of military to ensure fair elections.
• Garfield was compromise candidate at convention from deadlock between supporters of John Sherman and Grant.
• Advocated for universal education as means to ensure black suffrage.
• Wanted strong executive power: wanted repeal of Tenure of Office Act, federal power to ensure fair elections, and to prevent Congress from making political appointments (spoils).
• Lucy hosted first White House Easter egg roll in 1878 after Congress banned it at Capitol.
• Post presidency, served on the national prison reform association board with Theodore Roosevelt in 1883.
• Argued against monopolies and for railroad reform.
• Served as board president at Ohio State University.
• Made social justice work foundation of his post-presidency. ↑

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

• Several Homo species: siblings of ours
• Large brains cost more energy, which needed more food and atrophied muscle
• Bipedalism developed toolmaking and such but results in back aches and stiff necks: also favored earlier births when infant small enough to exit
• Takes a tribe to raise kids, which favors strong social ties
• Humans in the middle of food chain for a long time
• Stone tools for cracking into bone marrow: niche use
• Domestication of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, which changed our biology
• Quicker cooking/eating = smaller teeth, shorter intestines, bigger brains
• Humans 150,000 years ago looked just like us now
• Interbreeding Theory vs. Replacement Theory vis a vis Sapiens and other species: breeding with different species created modern day races? Or we just killed them off
• Neanderthals: “they were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate”
• 70,000 years ago Sapiens left Africa and expanded; 70-30K years ago invented boats, oil lamps, bow & arrow, language, art – Cognitive Revolution
• Sapiens language “amazingly supple” with sounds for infinite number of sentences and meanings
• Language for gossip essential for social cohesion, trust, information
• Sapiens first animal to transmit info about things that don’t exist: legends, myths, religions
• Fictions/myths “give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers”
• Maximum natural size of a group is 150 individuals, but fictions can unite larger groups
• Sapiens only animal to trade
• History: unstoppable alterations within cultures
• Cognitive Revolution when history separated from biology
• “The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.”
• Hunter-gatherer existence predominates our present characteristics
• Trying to document the Stone Age (really the Wood Age) like explaining 21st century teens by their mail use
• Human collective knows far more now than ever, but individually we know far less than the hunter-gatherer
• Foragers had varied diet, exercise, no epidemics, but also unforgiving conditions, child mortality, health hazards
• Hands Cave in Argentina
• “Curtain of silence” in front of forager era: no true evidence of sociological happenings
• “The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced”
• Journey of first humans to Australia as important as Columbus to America or Apollo 11
• Sapiens ecological serial killers: caused mass extinction of megafauna wherever they went
• 12-10K years ago pioneers extend from Alaska to south of South America
• Transition to agriculture ~9,500 years ago
• Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud”: harder life, population explosion, worse diet
• Wheat, rice, potatoes domesticated humans, not vice versa
• Transition to farming the result of small incremental changes made with hopes but unforeseen consequences – the “luxury trap” of always needing more
• Discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering
• “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
• Declaration of Independence a myth, as equality and liberty don’t exist biologically
• “Imagined orders” not evil conspiracy or useless mirages, but only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively
• Romanticism: having as many new experiences as possible – Romantic Consumerism
• Inter-subjective: exists between subconscious, consciousness of many individuals
• Imagined hierarchies reinforced by pollution mindset, creating vicious cycle even after direct oppression ends
• “Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
• What accounts for universality and stability of patriarchy? Not just muscle or aggression
• Culture: network of artificial instruments of how to think, behave, want, and follow certain rules to cooperate effectively
• Reconciling cultural contradictions constantly: Christianity vs. chivalry/crusades, equality vs. freedom
• Universal orders of mankind: 1) economic/monetary, 2) political/imperial, 3) religious
• First coins from 640 BC in Anatolia
• ID mark of king testified to trustworthiness of coin
• Money is also the “apogee of human tolerance”, trust system that can bridge any cultural gap and doesn’t discriminate
• Empire brought goods to other cultures (law enforcement, urban planning) along with bad (taxes, conscription)
• Religion: a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order
• Polytheism inherently open-minded, whereas 5-10,000 French Protestant Christians slaughtered by Catholics in 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
• Monotheism absorbed some dualistic beliefs, like independent evil force (Satan) against all-powerful God
• “The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.” (syncretism)
• Soviet Communism and capitalism no less religions than Islam – “fanatical and missionary”
• Liberal humanism (individual), socialist humanism (collective), evolutionary humanism (evolution)
• “We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural not inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”
• Scientific Revolution not of knowledge but ignorance = we don’t know answers
• Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism inseparable
• 1775 Asia accounted for 80% of world economy
• European domination from 1850 onward due to military-industrial-scientific complex
• Darwin was asked to join Royal Navy expedition
• Vespucci an Italian sailor who argued North America was new land, not India
• North America a foundational event in Scientific Revolution: observations over traditions, searching for new knowledge
• Aztecs unaware of Spanish conquering of Caribbean, so Cortes arrival in 1519 was like alien invasion; vanquished four years later after Cortes’ sneaky takeover
• Pizarro repeated tactics to unknowing Incas
• Europeans interested in linguistics to better understand and conquer foreign peoples – “white man’s burden”
• Adam Smith argued green is good essentially; higher profits benefit everybody
• Capitalist-consumerist ideal “first religion in history where followers actually do what they are asked to do”
• Industrial Revolution upheavals: adapting to industrial time, urbanization, democratization and collapse of family/community
• Imagined communities: nation, consumer tribe
• “Peaceful retirement” of European empires in 20th century, relatively
• Positive feedback loop: nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism, pacifism reduces war and boosts trade, trade increases peace profits and cost of war
• “Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?”
• 18 year old now more likely to feel inadequate due to ads and mass media; 18 year old 5,000 years ago had few others to compare to
• “A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.” ↑

Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

• To ancient Greeks, atoms (primordia) represented indestructibility, indivisibility, unity
• Absolutes comfort us; “the best and most beautiful we can imagine”
• “The Now isn’t enough. We want to go behind the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.”
• “Why should I insist on meaning?”
• Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were oceanic… a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being at one with the external world as a whole.”
• Self and Consciousness are names we give to the sensations produced by electrical and chemical flows in humans
• Damasio’s levels of consciousness: protoself (basic life processes), core consciousness (self-awareness, thinking and reason but without memories or future), and extended consciousness (what healthy humans have)
• Study showed the greater the uncertainty, the greater the electrical activity in the amygdala
• Earth is “a large family of noisy and feeling animals—the living, throbbing kingdom of life on our planet, of which we are a part. A kingdom that consecrates life and its possibilities even as each of its individuals passes away. A kingdom that dreams of unity and permanence even as the world fractures and fades. A kingdom redesigning itself, as we humans now do. All is in flux and has always been so. … Flux is beyond sadness and joy. Flux and impermanence and uncertainty seem to be simply what is.”
• “I will end this day listening to Bach’s exquisite Mass in B Minor. Written to celebrate the Christian God, I will take it to celebrate all gods, for the gods of our faiths are not so different from each other. I will take it to celebrate those who believe and those who do not, for we all want to believe something. I will take it to celebrate life and its myriad forms, even as that life passes away. I will take it to celebrate meaning, even if that meaning is only the moment. The moment is now. As I gaze out the window, slender blue heron lifts off from the shore and glides over the bay.” ↑

Sex, Freedom, Economy, Community by Wendell Berry

• “Environment” means that which surrounds or encircles us; it means a world separate from ourselves, outside us. The real state of things, of course, is far more complex and intimate and interesting than that. The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy mystery, made for and to some extent by creatures.”
• “The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor.”
• “Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion or jubilation that follows war. It is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and practicable method, it is nothing.”
• “We must learn to prefer quality over quantity, service over profits neighborliness over competition, people and other creatures over machines, health over wealth, a democratic prosperity over centralized wealth and power, economic health over “economic growth.”
• “Creation is thus God’s presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that “Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden Being.” This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God.”
• “Idolatry always reduces to the worship of something “made with hands,” something confined within the terms of human work and human comprehension. Thus, Solomon and Saint Paul both insisted on the largeness and the at-largeness of God, setting Him free, so to speak, from ideas about him. He is not to be fenced in, under human control, like some domestic creature; He is the wildest being in existence. The presence of His spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation.”
• “Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”
• “Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses nothing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God.”
• The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man=body+soul; the formula there is soul=dust+breath.
• “In practice, the religion of the Bible is for the correction equally of people and of kings. And Christ’s life, from the manger to the cross, was an affront to the established powers of his time, just as it is to the established powers of our time. Much is made in churches of the “good news” of the Gospels. Less is said of the Gospels’ bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every “Christian” government the world has ever seen.”
• “Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the difference between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love—the virtues without which neither we nor the world can live.”
• “If the word community is to mean or amount to anything, it must refer to a place (in its natural integrity) and its people. It must refer to a placed people.” ↑

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

• Boustrophedon: from left to right and right to left in alternating lines (from Greek “as an ox turns in plowing”)
• Aristophanes, Dionysius Thrax
• Komma, kolon, and periodos were initially dots denoting short, medium, and long pauses
• C for capitulum (chapters) was filled in with a line in scriptoria, which became the pilcrow
• Paragraphos > pelagraphe > pelagreffe > Middle English pylcrafte > pilcrow
• Space left for rubricated pilcrow often forgotten about or left blank, leading to indented paragraphs with printing press
• Alternatives to interrobang: exclamaquest, interrapoint, exclarogative
• Interrobang was slow to appear because type foundries didn’t want to sacrifice an established character for an upstart
• Backwards question mark “percontation point” used briefly in 1500s for rhetorical question
• lb from Roman “libra” meaning scales or balances
• oz from medieval Italian onza, meaning twelfth of Roman pound
• lb with tilde/tittle above it (used to show contraction), when written in haste, looked like #; combined with Latin pondo became pound sign
• Shebang = # + !, became hash-bang in UNIX
• Ampersand started as Pompeian graffiti, later becoming part of the alphabet: “X, Y, Z, and per se (by itself) and.”
• @ from tittled a, an abbreviation for the Spanish/Portuguese arroba, a unit of volume and weight
• Dagger originally a straight line marking superfluous lines in text, called obelos (Greek “roasting spit”)
• Asteriskos (“little star”) for genuine lines in Bible translation; use with dagger meant line that should be elsewhere
• Martin Luther’s 95 Theses refuted by Eck’s “Obelisci” which Luther countered with “Asterisci”; Eck wanted to show Luther’s arguments to be false (to obelize them), while Luther’s “asterisks” highlighted defects in reasoning
• Glosses: notes in margin and between lines
• Scribes started using double virgules (//) to mark where a pilcrow should be, but they were often ignored so they just marked pauses
• Em dash used to censor names or curses, and Dash became its own epithet
• Exclamation points on early typewriters were made with a period and apostrophe
• Commash (,—) and semicolash (:—)
• Double hyphen instead of dash was standard on typewriters and became so in comics ↑

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford

• “Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the ‘opportunity costs’ of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”
• “This book advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair, and in doing so I hope it will speak to those who may be unlikely to go into the trades professionally but strive for some measure of self-reliance—the kind that requires focused engagement with our material things. We now like our things not to disturb us. Why do some of the current Mercedes models have no dipstick, for example? What are the attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff?”
• “We often hear of the need for an ‘upskilling’ of the workforce, to keep up with technologically change. I find the more pertinent issue to be: What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?”
• “Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”
• “The meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work suddenly appears as what it is, and it becomes possible once again to think the thought, ‘Let me make myself useful.’”
• “Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous ‘self-esteem’ that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”
• “Constantly seeking self-affirmation, the narcissist views everything as an extension of his will, and therefore has only a tenuous grasp on the world of objects as something independent. He is prone to magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence. A repairman, on the other hand, puts himself in the service of others, and fixes the things they depend on. His relationship to objects enacts a more solid sort of command, based on real understanding. For this very reason, his work also chastens the easy fantasy of mastery that permeates modern culture. The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.”
• “The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the objective standards of his craft. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable works—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.”
• “What becomes of the skilled workers? The naive view is that ‘they go elsewhere.’ But the competitive labor-cost advantage now held by the more modern firm, which has aggressively separated planning from execution, compels the whole industry to follow the same route, and entire skilled trades disappear. Thus craft knowledge dies out, or rather gets instantiated in a different form, as process engineering knowledge. The conception of the work is remote from the worker who does it.”
• “The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt.”
• “What is it that we really want for a young person when we give him or her vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. This humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing.”
• “Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level ‘creative.’ To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.”
• “There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility. I believe the appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook, is due to the fact it nonetheless captures something true. It points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.”
• “The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate. … Economics recognizes only certain values, and not the most impressive ones at that. Spiritedness is an assertion of one’s own dignity, and to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.”
• “With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.”
• “Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.”
• “This experience of failure tempers the conceit of master; the doctor and the mechanic have daily intercourse with the world as something independent, and a vivid awareness of the difference between self and nonself. Fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.” ↑

Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church by Philip Yancey

• “Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust-blister, callus, vomit…-demonstrates a reflex toward health.” -Paul Brand. Body wants to be healed, to be whole.
• Coles at Harvard: “We have systems here to explain everything—except how to live. And we have categories for every person on earth, but who can explain just one person?”
• “The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church told one direction or the other.” -Koop. Come as you are, but be ready to change.
• What is the meaning of death, pain, suffering?—that you are alive. The dead suffer no longer, but nor do they live. The dead feel no pain, but nor do they feel love, or raindrops, grass, or ecstasy. To feel—good, bad, mezzo mezzo—is to live. Feel all the feels.
• Donne: nature a “subordinate John the Baptist to Christ”
• Dillard combines “stubborn doubt with an equally stubborn insistence on faith”
• “Though I spend my life in pursuit of God, I often sense that God lies just around the next bend in the trail, just behind the next tree in the forest. I keep walking because I like where the journey has led me thus far, because other paths seem more problematic than my own, and because I yearn for the resolution of the plot.”
• “I am praying while not knowing how to pray. I am resting while feeling restless, at peace while tempted, safe while still anxious, surrounded by a cloud of light while still in darkness, in love while still doubting.” ↑

Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America by David Kamp

• Original idea identified social problem of poor children entering kindergarten without the learning skills of their middle-class counterparts, so to use television to better prepare them for school
• Debuted in 1969; Mister Rogers year and a half before, and soon Schoolhouse Rock
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting established in 1967
• “Age of Enlightenment Jr” came together organically, shaped mostly by Northeast progressive intellectual elites “yet was received by the public in good faith rather than as an uppity culture-wars provocation”; also coalesced during a “fun, fertile, anything-goes” artistic period
• 1961 new FCC chairman Newton Minow coined TV as “vast wasteland” in speech at broadcasters convention
• Nursery school barely existed in 1960s, and in 1970 only half of nation’s school districts offered kindergarten
• In March 1968, Children’s Television Workshop established by Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and US Office of Education
• Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In provided model for fast-paced procession of gags, short films, songs, etc. 
• CTW created Department of Utilization to create awareness in inner-city neighborhoods to watch the show
• Gordan was a writer-produced dragooned into acting; Bob McGrath a singer, and Mr. Hooper a stage actor who was previously HUAC-blacklisted
• With multicultural cast and guests, Sesame Street in its first season was “the blackest show on national television” with Soul Train a year away
• Name of Sesame Street deemed least worst option from longlist; worried it was too sibilant and hard to pronounce for preschoolers
• Mutual apprehension between Sesame Street and Mister Rogers but eventual détente 
• Cast invited by Pat Nixon to be entertainment for 1970 White House Christmas party but bad experience with no food; next day at Jesse Jackson’s event much better ↑

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

• “Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.”
• “Thamus knows that the uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself – that is, that its functions follow from its form. This is why Thamus is concerned not with what people will write; he is concerned that people will write.”
• “Once the technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do.”
• “Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines freedom, truth, intelligence, fact, wisdom, memory, history – all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.”
• “Those who cultivate competence in the use of a new technology become an elite group that are granted undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence.”
• “It is to be expected that the winners will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of the recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently. But discreetly they neglect to say from whose point of view the efficiency is warranted or what might be its costs. Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, almost all of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers’ lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe, as Thamus prophesied, that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a new technology is a form of wisdom.”
• “Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.”
• “To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.”
• “A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.”
• “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community, the arena in which thoughts develop.”
• “In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.” [mechanical clock & time; printing press & oral tradition; telescope & J-C theology]
• “Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using cultures.”
• “The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress.”
• “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself. … It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.”
• “Frederick Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-world of Technopoly. These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”
• “Why did Technopoly — the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology — find fertile ground on American soil? 1. the American character. 2. the genius and audacity of American capitalists. 3. the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance. 4. old sources of belief came under siege.”Why did Technopoly — the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology — find fertile ground on American soil? 1. the American character. 2. the genius and audacity of American capitalists. 3. the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance. 4. old sources of belief came under siege.”
• “The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in — technology. Whatever else may be denied or compromised, it is clear that airplanes do fly, antibiotics do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes — only faulty humans do.”
• “In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.”
• “To live in a world in which there were no random events — in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning — is an irreplaceable gift of theology. … with the emergence of technocracies moral and intellectual coherence began to unravel.”
• “The genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problem of information scarcity, the disadvantages of which were obvious. But it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut, the disadvantages of which were not seen so clearly.”
• “Schools became technocracy’s first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of information and discrediting other parts. Schools were, in short, a means of governing the ecology of information.”
• “Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words “A study has shown…” or “Scientists now tell us that…” More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no culture coherence.”
• “technocratic-typographic America was the first nation ever to be argued into existence in print.”
• “The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other.”
• “Telegraphy created the idea of context-free information — that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action.”
• “Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.”
• “Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”
• “All theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories — to oversimplify, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is that precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless.”
• “This is still another way to defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain.”
• “Religious tradition serves as a mechanism for the regulation and valuation of information. When religion loses much or all of its binding power—if it is reduced to mere rhetorical ash—then confusion inevitably follows about what to attend to and how to assign it significance.”
• “It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives.”
• “In principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing. … In attempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency. … Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are—and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency.”
• “I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts — there can be no experts — in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making. All of this is a figment of the Technopolist’s imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery, without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus.”
• “In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. … The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity.”In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. … The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity.”
• “The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “thinks” better than we can.”
• “A bureaucrat armed with a computer is an unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.”
• “I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words “The computer shows…” or “The computer has determined…” It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence “It is God’s will,” and the effect is roughly the same.”
• “Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information.”
• “Technopoly also encourages insensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.”
• “We may well wonder what other human skills and traditions are being lost by our immersion in a computer culture. Technopolists do not worry about such things. Those who do are called technological pessimists, Jeremiahs, and worse.”
• “In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.”
• “An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. A question may “invite” an opinion, but it also may modify and recast it; we might better say that people do not exactly “have” opinions but are, rather, involved in “opinioning.””
• “One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.”
• “In a Technopoly, we tend to believe that only through the autonomy of techniques (and machinery) can we achieve our goals.”
• “Management is an important example of how an “invisible technology” works subversively but powerfully to create a new way of doing things, a classic instance of the tail wagging the dog.”
• “In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity is profoundly unacceptable.”
• “By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.”
• “In Technopoly, the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise. This occurs not because corporate America is greedy but because the adoration of technology preempts the adoration of anything else.””
• “The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” applies as well to a technological divinity as any other.”
• “Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly’s power.”
• “The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advantage. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.”
• “No one is an expert on how to live a life. I can, however, offer a Talmudic-like principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of the American Technopoly. It is this: You must try to be a loving resistance fighter.”
• “In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.”
• “History is not merely one subject among many that may be taught; every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. … To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.”
• “The history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else’s shoulders.”
• “The products of the popular arts are amply provided by the culture itself. The schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response.” ↑

Temp: How American Work, Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman

• “For some at the top, this new economic arrangement produced great opportunities and wealth, but for most people, flexibility produced economic uncertainty.”
• “The answer goes deeper than Uber, further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our economy and our businesses work.”
• Postwar stability changed in 1970s, when focused changed from stability to leanness
• Risk-taking entrepreneur supplanted the risk-averse but loyal company man as capitalism ideal
• Agricultural guest worker pay ended in 1964 but 20 million stayed to work illegally
• “The postwar prophecies of office automation finally came in the 1980s, but instead of giving us leisure, they gave us the pink slip.”
• Alfred Sloan of GM pioneered market segmentation with different cars at different price points
• Accounting expanded after Crash, plus labor successes throughout 1930s and New Deal
• Mechanization of agriculture in 1920s transformed American work: agriculture workers 31% of workforce in 1910, 18% in 1940, 6% in 1960
• With men at war and women in factories, immigration opened for first time since 1920s for field work
• Taft-Hartley bill postwar prompted new labor standards, cost of living increases, health insurance, pensions, but no strikes
• “Job security, after the Great Depression, mattered more than anything.”
• Manpower and Kelly Girl first postwar temp agencies
• Temps helped ensure security of the permanent workforce by enabling sick days, vacations, and other perks
• Interchangeability of tasks made temps possible: all work was essentially the same wherever
• Winter of Manpower empowered women to work but as secondary to home
• Ruthless meritocracy of consultancy class spread through corporate America
• By 1970s economy was dependent on cheap, flexible Mexican labor
• Management consulting invented in 1930s but flourished postwar
• Manpower began franchising in 1950s: no need for investments or overhead so steady profits
• “Manpower did for work what McDonald’s did for the hamburger”
• Adoption of electronic data processing in 1950s/1960s drove accountants into consultant role
• Computers compelled businesses to use temps for rote data entry: night shift temps enabled full use of machines and weren’t paid overtime
• Stability was goal throughout 1960s; steady profits, not maximum gain
• Rise of conglomerates in 1960s: not monopolies but big; seeking stability thru diversification
• “Ad-hocracy” employees would be more like entrepreneur-contractors
• Conglomerates turned into lead corporations with restructuring and downsizing in 1970s
• Computerization led to automation of offices through routine tasks
• Apple and GM experimented with “lean manufacturing” in 1980s, no unions
• Constant downsizing and restructuring built class of “permanent consultants”
• Upwork “the logical extension of Manpower into the internet”
• Craigslist spawned other businesses based on its sections: Grindr, Etsy, Airbnb, etc
• Anger at Uber about the quick wealth and low wages
• Americans need “life security” not job security; health care, child care, basic income ↑

Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian

• “The richness or poverty of the moral imagination depends on the richness or the poverty of experience.”
• “The virtues needn’t be the dry and lifeless data of moral theories or the ethical version of hygienic rules in health science class; they can take on a life that attracts and awakens the desire to own them for oneself.” ↑

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See by Seth Godin

• Marketing is: the work of positive change, the generous act of helping someone solve a problem
• Better is when we make the dreams of those we serve come true.
• Marketers make things better by making change happen.
• products/services for customers, not customers for products/services
• avoidance of loss > desire for gain
• The way we make things better is by caring enough about those we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear. We need to be generous enough to share that story, so they can take action that they’ll be proud of.
• People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them.
• stories, connections, experiences
• Marketing is all of it: what we make, how we make it, who we make it for.
• If you’re a marketer, you’re in the business of making change happen.
• Market-driven = hopes and dreams of customers and their friends; listen to frustrations and invest in changing the culture
• What promise are you making? (“If this works for you, you’re going to discover…”)
• Finding a fit between what you make and what they want.
• Look for ways to do work for your members.
• Minimum viable market: chose curated people you’ll serve who will tell others.
• Simple Marketing promise: “My product is for people who believe ___. I will focus on people who want ___. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get ___.”
• Create and relieve tension
• Find the people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.
• The heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible.
• The engine of culture is status.
• Public relations is the art of telling your story to the right people in the right way.
• good enough → engagement → trust → see → learn → promise → enrollment → better
• Strategy: the way you use stories, status, and connection to create tension and forward motion
• Direct marketing = action-oriented and measured ; Brand marketing = culturally oriented and unmeasurable
• Permission, attention, and enrollment drive commerce. ↑

This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles Cobb

• Difference between “civil rights movement” and “freedom movement”: CR efforts to secure equal rights under law (Acts of ’64, ’65); FM larger idea to achieve rights, liberties, and consciousness, challenge systems and thinkings beyond laws (3)
• Concept of nonviolence a series of “aggressive confrontations”, not passive
• King’s house was armed, highlighting a common paradox: “black people are human beings” and respond to terror the same as others (7)
• Difference between media categories/labels (militant, activist, etc.) and the regular people in the movement not in leadership; due to South’s gun culture guns were more prevalent and less controversial
• FDR’s Four Freedoms for everyone: speech, religion, against want and fear; undermined conservative Jeffersonian states rights and way of life in South
• 1946 Columbia Tennessee riots started from store fight and ended with blacks defending themselves; showed will to fight
• Pershing’s 1918 memo objected to U.S. black soldiers under French command being treated equally: “The increasing number of negroes in the United States would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them….The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.”
• Difference between guns for self-defense vs punitive retaliation (129). “The necessities of survival blurred the line separating their organizational commitment to nonviolence from armed self-defense.” 130
• “The decision of what to do centered not on the choice between nonviolence and violence but on the question of what response was best in each situation. Most often, moreover, there was very little time to decide.” … “What was always at play was the common sense of survival… Flight when necessary was not cowardice, just as shooting it out hopelessly in the name of “manhood” was not always courage.” (145-6)
• Black Panthers emerged from Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an MS offshoot of the Democrats disillusioned after rejection at 1964 DNC in Atlantic City
• Conflict in urging Mississippi blacks to vote for “moderate” whites over blacks; though no LCFO candidates won in 1966, voter registration jumped from one in 1965 to 2,000 in 1966. ↑

A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Gordon

• Businessman Cyrus Field met Frederick Gisborne of the Canadian telegraph, who wanted to put submarine telegraph cable between London and New York via Newfoundland, to shorten communication time by weeks
• Field reached out to Samuel Morse, who thought it was possible, and oceanographer Lt Matthew Maury, who’d already studied the possibility and found it probable
• Reached out for funding from Peter Cooper, businessman and locomotive manufacturer, who saw mystical power in the project, along with other tycoons
• New group acquired the Newfoundland telegraph company from Gisborne and formed a new one, then got very favorable monopoly charter from Newfoundland assembly to begin in 1854
• Gutta-percha a rubbery substance used for submarine cabling: moderately flexible and didn’t deteriorate in water
• First attempt at laying water cables between Port aux Basques and Cape Breton Island in Canada failed, but landline laid between NYC and Newfoundland (1/3 way)
• Needed British capital, so formed British company (limited-liability corporations were a recent development, a lot spawning from the Industrial Revolution)
• British government agreed to pay yearly fee plus help with laying cable, so Field established Atlantic Telegraph Company in London in 1856 and sought investors, including Thackeray and Peabody
• Pierce signed funding legislation on last day of term, 1857
• Plateau along most of ocean route between Newfoundland and Ireland, allowing relatively smooth and unharassed passage of cable
• Though new science demanded experimentation, speed and cost triggered fast but faulty delivery
• Cable as small as possible to allow faster transmission; final size about index finger width and 2,500 nautical miles
• Began in Ireland right after potato famine; seen as hopeful connection to emigrants in America
• Cable popped when braked too hard, had to start over
• Crash of 1857 after decade of post-gold rush prosperity; Field’s company in rough shape but assuaged creditors with his trustworthiness
• Second attempt failed again, causing two board members to resign, but since they had just enough cable for a third try Field went ahead
• Iron in the cable armor affected one of the ship’s compass readings; as iron replaced wood on ships compasses had to be protected from ship’s own magnetic field
• Third time they finally made it; Queen’s message to president Buchanan the first to go through, but soon line went dead
• Fourth attempt began in July 1865, after more fundraising, on the Great Eastern, a massive ship with new paying out system
• 600 miles outside Newfoundland the cable snapped and dropped; after several failed attempts to grapple-hook it back up they returned to England
• Finally on fifth expedition they were able to complete the line after some innovations and lessons learned, and repair the original one as second insurance line
• At first exclusive and extortionate prices, as more cables were laid prices dropped and usage exploded over the decades ↑

