Here’s what I’ve been reading.
Books
- Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. Engaging, readable, and heartbreaking profile of families on the edge and the landlords who exploit them. I don’t usually cry at nonfiction.
- High-Risers: Cabrini Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, by Ben Austen. Similarly engaging history of public housing in Chicago. Profiles people who lived there, people who administered the program, and the reasons it all fell apart. I’m only about halfway through this one.
- Race for Profit, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Scholarly analysis of the failures of housing policy post-redlining. Studiously, almost stolidly analytical and yet still leaves me simmering with rage. Also only about halfway done with this.
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. A short, sweet novella about what it means to find purpose, and what it means to be a person.
Articles
- The Squamish nation has reclaimed ten acres of downtown Vancouver that were stolen from them in the early 20th century. As a tribal nation they’re exempt from municipal zoning laws, which means they can build six thousand new homes in an incredible sort of indigenous-art-informed solarpunk style. Their official project site is here and it’s beautiful.
- Related to the novella, a lovely profile of Becky Chambers in Wired. Chambers is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction, and has a distinctly non-bleak take on fiction, humanity, and the future. She drinks a lot of herbal tea.
- The Guardian on American households without plumbing: “…a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District… The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system… rent was $2,300 a month.”
- Robert Kagan on the constitutional crisis: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
- Climate refugees in Chico, California: “About a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground… Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming.”
- This headline alone: “New Florida Surgeon General Appeared at Demon-Sperm COVID Conspiracy Summit With Future Capitol Rioter.”
- This incredibly touching portrait of Kurt Cobain, in The New Yorker, by his biographer and friend.
- When Dasani Left Home: An update to a 2013 profile of a homeless child from the New York Times Magazine. This story made me very uncomfortable and I’m not sure how to address that aside to sit with it for a while. It’s borderline poverty porn.
Fwd: Good Newsletters
- Darrell Owens on gentrification. One of the best voices you’ll find today about cities, housing and racial justice.
- Noah Smith on the US/China cold war. It’s not just the guns and butter, it’s the culture.
- Charlie Warzel on “all this rage.”: “The main question occupying my mind is: Where does all that rage go? Eventually, the pandemic will subside. Health care workers will have a slight reprieve from this hell. But the immense grief and PTSD will stick around. I imagine the anger and resentment will, too. What happens then?”
- Will Wilkinson on Beverley Hills: “An amazing case study in NIMBY entitlement that merits our close attention and withering scorn.”
- Voudou Economics: How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas? (Well, first they went to Brazil to build stadiums for the Olympics & World Cup…)
- Ann Helen Peterson on the Worst of Both Work Worlds: Includes analysis of the failures of the Academy as an institution, the nature of office work, the suckage of commutes, and more.
Joy
This bearded dog.
Spooky szn.
Puppy’s first visit to the beach.
Emo dog.
CATLOAF.
Dog suspicious of beach water.
Secretly Ironic 