This smart graphic novel zooms in and out on engineered systems happening all around us: electricity, water, the internet. Fascinating and clever. Currently reading: Hidden Systems by Dan Nott 📚
I’m divorcing my Apple Watch because I’m in love with my Oura ring. I need fewer CTAs and notifications in my life, and more reminders to prioritize sleep and mindfulness. Plus, you can pay for one with your HSA.
V proud of myself because, despite going to the quilt store yesterday and getting everything BUT what I went there for, I found enough batting scraps to put together a quilt sandwich and began hand quilting it last night. She’s going to be cute.
Nicki does party songs, Megan does praxis.
The latest You’re Wrong About podcast about the pro-life movement is an excellent primer for anyone who knows a little but doesn’t feel like an expert. Covers the history of the movement, where they came from ideologically, how they organize and why it’s effective. yourewrongabout.com
Finished reading: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 📚
I liked this one mostly because it asks nothing of the reader, save for enduring the completely unnecessary side story about the biographer.
Goodreads never did anything for me
I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, I’m trying to take on some lighter reads because mom needs a little sugar with her medicine.
So far, I’m doing an okay job of keeping track of my reading habits here, which is why I ponied up for a paid membership to this site at all: flotisserie.micro.blog/books/
I’m looking for some lightness in my reading list for the next couple of months. Found this list of funniest novels from the Booker library: thebookerprizes.com/the-booke…
Devastating, bleak, relentless.
Finished reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚
❄️ big, fat snowflakes ❄️
Currently reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚
Dystopian, but not so far away.
First real snow today.
🍿 Saltburn, baby.
I am enjoying the Twitter/Tumblr feel of micro.blog and feel like I could settle in here. But it would be cooler if there was a quick reference for markdown near the input field to better format our posts.
The local story is ripe with corruption. Indiana likes to spin up private “growth” orgs to bypass legislation, after a long history of treating the state’s water resources like something between a highway and a sewer. Indiana’s Plan to Pipe In Groundwater for Microchip-Making Draws Fire
“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” My Unraveling, by Tom Scocca for NYMag
Best New (to me) Books of 2023
After a stint as an English major and as a writer myself, I got into a habit of reading dozens of articles a day instead of longer form writing: books. I spent a lot of energy in 2023 getting back to books. Thanks to a great book club (you know who you are) and making space to settle in with a great book in a cozy spot, here are my favs from 2023:
📚 Monica Potts, “The Forgotten Girls”
I’ve followed Potts’ career since she was a student blogger turned journalist in the aughts, so seeing her publish this book was a little personally gratifying, too. Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. She compares her childhood against a friend who didn’t get out of dodge, and explores what makes the difference in areas where people get left behind.
I really enjoyed this read for so many reasons, and was pleased that Potts’ voice is empathetic, smart and searching despite the challenging material. A mix of memoir and sociology. Very recommended.
📚 Timothy Egan, “A Fever in the Heartland”
In the roaring twenties, my home state of Indiana was a hotbed of racist activity. The KKK rose to their peak power with something like one in three adult Hoosiers counting themselves among their ranks, by leveraging evangelical churches, law enforcement, and local politicians to curry influence and power. This is ultimately a story about a deathbed testimony that broke the spell, when the telling of the Grand Dragon’s secrets, cruelties and perversions finally brought a public reckoning with the Klan.
📚 Barbara Kingsolver, “Demon Copperhead”
Like Dickens did with “Copperfield,” Kingsolver does with “Copperhead.” This novel explores how institutional poverty harms children, set in an American South that, frankly, felt familiar coming from the lower Midwest. It lives up to the hype and was vindicating and familiar. I listened to this audiobook on a long road trip and the narrator nailed it.
(I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. I finished this and turned around and reread “Poisonwood Bible” - about the hubris of American missionaries in Congo - on a camping trip. It holds up.)
📚 Britney Spears, “The Woman in Me”
Yanno, I didn’t think this would be on my list either, but here we are. Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship and stole her time, money and autonomy. Consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered right under our noses. It’s giving “Yellow Wallpaper,” but pop. Free Britney.
📚 Patrick Radden Keefe, “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty”
This is a giant tome of a book that nevertheless provides a riveting and thorough history of who knew what when and why it matters. It’s also a study of impunity among the super-rich, and how their money and influence reaches into the public commons. It turns out a lot of modern fiction deals with addiction, opioids in particular, so this became a foundational book for a lot of other reads on this year’s list.
