Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: July 2026

Going to see a lot of carry-over into next month with this one — for whatever reason, I had, like, a two-week pause in going through new music, and then caught up on it all on the 28th, so I haven’t really had time to get to know the latter chunk of this list.

Check out the entire playlist here, and see commentary on individual tracks below:

Categories
Review

“Why Nothing Works”

Marc J. Dunkelman

I’m of two minds about this book. It has definite positives—within the subtitle, “who killed progress—and how to bring it back,” it did a pretty good job of answering the first question.

The books thesis is that, within the ‘progressive’ movement, there’s two approaches to what should be done with power: the Hamiltonian, centralizing power, and the Jeffersonian, decentralizing it. The New Deal was Hamiltonian, creating agencies with sprawling powers to fix the problems facing the nation. But Robert Moses was also a Hamiltonian figure, who sure could get stuff done, but didn’t have much regard for if that stuff was worth doing. And so, in response to the failures of that Hamiltonian mode, we have the Jeffersonian, which I think is best embodied by the National Environmental Policy Act; it created an ability for individuals to block projects on the grounds that the environmental impacts were too great. Which, y’know, was quite often a good thing. But that same Jeffersonian approach has gotten us to where we are now, with the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world, because everyone can block everything, so every big project gets dragged through court time and time again.

My first issue is the degree to which the book discards the impact of people outside the progressive movement. Conservatives do, in fact, exist, and have frequently held both Congress and the Presidency. They’ve got a pretty solid lock on the judiciary of late, too. So acting as though the only source of this Jeffersonian gridlock is progressives is a bit irritating—especially since this same Hamilton/Jefferson divide can work just as well as a lens to examine conservative politics! It’s easy to equate the GOP’s “party of small government” stance with the Jeffersonian plan for power, but they have their Hamiltonian moments as well.

My second issue is the latter part of the subtitle, “how to bring it back.” Because that’s barely touched on at all. The conclusion has a bit of it, but by and large this book exists to point out the problem and state that, golly, we should really work on that. And, yes, there’s value to it; I’m a life-long progressive, but hadn’t ever thought of this ‘balance of power’ question, and now I’m aware of it and thinking about it. It’s perfectly fine for the book’s goal to be drawing attention to the issue, putting some framing around it so we can actually discuss it and figure out our approach to fixing it. But if that’s the goal, the subtitle is marketing it very wrong.

Still, though, I found it quite a useful piece of framing, and genuinely did find value in reading it. So, having spent most of the duration of this review talking about what I didn’t like about the book, I’m still going to recommend it. Worth reading.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Curbing Traffic”

Melissa Bruntlett & Chris Bruntlett

I think my favorite line in this book came from the conclusion:

Sure, the Dutch have had a five-decade head start, but that means they’ve shown what is possible if decision makers take risks and put people first.

Because everything leading up to that is, basically, a paean to the Dutch approach to city planning and traffic engineering. Which does mean that me reading this is the choir going to stand where they can be preached at; I’m already sold on the argument they’re making throughout the book. I already know that car-centric infrastructure is inefficient, expensive, and makes for bad built environments. I don’t need to read a chapter about noise pollution. I don’t need to read a chapter about resilience in transportation network design. I already know this stuff!

But there was also plenty of new things in there. The entire first chapter is about the benefits to children, the increase in safety and the ability to develop independence that’s missing in the American “indoor children” or “backseat children” options. So, in that sense, it was useful for me—my own ability to argue for this stuff has been improved. Beyond that, though, now I have a book I can point to when someone wants to know why I’m at the very bottom of the urban planning opinion progression.1

For the most part, I enjoyed this book; the biggest negative was that, in a couple spots, I had to stop to be angry at American civil planning. Not only would I say it’s worth the read, I would actively encourage all of my readers to check it out.2

  1. I’m not kidding. There’s a spot on my favorite bike route where the pedestrian and bike zones are just painted on the pavement, and quite often, a semi truck (bonus points: delivering a load of Teslas) will park on them, forcing pedestrians and cyclists both to swerve out into the car lanes. I have had to be talked out of buying caltrops before, and likely will again. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Photography United States

Photos: June-July

I’ve really been diving back in to photography lately, as I’d previously mentioned. Turns out having a creative outlet is a lot of fun! Who knew?

While I post things fairly regularly on my Glass profile (and wow, I hadn’t actually looked at their web UI, beautiful layout there, well done them), the only acknowledgement of it I’ve had here is occasionally, silently, adding new things to my list of available prints. You can tell it’s not intended as my primary source of income by the way I am absolutely terrible at promoting it.

