From the Mind of Trevor Stone

At the end of December I read Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. Grandin is one of the most famous people with autism, or perhaps it would be better to say that she's one of the people most well-known for having autism. Grandin thinks in pictures, and Visual Thinking draws on her own mind, her experience working with others, and psychological research to talk about three different types of thinking.

• Object visual thinking involves mental images of specific things or scenes. Thinking about airplanes involves recalling mental images of specific airplanes the person has seen, in person or in a photograph: perhaps a Boeing 737 or a Cessna 182. Temple Grandin is an object visual thinker, and famously designs livestock handling facilities by visualizing what an animal would see from a particular location.
• Visual-spatial thinking involves thinking in relations, abstractions, and patterns. Thinking about airplanes might involve thinking about the general structure of an airplane—the fuselage connects to wings, the cockpit, tail, etc.—without thinking about any specific plane.
• Verbal thinking involves words and sequences rather than images. Thinking about airplanes might involve the process of flight: boarding, taxiing, acceleration on the runway, liftoff, and so on.

The book's focus is on visual thinkers, people whose main mode of thought is either object-visual thinking or visual-spatial thinking, particularly the former. People on the autism spectrum are often visual thinkers, though not all visual thinkers are autistic or vice versa and neither has a bright-line diagnostic. As an autistic child, Temple Grandin didn't learn to speak until later than many children, and she struggled in many classes in school because the material was presented for verbal thinkers and folks who could do abstract reasoning. She talks about finally connecting with coursework that made sense to her when she got to shop class, which is about working with physical objects. Another key educational experience was going to a boarding school which involved chores like caring for animals; lacking language, animals are naturally visual thinkers.

Grandin talks about the kinds of work that the three types of thinkers do well. You'll often find object visual thinkers in roles that require hands-on work: mechanics, machinists, drafters, builders, equipment operators, repair people. They're excellent at troubleshooting machinery, and they're able to tinker and build things with whatever supplies may be at hand. Visual-spatial thinkers are often drawn to engineering, mathematics, and computers; they design complex systems and find patterns in the world. Verbal thinkers are, naturally, drawn to work that's focused on words or sequential thinking. Lawyers, politicians, authors, and journalists are often verbal thinkers, and project managers can apply sequential thinking to make sure things happen on time. Grandin likes to talk about how the two types of visual thinkers are complimentary when designing something. Abstract visual thinkers can do all the modeling and calculations to ensure a factory building will be sturdy and that the machinery runs reliably. But a factory designed only by abstract thinkers likely won't run very effectively because they tend to overlook problems in the specific details of things work on the factory floor: the awkward movements a worker needs to do at the assembly line, or poor lighting of a workbench because something's blocking the lamps. Visual-spatial thinkers can make great electrical engineers, but you might want an object visualizer as an electrician. In the software space you might want an object visual thinker for a UI designer, a visual-spatial thinker writing code, and a verbal thinker as product manager, figuring out the user journeys the system will support.

A lot of the book talks about how modern American society is letting object visual thinkers down. A lot of schooling is designed for verbal or abstract thinking, and object visualizers struggle. Grandin reports that object visual thinkers often have a very difficult time with algebra, which they find too abstract and this challenge prevents many people from graduating from high school. However, many of these same people excel at geometry and trigonometry because their visual cortex can make sense of the relationships. "Let students take trigonometry if they fail algebra" might sound weird to folks used to the traditional progression of high school, but it might result in having a lot more Americans who are good at math, at least some parts of it. Grandin highlights George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act for making this problem worse: schools are graded and funded based on students' standardized test scores, so the incentive is to focus instruction on what will be tested. There's no standardized test that gives subjects a pile of lumber and a box of tools and asks them to assemble a chair, so when budget cuts come, classes like shop and music get taken away. Colleges and universities tend to make things even more abstract and more verbal, and the availability of trade schools, apprenticeships, and other hands-on education has been dwindling. Companies often have a college degree requirement, not realizing they may be cutting object visualizers out of the employment pool. Grandin decries that the result is an America where we're losing the ability to fix things.

This has political implications, too. (Here I'm building on Temple Grandin's foundation, she doesn't frame the book this way.) There are fewer narratives in American politics stronger than the middle class dream of success. After World War II, a man with no education beyond high school could get a good-paying job as a factory worker, a miner, an auto mechanic, doing appliance repair, or many other roles that object visual thinkers do well. These jobs offered the chance to own a home, raise a family, and enjoy leisure time; a combination that was uncommon for their parents' generation. As the 20th Century drew to a close, and accelerating in the 21st Century, the American economy shifted strongly to jobs that reward abstract or verbal thinking. Globalization sent a lot of the manufacturing jobs to lower-cost countries while domestic production became increasingly automated. (Fun fact: the U.S. is still the world's leading manufacturer, even though we employ a fraction of the manufacturing workforce we once did: American manufacturing is mostly done by machines.) Computers and the Internet gave powerful tools to abstract and verbal thinkers who are able to thrive in a service and information economy. High-tech manufacturing also made hands-on work more difficult: in the 1960s and '70s, buying a Heathkit stereo system and assembling it yourself could save significant money and teach you something useful at the same time, and you could easily fix it if a component failed. Today with high-tech automated assembly and microprocessors running everything, the cost to pay someone to fix a damaged Sonos speaker system is probably higher than the price of buying a new one. Starting in 2015, America saw Donald Trump's messaging resonate with older voters who work in these object visualizing jobs, and especially among voters who identify with such work that's been in decline like coal mining and assembly lines. Should it be any surprise in 2024 that Harris outperformed Trump by 13 points among college-educated voters, but Trump was up 24 points among men without a college degree? Millennials living in their parents' basements and playing video games all day was something of a running joke in the late aughts, but that also describes visual thinkers who've been left out of the modern American social structure and have grown to resent folks who were able to follow the abstract and verbal path through college and the modern hands-off economy.