If you don’t want to read the book, but want to know more about the Sacklers and their terrible, coercive global influence, don’t miss the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which follows artist, activist and addict Nan Goldin as she fights against and grieves for all that opioids have taken from her, and from us. It’s a beautiful testament to art, community and the disenfranchised - and currently streaming on MAX.
I’m building my list for 2024, so let me know what you recommend!
Readings on the Midwest Water Wars
I’m following a new environmental drama in my Hoosier hometown. Some geniuses in the Indiana statehouse decided to court agreements to build gigantic computer chip plants in an area of the state that lacks one critical thing: there’s no water. Computer chip manufacturing apparently requires a ton of water.
“No problem!” the intellectual giants said. “There is the large Wabash River aquifer to the north that we can just have piped 35 miles down to our site.” The only problem is that the math doesn’t math and the people of Indiana hate the idea of giving up their water rights on the word of business men who are now on the record openly lying about the science.
Here’s what I’m reading:
Purdue Groundwater Expert on LEAP by Dave Bangert
The following quote is building a metaphor so the average person can understand just how much water is planned to be removed from this critical aquifer *** every day *** for this chip plant. The state agency responsible for steering the plans lied by claiming the aquifer will be recharged because it’s connected to Lake Michigan. There’s zero evidence that it is, and there’s no evidence it will be recharged as quickly as it’s tapped, or that the communities downstream that are planned to absorb the runoff can handle this amount of water at all. The more you learn about this, the more you wonder why Indiana would choose such a bad location for a chip plant (the answer is always money).
“Ask people if they know what ‘one acre foot’ means. That’s a volume of water that we commonly refer to in hydrogeology. One acre foot means you have one acre of land that’s flooded to a depth of one foot. Imagine that you’re at the football stadium. Without the end zone, it’s about an acre. And so if you fill that to a depth of one foot, that is 326,000 gallons. Now think about how deep you would have to flood the field to get 1 million gallons – that’s essentially about three feet of water to pump out 1 million gallons per day. To pump out 10 million gallons, that’s a football field flooded to 30 feet. To get to 100 million gallons, you’ve got to flood it over 300 feet. … That’s taller than all the buildings in West Lafayette.”
The more people begin learning about this, the more chatter I see on social media suggesting that they just draw the water from somewhere else, like the Ohio River, the White River, Lake Michigan, even Lake Superior. It really didn’t bode well when Indiana futzed with the Kankakee River basin, which killed migratory wetlands and an estimated twenty percent of migratory birds in the early 1900s, for example, and it’s unlikely to play out well now. The following two books explain that kind of thinking and why it’s terrible for, well, just about everything.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
I’m kind of a nerd about science writing because it takes several types of technical skill and expertise to thread the needle so the layperson can follow along. This book, which won awards from all kinds of industry bodies, is wildly readable considering that it’s about the intersection of biology, commerce and hydrology. Egan covers the ways that people leverage water to meet their needs, which often means treating critical waterways like a cross between a highway and a landfill.
The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin
As communities around the Great Lakes basin grow, as as climate change progresses, it’s likely we will see a lot of scuttlebutt around lake water diversion. It’s extremely likely these will turn out to be the biggest environmental and resource conflicts in the coming decades. The author lays it all out, and the updated version includes three new chapters on water fights and, alarmingly, the effect of the invasive Asian carp, a voracious species that reproduces at a disturbing rate—which is transforming the ecology of the river as it makes its way through the Chicago River diversion and ever closer to Lake Michigan.
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Indiana, the KKK, and me
Currently reading: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan 📚
Despite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts finally land him in enough trouble that the powers that be couldn’t ignore his non-KKK activities any longer. The point, however, is that they ignored most of his activities because institutional power was both in the Klan’s pocket and was leveraged to recruit members up and down the state. Egan takes a powerful, uncomfortable look at how the KKK organized white, Protestant people against everyone else using social and professional organizations and churches, and how they helped shape neighborhood vigilantes into police forces tasked with protecting property and morality.
Fellow Hoosiers will recognize a lot of familiar names, towns and players. That photo in the NYT book review was taken in Marion, Indiana, for example. I’m finishing up an anecdote that takes place in Logansport. New Castle, Muncie, Ft. Wayne, Terre Haute are also places of interest. A reader on Twitter reminded me that the KKK tried to purchase Valaparaiso University, once one of the most prestigious private universities this side of the Mississippi. Examples abound. It’s unsurprising to read that Indianapolis was nearly taken over by the Klan in the 1920s, considering how many in the statehouse openly endorse racist, exclusionary and eugenicist opinions today (including perennial media darling Mitch Daniels).
The trailer for the next Mad Max movie, “Furiosa,” is out now: www.youtube.com/watch 🍿