(Guy who has next to no social media presence and just quietly blogs into the void doesn’t like self-aggrandizement; more at eleven.)

That said, in the same way I do my monthly playlists, I’m going to try to do the occasional “here’s the latest photos” post on here, as well. In the interest of not needing to shuffle around my far-too-deep queue of book review posts, I’m just going to throw ’em out whenever, rather than fit into my usual Saturday-morning schedule.

Without further ado, some of the photos I’ve taken lately that I enjoyed:

Ape Caves

Hiking through Ape Caves! It’s a very cool (literally – underground is a pretty constant temperature regardless of what’s happening outside, so it was a bit chilly down there) hike to do. Also a great change to play around with the settings on your camera, and figure out how to do long exposures. (Long exposures: pretty easy. Getting the auto-focus to stop screwing things up: shockingly difficult. I miss the ‘auto/manual’ switch on the T3i.)

And, to do some cross-promotion, my favorite photo from that whole expedition, which is available as a print.

Cave

$50.00

Willamette River

I mentioned that selling prints isn’t my day job, yes? My actual day job had a summer “picnic” on the Portland Spirit. I wasn’t the only one who brought a camera along, nor was I the only one who quite enjoyed looking at all the bridges — programmers are a certain sort of person, after all. From the water was a different angle than I usually get, though, which made it quite fun.

Marquam

$50.00

Olympia

… was what I called this trip in my mind, but I never actually got up to Olympia, it was just the Olympia area.

While hiking around Mima Falls, I wound up stumbling into doing some approximately-macro photography! Not something I’ve really tried before, at all, so I had a lot of fun trying it in a few different places along the hike.

Turns out foxglove is a very pretty flower! Just don’t, y’know, ingest any. Unless like you like cardiac arrest.

While I’m normally not a huge fan of graffiti, it is an art form, and sometimes the results are deeply touching, even when they’re very simple.

I Did

$50.00

Also went up to Tumwater Falls, which is along the secret, second Deschutes River in the Pacific Northwest! (It’s not really a secret, I just didn’t know about it.)

An absolutely beautiful park, this, built around some old industrial works that were, of course, built around the falls. Get enough water dropping enough distance, and someone will have used it to drive machinery.

Pacific City

The Oregon Coast is a beautiful place, and Pacific City is no exception. This was a group trip with friends, and we got there well before sunset, but it was the sunset colors that really caught my eyes as I was going through the (couple hundred — I’m a “storage is cheap” sort of photographer) photos I took over the course of the day.

Towards the end of the day, the wind and chill were getting to be enough, and we decided to put out our fire and head home. One of the steps of this was grabbing a driftwood log that hadn’t been in the fire, but had been near enough to start smoldering, and getting rid of that fire hazard by… tossing it in the water.

I couldn’t help but call this a “viking burial”, in my mind, because what else would I call it? It’s a piece of wood, being launched out to see at sunset, spewing smoke (well, steam, but close enough) as it drifts away.

Viking

$50.00

That’s it for my recent photography. I’ll probably do another of these in a month or two — this write-up has taken me a surprising amount of time, and even with the effort put in, it still feels quite odd to mix in all those ‘add to cart’ buttons.

(And, as an aside, which doesn’t at all help with that feeling: if any of the photos above that don’t have an ‘add to cart’ button are one that you think should, let me know – I do, in fact, read the comments here.)

Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope you enjoyed coming along on these various outings.

Categories
Review

“On Freedom”

Timothy Snyder

It is summer 1976, a sunny afternoon on an Ohio farm. Wisps of cloud flit across the sky; gravel presses underfoot. A boy of six, going on seven, stands in line next to a farmhouse to ring a bell: the me that I once was, full of futures.

This is a beautifully-written book about all kinds of things, but I think the core discussion that sticks with me is the distinction between positive and negative freedom—the difference of freedom to and freedom from. And I truly won’t be able to do it justice, if I try to summarize any more than that; this is a book that I’ll be chewing on for a while, I think. It’s certainly not a light read, but it’s one well worth reading. Give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Subprime Attention Crisis”

Tim Hwang

The core thesis of this book is that the online advertising marketplace looks a whole lot like the financial marketplace looked in the lead-up to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. I found it to be a fairly compelling argument, honestly; surveillance capitalism has built these massive machines of privacy destruction, and yet here I am, barely ever seeing ads, and those that I do see have no correlation to me or my interests. And, sure, not everyone has a Rube Goldberg machine swatting away adtech, but ad blockers in general are quite common, and everyone has had the experience of buying a product and then seeing exclusively ads for the same product for the next couple of weeks. Is that really value? Has the manufacturer’s money been well spent?