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

• “I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three—far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.”
• “Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood. Why should the Accursed not be both the best and the worst?”
• “The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end. The freshness and wetness around me made me feel that I had misjudged the world; it seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced. Even my ugliness I could not quite believe in. Who can feel ugly when the heart meets delight? It is as if, somewhere inside, within the hideous face and bony limbs, one is soft, fresh, lissom and desirable.” ↑

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

• Clarence Dutton on encountering the Grand Canyon: “As we contemplate these objects we find it quite impossible to realize their magnitude. Not only are we deceived, but we are conscious that we are deceived, and yet we cannot conquer the deception. Dimensions mean nothing to the senses, and all that we are conscious of in this respect is a troubled sense of immensity.”
• Dutton: “Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must be understood before they can be estimated, and they must be cultivated before they can be understood.”
• “What one might perceive as timeless is but one frame of an endless geologic film.”
• [unfinished] ↑

Truman by David McCullough

• Independence Missouri the port of embarkation for “grand prairie ocean”
• 1840s push westward to Missouri for land from Kentucky and east
• Early 1830s Joseph Smith and Mormons arrived in Jackson City Missouri and settled, but driven out to Illinois by late 1830s
• Civil War in Missouri started in 1854 with Kansas-Nebraska Act and brutal violence that followed
• Harry Truman born 1884 outside Kansas City
• Got glasses when he was 9 and quickly became a reader of everything
• Bessie a year older than Harry in school, lived a few blocks away; athletic
• Huge fan of history, generals especially
• Harry’s history teacher Margaret Phelps on history: “It cultivates every faculty of the mind, enlarges sympathies, liberalizes thought and feeling, furnishes and approves the highest standards of character.”
• Harry essay on courage: “The virtue I call courage is not in always facing the foe but in taking care of those at home….A true heart, a strong mind and a great deal of courage and I think a man will get through the world.”
• Seriously studied and loved piano
• Self-described sissy as a kid who loved studying and music and hated fighting
• Father John lost everything on wheat futures in 1901 when Harry graduated high school: no West Point or college but job as construction timekeeper on Santa Fe railroad
• Saw Theodore Roosevelt speak from railcar in Kansas City in 1903
• Joined National Guard in 1905 at 21
• Boarded with Eisenhower’s older brother Arthur in Kansas City while bank teller before returning to family farm to help father
• Neat, polite, down to earth, honest, admitted wrong
• Joined Masons in 1909 in family tradition
• “You know when people can get excited over the ordinary things in life, they live.” Letter to Bess
• Started long correspondence with Bess: proposed to her but she denied him
• Admittedly racial prejudiced against blacks and Asians
• Mother gifted him car in 1914 for work on farm
• Father John died in 1914 and Harry took over farm
• Enlisted in 1917 and left farm to sister Mary Jane and mother, though could’ve avoided as farmer and hated guns: swept up in patriotism
• Lieutenant then captain in training: shipped out March 1918 from New York
• George Marshall assistant to General Pershing
• Finally returned home in May 1919 and married Bess in June, moved into her mother’s
• Started high-end haberdashery store in Kansas City with war buddy Jacobson and made high ROI in first year, but failed the next in depression
• Would be strapped for money for 20 years paying off debt
• Pendergast of Irish catholic immigrants who came to Kansas City in 1876 and built up gambling/liquor business and Democratic political machine
• Son Tom took over with much acclaim: quiet, generous, analytical
• “Repeaters” voted early and often
• Organization furnished lots of help and goods to citizens in exchange for “gratitude expressed at the polls”
• Rival Shannon faction know as Rabbits vs. Pendergast’s Goats
• “Fifty-Fifty Agreement” divided patronage evenly between factions, but off and on and battles continued
• Brother Mike Pendergast the enforcer hothead
• Harry tapped by Pendergasts for county judge
• Brief brush with KKK when running for judge, but then denied their support due to anti-Catholicism
• Close primary but soldier vote put him ahead: enjoyed being judge but soon reengaged Masons and army reserve
• Bess had two miscarriages before Mary was born in 1924
• Elected presiding judge 1926-1934, earned stellar bipartisan reputation
• Lobbied for county bond for road repair (a pet project) and courthouse renovation, and got both
• Worried about entrapment with women so avoided any opportunities for it
• In 1933 appointed director of Missouri federal reemployment service, to channel unemployed laborers into public works jobs
• In 1934 tapped by Pendergast for US Senate (his fourth choice)
• Consistent supporter and voter of New Deal; stained by Pendergast
• In 1939 Pendergast indicted by FBI for tax evasion
• In Senate speech lambasted federal DA Milligan (a Roosevelt man) who investigated voter fraud and Pendergast in Kansas City; lone no vote in Senate
• Missouri governor Stark ran against Harry in 1940; ran struggling bare bones campaign
• Favored racial equality and fairness in law but not socially
• Chaired special committee on national defense, which looked for waste and mismanagement
• Produced report damning inefficiency of Roosevelt’s Office of Production Management; report spurred new War Production Board
• Remained ever cheerful and brisk even as personal toll of job and war wore on him
• Put Bess on office payroll, which he’d criticized others for doing but needed the money
• “Investigator Truman” on the cover of Time in March 1943, about being watchdog and surprising success
• April 1943 spoke at rally supporting European Jews against Hitler’s atrocities
• Truman Committee’s deterrent effect probably helped save millions; also spurred production of Higgins boats
• Roosevelt’s VP Wallace too intellectual, liberal, mystical, so top Democrats sought other VP for 1944, especially since Roosevelt’s health was declining
• James Byrnes (head of the Office of War Mobilization after Senate and Supreme Court) was favorite but Truman, least-harmful option, slowly climbed list until convention
• Truman forces strategy was to flood first-ballot with nominations to deny Wallace majority
• Richard Rovere: “No one ever contrived less at his own elevation than Harry Truman at Chicago.”
• Bess not happy; could have been fear of her father’s suicide becoming public
• 1944 inauguration first wartime one since 1864 and first at White House due to Roosevelt’s ailing
• Truman first VP to have Secret Service protection
• Was VP for 82 days
• Elevated White House pool photographers to same level as journalists
• With brisk walking and volubility he provided stark contrast with cagey and wheelchair-bound Roosevelt
• Roosevelt had started political surveillance with FBI wiretaps of White House staff courtesy of Hoover, but Truman shut down and kept distance, infuriating Hoover
• Invited Herbert Hoover to the White House, who’d been unwelcome under Roosevelt
• While bomb being developed, had to decide whether to invade Japan or bomb/blockade
• Spoke at first United Nations meeting in San Francisco in June 1945
• Went to Potsdam in July 1945 and saw devastation of the war; also received word of atomic bomb test
• Stalin 5’5”, personally likable and fatherly but with a mask, hardly budged on demands for Poland territory
• Truman and Churchill decided to split Indochina (Vietnam) for “operational purposes” between China and Britain
• After Potsdam Stalin told Khrushchev that Truman was worthless
• Hiroshima bomb dropped as Truman was shipping back from Potsdam
• Wanted to consolidate armed forces under single Secretary of Defense
• Approval rating in 80s but dropped as struggled to navigate postwar period and new domestic demands of inflation, unemployment, Congress; 32% by mid-1946
• Common criticism he was too eager to agree
• Stalin declared in February 1946 inevitability of war and began rearmament
• Truman introduced Churchill at his “iron curtain” speech at Missouri university
• Planned to draft striking rail workers and said so in address to Congress, then notified the strike had ended
• Republican sweep in 1946 elections set Truman free from Roosevelt shadow
• Appointed Marshall to State to unanimous approval; had intangible aura of Washington
• White House staff and cabinet appreciated Truman’s work ethic, reliability, amiability, groundedness
• Marshall to staff reporting on European crisis: “Avoid trivia.”
• Vetoed anti-union Taft-Hartley Act (overridden) but showed taking a stand
• Congress passed National Security Act which unified armed forces under Defense, set up NSC and CIA
• Bess described as serene, shy, stubborn, somber in front of crowds
• After passage of Marshall Plan Truman wrote US is “first great nation to feed and support the conquered. … to create independent republics from conquered territory [Cuba and Philippines]. Our neighbors are not afraid of us.”
• “All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”
• Unsure of running in 1948, but felt compelled to fight for Democratic heritage
• Spoke at NAACP at Lincoln Memorial and established Civil Rights Commission, whose report was shocking to Truman
• Would need black, Jewish, farmer, and western votes to win in 1948
• Letter to fellow southerner: “The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the time and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves. I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint. … I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause.”
• Proposal for south portico for more private space along with White House renovations met with derision
• Decision to recognize Israel right away strongly influenced by old Jewish friend Jacobsen but also by Russian encroachment in Mediterranean; Marshall almost resigned over it
• Dewey heavy favorite to win; J Edgar Hoover began supplying him info before election with hopes of becoming attorney general
• Countrywide whistle-stop tour was decisive in victory: 24 million to 21 million
• Berlin airlift successfully ended May 1949 when Stalin backed down
• NATO ratification in July 1949; first peacetime military alliance since Constitution
• Met MacArthur at Wake Island in summer 1950 after successful Inchon battle and all was positive
• Two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted assassination at Blair House to bring attention to their cause; Truman commuted death sentence to life
• US pressed past 38th parallel, then China invaded Korea and harsh winter set in
• After insubordination MacArthur fired, which caused uproar; congressional hearings revealed joint chiefs agreed with Truman
• Closely supervised White House gutting and renovation; insisted on keeping continuity and authenticity
• Seized steel mills ahead of strike but lost Supreme Court challenge 6-3 in liberal court
• Continually prodded Stevenson to run; Eisenhower campaigned with McCarthy and failed to pay tribute to Marshall, which enraged Truman
• Invited Eisenhower to post-election White House meeting, a new precedent
• No pension or Secret Service protection, and they’d barely been able to save much of presidential salary, but book deal helped
• Died in 1972 at 88 ↑

Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

• “There can be a real meeting between two people at the point where they always felt marooned. Right at the edge.”
• begin to get along with myself
• “I was awful lonely then but still enjoyed the romance of the road.”
• for a week keep record of first words every day
• “I’ve always set myself up as a great enemy of sentimentality. But now, I see, that time brings a certain yearning toward past experience. That’s the thing my old man got lost in. That & the bottle.”
• “Life compels me now. I must eat! I must have coffee! I must smoke & become engaged in the activities of the day. I must be pulled inexorably out of myself in order to be reminded again & again of the need to come back.”
• “What would it be to be a conscious day-dreamer?”
• “Now & then a glimpse of what “seeing” might be.”
• they move to Minn and Jessica immediately wanted to leave again, Sam said we’ll try a year, then they stayed for decades
• “How could I be this way? How is it possible? After all these years; all this time & so-called effort? I’m just an arrogant self-righteous old prick watching T.V. & snickering.”
• “Sometimes lists are better than writing—more fun—but then they get boring—so does writing. I would like to be burning up with writing, but I’m not. Other things are more fun. Fun is important, I guess. It feels good to have fun. Did you ever consider the possibility of losing your mind entirely? Maybe we have. More later—if it comes.”
• “There are these monumental turning points in a life that cannot be denied. Circumstances. Choices. A fork in the road. Whatever you want to call them. Things come up in which you could go one way or the other and no matter which turn you make your life is forever, irrevocably changed.”
• the movies: “a dark room where a bunch of strangers sit down and watch huge images of other strangers who somehow seem more familiar than the people they know in real life”
• drunkenly kicks daughter’s boyfriend out of wedding for flirting with someone
• biking similar to canoe: silent, little effort, exposure of the body, “almost a part of things and yet slightly distanced”
• “I have been lucky beyond reason—yet still bewildered.”
• Dark: “When I was young I thought I’d like to be an Authentic Man. I wanted to believe in something. I wanted to be a ‘real’ person. God knows I tried. But I can see how that it was all in vain.”
• “Funny how we crave the next season—just like we look forward to a future we can’t see.” ↑

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford

• “Wherever the line is drawn between good and evil, between acceptable and unacceptable…, we’re always going to be voting on both sides of it, despite ourselves.”
• “Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices.”
• “Christianity is perfectionist and impossible, vis a vis Islam and Judaism.”
• “HPtFtU [human propensity to fuck things up] is like family resemblance: all sin looks kinda the same. Christians are supposed to understand that the family resemblance makes us family even with the nastiest and most frightening of our brothers and sisters.”
• “All processes exists thanks to Him; He is the universe’s environment.”
• “Whether God exists or not is unprovable, so whether He exists or not is always going to be a matter of belief. Either He exists or He doesn’t, irrespective of whether He’s believed in.”
• “Wishing does not in fact cause things to exist. Or cease to exist.”
• “Polytheism honors the range of what we are. (Which is nice but egocentric.)”
• “The power of the God of everything is not exercised from the top of any hierarchy. It works entirely through presence. … He is as common as the air.”
• “We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself. We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in time of perplexity, a wider hope than we can manage in time of despair.”
• “Yeshua’s kingdom apparently exists in ever-changing resemblances. He does not say what it is, only what it is like. … The kingdom is whatever all [the parables] have in common.”
• “If God really does long for every last soul, then in principle God regards as forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don’t want forgiven, thank you. … We don’t want that. We want justice, dammit, if not in this world then in the next.”
• “We believe the church is precious because it embodies something that the HPtFtU in general and our sins of complicity in particular cannot destroy. … It’s a failing but never quite failed attempt, by limited people, to perpetuate the unlimited generosity of God in the world.”
• “Unlimited love having once entered into limited us, it’s here for good, apparent to us or invisible depending on the light, depending on our willingness to see. Humanity glimmers with God’s presence.”
• “Forgiveness has no price we need to pay, but it exposes our illusions of control. Forgiveness is not flattering. Forgiveness reminds us that our masks are masks. Forgiveness starts something, if we let it.”
• “It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.” ↑

