Summer Reading

It’s been a minute. I have a draft started about radio edits and the futility of censoring explicit pop music, but it’s going nowhere, so I decided to just send you my current reading list and say hello. What’s up?

I’ve been reading Paved Paradise, by Henry Grabar, about the ways that parking warps our entire perception of the world, land use, and society. And also Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher, which starts as a fairy tale about a princess who needs to complete three impossible tasks in order to accomplish her goal, which is later revealed to be the murder of her abusive brother-in-law.

A few things I’ve been thinking about

Learning about climate refugees makes people more hostile to immigration, which doesn’t bode well for US immigration policy. One winner from our current terrible immigration policies, though, is Canada, which is welcoming a robust new cohort of citizens from all over the world.

A more in-depth explanation of Juneteenth.

A new dialect or at least some local multilingual slang emerging in Miami.

We all know that working from home is hurting commercial real estate, but people in the know worry about the follow-on effects: commercial loans aren’t like residential mortgages, and they will need to be refinanced soon. But with interest rates high and values down, a lot of borrowers are going to go broke, and may take their lenders down with them.

Ragebait

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, as it ever was.

Told you this would happen: angry grandpa demands tween genital inspection at youth track meet. (He denies it, or at least denies he was rude about trying to get a nine year old girl with a short haircut expelled from a track meet).

A new study on how much it costs to drive everywhere, and a planned documentary on the health costs of driving everywhere, and a new study on gasoline leaking out of gas stations and contaminating everything.