I'd watched Temple Grandin talk about this book at Google, so I was curious how the ideas of a highly visual thinker would come across in a book, a naturally verbal and sequential medium. At times reading the book felt like listening to Temple Grandin give a talk; she often communicates in specific anecdotes, and related stories recur throughout the book. One of the big themes of the book is how people with different thinking styles can collaborate, and in the book she gives praise to her editor who's able to apply strong verbal thinking to organize the scattered notes and fragments that Temple gives her. This is certainly helpful in making this information about visual thinking accessible to verbal thinkers and readers. I found it interesting, though, that a book which is all about thinking in images and spatial relationships contains 400 pages of words and no photographs, illustrations, or diagrams. As a visual-spatial thinker, I was hoping to see some kind of 2D representation of how a visual thinker might operate. I wonder how many visual thinkers would benefit from learning this information, but get turned off by a book that's nothing but words.

I think I first heard about visual-spatial thinking, as distinct from object visualizing, from a previous Temple Grandin talk. I've considered myself on the autism spectrum for over 20 years, since I learned about Asperger's syndrome. When I heard Temple Grandin explain how her brain works I said "that's definitely not how mine works." While I can build intricate and elegant software systems, I'm perennially bad at building physical things. Cognitive tasks like mentally rotating a cube are challenging for me, but I can visualize a map of the whole world or specific areas, and at talent shows I like to recite every country in the world in geographic order. Unlike many kids with autism I didn't have any trouble learning language, and I always read above grade level. But I think my language use shows signs of spatial and abstract thinking: I've always loved puns, which feel to me like I'm demonstrating a multi-dimensional linkage between words that aren't present in the normal linear version. As a kid I often focused on the literal meaning of a set of words, much to the consternation of verbal thinkers who would say "you know what I mean!" (I still do this as an adult sometimes, but I have four decades of building a database of what people actually mean when they say something that a program would interpret differently.) I also tend to be very long-winded: an excellent verbal thinker can convey an idea without using a lot of words, while I tend to say or write down every sentence that comes to my mind related to a topic. Someone might mention a topic at lunch and I'll spend three minutes talking about all the things I learned from Wikipedia that are tangentially related. This is a bit like reading a map out loud: the river we were talking about touches another river, so let's row up stream and see where that one goes.

It's important for people creating tools and products to design with the different modes of thinking in mind. Much as a product that was designed and tested entirely by right-handed people is likely to be awkward for lefties, a product or process that was designed around the way verbal thinkers operate is likely to be frustrating to visual thinkers. Google Maps is an interesting example here. At the core, the data is inherently spatial: where is everything? But there are ways to expose that data that fit different thinking patterns. If someone wants directions from one place to another, Maps could show a path on a map and instructions like "take 6th Avenue to Broadway and turn south, then turn west on Alameda." This is great for spatial thinkers like me; I might ignore the written instructions entirely and just look at the lines on the map; if I take a different turn I can still reach the destination because I've formed a mental model of the space between here and there. Verbal thinkers might focus on the step-by-step instructions, but when they come to each intersection they'll have to figure out "which way is south?" So instead of cardinal directions, let's use left and right turns. Object visualizers still might have trouble, though: the map is an abstract set of lines and rectangles that can be hard to turn into 3D space, and the turn-by-turn instructions are a bunch of street names and numbers that need to be kept in order: "do I turn on Alameda before Broadway, or is it the other way?" So Google Maps recently added navigation by landmarks: "turn right after the McDonalds" and "turn left at the second traffic light." To get even more context, object visualizers can drop into Street View and see what all the buildings look like at an intersection. This multi-modal approach to directions is a big win over paper maps, when everyone but the spatial thinkers was faced with a daunting puzzle. The old stereotype of a woman in the passenger seat complaining that the man in the driver's seat didn't pull over and ask for directions might have been a conflict between verbal and visual thinking…

I was pleased to learn that object visual thinkers do share a trait with visual-spatial thinkers: we organize things by keeping track of their physical location. It might look like a random pile of papers on a desk to a verbal thinker, but ask a visual thinker to retrieve a particular document and they can probably find it quickly. But if a verbal thinker comes in and tries to be helpful by organizing all the papers into an efficient filing system the visual thinker will be unable to find anything, because it's not where they last put it. These two organization approaches are "piling" and "filing." My coworkers are often confused about how I can manage having 20 browser windows open with 50+ tabs in each. I find it quite easy: each window has a loosely-related theme, and I remember where on the desktop each window sits. When my workstation switched to Wayland, Chrome was unable to restore windows to their original locations when it opened and I was completely flustered; I had to spend 20 minutes a week figuring out which window was which and moving them back to their original location. On the other hand, I always wonder how someone who's only got one browser window open can keep track of what they were working on :-)

A month or two into the 2020 pandemic lockdown I scanned my bookshelf for something appropriate to read that didn't involve staring at a screen. I found A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster by Rebecca Solnit. Given the novel disaster that the world was collectively experiencing, this seemed a particularly opportune time to read it. As with many new pandemic hobbies, reading this book ebbed and waned, taking until New Year's Day of 2023 to finish it.

The book dives deep into a handful of major physical disasters which struck cities, how the residents in the disaster area responded with creativity and communal support, and how the official response and media coverage assume that people in a disaster engage in anti-social behavior that isn't generally happening. This exploration was inspired by the author's own experience of euphoria and sense of possibility in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and deepened over the next two decades as she researched the sociology of other disasters and interviewed people who were on the ground, participating in the suddenly created community where many of the social norms from just hours before had fallen away.