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

• “The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets). Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”
• “Force yourself to see more deeply.”
• “The underland is vital to the material structures of contemporary existence, as well as our memories, myths and metaphors.”
• “Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving.”
• “‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.”
• “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.”
• “It is a paradox of his work that in order to watch the stars he must descend far from the sun. Sometimes in the darkness you can see more clearly.”
• “To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.”
• “In a landscape where the earth was once raked and gouged in search of a highly valued rare metal, the search is now ongoing for a substance that is plentiful beyond imagination and of no worth at all.” (dark matter)
• “My sense is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.”
• “Above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping.”
• “The Anthropocene requires us to undertake a retrospective reading of the current moment, however—a “paleontology of the present” in which we ourselves have become sediments, strata and ghosts. It asks that we imagine a single figure: a hypothetical post-human geologist who—millions of years into the future, long after the extinction of our species—will examine the underland for what it reveals of the epoch of anthropos.”
• “A trace fossil is the sign left in the rock record by the impress of life rather than life itself. … A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as a sign. We all carry trace fossils within us—the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. … Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace—and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”
• “As someone lucky to live in a long love, I recognize the gradual growing-towards and subterranean unspoken communication which can sometimes tilt troublingly towards silence, and the sharing of both happiness and pain. I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings. Theirs, too, seems to me then a version of love’s work.”
• “I am reminded once more of how resistant the underland remains to our usual forms of seeing; how it still hides so much from us, even in our age of hyper-visibility and ultra-scrutiny.”
• Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake: “The forest is always more complicated than we can ever dream of. Trees make meaning as well as oxygen. To me, walking through a wood is like taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales. Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest’s underland is a new language altogether—one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi. We need to speak in spores.”
• “The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soul of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time.”
• “Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene. 
• “If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web, it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”
• (re: Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”): “itself an exploration of the currents and flows of a psychological underland—the starless rivers of the id that rush beneath the sunlit uplands of the conscious mind, here and there surging powerfully up.”
• “Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope—and this is another kind of oppression.” 
• “Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more. … It remembers and it tells—tells us that we live on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.”
• “Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. … To imagine ice as a ‘medium’ in this sense might also be to imagine it as a ‘medium’ in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.”
• “As a human mind might, late in life, struggle to remember its earliest moments—buried as they are beneath an accumulation of subsequent memories—so the oldest memory of ice is harder to retrieve, and more vulnerable to loss.” ↑

The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse

• “This crisis of idleness and passive drift is profound for every citizen of this republic. For this nation is premised on the idea that the government exists not to define and secure the good, the true, and the beautiful, but rather to maintain a framework for ordered liberty—so that free people can pursue their happiness in the diverse ways that they see fit.”
• “We need to find ways to liberate our kids from the tyranny of the present. One basic way to do that is to know other people, especially older people.”
• “Consumption is not the key to happiness; production is. Meaningful work—that actually serves and benefits a neighbor, thereby making a real difference in the world—contributes to long-term happiness and well-being. Consumption just consumes.”
• Schooling philosophy Realist vs. Romantic, Augustine vs. Rousseau, sin vs. self
• Doesn’t like Dewey, who crusaded to make schooling central rather than supplemental to parents
• “I have no interest in my children being formed by the zeitgeist, by the majoritarian sentiments of any particular moment, by what Dewey celebrated as an abstract ‘social consciousness of the race.’ Instead, I want my children to be formed by ideals and principles that are definable and debatable—by me and by them—even if such ideals and principles are not always in vogue.”
• Children would do work according to ability rather than age; citizenship a goal for kids
• Romantics associated childhood with purity and innocence, whereas early Americans willfulness and obstinacy
• Today’s child-centered, nurturing approach is a choice; would have been foreign to earlier generations
• Character building: break tyranny of generation segregation, develop work ethic, embrace limited consumption, travel, learn how to read well
• Coming of age factors: medication, screen time, video games, porn, living with parents, less marriage, softer parenting, less religion, more intellectually fragile
• Visual media eroded childhood: adult things known only by literacy, which required work and self-discipline to learn; TV a “total disclosure medium” (Postman)
• “There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption. Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.”
• “Denying meaningful rites of passage and obscuring the distinction between childhood and adulthood cheats the generation coming of age of something vital. Lowering expectations, cushioning all blows, and tolerating aimlessness not only hurts them, it also deprives their neighbors, who desperately need their engagement.”
• Schooling=large-scale institutional tool; education=goals and dreams we have for our kids
• Need more diversity of institutional forms: family school, crafts schools, etc
• P16 a more standardized transition to college: bad. Just perpetuates teens as cogs in machine (cf Postman)
• “Unfortunately, centralized education and bureaucrats tend to see every failure as a product of still not enough centralized bureaucracy. Most of these experts are blind to the possibility that perhaps we are still trying to spoon-feed young adults who we should instead nudge to travel and to read, to work and to become the kind of students to ask questions before being handed a three-point formulaic answer.”
• “Too much formalized schooling inevitably crowds out communities of the heart and soul, voluntarism, flexibility and choice, cross-cultural experience, exertion, success and failure, and time—essentially everything for becoming a fully formed adult, an emphatic citizen, and a worker-learner flexible enough to navigate the accelerated pace of job expiration and change in the new economy.”
• Education is about “the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is not the private domain of the experts. It belongs to all of humanity.” (Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning)
• “Education that focuses on tools and techniques at the exclusion of the student’s role in directing his or her own learning is destined to fail. As Socrates taught, it is almost impossible to educate someone with an answer until he or she is invested in asking a question.”
• “The same procession of grammar, then logic or dialectic, then rhetoric applies to virtually every subject. A student needs to become conscious of learning how he or she learns.”
• “parent with the grain”
• Three stages of child development: Poll-Parrot (learning and recitation is easy), Pert (contradicting, answering back, high nuisance value), and Poet (yearn for independence and self-expression) — aligns with Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric process
• “If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions, and awakening the curiosity in the soul of each citizen.”
• “Our kids are not commodities; they are plants—they require a protected environment, and care and feeding, but most basically an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight.”
• “Allowing our culture to devolve from one that encourages self-sufficiency into one that indulges permanent dependency is to tolerate a disengagement of the soul akin to permanent training wheels. Letting the next generation believe someone else will solve their problems imperils not only them but our whole society.”
• “We latch onto evidence hinting that aging can be put off, perhaps indefinitely. It’s no surprise then that our young today inherit a fear of growing up and growing old, and a near allergy to confronting honestly the only certainty in life besides taxes.”
• Three purposes of sex: covenant, procreation, pleasure
• “For people who are alive, really alive, their brains are in motion.”
• Ellen Parr: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Curiosity is the mental mortar for building strength and resilience.
• Advice for teen parenting: Less helicopter and more stealth-drone; encourage good behavior; invite to ask hard questions of house guests; sing together; rethink flotations and training wheels; memorize poetry; family dinner; family digital detoxes; give choices; mix storytelling with walking; model gratitude; focus on habits
• “A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work, rather than freedom from your work, even when work hurts.”
• Thomas Carlyle: “Whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does…Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name!”
• “We believe you’re most fully alive when you distill things to the essentials of life—and then learn the habit of finding great pleasure and great gratitude in those essentials.”
• “Bloodless revolution” of printing press helped create America, but now without literature canon we lack a common culture and values
• Thomas Hine: American adult anxiety about growing older leads us to undermine our own kids’ growing up; parent need to feel young makes them reluctant to acknowledge child maturity
• Arthur Brooks four factors of “happiness portfolio”: faith, family, community, work
• Idea of America, “negative” build of Constitution, framework of ordered liberty all need to be taught; majority of Americans don’t know basic civics ↑

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

• Druyan: Sagan “never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.”
• “The methodology of science, with its error-correcting mechanism for keeping is honest in spite of our chronic tendencies to project, to misunderstand, to deceive ourselves and others, seemed to him the height of spiritual discipline. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just as palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.”
• Science as “informed worship”
• Superstition: belief without evidence
• Given scale of universe, God of the Bible too small
• “The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.”
• If God created the universe for humans, what if humans destroy themselves?
• If scientists can be fooled about canals on Mars, what of religion where evidence is weaker and will to believe is greater?
• “We are the product of a unique evolutionary sequence.” e.g. could have had 12 fingers if mutations had gone differently
• Either success or failure of SETI would be success
• Einstein’s God: sum total of physical laws of universe; “a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe.”
• What kind of God, and what evidence?
• “Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?”
• “By no means does it follow that religious thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.”
• In early humanity, change was slow so ancestral traditions and wisdom was venerated and valuable; today change is so fast so parental wisdom is not as relevant
• Late 1940s television waves our emissaries to outer space
• “Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is.” ↑

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

• “As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls….We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.”
• “Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.”
• William Blake: “Eternity is in love with the creations of time.”
• W.H. Murray: “Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.’”
• “A [artistic] territory sustains us without any external input. A territory is a closed feedback loop. Our role is to put in the effort and love; the territory absorbs this and gives it back to us in the form of well-being.”
• “Remember, as artists we don’t know diddly. We’re winging it every day. For us to try to second-guess our Muse the way a hack second-guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. It’s blasphemy and sacrilege. Instead let’s ask ourselves like that new mother: What do I feel growing inside me? Let me bring that forth, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.”
• “If you’re all alone on the planet, a hierarchical orientation makes no sense. There’s no one to impress. So, if you’d still pursue that activity, congratulations. You’re doing it territorially.”
• “Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.” ↑

Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer

• Washington thought of liberty in Stoic way: independence from “involuntary passion”; slavery to be in bondage to unbridled passion
• Washington OK with slavery until revolution in 1775, then freed slaves in will
• Got command because he was qualified and Virginian
• “An army of cantankerous Yankees” under “gentleman of Virginia”; disparate groups uneasily working together and being led
• In 1776 British army and navy at peak of power
• British army a decentralized bureaucracy of “semi nomadic tribes”: grenadiers (storm troops), light infantry elite (precursor to Green Berets), light horse dragoons, Royal Artillery (intellectual elites)
• Marching in step just became common by 1776
• British preference for “bend not break” method of discipline; emphasis on willingly supporting others
• 170 different drum signals, plus songs to foster “regimental identity”
• Britain tried to hire Hessians as early as winter 1774-75
• Hessians elite army Britain paid top dollar for from Hesse-Cassel state: warrior’s creed; mercenary but believed in causes and corporal punishment
• Hessians ruled by discipline and order, loyalty to prince Landgraf Wilhelm
• Hesse-Cassel thrived from lucrative treaties with Britain and Holland: soldiers in exchange for funds invested in public spending and lower taxes
• Hessian tension between obedience & service and entrepreneurial risk for sake of profit in America
• Richard and William Howe of aristocratic family and grew up with George III
• Richard entered navy and garnered acclaim; known as Black Dick for dark complexion and “saturnine mood”
• Howes sympathized with colonies as more liberal Whigs but were called to serve
• Suggested British strategies included brute force, blockade, constant battles; instead a middle way of strategic occupation, swaying moderates, and “speed and skillful maneuver”
• Blockade would be ineffective without allies; the needed forces were at home and around the world
• Several American strategies tried: economic war, defensiveness/attrition, modular armies and battles, defend perimeter of colonies
• Fall of Fort Washington and New York low part of Washington’s career
• Cornwallis a career soldier who’d go on to fight in Ireland, India, and Europe; as a Whig opposed hard measures against America
• Artillery captain Hamilton raised company, recruited, fundraised uniforms and weapons at 20
• Paine aide-de-camp to General Greene and war correspondent: Common Sense then The American Crisis published in papers then pamphlets – widely read and galvanizing in dark time
• “This great revival grew from defeat, not from victory. The awakening was a response to a disaster. Doctor Benjamin Rush, who had a major role in the event, believed that this was the way a free republic would always work, and the American republic in particular. He thought it was a national habit of the American people (maybe all free people) not to deal with a difficult problem until it was nearly impossible. “Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity,” Rush wrote. “We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.”
• ‘Crisis’ appeared in December 1776 at lowest moment; revived population and army
• Congress voted in December 1776 to give Washington full military powers for 6 months: civilian control and military direction
• Washington exercised powers carefully and with explanations; delegation and cooperation a trial run for eventual Constitution
• Howes offered lenient policy of amnesty to colonists who took oath to king
• Richard Stockton of New Jersey only Declaration signer to turn coat when New Jersey occupied
• Customs of plunder: unoccupied house could be stripped, victims had to respect plunder, stuff taken from military was OK not from civilians, family homes had to be left with enough to survive
• Rape by British and Hessians endemic and large-scale
• Occupied New Jersey radicalized against British and devolved into anarchy and violence
• While Washington preparing Delaware crossing, Gates went to Congress to try to seize command
• Victory at Trenton against Hessians boosted morale
• Washington’s “quiet, consultative leadership” helped encourage open debate and unite different factions
• American officers addressed soldiers as gentlemen, which spoke to principles of honor by human decency and dignity instead of rank or status
• Lost a lot of Continentals on New Year’s Eve 1776 when enlistments ran out but gained some militias and paid some to continue
• Washington forbade plundering (not always followed) wanting to set example of freedom and humanity, contrasted with British and Hessians
• British and Hessians losses at beginning reduced effectiveness through rest of war
• 1776 celebrated as glorious year but it was agony on the ground; by spring 1777 fortunes reversed
• A “web of contingency” determined the outcomes ↑

When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future by Abby Smith Rumsey

