I’ve been posting my annual list of goals since 2013, and it’s featured Ironman triathlons, epic hikes, Rubik’s Cubes, reading, writing and arithmetic, to name a few.
This year’s list is a slight shift from many of my previous lists: I’m making habitual, sustainable behavioral changes more of a focus, rather than one-time, bucket-list style accomplishments.
Continue reading 2020 GoalsThis is a follow-up to see how I did on the big 2019 to-do list I laid out back in January.
Continue reading 2019 RecapHighly recommend the book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” by Alain Bertaud.
Especially recommended for professional urban planners, armchair urban planners, people looking to better understand how their cities work, and nerds looking for healthy doses of graphs, statistics, and analysis to inform their municipal commentary and priorities.
For me, this book fed my confirmation bias that it’s all about mobility, and also challenged and changed my views on sprawl and density constraints. It also introduced me to some next-level ways of thinking about housing affordability and cities as labor markets.
Here are some of my notes, comments and favorite excerpts. I put direct excerpts in quotations, and delineate my personal commentary using AF Comment. Everything else is pretty much me picking out takeaways, summarizing and paraphrasing to varying degrees.
For more on these topics, be sure to listen to interviews with author Alain Bertaud on Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen) and EconTalk (Russ Roberts).
Continue reading “Order without Design” by Alain BertaudThe Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell is a powerful, classic book, not for the faint of heart.
Mythology is a huge part of our lives for better and for worse. This book helps make sense and better use of it all — also for better or worse.
Continue reading “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph CampbellGuns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is a classic that’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple years. I’m happy I finally moved it up to the front burner and dove in.