She shares writings from survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, highlighting the profound impact it had on Dorothy Day who went on to a life of social activism and anarchism. The ordinary residents of San Francisco quickly improvised solutions to help the community, putting out fires, setting up tents in Golden Gate Park for the suddenly homeless, preparing free meals, and other simple and effective acts of mutual aid. Many firsthand descriptions of the experience describe a joyful time in an odd utopia, where the city collapsed but the community rose up. Solnit contrasts this spontaneous community support network from the elite panic shown by the mayor and the army (based in the Presidio) whose goal was to "save the city from the people." In a refrain that recurs throughout the book, political, military, police, business, and media leaders often focus on looting in disaster situations even though property theft is rarely prominent in such situations. Additionally, the word looting fails to distinguish theft of financially valuable items for personal gain from requisitioning important supplies in an environment where survival is of the utmost importance and the ordinary mechanisms of cash transactions and functioning supply chains are disrupted. Earthquake survivors broke pharmacy windows so they could take medicine for a sick neighbor, an act which should not be conflated with stealing luxury goods for sale in the underground market.

Solnit then explores some unnatural disasters: the 1917 Halifax explosion (the collision of an ammunition ship that stands as the largest non-nuclear explosion), the London Blitz, and nuclear fears in the Cold War. Once again, elite expectations that the public would panic and a large collective of disaster survivors would bring out the worst in humanity did not materialize. The famous scenes of Londoners spending the night on subway platforms as bombs fell and air raid sirens screamed above ground was initially an organic response of ordinary people that surprised the authorities, who only belatedly provided institutional support. Solnit introduces sociologists who found a lack of evidence of panic and social disorder during a natural disaster or military attack, yet politicians still worried about it and Hollywood found crowd panic and a Hobbesian state of nature to be compelling tropes.

Moving forward in time, Solnit dives into the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, writing

One disaster utopia lasted. During the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, citizens discovered each other, their own strength, and the superfluity of what had seemed like an omnipotent and pervasive government, and they did not let go of what they discovered. It reshaped the nation. The real disaster began long before the earthquake, just as the utopia of social engagement and community strength lasted long after.

Here again ordinary citizens suddenly sprang into action, digging their neighbors out from collapsed buildings with no tools or training. Meanwhile the bad deeds of many of the city's elite were exposed, including factory owners (some with military support, again to "prevent looting") who rescued their equipment from collapsed buildings but left their trapped workers to die. Many of the shoddy collapsed buildings were government built, and the official response to the disaster left much to be desired. Citizen groups sprung up from the destruction and persistently demanded change. The whole city could see the incompetence and corruption of the PRI and organized effectively, winning concessions as Mexican civil society began to develop outside the patronage structure of the ubiquitous authoritarian political party.

The next chapter is titled Losing the Mandate of Heaven and expands from the Mexico City earthquake to connect disasters and revolutions.

In some ways a diaster merely brings the existing tensions, conflicts, and tendencies in a society and its government to light or to a crisis point. If the government fails to meet the urgent needs of its people, if it is seen to be self-interested, incompetent, or possessed of interests that serve an elite while sabotaging the well-being of the majority, the upheaval of disaster provides an opportunity to redress this failing that disaster has brought to the light.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake marked a shift in Portuguese political power and it is usually considered to be one of the starting points of the European Enlightenment, a movement away from authority and religiosity toward individual reason—and doubt. A 1972 earthquake near Managua and the Somoza dictatorship's corruption and focus on personal profit from rebuilding provided the spark which culminated in the Sandinista revolutionaries toppling the government seven years later. And not just earthquakes; bad weather (thanks, Icelandic volcanoes) led to crop failures that were major factors in the French Revolution. Mikhail Gorbachev attributed the Chernobyl disaster as the most important cause of the Soviet collapse of the early 1990s. As in disasters, the chaotic period of a revolution often brings out euphoric feelings, communal connections, and a sense of utopia.

The final third of the book dives into two events in America that many readers think they're quite familiar with: the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Rebecca Solnit weaves together many stories in and around New York and New Orleans, reminding the reader of the stories they saw on the news while also introducing them to personal stories which show that the disasters looked a lot different on the ground than they did on TV. While the nation freaked out about the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the people of lower Manhattan remained fairly level headed. Ordinary office workers helped their colleagues out of the burning building, in some cases despite official instructions not to evacuate. In the neighborhoods people were generous and compassionate (despite New York City's reputation for being gruff and impersonal) and without regard for religious, racial, or social divisions. Americans glued to their TV sets that day saw Mayor Rudy Giuliani in picturesque leadership situations, covered in WTC dust along with the evacuees and rescue workers. He was so available for TV in part because he'd insisted on creating New York's emergency operations center at the World Trade Center, rendering it essentially useless in handling New York's biggest emergency. The stories that TV continued to tell about 9/11 had a monumental impact on American society in the weeks and years to come. Aided by elite panic from the government, the media turned 9/11 into a clash of civilizations narrative, of terrorists versus the free Western world, a story that would spike George W. Bush's popularity rating and lead to two decades of destructive foreign policy, America's longest war. If the story had instead been told by the people on the ground in New York, the people who experienced the painful clouds of dust and the generosity of fellow New Yorkers, it could have been a tale of compassion, connection, and good deeds in the face of governmental failure to prepare for an emergency or protect the country from nineteen guys with box-cutter knives.

The final chapters about New Orleans are the most personal and the most gut-wrenching. Rebecca Solnit had already been researching the spontaneous community building and often collective sense of euphoria that occurs after a disaster, and had just published an article in The Nation when Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. Here again are stories of ordinary people helping their neighbors out, a media looking for stories of looting, elite panic, and a government woefully unprepared to handle the disaster and often outright hostile to citizens trying to help solve the problem. In New Orleans the media disaster narrative fed back into the community and built upon over two centuries of racial distrust and injustice. The police chief in predominantly white Gretna prevented people from evacuating to higher ground across the Crescent City Connection bridge. In the predominantly white neighborhood of Algiers Point, a well-armed vigilante group worried about looting, not because of direct evidence but due to the cultural assumption that looting is a natural byproduct of disaster, especially in black areas. This fear led the Algiers Point folks to murder several African Americans, actions which they didn't try to hide but that have gone largely unreported. Solnit does a great job helping the survivors of Katrina tell the stories of these murders in plain view. Looting, as distinct from requisitioning supplies was quite rare after Katrina, perhaps in part because there's not much use stealing an expensive television when your house is under ten feet of water and most of the city is without electricity. Evacuees sheltering in the sweltering heat of the Superdome were trying desperately to get bottles of water; a shopping cart full of orange juice would've been more valuable to take from a store than a flat screen TV. I remember seeing a video from inside a Whole Foods after Katrina; basic foodstuffs had been taken from the shelves but the cooler of fancy cheeses was largely untouched.