• “Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile, limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.”
• “Question changed from What can we afford to save? to What can we afford to lose?”
• “Data is not knowledge, and data storage is not memory.”
• “Temporal depth perception” allows us to travel in tie back and forward, increasing our imaginative capacities and conjectural thinking.”
• “Access of memory over time requires: self-awareness, symbolic thought, and language”
• “Culture is the collective wit by which we live.”
• History started when Adam and Eve chose knowledge over reverence: “The moral of the story is that in Paradise, there is no curiosity.”
• Proliferation of Sumerian cuneiform tablets first instance of Big Data management, logistical challenge
• Memory the ultimate life-hack: DNA doesn’t keep what our parents knew; we have to learn from scratch using “knowledge objects” – objects as evidence principle
• “We often blame the feeling of alienation from Nature on our technologies. But that feeling of separation existed well before the invention of computers, cars, and air-conditioning. Assigning blame to our tools and technologies is a by-product of secularization. Why we have that feeling is “explained” in Genesis as part of the human condition. But having rejected that explanation, we simply turn to technology as the culprit.”
• “Culture is the set of given, ready-made elements that make up a living past, and that living past determines the basic parameters of lives and the choices available to us over time. It provides the baseline context of order and meaning in our private lives by directing our attention to some things and steering us away from others.”
• “In periods of great instability, the past becomes more useful as we increasingly tap into the strategic reserve of humanity’s knowledge. Yet it is at moments like this when the past is most easily lost.”
• Spatial context key to memory retrieval (Alzheimer’s patients, mnemonics)
• “Until the present age, managing physical objects was the only way we managed knowledge. The order of knowledge mirrored the order of things. In digital archives, there are no objects, only bits. They are stored randomly and assembled on the fly when they are called up on the screen.”
• “Distributing knowledge over generations and across continents is the closest we will ever come to creating a natural resource that cannot be exhausted and whose value actually increases with use.”
• Montaigne turned to library later in life: “The land of memory where dead people talk.”
• 1500s excavation of classic literature and the proliferation of printing press – self-documenting
• Jefferson sold Congress book collection at face value ($23,950) which was approved along party lines; paid off creditors with 8K to spare
• Jefferson obsessed with books and recovery of past to demonstrate America’s greatness; sought comprehensive and coherent collection of knowledge about and useful to America, not merely catering to personal interests
• Collectors the “first line of defense against the physical loss of our cultural legacy”
• “In exchange for the eminent powers over Nature we gained with the new science, we lost more than a god who knows our name and cares about our individual fate. We lost anyone to hold accountable for the ills of the world. We cannot blame our creator for the existence of evil. … Materialism robs us of a supernatural source of knowledge. This means that the cumulative knowledge and know-how of humanity, the collective memory that constitutes the entire repertoire of knowledge we need to understand ourselves and the world, is dependent on our careful stewardship.”
• “Nature is the ultimate archives, the most complete set of records about the past, the Universal Library itself. And science becomes the ultimate library card, granting unlimited access to the curious.”
• “The forensic imagination demanded better instruments of investigation and lots of them. That desire to read Nature’s archives drove—and still drives the invention of new technologies to observe, measure, record, play back, analyze, compare, and synthesize information.”
• Memory formation and retrieval = curation — selection, acquisition, categorization, storage, and preparation for retrieval on demand
• Interesting idea of short-term memory like overnight parking lot, which is sorted and processed during sleep before being discarded or filed long-term—sleep as algorithm. What is useful gets converted to long-term and abstracted from native context for future reuse in other contexts
• Memory isn’t read-only, it’s save-as
• Cuneiform opposite of our memory because didn’t change; digital memory more like our biological memories
• “Memory records the world as so. Imagination transposes it into the key of as if, transforming experience into speculation.”
• Soviet joke that in their land the future is certain, it is the past that is always changing
• Cultivating imagination: don’t cut back on kids’ unstructured playtime and music & arts ed, don’t privatize culture to all but well-off adults
• “In the present age, we are told that knowledge is cumulative, expert knowledge abounds, and what counts is to add something useful to the sum of useful knowledge. It is hard to argue for the cultivation of the aesthetic imagination by saying that it is useful because it makes us better friends, mates, parents, citizens, workers. But it does precisely these things because it enhances our emotional intelligence. The aesthetic and moral imagination are intrinsic to the human condition. Without them we are less than human.”
• “How do we master memory in the digital age of abundance? It will start with retooling literacy for the digital age and updating public policies to ensure investment in long-term institutions capable of securing memory into the future.”
• Digital autonomy/literacy: filtering data for value, creating times of deep absorption, and setting our machines to be on call when we need them but not to intrude on our privacy
• Commercial companies have no responsibilities to future generations, can disappear; preserving commercially owned digital content = handoff of “significant knowledge assets” to public institution
• Market capitalism not good for long-term investment in public good. Jefferson and Founders envisioned the organization of access to knowledge to be a public utility wholly owned by the people for the purpose of self-government; without handoff from private to public nonprofit stewards, “it will be hard to avoid collective amnesia in the digital age.”
• “Earbudding” restores autonomy in a noisy environment
• “Digital memory will outsource more tasks to machines that outperform us and make room in our “brain attics” for cultivation of our emotional and imaginative powers”
• Need secure, reliable digital infrastructure, like Internet Archive; without it will have black holes of memory
• Lincoln: “I know of nothing so pleasant to the mind, as the discovery of anything which is at once new and valuable.” [– nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery.”]
• “The Internet is extremely useful. At the same time it encourages the pursuit of curiosity for its own sake and democratizes it.”
• “The realm of emotional intelligence, empathy, and imagination—all necessary for judgment in the context of incomplete information or conflicting aims—is beyond the reach of our machines. … As we teach our children how to use digital machines, we need simultaneously to cultivate their capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence by integrating the arts—the making of beautiful things and the telling of stories—into the new curriculum for digital literacy. Our machines will not grow a moral imagination anytime soon.” ↑

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

• On Copernicus… “how hard it must have been for people in his day to look up at the stars and fathom that stars are not the ones moving. But still, it mattered to talk about it, to think about it, to do the mental scrunching that allowed oneself to slowly let go of the idea of the stars as a celestial ceiling that rotated over one’s head each night. Because when you give up the stars, you get the universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?
• “Once you name something, you stop looking at it.”
• “When you give up the fish…” and then can discover something better and deeper

Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams

• political commentators without business experience at a disadvantage interpreting Trump
• encourages readers to remain skeptical of his book
• Trump’s hyperbole “weapons-grade persuasion”: large opening offer
• Trump matches emotional state and priorities of supporters
• Not factually true but emotionally and directionally true
• campaign policies are “more persuasion than policy”
• “When Trump’s critics accused him of laziness, ignorance, and cruel intentions, I saw a skilled persuader who knew what mattered and what didn’t.”
• similar talent stack: hypnotist, New Yorker, rich, doesn’t feel shame: “I don’t feel shame or embarrassment like normal people. I wasn’t always this way. It’s a learned skill.”
• “intentional wrongness” directionally accurate (the Wall)
• errors suck up attention and energy
• Persuasion tip 4: “The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.”
• “A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.”
• Persuasion tip 8: “People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.”
• Trump actually thick-skinned having endured a lifetime of it
• Trump’s counterattacking is good persuasion: “It tells people that being his friend is better than being his critic.”
• Response to poor action or words: “Is that the person you want to be?” Higher-Ground Maneuver
• Trump’s slogans, branding, nicknames were sticky, simple, and unusual for politics
• “Fairness is an argument for idiots and children.” [wtf?] ↑

Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik

• “A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, and with them hope of life and divinity, but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying presence of something else—the beautiful and peaceful, yes, but also the mysterious, the strange, the sublime—is a modern taste.”
• “Winter’s persona changes with our perception of safety from it. … The romance of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through.”
• “In the past two hundred years we have turned winter from something to survive to something to survey, from a thing to be afraid of to a thing to be aware of.”
• “The iceberg becomes representative of the ultimate common mystery of the mind—what you don’t see is what counts most—and the snowflake becomes a representation of the radical individualism of each person.”
• “The final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.”
• “We celebrate continuity and want to renew it; we recognize that continuity has its discontents, and want to reverse it.” (re: reversal festivals and renewal feasts)
• “The reason we should be engaged with material life is that our abundance can lead us to acts of altruism.”
• “That’s the complex inheritance of modern Christmas. Our recuperative winter is one in which renewal and reversal, anxiety and abundance, epiphany and uneasiness are knotted together.”
• “The earth does renew itself; we don’t. And so we want to connect our human cycle of mere growth and decay, where winter holds no spring, to the natural cycle of renewal. We can’t do it, of course, but we can’t stop trying.”
• “And in that way the secular holiday, in its secular sequence, rhymes most powerfully with the sacred holiday. The secular holiday is the sacred holiday. I find myself moved by the specificities of this holiday, as we celebrate it now, and if I were pressed to say why, it is because what we celebrate is an idea, though not a simple one. The truth is not that modern people have domesticated and democratized a spiritual impulse, but instead that we have made material an idea that is material at its very core. That is the idea of the Nativity: that the infinite idea, the permanent Presence, the Thing Beyond All Things, might become the finite fact, the impermanent infant, the Thing that Wets Itself at Night, that kid in the corner. We all recognize that human renewal through the newborn child, whether its mother be virginal or merely young, is a glimpse of something amazing and miraculous in itself. Love’s architecture, as Crashaw wrote, is its own. The manger inside us, and the mystery of birth and renewal, imagined as sacred or simply experienced as life, remains miraculous. It can never be parsed by critics, only praised by carols. The bleak midwinter passes as we wing the beauty of the baby. These feelings are tied so deeply to the rhythm of the season, and to the rhythms of human existence that we make within them, that to render them as mere ornament seems adequate to their measure, just as taking them on entirely as dogma seems insulting to their universality. The force of the holiday is the oppression can produce new births, and that a light can go on in the middle of darkness.”
• “One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need the warmth in order to enter the cold, and at Christmas we need the cold in order to reassert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable. If the world has globalized Christmas, Christmas has winterized the world. And so the empire of the winter holiday extends from one end of this continent to another… It is necessary to assert snow in order to evoke sunshine, to make a theatre of winter in order to promise spring, to chill the Baby in order to let him do his thing, to submit to helplessness and winter in order to evoke power and new light. The simplest description of Christmas, which stretches from Scrooge’s social dream to the last chorus of the last bad song sung on Christmas Eve, is perhaps the deepest: it’s a winter holiday meant for kids.”
• “If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely; if we didn’t think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys.”
• “Winter stress makes summer sweetness—and the stress of warm times makes us long for the strange sweetness of cold ones.”
• “Stress makes sweetness, and snow and ice are the frosting of loss.”
• “That feeling that only the thinnest of membranes, the simple pane of glass separating the onlooker—the poet or the painter or the ordinary child—from the threat beyond is one that has receded from our immediate experience.”
• “But instead we give the coldness names, we write it poetry, we play it music, we experience it as a personality—and this is and remains the act of humanism. Armed with that hope, we see not waste and cold but light and mystery and wonder and something called January. We see not stilled atoms in a senseless world. We see winter.”
• “Winter is the white page on which we write our hearts.” ↑

Winter: Notes from Montana by Rick Bass

• “The danger in yielding to thoughts of spring—green grass, hikes, bare feet, lakes, fly-fishing, rivers, and sun, hot sun—is that once these thoughts enter your mind, you can’t get them out. Love the winter. Don’t betray it. Be loyal. When the spring gets here, love it, too—and then the summer. But be loyal to the winter, all the way through—all the way, with sincerity—or you’ll find yourself high and dry, longing for a spring that’s a long way off, and winter will have abandoned you, and in her place you’ll have cabin fever, the worst. The colder it gets, the more you’ve got to love it.”
• “A driving snowstorm, big flakes blowing past, crashing into the woods, swirling in the meadows. They are the currency of winter, and I am the richest man in the world.” ↑

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

• “This is a history of play” “a history of what we do for fun” beyond “daily grind of subsistence”
• “When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze, they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people foxed on more utilitarian concerns.”
• “Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions, it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations that ultimately develop into much sturdier and more significant forms.” “You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.”
• Phoenicia purple dye from snails inspired sailing out of Mediterranean
• 1600s England made protectionist acts to ban calico and protect wool industry; also to eliminate “calico madams” with taste for cotton
• Cotton’s initial success due to fashion over utility
• British shopkeepers with ostentatious displays allowed space for fashion and slow revolution of shopping
• Cotton spawned industrial slavery in 1800s; without it no Civil War?
• Musical technology (bone flutes) almost as old as technology for hunting and warmth: “Aeons before early humans started to imagine writing or agriculture, they were crafting tools for making music. This seems particularly puzzling because music is the most abstract of the arts.”
• Octaves have 2:1 ratio of waveforms; fourth is 4:3, fifth is 3:2
• Music emerged because certain sounds were new, different enough from others: “Because the sound was new, it was interesting, worth repeating, worth tinkering with.”
• Music as auditory cheesecake, or evolutionary value?
• “The pleasure in hearing those captivating sounds doesn’t just establish a demand for more of the same. Instead, music seems to send us out on a quest for new experiences: more of the same, but different.”
• “We don’t need to hear that sound in any existential sense, but nonetheless something about it captures our attention, prods us to seek the experience out in future environments.”
• “The pull of opiates is centripetal; most heroin victims die alone for a reason. But music, like other similar forms of play, is a push: it propels you to seek out new twists. That exploratory, expansive drive is what separates delight from demand: when we are in play mode, we are open to new surprises, while our base appetites focus the mind on the urgent needs of staying alive. Understand that distinction is critical to understanding why play—despite its seemingly frivolous veneer—has led to so many important discoveries and innovations.”
• Map of Muslim spice trade circa 900 CE corresponds almost exactly to map of Islamic populations today
• Doritos chip conglomeration of world flavors; “cosmopolitan melange of flavors”
• Thomas Jefferson brought vanilla ice cream to U.S. via France’s vanilla pods
• Spice trade facilitated plague in 1300s
• Cinema had panoramas, magic shows as ancestors in London West End
• Chess to explain society: “games have a wonderful ability to cross borders”
• Checkmate from Persian for shah-mat; for “king defeat”
• Chess as open source game, spurred probability theory
• Aztec rubber balls formed from naturally occurring latex
• Darwin saw orangutan exhibit dressed as humans: evolution
• “The surge of dopamine that accompanies a novel event sends out a kind of internal alarm in your mind that says: Pay attention. Something interesting is happening here.”
• “Perhaps we have been wrong to worry about what will happen when the machines start thinking for themselves. What we should be really worried about is what will happen when they start to play.”
• [Play = embodied delight] ↑

