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Robert Gandt, Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am: Entertaining if not very explanatory account of how Pan Am, the most prestigious airline in the world, ultimately withered and died. Its very success and global reach made it arrogant, which left it politically isolated and also without domestic routes to feed into its international ones. Also there appears to have been essentially no one able to do accounting to figure out what was actually costing too much money, or to act on it if they did find out. Another version of “private enterprise isn’t more efficient than government, there’s just survival bias because failed businesses disappear.”
Christine Negroni, The Crash Detectives: Stories of airplane crash investigations from a journalistic perspective, investigating the human factors and possibilities. Look, my spouse is reading a bunch of these for a class he’s teaching and now so am I. This didn’t stand out particularly.
Thomas Kessner, The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation: Focuses on Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight across the Atlantic and the weird consequence that he was the first global celebrity, with people proposing marriage and following his every move for years. He used this celebrity initially to promote the cause of aviation, touring countries to build American goodwill and encourage the building of airports. Does not get into his later pro-Nazi activities; he seems not to have had much under the surface.
Brian Laslie, The Air Force Way of War: Extremely repetitive; has one point, which is that the US Air Force became the best after Vietnam by training to fight with and against lots of different aircraft (even though dogfights are not really a huge part of war). The most interesting thing was that, at these Red Flag exercises, the missions got more complex over the course of the training, but they also removed anti-aircraft systems that had been “destroyed,” so pilots learned there was a payoff for targeting those systems and would do so in a real fight. (Control of the air, if you can get it, is really important!) Unfortunately there was no insight from the game designer who figured that out but I would have loved more about the human factors side.
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Churchill's American Arsenal: History of military cooperation between the UK and the US in World War II. There was a lot of interchange, especially when it came to production. Both sides were initially reluctant—the UK didn’t want to transfer its tech—but they ignored that when the situation got bad.
Peter Robison, Flying Blind: How did Boeing go so bad that it released badly designed planes that triggered crashes and covered it up? Capitalism!
Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A big, depressing book that focuses each chapter on a country or a few countries near each other and explains what challenges they faced, especially in building democratic institutions out of the rubble that colonial powers left behind. Transitions to self-government were fast, mostly because Africans wanted it that way, but the Europeans took/destroyed stuff on the way out and hadn’t invited participation before that, so the newly “independent” nations were left without the infrastructure of governance. In many cases, they also had to deal with ethnic divisions that had been exploited by the Europeans to hold on to power. Coup after coup, slaughter after slaughter resulted.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story: The book version has some creative prose/poetry that didn’t do much for me; I do recommend the original, which traces the history of Black experience in the US. Wesley Morris’s chapter on music stood out for its argument about authenticity/appropriation, what he calls the “psychic residue of the minstrel … impersonation taking its toll, leaving you riven by distrust. You never quite know whether the Blackness being presented to an audience is true or a performance. Even the most wondrous self-expression risks contamination when white people adore it.” “Respectability” can be empowering or imprisoning, and the legacy of blackface minstrelsy “is still misshaping perceptions, so that not every victory gets to feel like a win.” Although “[l]oving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people,” music also enabled “the only true integration” in the US. Some white artists “worked in Black traditions with admiration and respect,” but they still succeeded more easily with Black music. “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” Also, a reminder from Hannah-Jones: “most Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.”
Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World: Comprehensive anti-parking screed: Americans in particular have insisted that parking be payment-free, steps from their ultimate destination, and always available. But only two out of the three are achievable at any one time, and the result has been a country optimized for cars instead of humans, high housing prices, traffic congestion, and much worse. “[M]ore than half of baby boomers, a group that tends to dominate local politics, said free parking was more important than affordable housing in their neighborhood.”
A great aside on parking & organized crime explains that parking is perfect for money laundering because it’s a cash business and nobody can really keep track of how many cars parked that day, especially since most parking is unused most of the time. (As a cash business, parking lots are also good to rob, for writers looking for that kind of thing. And they still make a lot of money because, given parking habits, parking garages tend to have a monopoly or oligopoly, especially at places like college campuses.)
About that utilization: Even neighborhoods where people think you can’t ever find a parking space are almost never fully utilized, and their fullness is for only short periods. By some estimates, there are six parking spaces per car! But parking-centric design means you’ll still feel frustrated much of the time.
His solutions include zoning that allows parking-free construction or at least much lower parking minimums, although the neighbors scream bloody murder about it; this allows cheaper housing and also turns out to encourage people not to own cars. “If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot would cover twelve whole blocks.” He also wants dedicated off-street parking, to reclaim the streets for non-drivers and accustom people to parking a block or two away from their destination rather than holding out for the holy grail of a spot right in front of where they want to be. And of course more urbanist design more generally: “One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance.”
Why is America the worst? Because we see parking as a frontier that opens up anew every day, so, among other things, like other American pioneers, we feel free to disregard the actual rules. Icky: “Drivers take 21 percent longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting.” And our utility calculations are off regardless: people mostly like to search for the closest spot, underestimating the time that makes them spend driving around in circles and overestimating how much they’ll walk. (Of course, if you’re walking through a parking lot, it’s a much less pleasant walk than if you’re walking past houses or storefronts.) Parking violations are also infuriatingly arbitrary and offer opportunities for both abuse and corruption.
Speaking of which, Grabar tells a sad story of Chicago’s sale of its parking meters to private profiteers who then charged them for every street festival that shut down parking for a day. The city made much less than the sale was worth, of course, to fill one budget hole, and then its contract prevented it from improving things for drivers. “Parking ticket fines had to be at least ten times meter rates, and unpaid tickets had to be sent to a collection agency.” The new owner charged the city $73 million for issuing too many disabled parking placards—as much in one neighborhood as it had generated previously from all the parking meters in the city. Rahm Emanuel sold it as a political success when he decreased the amount the city was paying, but it was supposed to be getting paid!
On the plus side, Morgan Stanley raised prices so much that driving decreased, average space utilization went down to 25%, and transit and bikeshare improved. Grabar likes that and wants on-street parking to be more expensive if it is to exist at all, though he might let delivery trucks and similar vehicles get an exception. But it’s not great that Morgan Stanley made back its billion dollars with 64 years of receipts left to come.
Here, have some statistics: “If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year.” But if you make on-street parking really expensive and garage parking less expensive, people circle less and violate fewer parking regulations, as San Francisco found.
Also some advice: don’t say “parking requirements” or “minimums.” That’s value-neutral at best, or implicitly conveys a need. Instead, try “costly parking mandates.” Existing minimums are both random (varying hugely by city) and incredibly overgenerous. DC required Target to build a 1000-car garage, less than the 1700 required by then-extant regulations; it was never half full and Target has now built a store in nearby Rosslyn with zero parking.
But this is politically hard, often impossible. Grabar suggests that free parking seems like the only thing many people can have, given the cost of housing (to which parking’s contribution is invisible). “Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.”
Ted Striphas, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet: Not necessarily the kind of book I thought I’d be getting. Starts with the idea of using “keywords,” the social science concept, as already implicated in technologies of knowledge. Uses that as a jumping-off point to discuss, for example, how the history of “algorithm” and what Westerners say about the scholar for whom it is named preserves some elements of the past while erasing others. I didn’t know how much mathematical writing changed over time—apparently the early Indian scholars wrote verse explaining their theorems, and worked through examples about who’d inherit how many slaves in ways that made clear that calculation was only part of the problem they were thinking about. Notation also changed a lot, sometimes to accommodate printing technologies. Florentine traders rejected switching to Indo-Arabic numerals because they thought they were too easily altered compared to Roman numerals.
And, in a reminder of how technologies are always tested on marginalized people first, he notes that Cambridge Analytica tested its ability to manipulate politics in Trinidad and Tobago before it brought the same tools to the West. “Aimé Césaire identified this vicious, narcissistic circle back in 1955, powerfully connecting Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity to the brutalities that had been and continued to be exacted in Europe’s colonies: ‘What he [Westerners] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man ….’” As you can tell, there are a lot of riffs here.
Christine Negroni, The Crash Detectives: Stories of airplane crash investigations from a journalistic perspective, investigating the human factors and possibilities. Look, my spouse is reading a bunch of these for a class he’s teaching and now so am I. This didn’t stand out particularly.
Thomas Kessner, The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation: Focuses on Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight across the Atlantic and the weird consequence that he was the first global celebrity, with people proposing marriage and following his every move for years. He used this celebrity initially to promote the cause of aviation, touring countries to build American goodwill and encourage the building of airports. Does not get into his later pro-Nazi activities; he seems not to have had much under the surface.
Brian Laslie, The Air Force Way of War: Extremely repetitive; has one point, which is that the US Air Force became the best after Vietnam by training to fight with and against lots of different aircraft (even though dogfights are not really a huge part of war). The most interesting thing was that, at these Red Flag exercises, the missions got more complex over the course of the training, but they also removed anti-aircraft systems that had been “destroyed,” so pilots learned there was a payoff for targeting those systems and would do so in a real fight. (Control of the air, if you can get it, is really important!) Unfortunately there was no insight from the game designer who figured that out but I would have loved more about the human factors side.
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Churchill's American Arsenal: History of military cooperation between the UK and the US in World War II. There was a lot of interchange, especially when it came to production. Both sides were initially reluctant—the UK didn’t want to transfer its tech—but they ignored that when the situation got bad.
Peter Robison, Flying Blind: How did Boeing go so bad that it released badly designed planes that triggered crashes and covered it up? Capitalism!
Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: A big, depressing book that focuses each chapter on a country or a few countries near each other and explains what challenges they faced, especially in building democratic institutions out of the rubble that colonial powers left behind. Transitions to self-government were fast, mostly because Africans wanted it that way, but the Europeans took/destroyed stuff on the way out and hadn’t invited participation before that, so the newly “independent” nations were left without the infrastructure of governance. In many cases, they also had to deal with ethnic divisions that had been exploited by the Europeans to hold on to power. Coup after coup, slaughter after slaughter resulted.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story: The book version has some creative prose/poetry that didn’t do much for me; I do recommend the original, which traces the history of Black experience in the US. Wesley Morris’s chapter on music stood out for its argument about authenticity/appropriation, what he calls the “psychic residue of the minstrel … impersonation taking its toll, leaving you riven by distrust. You never quite know whether the Blackness being presented to an audience is true or a performance. Even the most wondrous self-expression risks contamination when white people adore it.” “Respectability” can be empowering or imprisoning, and the legacy of blackface minstrelsy “is still misshaping perceptions, so that not every victory gets to feel like a win.” Although “[l]oving Black culture has never demanded a corresponding love of Black people,” music also enabled “the only true integration” in the US. Some white artists “worked in Black traditions with admiration and respect,” but they still succeeded more easily with Black music. “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” Also, a reminder from Hannah-Jones: “most Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.”
Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World: Comprehensive anti-parking screed: Americans in particular have insisted that parking be payment-free, steps from their ultimate destination, and always available. But only two out of the three are achievable at any one time, and the result has been a country optimized for cars instead of humans, high housing prices, traffic congestion, and much worse. “[M]ore than half of baby boomers, a group that tends to dominate local politics, said free parking was more important than affordable housing in their neighborhood.”
A great aside on parking & organized crime explains that parking is perfect for money laundering because it’s a cash business and nobody can really keep track of how many cars parked that day, especially since most parking is unused most of the time. (As a cash business, parking lots are also good to rob, for writers looking for that kind of thing. And they still make a lot of money because, given parking habits, parking garages tend to have a monopoly or oligopoly, especially at places like college campuses.)
About that utilization: Even neighborhoods where people think you can’t ever find a parking space are almost never fully utilized, and their fullness is for only short periods. By some estimates, there are six parking spaces per car! But parking-centric design means you’ll still feel frustrated much of the time.
His solutions include zoning that allows parking-free construction or at least much lower parking minimums, although the neighbors scream bloody murder about it; this allows cheaper housing and also turns out to encourage people not to own cars. “If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot would cover twelve whole blocks.” He also wants dedicated off-street parking, to reclaim the streets for non-drivers and accustom people to parking a block or two away from their destination rather than holding out for the holy grail of a spot right in front of where they want to be. And of course more urbanist design more generally: “One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance.”
Why is America the worst? Because we see parking as a frontier that opens up anew every day, so, among other things, like other American pioneers, we feel free to disregard the actual rules. Icky: “Drivers take 21 percent longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting.” And our utility calculations are off regardless: people mostly like to search for the closest spot, underestimating the time that makes them spend driving around in circles and overestimating how much they’ll walk. (Of course, if you’re walking through a parking lot, it’s a much less pleasant walk than if you’re walking past houses or storefronts.) Parking violations are also infuriatingly arbitrary and offer opportunities for both abuse and corruption.
Speaking of which, Grabar tells a sad story of Chicago’s sale of its parking meters to private profiteers who then charged them for every street festival that shut down parking for a day. The city made much less than the sale was worth, of course, to fill one budget hole, and then its contract prevented it from improving things for drivers. “Parking ticket fines had to be at least ten times meter rates, and unpaid tickets had to be sent to a collection agency.” The new owner charged the city $73 million for issuing too many disabled parking placards—as much in one neighborhood as it had generated previously from all the parking meters in the city. Rahm Emanuel sold it as a political success when he decreased the amount the city was paying, but it was supposed to be getting paid!
On the plus side, Morgan Stanley raised prices so much that driving decreased, average space utilization went down to 25%, and transit and bikeshare improved. Grabar likes that and wants on-street parking to be more expensive if it is to exist at all, though he might let delivery trucks and similar vehicles get an exception. But it’s not great that Morgan Stanley made back its billion dollars with 64 years of receipts left to come.
Here, have some statistics: “If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year.” But if you make on-street parking really expensive and garage parking less expensive, people circle less and violate fewer parking regulations, as San Francisco found.
Also some advice: don’t say “parking requirements” or “minimums.” That’s value-neutral at best, or implicitly conveys a need. Instead, try “costly parking mandates.” Existing minimums are both random (varying hugely by city) and incredibly overgenerous. DC required Target to build a 1000-car garage, less than the 1700 required by then-extant regulations; it was never half full and Target has now built a store in nearby Rosslyn with zero parking.
But this is politically hard, often impossible. Grabar suggests that free parking seems like the only thing many people can have, given the cost of housing (to which parking’s contribution is invisible). “Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.”
Ted Striphas, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet: Not necessarily the kind of book I thought I’d be getting. Starts with the idea of using “keywords,” the social science concept, as already implicated in technologies of knowledge. Uses that as a jumping-off point to discuss, for example, how the history of “algorithm” and what Westerners say about the scholar for whom it is named preserves some elements of the past while erasing others. I didn’t know how much mathematical writing changed over time—apparently the early Indian scholars wrote verse explaining their theorems, and worked through examples about who’d inherit how many slaves in ways that made clear that calculation was only part of the problem they were thinking about. Notation also changed a lot, sometimes to accommodate printing technologies. Florentine traders rejected switching to Indo-Arabic numerals because they thought they were too easily altered compared to Roman numerals.
And, in a reminder of how technologies are always tested on marginalized people first, he notes that Cambridge Analytica tested its ability to manipulate politics in Trinidad and Tobago before it brought the same tools to the West. “Aimé Césaire identified this vicious, narcissistic circle back in 1955, powerfully connecting Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity to the brutalities that had been and continued to be exacted in Europe’s colonies: ‘What he [Westerners] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man ….’” As you can tell, there are a lot of riffs here.