Katrina started as a natural disaster, but it was compounded by a man-made disaster. All levels of government failed the people of New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin avoided an evacuation order (worrying it would make him look bad if the storm didn't have a big impact) and did not have a plan to evacuate a city where many people don't own a car. Police, the military, and other government organizations treated the people of New Orleans as potential enemies rather than victims of a disaster that needed help. Police and soldiers essentially imprisoned New Orleanians in their own city, waist deep in water. George W. Bush had spent four years making sweeping changes to prevent another round of terrorist attacks, curtailing civil liberties and reorganizing every disaster-related agency into the Department of Homeland Security. Yet DHS failed miserably in its first trial in a real disaster; they'd focused so much on a threat model of foreign invaders yet were woefully unprepared for a city of people displaced by Mother Nature. Unlike 9/11 the media started asking tough questions about the government response to Katrina, leading to the resignation of unqualified FEMA director Michael Brown and the beginning of the crash in President Bush's popularity ratings that had been based in large part on his image as a protector of the nation. One might imagine a post-9/11 media narrative focused on resilient communities that prepare locally and remain resilient and resourceful in the face of tragedy.

The physical damage on 9/11 was very localized and most New Yorkers could return to something resembling normalcy within days or weeks. The World Trade Center and The Pentagon are symbolic and commercially valuable, so financial and organizational support for rebuilding was easy to come by. Hurricane Katrina destroyed infrastructure for more than a hundred miles along the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. In many neighborhoods it took months or years for half of the residents to return from evacuation before they could even start rebuilding their homes, often with limited and frustrating government help. Here again civil society emerged to help people meet their basic needs more quickly and flexibly than official emergency response organizations could. Solnit reports that Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's protest community in front of President Bush's ranch (which had itself become a temporary community much like after a disaster) quickly decamped from Crawford, Texas and headed east to help the communities hit by Louisiana. She shares stories of the generosity of Rainbow Family members who arrived in Mississippi to share their experience building temporary sanitation, community kitchens, and spontaneous welcoming communities. (Burners Without Borders also came into existence as volunteers traveled straight from Burning Man to the Mississippi coast to help rebuild.) Community groups formed in New Orleans, providing basics like medical care and construction tools while also fighting for the rights of long-time residents as elites and outside parties sought to rid the city of public housing and other social infrastructure.

I had started reading A Paradise Built in Hell hoping for a perspective on the unfolding disaster. COVID-19 was in many ways the inverse of the disasters described in the book. Instead of everyone in a city simultaneously experiencing a sudden tragic event, the pandemic quickly jumped from hotspot lockdowns in Wuhan, Northern Italy, and New York to worldwide "safer at home" orders. Everyone in one house could die of COVID without anyone else on the street realizing anything was wrong. Rather than gathering with our neighbors in the streets and pulling strangers out of collapsed buildings we tried hard not to get within six feet of our neighbors. Instead of a city cut off from communication, experiencing a very different world than the media's rumor-fed narrative of chaos and looting, hundreds of millions of people spent hours a day sheltered in their living rooms feeding on COVID stories from around the world. And despite the constant stream of bleak news, uplifting stories spread as well: a video of a cute lockdown craft project could easily garner a few million views. The ubiquity of recording technology and easy Internet sharing helped everyone find connection in a shared experience: "the famous TV host is working from their living room table, just like me." As in physical disasters, generosity flowed from ordinary people, giving money, dropping off groceries for elderly neighbors, and providing emotional support video conferences. But without a physical shared experience the COVID disaster area turned into social conflict that wasn't typical of disaster communities. Acts of survival like wearing a mask and avoiding large gatherings became flashpoints of cultural conflict, seen by some as effective defense against an invisible hazard and by others as a government attempt at control. As in the disasters in the book, governments in 2020 were generally not well prepared to handle the situation, but it's unlikely that the people left to their own devices would've fared better: fighting an ongoing airborne disease requires coordinated social action, unlike the localized and improvised action needed to help people in a neighborhood that just collapsed.

A Paradise Built in Hell is a book about specific disasters and the communities that arose there. It's also a book about human nature, the human capacity for spontaneous generosity, and the wonderful connection and lack of hierarchy in disaster communities. It's a book about the incorrect assumptions people—especially elites with more to lose in a disrupted society—make about how people will behave without government authority and established social structure. And it's a book about transformation, people whose lives changed from being in a disaster or by coming to help people out of one.

The relationship between disaster and revolution has seldom been explored, though it crops up throughout the history of revolutions. Catastrophic weather across France in the summer of 1788 brought on the crop failures and bad harvests that led to the rising bread prices, shortages, and hunger that played a major role in triggering the French Revolution the following year. The 1870–71 siege and occupation of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War brought on the sense of daring and solidarity that made possible the Paris Commune—several weeks of insurrectionary self-government Kropotkin and anarchists everywhere have cherished ever since. Belli spoke of Nicaraguans feeling after the earthquake that since they could lose their life, they wanted to make it means something, even if that involved risks. Disaster and crisis can stiffen resolve… Sometimes they work by making a bad situation worse to the point of intolerability; they create a breaking point. Sometimes they do so by making obvious an injustice or agenda that was opaque before. Sometimes they do so by generating the circumstances in which people discover each other and thereby a sense of civil society and collective power. But there is no formula; there are no certainties. Leftists of a certain era liked to believe that the intensification of suffering produced revolution and was therefore to be desired or even encouraged; no such reliable formula ties social change to disaster or other suffering; calamities are at best openings through which a people may take power—or may lose the contest and be further subjugated.

— Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster

Although I've been making slow progress (distracted by 2020!), A Paradise Built in Hell was an excellent book choice for 2020.

I've also been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast for the last several years, too[1]. I've noticed a theme that what history knows as the big moments that made a revolution seem inevitable were often a surprise or a minor event at the time. When the social order sits atop a rotten and rickety structure, it's anyone's guess what will happen when a piece of that edifice gives way.

[1] The series will end after the 1917 Russian revolution and it's currently taking a break after the 1905 Russian revolution, so if you start binging now, the last episode should be available by the time you're ready to listen.

One thing I was looking forward to as a homeowner was some really nice bookcases.
Our new house has a lot of roomy floor space, but bookshelf-appropriate walls are at a premium. So we need just the right bookshelves.

Since moving out on my own after college I've been slowly accumulating and then moving cheap particle board flat-pack bookshelves from Target. These do a decent job of holding rows of books and magazines.
However, each move tends to leave them shabbier, with the paperboard backing starting to come loose, the central load-bearing shelf bowing out, and corner chunks of particle board get dislodged. Flat-pack bookshelves also have a tendency to have awkward shelf spacing. They seem to universally max out at five shelves, but I almost always want to fit six shelves worth of reading material on them, thus ending up with three stacks of books per shelf rather than an orderly line. And since these were acquired one or two at a time they're a hodgepodge of colors, widths, and depths.

So—I figured—when I own a house and never need to move bookshelves again, I can buy some nice solid pieces with adequate shelving that cost more than $35 a piece. I therefore nicely stacked all my file boxes full of books against the walls of the garage nine months ago, figuring I'd wait a couple months until I'd found the bookshelves of my dreams before unpacking any.

Unfortunately, furniture shopping is a pain in the butt. Boulder furniture stores are mostly high-end, so they tend to have bookshelves that look distinguished but have significant shortcomings when it comes to the business of actually shelving books. And metro Denver stores seem to mostly have a slightly higher quality on the same 5-shelf Target flat-pack theme. I considered ordering custom-built shelves, but realized that I'm not sure how many linear feet of books of each height range we've got, so it seems easy to get a custom order wrong.

So instead we had three empty mismatched bookshelves sitting in the living room for nine months and an occasional sigh of "I could look that up, but first I'd have to find the right box." A couple weeks ago, Kelly went on a quest to find a book she needed, filling the living room floor with boxes. I decided to admit temporary defeat and last weekend I stuck shelves on the cases and Kelly's books on the shelves. And this afternoon, after not sleeping last night and deciding I shouldn't spend all day on the computer again, I unloaded most of my boxes into a reasonable categorization.

I'm fairly impressed at how compactly our combined library fits. Kelly's books take about a case and a half and mine take about two and a half cases, plus a small one for paperback novels. We've still got three cases in the garage and we used two for games which had been on built-in shelving at previous residences. Still in storage, though, are two boxes of roleplaying games (takes a shelf and change), a couple boxes of textbooks (another 2–3 shelves), 40 years of National Geographic (takes a whole case), a couple hundred issues of Dragon and Dungeon magazines (takes most of a case), and a variety of magazines from a family friend who passed away, including a large number of aerospace-related books, which seemed odd for an anti-government, anti-corporate pacifist who lived in a cabin in the woods.

So… a partial victory. I can now easily read almost any book I own. I can estimate the needed dimensions of future fancy bookshelves. And it's significantly easier to move around the garage.

Also on the eventual homeowner to-do list: make a Little Free Library.
… and figure out what to do with about five cubic feet of CD jewel cases.
… and find somewhere to put my boxes of CCGs so we can put a chest freezer and beer fridge in the garage…

When a single hive is scaled up to the size of a nation and is led by a dictator with an army at his disposal, the results are invariably disastrous. But that is no argument for removing or suppressing hives at lower levels. In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls. Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America’s founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny. More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”

— Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, “The Hive Switch”

The driving metaphor for the final section of the book is “We are 90 percent and 10 percent bee.” He spends quite a while arguing for a limited form of group selection (specifically multilevel selection theory which I previously resonated with in David Sloan Wilson's Darwin’s Cathedral). Haidt says that humans usually act with the familial interest that any evolutionary biologist or economist could explain. But we’re also capable of switching into a eusocial hive mode akin to ants, bees, some shrimp, and naked mole-rats. This hive capability (which other primates do not possess) has allowed humans to build progressively larger groups from tribes to city-states to nations to empires to multi-national corporations. It's at work with sports teams, religions, politics, and any scenario where groups compete with each other and can form a strong internal bond.

Cheap travel, mass media, and the Internet have allowed the last few generations to develop and scale hives which are much more geographically diffuse than we could at America’s founding. I wonder if this, plus our winner-take-all political system, puts us more at danger of one hive being able to impose that hive’s will on all the others.

At lunch, a coworker said she used to be a bookkeeper. Another coworker asked if that meant accounting. This suggested alternate ways in which one could be a bookkeeper:

The Guard

This library is a fortress of knowledge. Anyone seeking to assail these volumes must first contend with The Sword of Dewey!

The Dragon's Hoard

I shall keep these books for I have not yet read them all. If you borrow a book and do not return it, I shall raid your village!

The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater's 1960 slim volume (ghostwritten by L. Brett Bozell, Jr.) advocating for conservative values, had more impact on right-wing and Republican politics in postwar America than any book besides The Bible and, perhaps, Atlas Shrugged. I sought the book out because I wanted to understand where conservatives are coming from and be able to have more productive political conversations. Since my political thinking operates with a different set of frames I was expecting to disagree with a lot of what Goldwater wrote, and I did. My focus in this review is therefore not to critique the book but to characterize it and highlight its arguments.