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher

• “So it came to be that in the world’s earliest libraries, scripture and literature were joined. And indeed, so right was the jointure that literature and scripture would be fashioned with identical root meanings: “that which is writ.” They were two ways of saving the very same thing.”
• “The first great power [of literature] was narrative, or, more colloquially, story. Story connected events.”
• “The second great power of literature was the stirring of emotion: love, wonder, faith. For such was the strength of these feelings that they could fend off life’s mightiest demons.”
• “A technology is any human-made thing that helps to solve a problem.”
• “To be human is to be saddled with the problem of having a human brain. A brain capable of asking vast questions that it cannot answer.”
• “By drawing on literature’s great power of story, these works answered existential doubts with narrative purpose.”
• “[Literature] was a narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology. It was an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.”
• Aristotle’s Poetics preserve invention-finding method consisting to two linked steps: what literature does, and how
• Aristotle saw not just reason as “soul lifter” (per Plato) but wonder (thaumazein); achieved through plot twist
• plot twist is final link in a chain that is straight but feels like a swerve
• Buried in plot twist is the stretch: taking a regular story component (plot, character, setting) and extending it further (regular objects into metaphors, rhythms of speech into poetic meters, humans into heroes)
• Described as self-transcendent experience or (per William James) spiritual
• The stretch linked to decrease in parietal lobe activity (mental representations of self) causing “self-annihilation”; why we “lose ourselves” in stories
• “By immersing our neural circuitry in the feeling of things bigger, they elevate our charity and our happiness, spiriting us closer to a scientific shangri-la.” 
• Catharsis via Greek tragedy important for purging fear; performances of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon including back-and-forth choreography mimicking benefits of EMDR
• Poetics identifies importance of self-efficacy (inner conviction we can deal with fear) via anagnorisis: belated acknowledgement of trauma (aka Hurt Delay)
• Audience’s foreknowledge of Oedipus’s tragedy stimulates sensation of cosmic irony in prefrontal cortex, giving God’s-eye perspective and ability to support — very therapeutic 
• “When we experience our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.”
• Adapting our mind to literature and literature to our mind
• Narrator is the mind behind a story, can inflect a story with tone (ring and timbre of the voice) and taste (preferred subject matter)
• Translating tone/taste from oral to visual created style and focus of literary narrator
• God Voice stretches truth into Truth, law into Law, etc
• Amygdala releases adrenaline in fearful situations, but addition of oxytocin through “tend and befriend” survival strategy with others
• Threefold chest heat of adrenaline, opioids, and oxytocin the “neurochemical elixir” and “heart flame that we hail as courage” 
• Paean (song to a god) combines a massed vocal chorus with holy supplication into courage-creating charge 
• The Iliad a massive paean “designed to stir the latest courage of our heart”
• Scientific formula for love: self-disclosure combined with wonder (wonder becomes less necessary over time)
• Sappho’s intensely personal poetry showed that lyric poetry “could be as mighty as epic, not by incorporating gods and other outside voices, but by revealing more of the I.”
• Sappho also invented secret disclosure on behalf of someone else
• Humans have biological desire for justice; better for long-term health and diversity of our communities
• Empathy is the counterbalance to anger and bitterness of justice obsession; powered by newest neural circuitry of “perspective-taking” cortex
• Empathy is good for mental health, but fickle enough to make us too softhearted; invention of apology helps neutralize negative emotions while honoring fairness 
• Literature’s “special power to carry us inside the minds of others” allows us to see true remorse and generate empathy even for villains 
• “No matter how stern your heart, there are characters in literature whose remorse will ring true. So you don’t just feel the primal zeal of righteousness. You feel the human touch of kindness too.”
• Satire/irony generates detached vantage, which reduces felt intensity of emotional hurts—a mental novocaine (wry humor in soldiers, paramedics, etc)
• Riddles activate wonder and information-seeking neurons 
• When we have some idea of an answer but are unconfident about it, dopamine hit and ravenous curiosity (“This is close-at-hand data that will change everything!”)
• Curiosity crucial for our survival and happiness—generates positive affect
• Medieval Catholic Church embraced allegory (Greek for “speaking other”) because it activated our brain’s spiritual zones and produced wonder; rituals and garments and architecture all meant something more
• Familiar thing in unfamiliar place reminds of home, like home has stretched; unfamiliar thing in familiar place generates paranoia in threat-detection network of parietal lobe
• Per Dante, churchmen used allegory to reveal hidden truth, poets to conceal it; intended The Inferno to trigger paranoia with pagan references within Christian narrative 
• “The Inferno hints at secret it never divulges because Dante believed that the secret was less important than the looking for the secret.”
• Dante wrote: “My poem is an allegory about how we, through our own free choice, are punished or rewarded by Justice.”
• Opposite of poetic justice is lucky twist (deus ex machina), which can generate optimism
• Left-brain optimistic, right-brain pessimistic (not just realistic, which isn’t fully possible with our limited brains)
• Fairy-tale Twist reminds us that we can be lucky, and have been; strengthens our resilience and gratitude 
• Hamlet an example of “Grief Releaser” plot (abandons usual forward momentum for drifting, aimless time of acknowledging grief) and “Guilt Lifter” character (someone else with shared frustration at formulaic condolences and desire to honor uniqueness of the departed)—together the Sorrow Resolver
• Paradox as if we had two sets of eyes, of the body and of the mind; “the feeling of two truths in one”
• Psychedelic: “the stretched-out experience of visual wonder that creates a special feeling in our brain”
• “Our head is thus even more impossible than the philosophers and psychologists knew. Each waking instant is really instants twinned, making every second of our mental life a paradox.”
• “The miracle of the impossible you. The one that glimpses two.”
• Shame, guilt, and pride the “moral” emotions that reinforce ethical codes of community 
• “By imbuing us with a calm confidence in our own Way of being, it can make us less inclined to view alternate Ways as a threat, encouraging us to value other people for what makes them different.”
• Deduction: using general knowledge to draw conclusions about individual cases; induction the reverse
• John Herschel’s 1830 “Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy” married induction and deduction into “a method that established regeneration truths by testing predictions through trial”; the scientific method
• Magical thinking, conformation bias, intellectual insecurity are the ego’s barriers to admitting failure 
• Transporting our brain to a new environment that isn’t associated with our health, social status, or material success can help ego adapt to failures 
• “Read widely in history, memoir, and autobiography, treasuring the uniqueness of every past life you discover while taking a lightly ironic view of your present self. That way, each dawn will bring a chance to celebrate history—and embrace future change.”
• Gratitude has therapeutic potency over failure and misfortune by directing at others over self
• Our brains by default accept things as true before retroactively tagging things as false
• Repetition provokes deja vu and makes our brain self-conscious
• Brain’s “default mode network” for anarchic streams of thought (mind wandering”) when brain not otherwise engaged 
• Soliloquy combines two different inner perspectives into a dialogic monologue; a verbal dramatization of a character’s inner conflict
• Brain’s salience network monitors for internal conflicts to prompt resolution
• Soliloquies help connect to Transcendentalism’s greater human soul 
• “Poetic phrasings release a brain-slowing burst of dopamine wonder that mingles out existing memories with a new mental perspective.”
• “The longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become.”
• Pleasant museum triggers brain’s caudate nucleus to fire dopamine neurons into our nucleus accumbens, dosing is with neurochemical sweet that shares flavor with nicotine, heroin, and cocaine
• Quintilian’s “Institutes of Oratory” laid out “three invention-making techniques, all borrowed from Nature, that our literary pens can imitate”:
  • Embrace happy accidents. “Such accidents lie at the root of all of Nature’s inventions, engineered through evolution’s blind process of lucky mutation and fortuitous environment.”
  • Splice together two old blueprints: Euripides’s tragicomedy, Shakespeare’s dialogic monologue. 
  • Focus on what works, not on what’s “right.” “This is how Nature has produced all of life’s intricate astonishments; natural selection knows no higher reason, only the wing that lifts and the brain that thinks.”
• “Whatever the power of truth may be, literature’s own special power has always lain in fiction, that wonder we construct.” ↑

Woodrow Wilson: A Biography by John Milton Cooper

• Liked the South but hated the Confederacy
• Stressed reason over passion, yet didn’t become conservative because he believed in regulation and restraint of monopolies
• Much preferred politics over law; very intellectual above all
• Had success as Princeton president but also tried to push Quad Plan through too quickly
• Dedication to Quad Plan turned Wilson against conservative Democrats and into a progressive due to class and wealth issues
• Second to last president to write own speeches (Hoover); first to hold regular press conferences
• In first session of Congress got banking reform, antitrust, and tariff legislation (and Fed); huge
• Second term starts with run-up to war. Kept trying to get “peace without victory” but Germany was being difficult
• Didn’t defend free speech during the war or women’s suffrage
• Delegation to subordinates (czars); intellectual ↑

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

• “The company has been around longer than Ford Motors, Betty Crocker, NASCAR, and thirty-three of the fifty American states. It’s more American than football (a British invention) and apple pie (ditto). According to the lore, the flagship product of the company, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is one of the best-selling books in American history and may be second in sales only to the Bible.”
• “Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid.”
• “The process of creating a dictionary is magical, frustrating, brain wrenching, mundane, transcendent. It is ultimately a show of love for a language that has been called unlovely and unlovable.”
• “We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go; it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.”
• “English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.”
• “When a lexicographer says “unless…” in the middle of defining, you should turn out the lights and go home, first making sure you’ve left them a supply of water and enough nonperishable food to last several days. “Unless…” almost always marks the beginning of a wild lexical goose chase.” ↑

The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon

• “I guess all I’m trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation—in other words, language is like love.”
• “It’s comforting to believe that consigning small decisions to a device frees up our brains for more important things. But that begs the question, which things have been deemed more important? And what does our purportedly decluttered mind now allow us to do? Express ourselves? Concentrate? Think? Or have we simply carved out more time for entertainment? Anxiety? Dread?” ↑