This was an interesting read overall; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: June 2026

I had honestly entirely forgotten this was Pride Month, but as it turns out, I’m really starting to collect queer country artists, so I guess I was accidentally celebrating it a little bit.

As usual, you can listen to the entire playlist, and read below for my commentary on a few tracks.

  1. My theory: Wesko is queer.
    My evidence: Hunting Ghosts is clearly in the country sub-genre of “sad country boy sings about his ex.” In the music video, so far as I’m able to tell, the ghost is played by a man.
    Where it turned into a conspiracy wall: I went through the lyrics of every track on that EP, and a couple other tracks from his oeuvre, and he generally does a great job of avoiding gendered pronouns for people he’s interested in. The only song where he doesn’t do that “if I never mention a gender, people will assume heterosexuality” thing? Lies. ↩
Categories
Review

“Better Buses, Better Cities”

Steven Higashide

Now this is how you write a “we need $x policy changed” book! Short and to the point, and the conclusion is not just a call-to-action but instructions on how to best do the action. Absolutely wonderful, and a great case for improving bus systems as the backbone of a public transit network!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and highly recommend it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Atomic Awakening”

James Mahaffey

Thinking about the arc of this book, it’s honestly hilarious. The introduction feels condescending; the point of it is to tell you, the reader, that you know less about nuclear science and the nuclear industry than the author. Which is true; he has a degree and a job history in nuclear engineering, he does know more about it than I do! That’s why I’m reading a book he wrote about it, instead of the other way around!

From there, it dives into the history of nuclear physics as a science. Lots of whacky 1800s anecdotes here, and an approach to lab safety that was… concerning at best.

Next, we get to the bit everyone knows at least a little about: World War II and the Manhattan Project. As much of a nerd about nuclear history as I am, there was still plenty in here that was new for me; I enjoyed the bit that General Groves, anxious about the delayed-by-a-few-hours first atom bomb test, called up the governor and threatened to impose martial law over all of New Mexico. I guess the stress ball hadn’t been invented yet.

The second-to-last portion is basically a list of every major nuclear accident. There were a few I hadn’t heard of. Windscale was a relatively recent discovery for me, but I like that every telling of it has to hit the note of Cockroft’s Folly. When the world gives you dramatic irony, you’ve gotta use it. New to me, and very interesting by appearing to be the first use of a nuclear reactor as the weapon in a murder-suicide, was SL-1.1 I do so enjoy that, in this area of interest of mine, I can still find entirely new pieces of the history to learn about.

Then, having spent something like half the length of the book describing in detail everything that can go wrong with nuclear power, the book pivots to talking about how great nuclear power is and why we should be doing more of it. Admittedly, I agree with most of the arguments; it is a very safe, low-carbon producer of energy, and having that kind of baseload available really does help with the intermittency issues posed by renewables. I’m less convinced of his assertions about nuclear waste reprocessing and storage; yes, those would be good to do, but unfortunately, we can’t make this book required reading for the entire country, so the political issues remain.

Overall, a very enjoyable read; if you, like me, never get bored of talking about nuclear energy, check it out!2

  1. Very dark comedy to the Army trying to make a Fool-Proof Nuclear Reactor; nothing says “we’ve underestimated the ingenuity of fools” like an investigation requiring tests like “now, act like you’re halfway through manually removing the control rod from the reactor, and Frank here is gonna punch you in the crotch, we need to know if the reflex response is to pull the rod further out or to drop it back in.”
    I won’t leave you in suspense: it was to drop the rod, and they concluded that it was a deliberate choice to pull it all the way out and cause the explosion. I suppose that if you’re trying to really test your ‘fool-proof’ designation, it is valuable to put some high-level fools in it and see what happens… ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Killed by a Traffic Engineer”

Wes Marshall

If we need to constantly remind people in the transportation system to be safe, is it really a safe transportation system?

As someone who works in a field other than traffic engineering, I’m not quite the target audience of this book. There’s a lot of citations that I didn’t bother looking at, and detailed discussions of the various 1,000–page guidebooks that, presumably, every traffic engineer owns and nobody else has ever heard of. But I still found it a very interesting read; it’s basically a takedown of the current state of the field.

It’s 88 chapters long, and the majority of them are devoted to taking a “standard practice” and showing how thin the evidence backing it is. It’s more than a little disturbing to know how much of our road design is based on a single study from 60 years ago with a limited dataset and nary an attempt at replication… and which only sorta addresses the topic that became the standard. And those are the better cases! As a “fun” example, consider those retroreflective road stripes: on rural highways, it sure seems like having stripes marking the outside of the roadway, and not just the division between travel lanes, would make the road more visible and thus safer, right? Bad news, that vibes-based approach isn’t even what it’s based on; safety studies showed adding them actually increased the crash rate.

There’s a lot of that sort of thing in this book. I think my only edit I’d make is adding an 89th chapter at the end; the last three chapters are the “call to action” portion, but said calls to action are directed almost entirely at traffic engineers. Maybe throw in another one for people like me, who don’t work in the field but want to help improve things; I could use a few tips on what sorts of public comment meetings I should be attending, and what questions I should ask.

Overall, an interesting read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Photography

Print Shop

Photograph of several photo prints, arranged in a loose grid.

I’ve gotten back into photography in the last few months, and one outcome of that was spending a little too much on a big photo printer. Cost aside, it’s been quite fun to be able to print out some of my photos, and have something tangible to show for that effort, rather than just pixels on a screen.

A thing I’ve noticed among my coworkers in the programming field: an eventual development of hobbies centered around creating physical things – woodworking is surprisingly popular, in my office – and I think this is in deliberate contrast to the ephemerality, the irreality, of what we spend our workdays doing. Seems like it’s my turn to pick up a making things hobby!

That said, I only have so much wall space for hanging photos, and the rate at which I’m having fun printing (and hand-cutting — it’s a roll-feed printer, something I’ve never used before!) photos is a lot higher than the rate at which I have reasonable gift-giving opportunities for a 13″-wide photo print.

So, in an effort to find something to do with all these, and a little bit to help me retroactively justify the amount I’ve spent on camera, lenses, printer, paper, ink… I’ve opened up a little print shop on my website. I have no illusions that I’ll suddenly be running a massively profitable side business like this, but I do hope one or two people will find something they like enough to order a print!

Please do take a look, browse around, and let me know if you spot anything wrong with the setup — I’m not exactly an expert at running an e-commerce site, so it’s quite possible I’ve missed something here or there.

Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: May 2026

I threw a whole housewarming party this month, and actually didn’t play this playlist. You’ll see why. Or, find out the fun way, and listen to the whole thing without reading my comments!

Categories
Review

“Not the End of the World”

Hannah Ritchie

Quite an enjoyable read! The general gist of this is “forget about what you think is true, let’s look at the data,” which is applied to two different things: the current state of affairs and their rate of change; and what we, as individuals, can do to make things better. Which was, I think, a great way to do it. It keeps the focus on reality, instead of the “what sells papers” aspect, which will always favor the New Exciting Bad Stuff over the boring everyday improvements we’re making. And having each chapter wrap up with a section on “what you don’t actually need to worry about” was great; something of a call-to-action, in that it pushes for focusing on useful changes we actually can make as individuals, but without feeling like it’s pushing for self-flagellation about our failures as a species. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Humankind: A Hopeful History”

Rutger Bregman

This feels like the antidote to having too much of the news in your life. It is, throughout, mostly just cheerful.

It somewhat feels like the author’s journal while they were writing another book on the topic; I seldom think of “history” as a genre told in first person, but this contains a lot of that. In many places, the ‘history’ feels more like “the history of how the author learned these facts” than it is the proper history of said facts. But, for the most part, that works—it’s how Bregman goes through the repeated structure of “here’s this bad thing we all know about… but it turns out…”

I liked what was roughly the middle of the book the most; he goes through some of the well-known psychology experiments/phenomena. You know the ones—the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s “just following orders” experiment, and Kitty Genovese’s murder. And for all three, he absolutely tears apart the common knowledge version of events, points out the massive flaws in the experimental methodology, tells the much-less-“newsworthy” version of the story. Aside from the psychology, having that same treatment applied to Easter Island was also quite enjoyable.

The book is, overall, hopeful. I very much enjoyed it, and heartily recommend it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Power of Scenery”

Dennis Drabelle

If I was shelving this, I’d have a tough time deciding between “literature” and “history” as the genre. It went back and forth; some sections felt like pretty straight history, while others sent me back to freshman year of college, reading Walden and Thoreau for a class on “writing the Western landscape.”

Whichever genre this falls into, though, I did enjoy the read. For all that I love the national parks system, I didn’t know much about the history, and this book really told that story well.

A very enjoyable read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