The book is an easy read. It's short and readable in an afternoon. My 50th anniversary copy, with foreword (George F. Will) and afterword (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) is 137 pages of roughly mass-market paperback size. It is not a work of technical political theory and is thus accessible to almost any American adult. It takes a personal and casual tone, clearly the broad appeal words of a politician and not the jargon of an academic. I think this accessibility is at least as important to the book's success in the conservative movement as any specific policy idea expressed in its pages.
The book starts with a few chapters on general principles followed by several chapters applying those principles to specific domestic issues that were prominent in the late 1950s.

Goldwater argues for Conservatism in opposition to Socialism and also in opposition to Liberalism and the (then-ascendant) moderate wing of the Republican Party. He starts by quoting Vice President Nixon, Republican candidates should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart, and President Eisenhower, I am conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems. Goldwater is conservative on both fronts and emphasizes that Conservatism isn't just about economics: The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man's nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Growing up in an Arizona which had recently gained statehood and in which the wild west didn't seem so long ago, it's not surprising that the focus of Goldwater's philosophy is individual freedom. Man's most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in the time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery. (Despite this emphasis on spirit and soul, Goldwater did not want the church to be actively involved in politics and he did not like the rise of the Religious Right.)

Goldwater's political framework is focused on the Constitution and a limited federal government. While some people's political approach is to devise a solution to a problem first and then shape it to match the law, one gets the sense that Goldwater would prefer to start with what's constitutional and then work out a solution which is permitted. In the way that some folks on the right treat the Second Amendment as the most important while some on the left elevate the First, the Tenth Amendment is, I think, most fundamental for Goldwater. (The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.) Goldwater objects to several federal programs not because they're bad policies but because he thinks the states should implement them, with structure and prioritization driven by local voters and legislators, not a nationwide legislature and bureaucracy. He argues against federal involvement in education because the Constitution doesn't grant any federal powers over education, thus leaving the subject up to states. Yet if there were a constitutional amendment in place regarding education, Goldwater would seem to have no objection to the execution of it.

Many on the left, citing rhetoric of the Confederate and Jim Crow South, characterize the phrase “states’ rights” as an innocuous phrase meant to mask an underlying policy of racial discrimination. Goldwater acknowledges this perception, writing It is quite true that the integration issue is affected by the State's Rights principle, and that the South's position on the issue is, today, the most conspicuous expression of the principle. So much so that the country is now in the grips of a spirited and sometimes ugly controversy over an imagined conflict between State's Rights, on the one hand, and what are called “civil rights” on the other. He goes on to argue that civil rights are not universal rights granted by virtue of our humanity but rather a right defined in law: Unless a right is incorporated in the law, it is not a civil right and is not enforceable by the instruments of the civil law. There may be some rights—“natural,” “human,” or otherwise—that should also be civil rights. But if we desire to give such rights the protection of the law, our recourse is to a legislature or to the amendment procedures of the Constitution. We must not look to politicians, or sociologists—or the courts—to correct the deficiency. Goldwater was not a racist, and although he spends much of the chapter on civil rights arguing against federal efforts to desegregate schools and questioning the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, he speaks in favor of the principle of desegregation.

In a political world following Goldwater's philosophy, one might expect a great many constitutional amendments be proposed. (He argues against high tax brackets, for instance, but not against income tax itself, since that power is granted by the Sixteenth Amendment.) Addressing an issue like education, air pollution, or Internet crime would start by passage of an amendment granting federal jurisdiction on the matter. Yet amending the Constitution is hard, and in the half century since The Conscience of a Conservative was published, the Constitution was only amended five times—thrice regarding voting rights, once regarding presidential succession, and once regarding congressional compensation. Only the latter came after Ronald Reagan and Goldwater's intellectual heirs took power in Washington (and that one was proposed with the initial Bill of Rights). Many more amendments have, of course, been proposed but not passed in Congress—depending on one's perspective, this might speak in favor of or against an amend-first model.

Reading the book after it influenced half a century of politics provides an interesting sense of retrospective. For instance, a book written today wouldn't focus so much on the power of unions, yet it is precisely this book's arguments about unions which provided the framework for the legislation that weakened union power. Goldwater's arguments reverberate through contemporary conservatives: reading Goldwater's complaints about depression-era laws paying farmers to not grow crops (and thus avoid a market crash) reminded me of several folks I've heard rail against the same practice, even though it was ended by the 1996 Farm Bill.

Unfortunately, some of Goldwater's advice was not heeded by conservatives. He ends the “Freedom for Labor” chapter by saying Let us henceforth make war on all monopolies—whether corporate or union. The enemy of freedom is unrestrained power, and the champions of freedom will fight against the concentration of power wherever they find it. The Republicans who came to power with the help of Goldwater's rhetoric duly set about disarming the power of labor unions, yet they simultaneously enacted policies to boost the power of capital and corporations. Conservative-championed deregulation has led to a handful of companies controlling most broadcast and publishing media outlets, granting significant power and control of information to corporations. And despite the breakup of Ma Bell in the mid-80s, many consumers have no choice over telecommunications providers and the companies wield near-monopolistic power (Comcast revenues exceed every state government but California).

Goldwater's recommendations in “Taxes and Spending” were likewise only followed half-way. Goldwater wanted to reduce taxes by cutting back on federal programs: The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate—from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals. I do not suggest that the federal government drop all of these programs overnight. But I do suggest that we establish, by law, a rigid timetable for a staged withdrawal. Yet the oft repeated mantra of today's Republican party is Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter, and Republicans have tended to propose tax cuts without spending cuts, program elimination without reducing taxes, and spending increases (particularly for military expenditure) without corresponding tax increases. While academic fiscal conservatives decry these policies, the party doesn't seem to care: tax cuts are a good way to get elected and eliminating popular programs are a good way to get voted out of office.