A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester

• From foreword by Tom Hanks: “A great work of nonfiction is an enlightening, educational, and entertaining record, a story of the never-ending audaciousness of human nature—of our instinct to either fight, flee, or fix.”
• Dark Ages roughly A.D. 400-1000 
• “Nevertheless, if value judgments are made, it is undeniable that most of what is known about the period is unlovely. After the extant fragments have been fitted together, the portrait which emerges is a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.”
• After fall of Roman Empire, bricklaying disappeared so except for cathedrals no stone buildings in Northern Europe for ten centuries 
• Very little iron so no agricultural tools or horse harnesses; handwork for peasants 
• Wilderness infested by boars, bears, wolves, outlaws—inspiring fairy tales and lawlessness
• “One consequence of medieval peril was that people huddled closely together in communal homes. They married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away.”
• “Despite their bloodthirstiness—a taste which may have been acquired from the Huns, Goths, Franks, and Saxons—all were devout Christians. It was a paradox: the Church had replaced imperial Rome as the fixer of European frontiers, but missionaries found teaching pagans the lessons of Jesus to be an almost hopeless task. Yet converting them was easy. As quickly as the barbaric tribes had overrun the empire, Catholicism’s overrunning of the tribesmen was even quicker.”
• “Medieval Christians, knowing the other cheek would be bloodied, did not turn it.”
• Death was standard penalty for hundreds of offenses, especially property ones
• “Soldiers of Christ swung their swords freely. And the victims were not always pagans. Every flourishing religion has been intermittently watered by the blood of its own faithful, but none has seen more spectacular internecine butchery than Christianity.”
• Medieval Christianity had more in common with paganism than worshipers would acknowledge; Paul and John “profoundly influenced” by Neoplatonism
• Slowly over medieval millennium the Church’s influence over aristocracy increased and solidified, though paganism survived
• “Idol worship addressed needs the Church could not meet. Its rituals, myths, legends, marvels, and miracles were peculiarly suited to people who, living in the trackless fen and impenetrable forest, were always vulnerable to random disaster.”
• Medieval astrologers and magicians flourished; uneasy blend of sacred and pagan
• Medieval world: “If their society was diverse and colorful, it was also anarchic, formless, and appallingly unjust.”
• Time between Roman Empire and Europe as a distinct unit: “The interregnum was the worst of times for the imaginative, the cerebral, and the unfortunate, but the strong, the healthy, the shrewd, the handsome, the beautiful—and the lucky—flourished.“
• “Royalty was invested with glory, swathed in mystique, and clothed with magical powers. … Because the first medieval rulers had been barbarians, most of what followed derived from their customs.”
• Hereditary monarchy largely a medieval innovation 
• Lack of ego/identity for peasants; Fewer than one percent of Christendom were “wellborn” so had no surnames; usually just nicknames since they rarely left their birthplace 
• Rival popes excommunicating each other during Great Schism of 1378-1417 while peasants unaware 
• “The folk were baptized, shriven, attended mass, received the host at communion, married, and received the last rites never dreaming that they should be informed about great events, let alone have ant voice in them. Their anonymity approached the absolute. So did their mute acceptance of it.”
• Renaissance believed to have begun in early 1400s
• “Like all people at all times, they were confronted each day by the present, which always arrives in a promiscuous rush, with the significant, the trivial, the profound, and the fatuous all tangled together.”
• No significant European inventions except waterwheels in 800s and windmills in 1100s
• By 1500: “No startling new ideas had appeared, no new territories outside Europe had been explored. Everything was as it had been for as long as the oldest European could remember. The center of the Ptolemaic universe was the known world—Europe, with the Holy Land and North Africa on its fringes. The sun moved round it every day. Heaven was above the immovable earth, somewhere in the overarching sky; hell seethed far beneath their feet. Kings ruled at the pleasure of the Almighty; all others did what they were told to do. Jesus, the son of God, had been crucified and resurrected, and his reappearance was imminent, or at any rate inevitable. Every human being adored him (the Jews and the Muslims being invisible). During the 1,436 years since the death of Saint Peter the Apostle, 211 popes had succeeded him, all chosen by God and all infallible. The Church was indivisible, the afterlife a certainty; all knowledge was already known. And nothing would ever change. The mighty storm was swiftly approaching, but Europeans were not only unaware of it; they were convinced that such a phenomenon could not exist. Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, they trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew—gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible irresistible vortex since Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.”
• “When the cartographers of the Middle Ages came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote: Beware: Dragons Lurk Beyond Here. They were right, though the menacing dimension was not on maps, but on the calendar. It was time, not space. There the fiercest threats to their medieval mind-set waited in ambush.”
• Magellan born in Portugal but renounced it for Seville; sailed under colors of Castile and Aragon
• King Carlos I of Spain (also elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) commissioned Magellan to claim Spice Islands in Indonesia from Portugal; reward would be two of the islands and five percent of all profits 
• “Death is always a misfortune, at least to the man who has to do the dying.”
• Possible/likely that Magellan’s true but unspoken motive but was circumnavigation
• Spices made valuable preservatives that could disguise odor and taste of spoiled meat, hence imperial motivations
• “At any given moment the most dangerous enemy in Europe was the reigning pope. … Ruthless in their pursuit of political power and personal gain, they were medieval despots who used their holy office for blackmail and extortion.”
• Lots of “recreational homicide” and betrayals; “If such slaughters were remarkable, so was the alacrity with which the Eternal City forgot them.”
• “Iniquitous regimes do not perpetuate themselves in disciplined societies, nor does a strong, pure, holy institution, supported by centuries of selflessness and integrity, abruptly find itself wallowing in corruption. Vice, no less than virtue, arises from precedents.”
• “Over the thirteen centuries since Christianity’s rise to power the Church had lost its way because the wrong criteria had insinuated themselves into its sanctuaries, turning piety into blasphemy, supplanting worship with scandal, and substituting the pursuit of secular power for eternal grace.”
• “Philanthropy, one of the Church’s most admirable virtues, had become another source of vitiation. Donations poured in from the faithful, and the unspent wealth was passed up to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, where it accumulated and led to dissipation, debauchery, and—because spendthrifts are always running out of funds—demands for still more money.”
• Europe covered with forests 
• 73 million people in Europe in 1500; 20 million in Germany and surrounding states (aka the Holy Roman Empire, 15 in France, 13 million in Italy, 8 in Spain, 4.5 in England/Wales
• In 1500 the three largest cities were Paris, Naples, and Venice at 150k each
• Germany’s First Reich from mid-1400s a cultural nation of 300 different states; Second Reich a nation-state by Otto con Bismarck from 1870-1918; Third Reich Hitler’s Nazi Germany
• No correctional institutions, just maiming, the lash, execution
• Town wall first line of defense, donjon/keep last refuge
• Rise of merchants a sign of fading feudal past and dominance of knights 
• 80-90% of population lives in villages of less than 100 people, 15-20 miles apart
• Average of three years of harvest for every one of famine; dinner at 10am and supper at 5pm; lots of black bread, soup, beer or wine 
• Average height a few inches over 5 feet, 135 pounds weight; over 6 feet a giant
• Clothing served as uniform and designated status; different colors/symbols for lepers, prostitutes, penitents, heretics, Jews
• “Each man knew his place, believed it had been foreordained in heaven, and was aware that what he wore must reflect it.”
• “The distinction between devotion and superstition has always been unclear, but there was little blurring here. Although they called themselves Christians, medieval Europeans were ignorant of the Gospels. The Bible existed only in a language they could not read. The mumbled incantations at Mass were meaningless to them. They believed in sorcery, witchcraft, hobgoblins, werewolves, amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from pagans.”
• “At any moment, under any circumstances, a person could be removed from the world of the senses to a realm of magic creatures and occult powers. Every natural object possessed supernatural qualities. Books interpreting dreams were highly popular.”
• Witchcraft/superstitions accepted as manifestations of Satan; “The Prince of Darkness, it taught, was as real as the Holy Trinity. Certainly belief in him was useful; prelates agreed that when it came to keeping the masses on the straight and narrow, fear of the devil was a stronger force than the love of God.”
• Travel was slow, expensive, uncomfortable, perilous; slowest for coaches, faster walking, fastest horses
• Due to arranged marriages and divorce forbidden, adultery among aristocracy was “considered almost obligatory”
• Contemporary account: “Sodomy was frequent, prostitution was general, and adultery was almost universal.”
• “In an ideal world, genius should not require the largess of wicked pontiffs, venal cardinals, and wanton contessas. But these men of genius did not live in such a world, and neither has anyone else. In art the end has to justify the means, because artists, like beggars, have no choice.”
• “It is incontestable that the Continent’s most powerful rulers in the early sixteenth century were responsible for great crimes. It is equally true that had this outraged the painters and sculptors of their time we would have lost a heritage beyond price. Botticelli pocketed thousands of tainted ducats from Lorenzo de’ Medici and gave the world The Birth of Venus. In both temperament and accomplishments Pope Julius Il was closer to Genghis Khan than Saint Peter, but because that troubled neither Raphael nor Michelangelo, they endowed us with the Transfiguration, David, the Pietà, and The Last Judgment. They took their money, ran to their studios, and gave to the world masterpieces which have enriched civilization for five hundred years.”
• Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus) determined earth was moving rather than center of universe; published in 1514 and initially supported by humanist Pope Leo X but after death denounced by Bible-quoting Martin Luther, John Calvin
• Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg agreed to publish Copernicus but only with disclaimer that it was a hypothesis; Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno asserted it as fact and was burned at the stake, then Copernicus was banned until 1828
• “Da Vinci, like Copernicus, threatened the certitude that knowledge had been forever fixed by God, the rigid mind-set which left no role for curiosity or innovation. Leonardo’s cosmology, based on what he called saper vedere (knowing how to see) was, in effect, a blunt instrument assaulting the fatuity which had, among other things, permitted a mafia of profane popes to desecrate Christianity.”
• “Medieval minds retained the orbs and maces of authority, yet they could not cope with men like Copernicus and Leonardo.”
• In 1513 at 61 Leonardo da Vinci sought patronage from Vatican but denied due to negative reputation (human dissections and other unchurchy research); Frances I of France invited him as official artist 
• “Before the dense, overarching, suffocating medieval night could be broken, the darkness had to be pierced by the bright shaft of learning—by literature, and people who could read and understand it.”
• Chinese designed wooden typography before 1066 for money; Muslims introduced paper manufacturing as early as 900s
• Johannes Gutenberg Gensfleisch introduced movable type with Bible in 1458; “Gutenberg had built a bonfire in Mainz, and printers throughout Christendom flocked to kindle their torches from it.”
• Vast majority of books made in 1500s were in Latin because it was still the language of international communication 
• Niccolò Machiavelli was a devout Christian and Florentine whose The Prince (1513) “reveals profound insight into human nature and an acute grasp of political reality in the scene he saw”; mistakenly interpreted as cynical and immoral 
• “The reawakening—the establishing of new ties with the gems of antiquity—was one of the great triumphs of the Renaissance. Its first seeds had been sown early in the fourteenth century, with the rediscovery of Latin classics; then the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 gave impetus to the revival of Greek learning.”
• “The French refined it to la Renaissance des lettres, and though its leaders embraced more than literature—they sought the reemergence of all the lost learning of the old world, including the flowering of art, esthetics, mathematics, and the beginnings of modern science—the heaviest emphasis was on reverence for classical letters, the poetical and philosophical Hellenic heritage, scholarly purity, and the meticulous translation of the ancient manuscripts retrieved in Athens and Rome.”
• “All this ferment led to that rarest of cultural phenomena, an intellectual movement which alters the course of both learning and civilization.”
• Humanists of the 16th century, 17th century rationalism, 18th century Enlightenment, Marxism in 19th century, pragmatism and empiricism in the 20th century
• Martin Luther: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it struggles against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
• “If you were a believer, you never subjected piety to the test of logic. Intellectuals, however, found logic an irresistible attraction, and therein lay their menace.“
• “Belief in a life everlasting lay at the very center of Christianity. To true Christians, life on earth was almost irrelevant. During it they obeyed the precepts of Catholicism to safeguard their future in paradise, disciplined by the fear that if they didn’t, they might lose it. The thought of living for the sheer sake of living, celebrating mortal existence before God took them onto his own, was subversive of the entire structure. Yet that was precisely the prospect humanism offered.”
• “Those who translate revolutionary concepts into action are never as acceptable, or even as respectable, as those who expressed themselves indirectly.” (Renaissance artists vs. scholars)
• “Reflective men make uncomfortable prosecutors. By nature and by training, they tend to see the other side and give it equal weight.”
• Martin Luther a professor of philosophy at Wittenberg and devout Catholic in 1517 when he encountered Pope Leo’s sales of indulgences 
• Joined the Church as rebellion against anticlerical, abusive, and pagan parents 
• Conceived of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith while on the toilet
• “In Wittenberg, as in many university towns of the time, the church door was customarily used as a bulletin board; an academician with a new religious theory would post it there, thus signifying his readiness to defend it against all challengers.”
• Posted 95 Theses the day before All Saints’ Day, which would draw a crowd anyway, and circulated German translation 
• Luther had challenged pope’s powers as grand magician; coupled with peasants learning more about Christ’s sympathies through fragmentary Gospels created class division as well
• 144 “Luther was discovering that he had become the voice of millions who suffered doubly from the Renaissance popes; impoverished by highwaymen like Tetzel, they also grieved for their beloved faith, desecrated by rogues in vestments. From this point forward, his wrath and theirs would join, gathering in volume and strength as together they confronted the most powerful symbol of authority Europe had ever known.”
• After Theses, back and forth with Rome until Luther summoned by Pope Leo X; declined and got protection from Habsburg emperor Maximilian (anticlerical sentiment was increasing in Germany)
• Pope instead ordered Luther to confer with cardinal in Augsburg; Luther expected to discuss reforms but only got discipline of recantation, which he refused and had to flee city
• 153 “Historians agree that Luther could have been swiftly crushed had the pope moved decisively in his role as Vicar of Christ, the spiritual head of Christendom. Instead he dallied, vacillated, became engrossed in minor matters, and spent too many late evenings with his books. Leo X was no Borgia. In many ways he was more admirable than Martin Luther. Head of the Medici family, a poet and a man of honor, he was a leading patron of the Renaissance, a connoisseur of art, a scholar steeped in classical literature, and a pontiff tolerant enough to chuckle as he read the satires of Erasmus, appreciative that the humanist had observed the gentlemanly rule under which learned men of that time were free to write as they pleased, provided they confined themselves to Latin, leaving the unlettered masses undisturbed.”
• Leo X was superficial, spendthrift, lacked judgment, waited 3 years after Theses to issue ultimatum 
• Vatican’s “systemic looting” of German taxpayers, industries, and noblemen inspired increased anticlericism; “rather than kindle an uprising” there the Curia exempted Germany from the Inquisition
• Luther’s Theses were based on theological differences, but with his later tracts written in nascent German for common people, conflict became about Roman imperialism and economic extortion
• Von Miltitz, spokesman for the pope, offered Luther reconciliation through letter to pope denying malice; he wrote a bridge-burner 
• At trial in Worms in January 1521, with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V presiding, Luther refused to recant or repudiate his writings (“Here I stand. I can do no other.”)
• Though guaranteed safety on trip home with safe-conduct from pope, Frederick the Wise disguised his soldiers as highwaymen and staged false ambush to shepherd Luther away to castle under false name 
• Charles V ordered Luther’s writings eradicated and got Pope Leo to switch allegiance to Spain in coming war with France, but left — allowing Lutheran movement to flourish; “The monk and the movement he had launched had grown too powerful to be suppressed. The emperor tried mightily, but it would be his dying effort, and medieval Christendom would die with him.”
• Lutheran movement swept Northern Europe (Spain, Italy, Ireland excepted); upon renouncing allegiance to Rome, German nobility reclaimed church wealth and land
• “The various diets and councils which met throughout the century to discuss tolerance—and eventually granted it, accepting the historic schism—were discussing the rights of rulers, not the ruled. Religious freedom for the individual lay centuries away. It did not even exist as an abstraction.”
• Protestant divisions appeared quickly but shared principles: “renunciation of papal rule; replacing Latin with common tongues; the abandonment of celibacy, pilgrimages, adoration of the Virgin and the saints; and, of course, condemnation of the old clergy.”
• Free will/predestination a major sticking point; Luther a determinist but John Calvin et al Reformed
• “New sects formed, each with its own views of worship, each as intolerant of the others as it was of Rome, each as repressive as Catholicism. … In the spirit of the time, they celebrated their spiritual rebirths violently. Tirades led to recriminations, then to public executions.”
• Luther wrote to Erasmus as an admirer for support to which he replied: “Old institutions cannot be uprooted in an instant. Quiet argument may do more than wholesale condemnation. Avoid all appearance of sedition. Keep cool. Do not get angry. Do not hate anybody.” Both men misjudged each other 
• “Intuition, though it fuels action, is volatile and therefore dangerous.”
• “The Martinians, as Luther’s followers called themselves, accepted what was coming to be known as the Zwickau Dogma, named after the town in which it originated. The dogmatists held that God spoke directly to simple men in simple language, that they instinctively understood him, and that the true Christian spurned literature, even reading and writing.”
• “Intolerance, contempt for learning, the burning of religious art, the rejection of classical culture as pagan, and the adoption of primitive papal tactics—book burning, excommunication, even death at the stake—alienated humanists who had at first defended Luther”
• Post-Reformation Protestant city-states (Calvin’s Geneva) became theocratic police states: “It was a consummate irony of the Reformation that the movement against Rome, which had begun with an affirmation of individual judgment, now repudiated it entirely.”
• Pope Leo died in 1521 at 46 with fever; unknown Dutch reformer Adrian of Utrecht elected as Adrian VI to break 3-way tie; attempted reforms but thwarted and died a year later; Leo’s cousin elected as Clement VII
• Charles V’s troops of mercenaries sacked and plundered Rome in 1527
• William Tyndale a 34 year old English clergyman who made English translation of New Testament; had to find printer in France and was later executed by Henry VIII
• Henry VIII vehemently anti-Protestant; requested honorific from Pope and got Defender of the Faith, which remains today 
• Henry VIII requested papal dispensation to divorce based on precedent of marrying his brother’s widow against scripture; Pope Clement had to defer to Charles V since surrounded by Holy Roman Empire and Charles V was nephew of Henry’s wife Catherine 
• Anne Boleyn pregnant so Henry declared Catherine a divorcée, crowned Anne, pushed through anti-Catholic legislation; Pope excommmunicated him 
• Anne Boleyn birthed a daughter (future Elizabeth I) and deformed stillborn boy so executed 
• Magellan’s lack of tact or guile cost him support of Portugal’s Manuel I, so went to Spain’s Carlos I, soon to be Charles V Holy Roman Emperor 
• “History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.”
• Threads of collapse of medieval world: religious revolution, fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, humanist discovery of classical civilization, growth of commerce and expansion of middle class, strengthening monarchies and nation-states, science and Copernican view, exploration and global discovery 
• Jerome Wolf, 1575: “No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the universe.”
• Portugal and Spain had contributed little to western civilization until explorers, which they yielded almost all; “Within thirty years—a single generation—a few hundred small ships weighing anchor in Lisbon, Palos, and Sanlúcar discovered more of the world than had all mankind in all the millennia since the beginning of time.”
• Iberian interest in finding route to India and spices that didn’t go through bottleneck of Middle East; in 1497 Vasco da Gama first to arrive there via Cape of Good Hope
• “For more than a century the economic consequences of this commercial revolution—for that is what it amounted to—were more spectacular than the discoveries of Columbus and his successors in what was coming to be known as the New World.”
• Based on anecdata Magellan believed a strait to the Pacific was a lot farther north than it really was; 1519 expedition searched Brazilian coast to no avail
• Magellan resolute as captain and intentionally provoked revolts; Spaniard sailors and officers distrustful of Portuguese 
• Finally reached Strait of Magellan; low on supplies but continued on, with one ship lost and another mutinied and returned to Europe 
• Previous explorers could always return to Europe but once into the Pacific he had no fallback yet vastly underestimated understanding of true width of ocean
• Six months to cross Pacific; landed at Guam on death’s door for provisions just in time
• Magellan acquired slave Enrique in Malaya in 1512 and had circumnavigated with him since; first proof of spherical earth 
• Magellan sought to curry favor with converted local tribe by fighting their enemies, but his ego, religious fervor, and poor planning led him and troops into a slaughter 
• Only one ship of the original five returned, with 18 emaciated sailors out of 265 three years previous
• Captain Juan Sebastian del Cano had led mutiny against Magellan but was now canonized for returning home and given credit for circumnavigation by Charles V
• Expedition logs by Francisco Albo and remaining survivors eventually exposed truth 
• “The most barefaced lies die hard when influence and prejudice have a vested interest in them.”
• Disagreement about date with Portuguese at Cape Verde Islands eventually revealed expedition had gained 24 hours in westward circumnavigation – proved Copernicus right
• “Magellan was not there to savor the moment, but it was his finest. In many ways it was the crowning triumph of the age, the final, decisive blow to the dead past. Those with the most to lose ignored their defeat, denied the discovery, and denounced those who endorsed it as heretics.”
• Circumnavigation and confusion of dates reported to pope, who rejected obvious conclusion due to conflict with scripture
• “Patristic mulishness could not diminish the glory of the armada’s achievement. The power of the medieval mind was forever broken. Medieval certitude had been weakened by the Renaissance. Nationalism, humanism, rising literacy, the new horizons of trade—all these had challenged blind, ritualistic allegiance to the assumptions of a thousand years.”
• “Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe. Since the earth was revolving daily, heaven and hell could not be located where they had been thought to be, and in rational minds there was a growing skepticism that either of them existed.”
• “The specter of skepticism haunts shrines and altars. Worshipers want to believe, and most of the time they persuade themselves that they do. But suppressing doubt is hard. Secular society makes it harder. Hardest of all is the sense of loss, the knowledge that the serenity of medieval faith, and the certitude of everlasting glory, are forever gone.” ↑

Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents by Robert Strauss

• Went to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania
• Aimed at law: went to bustling Lancaster to practice (almost PA capital)
• Two terms in Pennsylvania Assembly during War of 1812: fell in with Federalists in heavily Democratic state
• Went back to Lancaster for property law and got engaged to Ann Coleman, but innuendo about Buchanan eyeing another young woman led to broken engagement and Ann’s suicide soon after, by “hysteria”
• Switched to Democrats from Federalists in 1824 Congress when Federalists didn’t field a candidate
• Involved with Jackson, Clay, and Calhoun; thought might be Jackson’s VP in 1832 but was appointed to Russia minister instead because Jackson didn’t trust him
• Sent to Russia to fail, basically, he secured first U.S. treaty with Czar Nicholas via charm and luck
• Secretary of State under Polk, then in and out of presidential race in 1844, 1848, and 1852
• Big party host as Secretary of State (more domestic administrative post then)
• Led in delegates in 1852 but to break logjam put up Franklin Pierce as dark horse, who ended up winning
• Ambassador to Britain after 1852 election, kept him out of Kansas/Nebraska imbroglio
• Day before inauguration Congress passed Tariff Bill of 1857, which lowered tariffs and what Buchanan wanted, but caused Panic of 1857
• Dred Scott decision, which Buchanan influenced to be broad and decision in order to end slavery debate, came 2 days after inauguration and did anything but ↑

The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick

• Nile flooded every year, creating wealthy green oasis surrounded by desert 
• Pharaohs reigned from 3100 BC to 30 BC when Cleopatra committed suicide 
• “For Europeans, Egypt conjured up a hodgepodge of beauty (Cleopatra!) and grandeur (the pyramids!) and mystery (the Sphinx!). All this was seasoned with a soupçon of shivery horror (mummies!) that amped up the excitement.”
• Hieroglyphs considered a mystical form of writing conveying profound truths instead of mundane language, like math of today; in contrast to derided cuneiform 
• Rise of Christianity and Constantine’s conversion in 300s ensured fall of hieroglyphs and polytheism 
• Last hieroglyphs inscribed in 394 AD
• Cathedrals of Middle Ages the first man-made structures to stand taller than the pyramids 
• France had invaded Egypt in 1798 with young general Napoleon; French soldiers repairing broken down fort in Nile delta (French called the town Rosetta) spotted the stone among rubble 
• Stone had originally been placed in a temple in 196 BC, which was destroyed several centuries later; reused in 1470 AD for new fort
• “The laborers who wrestled the stones into place may have ignored the Rosetta Stone’s inscriptions. Possibly they never noticed them. In any event, they set the stone in position alongside countless others, an anonymous block in an anonymous wall in an anonymous fort. This was akin to using a Gutenberg Bible as a doorstop.”
• “Learning to read takes work. That thrusts each of us into the heart of the Rosetta Stone story, because every one of us has performed almost precisely the same kind of decoding that finally cracked the Egyptian case—every new reader struggling to bring life to the squiggles in The Cat in the Hat is a pint-sized counterpart of the brilliant sleuths who first wrestled with hieroglyphs. Reading is deciphering, and we are all linguistic detectives. Each of us has worked at Bletchley Park.”
• How to explain Egypt’s appeal compared to other ancient cultures? Scale (like dinosaurs), mysterious but not out of reach
• Egyptian obsession with death and the afterlife: showed they relished life and happy assurance of defeating mortality; also may be overestimated because tombs and cemeteries were relegated to dry (preserved) desert edges compared to towns in wet fertile ground 
• Pyramids were built by free men, not slaves and not Jews 
• Egyptians knew of the wheel from neighboring empires for centuries but chose not to use it for a long time; culture and art was conservative 
• Napoleon wanted crown jewel for France and himself; brought cadre of scientists, artists, scholars (savants) to observe and civilize 
• France’s fleet at Alexandria destroyed by Royal Navy under Horatio Nelson, stranding them
• Supervisor of fort rebuilding (Bouchard) both a savant and soldier so luckily and uniquely qualified to notice significance
• Inscriptions from 196 BC; Greek portion crammed with tributes to teenaged pharaoh Ptolemy V, “like the flip side of the list of King George’s misdeeds in the Declaration”
• Last lines decreed should be inscribed in “the writing of the words of the gods [hieroglyphs], the writing of documents [mysterious middle section (Egyptian demotic)], and the writing of the Ionians [Greek]”
• Napoleon secretly abandoned army to return to France to manufactured glory; remaining savants eagerly explored the country documenting relics 
• Denon an aristocrat turned savant who drew temples, monuments, and copied hieroglyphs for posterity: “Mine is an ardent piety, a blind zeal ultimately to be compared only to that of vestals of old who prayed, believed, and adored in a foreign language they did not understand.”
• Drawings savants made in 3 years in Egypt would prove invaluable and historic
• Remaining French army surrendered to British in 1801 and had to forfeit booty, including Stone; took big stuff but let savants keep their drawings and collections 
• “The Rosetta Stone is the ultimate message in a bottle, adrift on the waves of time more than two thousand years before it was finally found. It was not intended as a message for a far-off audience; the idea was that it would be read at once, where it stood. But its discovery so many centuries after the disappearance of Egyptian culture makes it seem almost like the first-ever communication from an alien world.”
• “Decipherers’ tools are intuition, experience, and deep knowledge, but they could never even get started without the archaeologists and explorers who bring back inscriptions from musty tombs and half-buried temples. This makes for odd partnerships. Will Shortz, meet Indiana Jones.”
• International cooperation was complicated by the wars and disorder of Napoleonic Europe
• Savants, sponsored by French government, published multivolume Description of Egypt in 1828
• British Thomas Young and French Jean-Francois Champollion 
• Young read article about Chinese language creating words for foreign names out of individual Chinese sounds of the name; insight led to finding foreign name Ptolemy in hieroglyphs throughout surrounded by cartouches (ovals)
• Young continued making discoveries, some inadvertent: found “pharaoh” but thought it was “temple” or “great house”; but Egyptians called pharaoh “great house” (per-aa… pharaoh)
• “Stories of invention or discovery always get the balance wrong, because a true picture would linger on false starts and futile wandering, and not on the ever-so-rare breakthroughs. No reader could put up with so disheartening a tale. After the truth has finally been found, Einstein once remarked, “the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and final emergence into light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”
• Qualities needed for codebreaking/deciphering: brainpower, doggedness, infinite tolerance for drudgery, gift for making sudden leaps of imagination 
• Historian Stephen Budiansky: “The ideal cryptanalyst is Beethoven with the soul of an account; or vice versa.”
• Hieroglyph = Greek for “sacred engraving”
• Horapollo an Egyptian priest around 400 AD who wrote book on hieroglyphs (long after their obsolescence); asserted hieroglyphs were emblems/allegories not writing and his scholarship was considered sacred for centuries after Greek translation discovered in 1419
• Impulse and bias to treat hieroglyphs as mystical symbols instead of writing delayed discovery for centuries 
• “With hindsight, it seems bewildering that deep thinkers insisted even into the Age of Science that hieroglyphs concealed mystic truths behind elaborate masks. The trouble began with misplaced faith. Plutarch and Horapollo and the others were names to reckon with, and the trappings of antiquity gave added weight to their pronouncements. Though they had lived long after the days of the pharaohs, they were still a thousand years closer to their Egyptian sources than the European scholars who echoed their words. Renaissance writers deferred to them much as theologians of their era deferred to the founders of the church.”
• Conventional renaissance assumption was that the Egyptians were deep bold thinkers and hieroglyphs were to conceal mysteries from unworthy 
• “Every generation patronizes its predecessors for having been so dim, forgetting that soon enough it will be our turn to stand in the corner and feel foolish.”
• Hieroglyphs used visual puns and rebuses (words represented by combos of pictures and letters), and homonyms that tripped up scholars 
• “Hieroglyphs were not only redundant, as it turned out, but extravagantly and outlandishly redundant. Hieroglyphic writing is one of those intellectual structures, like subatomic physics, that grow ever stranger as you delve deeper.”
• “We tend to think of the alphabet as the ultimate in writing systems. The hard-to-shake notion is that the history of writing is a long saga of crude ideas culminating in the alphabet, in much the way of those evolutionary charts that show an awkward creature heaving itself ashore and then a series of misshapen, hairy ape-men gradually straightening themselves up on the long climb to … us. Evidently that’s wrong. Though writing was invented independently several times—in China, the Middle East, and the New World—scholars believe that the alphabet was invented only once and then spread across the globe. But the rise of the alphabet had little to do with its peculiar merits and a great deal to do with the rise and fall of empires. If history had taken a different turn and the Maya or the Chinese had conquered Europe, they would have imposed their character-based scripts on the locals (along with their language and their customs). Alphabets, whatever their virtues, would have sunk into disuse.”
• “So the hieroglyphic system of writing, which was indeed complicated, redundant, and inconsistent, flourished even so. Partly, as we have seen, because hieroglyphs turned out to have merits that compensated for the drawbacks. One merit stood above all the others. Hieroglyphic script was beautiful, and people will endure a great deal for the sake of beauty. In hieroglyphic writing more than in many scripts, aesthetics were crucial. Appearance trumped convenience.” ↑