Goldwater's last chapter, “The Soviet Menace,” consumes the final third of the book and feels the most incongruous with the modern world. Goldwater begins in no uncertain terms: And still the awful truth remains: We can establish the domestic conditions for maximizing freedom, along the lines I have indicated, and yet become slaves. We can do this by losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union. He rails against the policies then in place to combat the USSR, from NATO and the UN to negotiation and diplomacy to foreign aid. He proposed instead an offensive (and quite so) strategy, The key guidepost is the Objective, and we must never lose sight of it. It is not to wage a struggle against Communism, but to win it. He proposed development and use of “small, clean nuclear weapons.” Recalling his fiscal conservatism, he writes As a Conservative, I deplore the huge tax levy that is needed to finance the world's number-one military establishment. But even more do I deplore the prospect of a foreign conquest, which the absence of that establishment would quickly accomplish. One wonders if he would similarly quiet his objections to spending on social programs if it were presented as a choice between liberal welfare or the election of an American communist or socialist party to congress. Goldwater's commitment to conservative constitutional law was also conspicuously absent from this chapter: socialist regimes generally installed a new constitution and American support for anti-socialist rebels would presumably violate the laws under which they found themselves.

While the flashpoints, proxy wars, and immense military buildups that characterized the Cold War definitely bore Goldwater's influence, the mechanism of victory fortunately took a significantly different tack than Goldwater's plan. He writes We may not make foreign peoples love us—no nation has ever succeeded in that—but we can make them respect us. And respect is the stuff of which enduring friendships and firm alliances are made. Yet despite the trillions of dollars spent on military hardware, the Socialist states collapsed not because of a respect-as-fear of U.S. power and might but thanks to a love-as-admiration we were able to foster in the people. While leaders threatened each other with weapons, support for the state was whittled away rock 'n' roll, hip young people, material comforts, and the gradual awareness that there was a world where grocery stores were always full of food.

The Conscience of a Conservative deserves a place in collections of key American documents, alongside The Federalist Papers and the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the others it took relatively few words to influence generations of political action and government policy. Many on the left believe its ideas were taken too far; many on the right that they weren't taken far enough. But taken they certainly were, and they continue to frame contemporary discourse.

The turn will come… when Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in power who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic. Who will proclaim in a campaign speech: “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promotte welfare, for I propose to extend freedom… And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that case I am doing the very best I can.”

– Barry Goldwater, The Conscieence of a Conservative, "The Perils of Power"

Folks on the left are often surprised when Republicans support economic policies which negatively impact a majority of their constituents. Some folks use this observation as a rhetorical barb (e.g. these tweets). But for politicians inspired by Senator Goldwater and the last half century of conservatism, policies which favor liberty (freedom from) at the cost of opportunity (freedom to) are the goal, not an accident.

Programs are a major problem for attempts at unity. As soon as a policy is made specific, the differences must be addressed. Progressives tend to talk about policies and programs. But policy details are not what most Americans want to know about. Most Americans want to know what you stand for, whether your values are their values, what your principles are, what direction you want to take the country in. In public discourse, values trump policies, principles trump policies, policy directions trump specific programs. I believe that values, principles, and policy directions are exactly the things that can unite progressives, if they are crafted properly. The reason that they can unite us is that they stand conceptually above all the things that divide us.
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Having those shared values, largely unconscious and unspoken, is not good enough. They have to be out in the open, named, said, discussed, publicized, and made part of everyday public discourse. If they go unspoken, while conservative values dominate public discourse, then those values can be lost–swept out of our brains by the conservative communication juggernaut.
Don't just read about these values here and nod. Get out and say them out loud. Discuss them wherever you can. Volunteer for campaigns that give you a chance to discuss these values loud and clear and out in public.

– George Lakoff, The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!, “What Unites Progressives”

Put another way, values, principles, and policy directions are how you build a movement. Policies are how you implement the vision once the movement has critical mass. When building a movement you don't worry too much about folks with a drastically different world view; you're just trying to find all of your friends. But when it comes to policy, it's important to work with folks from “the other side.” A policy which is supported by many members of some movements has a better chance of surviving than a policy which is supported by all and only one team.

I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up by James Hoggan with Grania Litwin, 2016

I went book shopping last weekend so that I would be better prepared to have conversations with conservatives about issues like climate change. This book sounded like exactly what I was looking for. James Hoggan is a professional in the public relations field. He runs DeSmogBlog, a site devoted to "Clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science" and has published a book on the topic. He set out to write another book devoted to climate advocacy and highlighting climate facts, but he realized that there was a bigger problem: the public space in which our society discusses issues and comes to agree on policy is polluted, sickening democracy and making progress on any tough issue almost impossible. So he decided instead to explore what was clogging the public square and how we can engender more productive communication and enable action on important problems.

Hoggan structured the book's chapters around people he interviewed, most experts in some mode of communication. The result is a book where each part is clear and interesting, but it can be difficult to find an overall narrative. I came away with several important insights but without a full practical framework for making things better. The epilogue does help tie things together, and I'd recommend reading that first, then deciding if you want to read the rest of the book.

Hoggan's background concern of climate change and environmental concerns shows up throughout the book; most chapters share the interviewee's thoughts on how people relate to environmental facts or arguments. And while I bought the book hoping to improve my ability to have conversations around climate change, I think the book would have been stronger if he'd dug into specifics on several distinct issues. He mentions migration, gun violence, and other "big challenge" problems in passing but never talks about how someone might approach those particular problems using the ideas in the book.

Some of my key takeaways:

Experts on a topic (e.g. scientists) make decisions based on facts, rational debate, and deep investigation. Most non-experts make decisions based on emotion and narrative.

In a modern democracy, the support of non-experts is needed for any major policy. Facts are important in deciding what to do, a story (particularly one with values or a moral) is crucial in getting people to do it.

People have a self-conception in which they generally do the right thing and believe in the truth. When something challenges this view, people experience cognitive dissonance, which is uncomfortable.

If new information is presented in a way that's too shocking to that belief, people are more likely to assume that the information is wrong than that they've been wrong. It's therefore very important not to structure an argument as "You're wrong" or, especially, "You're a bad person." Instead, find shared values and express a policy proposal as a way of expressing those values.

Tell your own story; otherwise people who oppose your idea will tell your story in a way that undercuts you.

Once you've told your story, avoid responding to attacks. It's easier for folks to see an attacker as offensive if you aren't playing defense.

Anger is important in motivation, and appealing to anger "on your side" can be a good way to get folks involved in an issue.

But it's super important to drop the anger as you start talking to folks who don't get angry by the same things you do. If someone feels that you're speaking to them out of anger or that you perceive them as an enemy, they aren't likely to take your words to heart.

Self-righteousness and purity can hurt your position.

If the public sees two sides loudly asserting their own position, they aren't in a good position to evaluate the arguments and they may conclude that the issue is just a matter of personal preference or align with the side that has better hair or a slicker marketing delivery.

Change is scary.

People resist imposed change more than when they feel they have agency.

Inevitability is a terrible motivator.

To take action, people need to feel that there's hope and that what they do will have an effect.

Compassion is key to communication.

You can't make progress working with an enemy. But you can make great progress working with a fellow human being that you understand, respect, and disagree with.

One of the best paragraphs in the book comes in the epilogue:

People don't start out mired in hostility. The situation evolves. When someone publicly disagrees with something we feel strongly about, we perceive them as aggressors and we begin to question their motives and intentions. When people criticize or condemn our cause or our reasoning, our defense mechanisms kick in. Anger simmers and escalates. When people on both sides of an argument draw their positions from the perceived bad behavior of the other, they eventually start treating each other as enemies, and this provokes a perpetual shoving match and eventual gridlock.

I've been surprisingly calm about my achalasia surgery tomorrow.
After scheduling it, I haven't had any second thoughts, bouts of dread, or even niggling worries.
Most of our office is playing musical chairs at the end of this coming week, when I'm out. So my last act of heavy object lifting for a while was packing my desk on Friday. This should help me unplug from work while I'm at home recovering: there is no longer an ethernet cable connected to my computer, so I couldn't SSH in and hack on something if I wanted to. (Email, of course, is a much more sinister temptation.)

I spent most of this week fighting a cold, which helped put me in "Hang around the house not expending much energy" mode but didn't help in the "fatten up before surgery" department. The cold reduced my appetite and severely depressed my appetite for sugar. Not wanting sugar sounds like it would be a good thing, but I had to spend this weekend on a clear liquid diet, so I'd been planning to get most of my calories from sweets.

My mom got me a jar of unflavored gelatin for Christmas (before she knew I was having surgery). Gatorade powder, gelatin, and water turns out to be a pretty tasty way to get some calories, protein, and electrolytes. And if you halve the recommended gelatin to water ratio it's pretty easy to drink. I should try this combo at Burning Man.

I had my last meal, of sorts, at Sushi Zanmai on Friday night. I wasn't especially hungry (because of the cold), but ate a bunch because it was so tasty. Rice and fish are some of the first items in the solid portion of the recommended recovery diet progression, so maybe I'll be able to return before too long. I had a hamburger at lunch and probably won't be able to do so again until the end of March. Maybe it'll be my half-birthday treat.

Part of my plan for recovery time was to read The Conscience of a Conservative so I'll be better prepared to have conversations with Republican lawmakers and potential issue allies on the conservative side of the spectrum. My plan for Saturday was to visit used bookstores until I found a copy. After five bookstores and $120 I didn't have any Barry Goldwater, but I did end up with a copy of A People's History of the United States. I also overheard a Bookworm employee tell a customer that they were sold out of 1984. I didn't end up without materials to strengthen my transpartisan dialog skills, though: Don't Think of an Elephant!, I'm Right and You're an Idiot, and The Righteous Mind are now in my possession. I still intend to read TCoaC, but now my plan is to borrow a copy from the public library, which seems like an especially apt approach to that book.

Originally posted by prettygoodword at tsundoku

Tsundoku is problem endemic in the Stone households.

Today's Fresh Air program featured an interview with Bob Sullivan, author of Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day -- And What You Can Do About It. He talked about arbitrary fees charged by banks, cell phone companies, cable companies, and others that can make up a major percentage of their profits. It sounds like a very informative book, especially for people who don't like to read the fine print. I do read fine print (though I don't usually enjoy it), and I will probably add this book to my "get around to reading it" list.

I think there's significant value in a lot of libertarian ideas, but their "get rid of government and the market will take care of it" philosophy doesn't win me over. I dislike dealing with government bureaucracy and oppose government control over private activities as much as the next hippie pagan techie. But I dislike corporate bureaucracy even more and oppose corporate disregard for privacy and personal freedom as well. "A free market would resolve this by selecting for companies with transparent processes and strong privacy policies" is the stock libertarian response, but Sullivan doesn't think it's true. He said that one hotel chain tried to be up front about their prices and it was a disaster because customers selected their competitors whose prices looked lower but packed a lot of hidden fees.

One reason I don't own a cell phone is that I choose not to participate in the rigged market of cancellation fees, incoming text message fees, convenience charges, and "you spent too long talking to your friend with a crisis" overage charges. My monthly local phone service + DSL bill is the same regular $44 every month; the only time I've had to call Qwest because of billing confusion was when I didn't understand the wording of "we've just started charging monthly for allowing long distance calls." But I'm sure that if I had mobile service through the same company, I'd be caught off-guard on a regular basis. One difference is that there are more government regulations of what and how companies can charge for local phone service.

At least with the government I know that all prices and fees are clearly published, the requirements are stated up front, and that caprice is against the rules. I'd rather be at work tomorrow morning than at the passport office, but at least I don't expect any surprises. Driving there in the snow, on the other hand...)

Clearly I need to write a book titled Chalice in Wonderland. I'm just not sure if it should be fiction or free-form religious theory.

Google's got 170 hits for the phrase, including an episode of a live action series based on a Disney movie and an album "In Wonderland" by the band Châlice. But I think it's still got possibility.

At work we use iText, a free library for manipulating PDFs. The library's author makes his money by giving away cool software that's complicated enough that developers are motivated to buy the book so they can use it well. We just bought said book, and I want royalties: