Lots of changes are afoot so I’ll get right to it. This newsletter will now be a dedicated non-fiction books recommendation newsletter, with a focus on history and cities. I will be changing the name to Book Time.

In addition, I’m moving back to Buttondown, an independent newsletter platform with more flexibility and customization options.

Finally, I will be introducing affiliate links to Bookshop.org for the books I recommend.

Sounds good? Great! Don’t care about non-fiction books? I understand. Want to learn more? Read on!

Why I’m Making the Change

I started Urbababble as a way for me to keep in touch with you all as I discontinued social media use. But it didn’t have a clear focus. I’ve realized the book recommendations are the part of the newsletter I most enjoy doing. I love reading. I read around 15,000-20,000 pages a year purely for pleasure, which comes out to about 50 non-fiction books a year. And I love talking about and sharing good books with people. And I love that many of you respond with your own recommendations. So I’m going to build on those things.

As for changing the name, Urbababble was always a silly name—although the pamphlet it’s based on remains one of the greatest finds of my professional research—and now that the newsletter has a specific focus I want it to have a name that reflects that. So you’ll still be getting emails from me, but the name of the newsletter will be Book Time and you can find it by going to booktime.email.

Why I’m Switching to Buttondown

I’m leaving Substack because it doesn’t have the features I want and it comes with too much baggage. I don’t just mean the political stuff. There is now a Twitter-like functionality, Reposts and Restacks, Chats, and god knows what other features I have less than no interest in. I don’t care about any of that stuff and I find it all increasingly annoying. I want to read good books and recommend them to you all and get emails back from you about good books you like, too. And if you choose to share the newsletter with others, that’s awesome.

So I’m going back to Buttondown, a platform run by a person named Justin who responds to all my questions quickly and works with me to build the newsletter experience I want. Buttondown also respects user privacy in a way I value.

Why I’m Introducing Affiliate Links

However, Buttondown costs money. So, to help defray those costs, I’m introducing affiliate links to the books I recommend through Bookshop.org. If you want to buy one of the books I recommend and do so through the links provided, you’ll help support the newsletter. I will also create lists on Bookshop of all the books I have recommended, broken down by a few distinct categories.

My goal is to cover the costs of running the newsletter the way I want to run it. And if I want to add features in the future, I’ll be able to do that, too.

Will You Get More Emails?

You might get fewer.

When it comes to newsletters, I believe in the Less Is More approach, both in terms of the frequency of emails and the length of each edition.

I imagine that for most people the main utility of Book Time will be the time they save hunting for book recommendations. So I’m aiming to send somewhere between 6 to 12 emails a year with brief book recommendations like I’ve been doing here on occasion. The less time I spend writing newsletters is more time we all spend reading good books.

If this all sounds good to you and you want to subscribe to Book Time, then do absolutely nothing. If book recommendations or non-fiction books aren’t your thing and you wish to unsubscribe, it’s been a pleasure to have you. I will wait two weeks from the time I send this email to migrate the subscriber list to Buttondown.

I’m super excited to start Book Time and hope to see you all there. And thanks as always for reading and supporting my work!

Cheers,

Aaron

But books, books are good. I have had a lot of time to read. And it’s been a while since I provided a books update/recommendations. So let’s dive in.

A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein

This is a strong but oddly constructed book. The book is at its best when it’s showing how Clinton’s proposed reforms on things like health care got neutered. It is less compelling when all of a sudden we’re knee deep in, like, arcane details of international trade negotiations for unspecified reasons. But for anyone who, like me, feels like the Clinton presidency is a blind spot on their historical radar, it’s well worth a read. I’m not sure how much it has to offer for people who were alive and paid attention at the time.

The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 by Cecil Woodham-Smith and A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland by Christine Kinealy

I read these because I realized I knew basically nothing about the potato famine, which is one of history’s greatest examples of bureaucratic failure, a particular fetish of mine.

Upon completing the book, I sent the following email to Professor Kinealy:

I’m writing with a question that, in the grand scheme of things, is not that important, but has perplexed me. In your work and others, I see the statistic that the average Irish adult male ate 14 pounds of potatoes a day pre-famine. This statistic is widely reported and used. The first time I read it, I thought wow, that’s a lot of potatoes! The second time I read it I thought, wait, that is a lot of potatoes. And the third time I read it I thought, wait a minute, exactly how many potatoes is that? Next time I went to the store, I made a note of how many potatoes that would be. It’s something like 60-70 full-size russet potatoes! I even decided to make a few baked potatoes for dinner to see how many I could eat. The answer was three.

So, this got me wondering: Where does this statistic come from? How reliable is it? Because it is one of those statistics that seems to be generally accepted in the field but as an outsider is, quite literally, unbelievable to me.

If you have any insight into this statistic that could offer any clarity, or if you just want to point me to existing literature that could help answer this question for me, I would be tremendously appreciative.

I did not receive a reply.

Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond

From the guy who brought you Evicted, a genuinely great book, this is more like a pamphlet you can give to your relative who has lived in a gated community for their entire adult life and never spoken to a poor person. That may sound like an insult to the book but it’s really an insult to America.

From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth Century America, by Beth Bailey

I’m a sucker for works where professors take an aspect of daily life super seriously as a subject of historical study and write it up in a way anyone can read and learn from. So I loved this book. Dating has always been a giant pain in the ass, but the ways in which it used to be a pain in the ass were so much more interesting than the ways it is now.

Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, by Andrew Needham

A fairly dense academic work but now on my list of must-read urbanist texts.

Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America, by David Skeel Jr.

American exceptionalism is usually overstated but I learned from this book that U.S. bankruptcy law is unlike bankruptcy law in any other country in the world. No other country gives the managers of the bankrupt firm as much control over the process or allow lawyers to dictate the outcomes rather than a government-appointed administrator like in the rest of the world. These combine to make U.S. bankruptcy law uniquely favorable for managers of companies with too much debt, which encourages companies to load up on debt because the “worst case” scenario of bankruptcy actually isn’t that bad for them. They get to keep their jobs!

Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, by Richard Foglesong

An absolute must-read urbanist text. Also an absolute must-read economic development text. Also just a damn fun book.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, by Henry Caudill

A beautifully-written book from the early 1960s about a fascinating and sad region. Mostly ages well, too. Ought to be much more prominently mentioned as a foundational environmentalist text along with Silent Spring.

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, by Kathryn Olmsted

I learned a lot from this book, not just on the named subject matter but also how the press worked in the 1930s. Also I now think of Elon Musk more as a wannabe descendant of the Press Baron than anything else.

That’s all from me today. If you have any upcoming vacations, I hope they go a lot better than mine did.

Cheers,

Aaron

Instead of an update on my recent work, I wrote something on biking in New York City. But first, a request: I’m suddenly and randomly interested in the history of U.S. bankruptcy law and how it shapes corporate behavior. If you’ve ever read anything good on the subject, please let me know.

Cheers,

Aaron

I am celebrating my 10th year as a car-free urban cyclist. In 2013, I was not involved in the urbanist scene. But I lived in Washington, D.C. and knew I no longer needed my car. So I sold my 2006 Honda Accord and started biking and Metro-ing everywhere. A year later, I moved to Brooklyn.

One year after moving here, I got doored while biking home from work in the rain on Wythe Ave. An UberEats delivery worker was in a rush and threw open the door without looking. I flew over the handlebars and into the road. Somehow, both me and my bike were OK. I crawled to the sidewalk, shaking from the adrenaline. The UberEats driver stayed with me for a few minutes out of what I interpreted as genuine compassion until his phone started blowing up. The person who ordered the food was complaining about the delay. I told him to go deliver the food to the person in the luxury apartment building we were outside of, and asked him to please look before opening the door in the future. He promised he would. I stayed on the sidewalk, shaking and crying, for another 15 minutes. Then I rode home.

A few months later, I was running errands in Manhattan on my bike. I was on the Prince Street bike lane in SoHo and pulled up to a light next to a black Mercedes. While waiting for the light to turn, the driver lowered the window, and, in a calm, monotonous tone, said to me, “If you touch my mirror, I will fucking kill you.” I believed him.

For the first six or seven years of biking in NYC, these were my dominant fears. Cars. Drivers looking straight down into their laps and on their phones. Road rage. Thoughtlessness. Aggression. Anger. Box trucks. Garbage trucks. Big things with motors controlled by people who either didn’t want or couldn’t be bothered to pay attention.

I am still afraid of these things. I am no less likely to be hit or killed by a car or truck than I was when I first moved here. But now, my terror of getting taken out by, say, some racing BMWs, has been supplemented by the lower-register but ever-present hostility of mopeds and other two-wheeled motorized vehicles weaving around bike lanes.

There is a responsible way to ride these things. Few do it. I’ve had my handlebars clipped and helmet slapped. I’ve been threatened by people, but now also from behind the handlebars of a motorbike instead of the wheel of a car. The bridges have become especially hostile places, with no wiggle room in an emergency and a “if you can you should” attitude towards weaving and speeding by moped riders despite the bridge paths not wide enough for safe passing. I used to love biking over the Manhattan Bridge as a quintessential Why I Live In New York experience, the skyline and the river providing a handsome reward for a little effort to get up the incline. Now, I dread it. I don’t have the luxury of looking at the skyline lest I drift ever so slightly and get slammed into by the oncoming e-moped at 35 mph.

Even protected bike lanes are no longer the safe spaces they used to be. Instead, they’re magnets for mopeds and the jerks who ride them. The e-mopeds are the worst because you can’t hear them coming. All of a sudden, there’s a several hundred pound small motorcycle passing you within inches at twice your speed. Some of them are quite literally indistinguishable from racing motorcycles except that they’re silent. They’re not legal but that doesn’t seem to matter.

When I ride in protected bike lanes now, I feel like one of those anonymous avatars in a racing game that only exists to be either avoided or crashed into in spectacular fashion. The player respawns and the race resumes. When I played those games as a kid, I never gave much thought to the bouncing body. Now I identify with them more than the racer.

On paper, one could compare the 2014 bike map with the 2023 one and see progress. And there is some. Central and Prospect Parks no longer allow cars. There were virtually no protected bike lanes in the city 10 years ago except for off-road bike paths. Citibike is much, much more prevalent.

And yet, over the past two years, I have come to the conclusion that, for me, biking in New York is a worse experience than when I moved here. The infrastructure progress has not kept pace with other, dangerous trends. Cars are bigger, faster, and more dangerous than they used to be. The proliferation of two-wheeled motorized vehicles have made formerly pleasant bike-only spaces nerve-wracking and even dangerous. When many of us advocated for better bike infrastructure, I don’t think we envisioned fighting for these spaces just so we could be bullied off them by mopeds going faster than the legal speed limit for cars. If I had known this is what the future would look like, I wouldn’t have bothered to fight for it.

I still love biking, just as much if not more than I did a decade ago. But more and more often, I ride in places in the city I used to enjoy and hate it. The Kent Ave bike lane through Williamsburg has become a death trap. The bridges are moped raceways. The Hudson River Greenway is still a jewel when you’re not getting sideswiped by mopeds or thoughtless Citibikers aren’t stopping dead in the middle of the path for a selfie. You have to be certifiably insane to ride a bike anywhere in Queens. The “protected” bike lanes are crammed with parked cars, ambling pedestrians, tourists with suitcases, or actual bags of garbage. I find myself riding more in the rain, the bigger the downpour the better, because it scares away the mopeds.

But more and more often, I come back from a ride and find myself asking why I bother. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that, nowadays, I want to like biking around NYC much more than I actually do. I used to look forward to biking places. Now I ride to try and remember why I ride. I’m sick of friends texting me that they almost died biking home from work or the store, more and more frequently about a moped encounter than a car. Just because these encounters are less likely to result in death than a run-in with a car doesn’t make them any less scary.

The obvious solution to all this is to have multi-lane bike lanes for safer passing. Maybe fast lanes and slow lanes, too. But, in the context on how far behind we are on just having protected bike lanes to begin with, even suggesting this feels like wasted energy. By the time we get around to having a real protected bike lane network around the city, we’ll be multiple transportation innovations behind. We, as a city, are still trying to figure out putting garbage in garbage cans. Putting actual barriers between cars and bikes is edging into a multi-generational battle. There is one eight-block stretch of Hoyt Street where the lights are timed for cyclists instead of cars. It was implemented in 2019 for seemingly no reason other than to toy with cyclists about what could be done if anyone gave a shit. Politicians promise to do things then spend years waiting to do it before watering it down then not doing it at all. New York has become a city of second-hand policies implemented by third-rate politicians playing with yesterday’s ideas. Behind on everything and late to every party, New York is being governed on tape delay.

Every time I think about what it’s like to bike in NYC these days, I find myself thinking about something that happened a few years ago. I was biking up the Prospect Park hill in the dead of winter, another good time for cycling because the most obnoxious moped riders don’t bother when it’s cold. I was the only one on the path. A storm was rolling in and the winds were picking up. I was battling a heavy crosswind when all of a sudden the wind shifted and started blowing straight into me. I gasped for breath as the air seemed to reverse the flow of my lungs. I pedaled harder and faster but still kept slowing down. I downshifted to my lowest gear and spun, spun, spun to no avail. Despite being panicky and exhausted, I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining what someone looking at me from the distance would have seen: A cyclist trying to get up a hill, putting in all this work, but still going backwards.

Update: I turned them off the comments. A few people were crossing the line and I’m not going to spend time moderating comments on a free newsletter.

But the truth is I sometimes don’t have “an angle” when I start reporting a story. I have a question. So I tell them what my question is.

For my most recent story, my question was about wildfires. Specifically, we at Motherboard have gotten many PR pitches regarding startups focused on “solving” the wildfire crisis over the last few years. My question was: What are these companies actually doing? And will it help? Or is this more of the same from an industry that has previously made big promises to solve huge societal issues with little or no results?

In general, feature stories usually start with questions, which you report out, and the reporting leads to an angle. That’s a jargon-y way of saying that you learn stuff and then write what you learn. And that’s exactly what happened here.

When I started reporting this story, I had no idea what my “angle” would be. But as I spoke to more and more startup founders/venture capitalists, I heard a recurring theme. They all think fire is like cancer. “An analogy we always talk about is cancer detection,” one startup founder said. “Catch the cancer at stage one, hit it with really aggressive treatment, and never allow it to get to stage four.”

Most every VC/startup person I talked to for the story used some kind of health care analogy similar to this one. And every wildfire expert I talked to hated it. They said the wildfire problem is not like cancer at all and this is totally the wrong way to think about it. And if you’re thinking about the problem the wrong way, you’re unlikely to be a part of the solution.

I’m grateful to have worked on this story because I gained a much deeper understanding of the wildfire problem and how to make it better. I heard about some incredible things happening on Indigenous land where cultural burnings are making a comeback, demonstrating that a healthy, sustainable forest has essentially zero to do with cancer treatment. And I gained a broader understanding of what “technology” is. If we continue to think of it as just a bunch of computer chips or lines of code, we’ll never seriously tackle any of the huge problems facing our world. I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

Other Stuff I Wrote

• New York may have actually lost riders by building an $11 billion train station

• Why air quality readings vary so much during wildfire smoke events

• NHTSA, an agency that sucks in almost every measurable way, has taken the time to interfere with a popular right-to-repair law coincidentally using the same discredited scare-tactic arguments car manufacturers have been using for years.

• A highway collapsed and every politician tangentially involved warned it would cause total gridlock and cripple the economy and guess what that never happened everything was fine

• I wrote 1,200 words on the War of 1812 for absolutely no reason

• Local town gets park upgrade

I started reporting this feature about two months ago, for reasons that essentially amounted to my own curiosity. I realized I had never read a really good story on what transit systems have tried to do about homelessness in the past and what they’re doing about it now. Are there any success stories? What’s working? What doesn’t? What does success even look like?

To be honest, we did put some pep in our step, editorially, to get the story published this week. But not because it was suddenly timely. We did it because it was almost done and I’m on vacation next week. But it turned out that it is, now, somewhat timely, but only because the same issues keep occurring in a country that never learns from its mistakes. The homelessness issue, particularly on transit systems, very much fits that paradigm. I hope you’ll take the time to read about it.

My subway navigation strategy

For a brief period it looked like the MTA was no longer going to post service updates to Twitter because Elon Musk did things, but now it seems he is undoing those things and they might go back to posting Twitter alerts. Each and every day I am more grateful I left Twitter long ago.

In any event, don’t rely on the MTA’s Twitter updates. Here is how to navigate the subway’s endless service alerts and changes without it. Shoutout to developer extraordinaire Sunny Ng.

I didn’t publish much else in recent weeks. You may have heard the company I work for is undergoing some…difficulties…which has affected production and morale. Despite it all, I somehow still have a job, for now, and it is a job I love. So I’m going to take a much-needed week off and get back to it. In the meantime, I’ve got some biking and birdwatching to do.

In recent years I have logged onto Twitter only to share my biggest stories. But there’s no point in doing that anymore. I am actually not sure where to go to share my stories anymore, other than here, with you, which is more meaningful to me anyways. So I’m going to send these emails slightly more often than I used to. Instead of every month, maybe every two weeks? Certainly no more than that. We’ll see how it goes.

Gas Cars Aren’t Going Anywhere

I found the coverage of the EPA’s new emissions rules a bit strange. Most every story framed the new rules as one of the most consequential regulations of our time. Reading the EPA’s press release, that is certainly the story they were telling.

But, after running some basic numbers—and I mean basic—I found that buying a gas car in 2032, according to the EPA’s projections, will be easier and more readily available than buying a sedan today. Using some elementary projections, it’s pretty obvious we’re looking at around the year 2050 until gas cars become truly difficult to buy. And that’s assuming these regulations don’t ebb and flow as new Republican administrations cancel or weaken them over time, which has very much been the historical norm on auto emissions.

All this is to say: Gas cars aren’t going anywhere any time soon, for better or worse.

Goodbye Netflix DVDs, How I Loved Thee

Netflix announced it is shutting down its DVD by mail service, something that, believe it or not, I still use. I sat down last night to write a eulogy to a service that meant a lot to me as a burgeoning cinephile. I wrote that, but also accidentally wrote an essay on the “the passing of an era where the great big tech companies of the day thought the internet was a way to improve the offline life rather than to replace it.” I hope you’ll read it.

Other Stuff

• Study Finds High-Speed Rail Increases Happiness. The study found Chinese people were two percent happier on average living near high-speed rail, but I’d be one million percent happier if we just had one in the United States. An hour and a half to get from NYC to Philly is 19th Century bullshit.

• Please Stop Crashing Trains So Much, Agency Responsible for Safety Regulation Asks Railroads

• Two-Thirds of Rural Mail Carriers Are Being Hit With A Massive Pay Cut Calculated By An Algorithm

Until next time,

Aaron

Which brings me to an email I recently received. It was in response to an article I wrote about how American cars are now too big for parking spaces. Well, it wasn’t really in response to the article.

Here is the email in full:

Aaron,

I just saw the headline for your article about American cars getting too big for parking spaces.

With no intent to be insulting, you are obviously just a youngster. If you were just a little bit older you would know the opposite is true: parking spaces, like airline seats, have been getting smaller for decades.

One only has to look back at the cars of the 50', 60's, and early 70''s.  The Cadillacs, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Ford Galaxy, Lincoln, and even Chevys were all huge land barges floating  down the road making any corner a precarious adventure.

I will freely admit, I have not read the article so maybe I have missed your point, but the headline is so wrong, I felt moved to address it.

Sincerely,

[redacted]

Computer, enhance:

“I will freely admit, I have not read the article”

Enhance…:

“I will freely admit”

Enhance…..:

“I have not read the article”

It’s all so perfect. I’m going to frame it.

Don’t be like this guy. Read the article.

Cheers,

Aaron

These aspects of Nextdoor are no secret. The company spends a lot of time and energy trying to combat it. I was interested in a different question. I had been hearing from many colleagues, friends, and sources that housing politics was taking over their local Nextdoor. I wanted to find out more.

Nextdoor works in a peculiar way for a large social media company. Users can only see posts in their local neighborhood. There is no way to join a Nextdoor from a different city, scroll, post, and then hop back to the one you live in. So I reached out to housing activists on both sides of the issue in about a dozen cities across the country. Most said they were active on Nextdoor, some agreed to talk to me about it in-depth for the story.

While reporting the story, I learned about even more contradictions inherent to the Nextdoor platform. The company wants people to talk about local politics, including housing issues, but not in a way that is hostile. The company wants people to use the platform for political organization but not to campaign for candidates. The company wants people to discuss the important issues in their neighborhood that affect their everyday lives but do so in a civil fashion. And the company wants local volunteer moderators to police the tenor of the conversations without the power to suspend or ban specific accounts.

The end result is predictable. Housing discourse is taking over Nextdoors around the country, particularly in places facing housing crises or controversial rezoning proposals. Rather than reflecting the local population, Nextdoors look a lot more like the inequities of the local zoning commission public comment period or community feedback process which I have previously written about in detail. And it is not just arguing for arguing’s sake, although there is definitely a lot of that. Nextdoor is becoming a key recruiting tool for local activists and future candidates for local office in ways that actively distort the local political landscape. You can read all about it here.

Other Stuff I’ve Written Lately

• It’s been a while since I got as much hate mail for a story as this straightforward write-up of a peer reviewed study that found COVID vaccine refusers have a 72 percent higher risk of getting in a serious traffic crash.

• The JFK Airtrain should be free for everyone.

• A long time ago I wrote a very long article very few people read about Dormzilla, the giant windowless dorm designed by a 96-year-old billionaire for UC Santa Barbara many people likened to a prison. Recently, an independent review panel found building it would be “unwise” and poses “serious safety risks.” If nothing else, this makes building Dormzilla as designed a massive legal liability.

• I wrote two articles about C-SPAN’s camera work, which is not something I would have ever predicted I would do.

• Here come the gas stove culture wars.

There has been much excellent work on this front. For my part, I have somewhat waded into this debate without ever fully diving in for a couple reasons. First, I don’t think there’s enough evidence one way or another as to what impact free transit has on various goals. Second, whether or not transit should be free depends almost entirely on what those goals are. If the goal is to increase ridership, then making transit fare-free makes sense, at least as an experiment. But if the system already struggles to run good service, free transit is unlikely to help that in any obvious way and may even hurt.

However, there is one type of transit that I do think should be made free immediately: AirTrains. Specifically, the JFK AirTrain.

You can read my argument for that here, but the upshot is: Most people already ride the AirTrain for free (within airport grounds), it would help all airport users if more people to take public transit to the airport, and the AirTrain’s $8 fare is both enough to discourage a lot of ridership while contributing little to the Port Authority’s bottom line. So check out the article if you’re interested.

For what it’s worth, researching this article on the AirTrain made me more in favor of fare-free transit generally than I was before, if for no other reason than I noticed we have lost a spirit of grand experimentation with public services in the U.S. For example, back in the 1920s, Los Angeles briefly implemented a total ban on downtown parking, which was promoted as a short-term experiment to solve a new and puzzling problem of urban car congestion. At the time, this policy was widely regarded as a failure and quickly reversed, but I like the spirit of experimentation and wish we did more of that today. Instead, transit agencies tend to do “pilot projects” that are either designed to fail so they don’t have to do more of it or only a “pilot” in the sense that they want to announce they’re doing something new to seem “innovative” but not at a scale large enough anyone will notice or care.

So I like the idea of trying fare-free transit in different ways and in different places and seeing how it goes. But more importantly, I like transit agencies feeling empowered to try new things in a big way.

Some Books I Liked

I love receiving book recommendations (from humans, not algorithms). Many of my favorite books ended up on my list that way. So in that spirit, here are a few of my favorite non-fiction books I read this year:

• Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham. I am obsessed with how bureaucracies fail so this was pretty much my ideal book.

• The Reckoning, David Halberstam. I am obsessed with how bureaucracies fail so this was also pretty much my ideal book. This is a 700-page book about the mid-century demise of U.S. automakers and the rise of Japanese competitors. I have noticed that Americans love to talk about dysfunctional public bureaucracies but largely ignore or downplay the harm that dysfunctional private bureaucracies play in our lives as if all of our work experiences at private companies have been paragons of efficiency, unless planes start falling out of the sky or something.

• Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, Peter Robison. This book will make you very angry and probably hesitant to fly in a Boeing plane and also my god are Boeing executives a collection of some of the most despicable men. Was there some corporate rule they all had to cheat on their wives with their secretaries?

• Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy, Daniel Geary. I read like 10 books this year about the 1960s urban crisis because I increasingly view the 1960s as a terribly important decade to understand for contemporary political reasons which is why I’m pretty confident the next president is going to be a thawed out Ronald Reagan. In any event, this got me deep into 1960s welfare policy. If I had to recommend one book on that, this would be it, because most social scientists are terrible writers.

• Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott Sandage. Absolutely delightful book, including a long section on the mid-19th Century credit agencies which were literally just huge networks of spies and gossipers sending unverifiable shit-stirrings to a corporate headquarters when then got put in a big book and treated as fact to deny people loans. I love how fucked up everything has always been, humans are incredible at being jerks to each other.

• American Colonies, American Revolutions, American Republics, Alan Taylor. This is a trilogy by an esteemed historian that changed the way I view the settling of the Americas and creation of the United States. Highly recommend if you have the time and patience. If you don’t, here’s a New Republic review.

• Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics, Timothy Lombardo. I have read more books over the last several years than I care to admit trying to figure out how we got here and all that nonsense and if I had to pick one that more or less sums it all up this would be it.

• The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America, Bradford Pearson. I am putting this in here both because Brad is a former editor of mine and a friend but more importantly he pulled off an incredible troll by pretending a book was a feel good all-American sports story to fool dads into reading about Japanese internment camps.

If you have any good book recommendations, let me know!

Cheers,

Aaron

One much lower key but no less wasteful effort is the plan to “fix” the DC-to-Boston rail corridor.

In October, the Northeast Corridor Commission released a plan to spend $100 billion on the Northeast rail corridor from DC to Boston. What will we get for that $100 billion? No new stations. No new lines. No line extensions. A lot of promises to fix deteriorating infrastructure but very few ideas on how to make it better.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, $100 billion buys an awful lot of cool stuff that makes trains run a lot faster or to places they didn’t previously go. The Grand Paris Express is 125 miles of new track, 68 new stations, and four new lines with two line extensions. It will transform the greater Paris region, and it will cost a third of the NEC’s plan. That’s just one of many examples in my recent article on the subject. And nobody in a position of power or influence seems to care. If you want to get depressed about U.S. infrastructure, you know where to click.

A Word About The Freight Rail Strike That Wasn’t

You may or may not have seen a lot of headlines about the freight rail labor dispute. Those headlines, and the articles therein, probably referred to “sick days” as the main point of contention. This was always puzzling to me. I’ve been talking to hundreds of freight rail workers on and off for various stories over the last 18 months. And I never actually heard any of them talk extensively about sick days. But I did hear them talk extensively about lots of other stuff. So I wrote an article about what they did talk about.

And, just to recap, here are the main stories I’ve done on the freight rail beat:

• ‘It’s Going to End Up Like Boeing’: How Freight Rail Is Courting Catastrophe

• ‘The Worst and Most Egregious Attendance Policy’ Is Pushing Railroad Workers to the Brink

• ‘What Choice Do I Have?’ Freight Train Conductors Are Forced to Work Tired, Sick, and Stressed

• 28 Freight Rail Workers Tell Us What They Want You to Know About Their Lives

Thanks everyone who wrote in with bike ride and hot sauce recommendations! I’ve got a long list of both I can’t wait to try.

Cheers,

Aaron

I could write a big long essay about why I’m resuming Urbababble now that arrives at no actual conclusion, has dozens of factual inaccuracies, and features lots of handwringing about various internet social trends, but then I’d be a wealthy and successful writer. (Shoutout to Michael Hobbes’s new podcast about wealthy, successful writers.)

What have I been up to lately? Oh, my usual bullshit. Longtime readers will know I write a lot about why the U.S. can’t build stuff. I had the phrase “urban productivity crisis” in a recent draft and my editor was like, “Is this a real phrase? If so define” and I replied that no, I had just made it up. It got cut. Editors are smart.

But I basically write about the U.S. urban productivity crisis, which I will define by linking to some stories I have written.

• Thank You For Your Feedback: The community feedback process is an inconvenient annoyance that brings out the worst in people. It is also at the heart of why U.S. cities can't build new housing or transportation.

• Here’s How the U.S. Can Stop Wasting Billions of Dollars on Each Transit Project: The U.S. is the most expensive country in the world in which to build mass transit. A new report by an NYU research group explains how that can change.

• Why Doesn’t America Build Things? Environmental review laws have become a favorite scapegoat among those who lament our inability to build ambitious infrastructure, but the problem runs much deeper.

These stories are about 15,000 words combined, so I’m not saying you should read them all right now. But you can see I’m working towards something here. I don’t know what that something is. Cities are big, confusing places, and I don’t have some grand theory about why they’re so broken and how to make them work. And I would advise against taking anyone who does too seriously. Because people like that usually end up the subject of a future Michael Hobbes podcast debunking.

In the meantime, I’m looking for recommendations in the following areas:

• Hot sauces

• Bean recipes

• Cat beds, preferably with a hidey-hole-like component

• Good road or gravel bike rides off Metro North or LIRR

Until next time,

Aaron Gordon, senior staff writer, Motherboard, VICE News, alive

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When I first moved to New York, I lived in Ridgewood, Queens. Hardly what people have in mind when they think "New York City." I remember the broker showing us the "roof deck" (heavy on 'roof,' light on 'deck') where, if one squinted, the faint outline of the Empire State Building could be made out in the distance. Bright Lights, Big City, baby.

Despite the outer borough-ness of this first apartment, it had everything I expected from an NYC apartment. A tiny bedroom, a neglectful landlord, a broken shower, and bizarre roommates. More importantly, it had a grocery store a five minute walk away, a bodega on the corner, and a perfectly serviceable greasy pizza joint two blocks down. Because my bedroom was nine feet by 12 feet and the "common area" was the kitchen, the idea of getting groceries delivered would have been a laughable concept, because any excuse to get out of the house was a good excuse.

I bring all this up because after my story about 15-minute-or-less grocery delivery services got published, a reporter named Matt Newberg from a publication that covers the tech/food industry called HNGRY emailed me with a few insights. Among other things, he pointed out that "JOKR (and pretty much everyone else) stole its idea from Getir, which has been around for 6+ years" and hyperlinked to a Financial Times article from last year. In that article, a Getir co-founder said, "We’re democratising laziness...It’s like having a butler for a dollar or two.”

Meanwhile, JOKR founder Ralf Wenzel told me his company's customers are hurried urban professionals or parents who have better things to do than grocery shop.

On the surface, these sound like two incompatible descriptions of the exact same service. One is about how productive its customers are, the other how lazy they are. But I read it as two people approaching the same point from different ends. These services use venture capital to subsidize an inherently inefficient service that replaces your labor to get your own food with someone else's. At some point, venture capitalists may get tired of footing the bill. They also may not. In either case, someone is paying for the butler. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of labor saving, because all of this requires even more labor, on aggregate, than simply going to the store yourself. It's just other people's labor, and to a certain type of person, that doesn't count on the ledger. Whether that person is too lazy or too busy to consider it is besides the point. Someone has to do the work. The math simply doesn't check out. You can't have a democracy of servants.

Which is one of the many reasons I find these ultra-fast grocery startups fundamentally depressing. The idea of getting things delivered to my door in minutes does not excite me, in much the same way I didn't find the humans in Wall-E aspirational. I like going outside. I like interacting with my neighbors, even the extremely religious one next door who worships Mike Pence of all people, thinks Jesus can cure my migraines, and vaccines are a global conspiracy, because despite it all he's a very nice and cheery fella. I like saying hi to the woman who is always smoking on her porch, even if, for four years, all we've done in smile and wave. And I love getting to know all the cats in the neighborhood. These are all "inefficient" interactions, in Silicon Valley parlance—well, maybe not the smile and wave, I barely have to break stride for that—but it's hard to imagine my life without them. The walks to and from the store is one of the many urban spaces where and when life happens.

I see a lot of reasons why businesses like this shouldn't be allowed to exist—you can read about some of them in the article I wrote—and very few why they should. There's a difference between being pro-business and pro-oligarch. One can be in favor of competition and disruption but against unproven business models funded with billions of dollars in capital provided by a handful of super rich capitalists.

I keep coming back to one basic point: There is something unsettling about an economic system that spends billions of dollars to provide a service for someone who doesn't want ice cream badly enough to put on their pants and go downstairs and get it but is willing to make some stranger do it for them. When we allow a handful of VCs to radically alter urban life over and over again to satiate their own peculiar, guttural whims, it's worth asking what we're really allowing, and for whom. I think all possible answers are deeply unflattering.

Reader Christine wrote in with the following question: "What does Ralf Wenzel like about living in New York?...What does he do for fun here? What makes it worth it to him?" To be perfectly honest, Christine, I didn't ask him. I should have. It's a good question. But I'm guessing it's not something that could be found in Ridgewood.

Take care,

Aaron

I want to try a little experiment. Let's play an urbanist scavenger hunt. Send me a photo of a delivery truck (USPS, FedEx, Amazon, or UPS) that is legally street-parked while making a delivery. No parking lots or driveways. It has to be parked on the street.

All successful entries will be entered in a lottery and the winner will get to request an Urbababble about a topic of their choosing.

Let's see how many I get in the next week.

Good luck,

Aaron

Eric received full scholarship offers to virtually every college program in the country. His high school coaches told him that with just a year or two of training with a top jump coach, he could be repping Team USA at the Olympics. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky stuff. When it comes to comparing jumpers and their career prospects, high jump is pretty straightforward. And Eric only needed a couple more inches at most to join Team USA.

But things didn't go as planned. The story I wrote ran under the headline "The Five-Buck Bump of Cocaine That Destroyed an Olympic Dream." I cannot do Eric's story justice in a few sentences. But I first came across it while researching another anti-doping case and saw it mentioned in a footnote. He became caught in the dragnet of an anti-doping system meant to catch drug cheats, not kids experimenting with a tiny amount of street drugs two days before a meet at a house party. As a result of this one bad decision and the ensuing chain of events, he became a literal footnote in athletic history.

I spent four days with Eric and his family in their home near Herrin, Illinois, where he grew up, in addition to months of reporting about Eric and the anti-doping system. The day I met him, I drove up to Eric's house, which then was adjacent to lightly used railroad tracks. Before I even got out the car, he came out his front door with a big grin on his face. We had only talked once before on the phone, but the second I stepped out of the car, he bellowed "A.G!!" like I was a long-lost friend.

I thought I was going to write a story about a young man the same age as me struggling to come to terms with a life that didn't go according to plan. The story did end up being that, but it was also so much more. Eric had been through some extremely tough times. But by the time I met him, he was settled. He was working in an Illinois coal mine, which is a good job in that area. He had twin daughters with his longtime girlfriend Haley. And he was as loving and devoted to them as anyone I have ever met. While he still had regrets about the athletic dreams unfulfilled, he knew if things had gone according to plan, he never would have met Haley or had his girls. And for him, that was an easy trade he would do every time.

The day after the story published, Eric called me on the phone. It is to this day the most rewarding phone call I have had in my life. He told me, almost in tears, how grateful he was for the article, that it gave him a sense of closure. There is one phrase I can remember hearing as if it was yesterday. He said, "I feel like I can begin the rest of my life now."

I was so happy and excited for him in that moment, and so proud to have played a role in helping him get there. He had a tough life and would be the first to admit he made plenty of mistakes. We all do. It was time for him to feel good about himself again, in a way I got the sense he hadn't in a long time.

I stayed in touch with Eric for a little while, but as these things tend to do, we fell out of touch. I did know he got a better-paying job at a different mine and moved to a bigger house further out in the country. He and Haley had a third daughter, and the kids could roam and play in the sprawling yard just like he did as a kid.

Even though I hadn't talked to Eric recently, I thought about him a lot. Partly because the article I wrote is still my favorite I have ever written. And, to me, it had the happiest of endings, something I don't usually get to do in my writing. Every couple of weeks or months I'd think to myself, "I wonder how Eric is doing." I imagined him putting his girls on his big, broad shoulders like he did when I walked in the front door that day, playing in the mud like they did at his old high school track. I imagined them happy. Of course I did. Why wouldn't I?

On Wednesday, August 25th, Eric ended his shift at the mine. He told his boss that if he hurried home he might be able to get there in time to see his girls before bedtime. On his way home, his motorcycle careened off a curve. Eric Thompson died that night. He was 32 years old.

Eric's death is nothing but a senseless tragedy. It leaves three young girls without a father, a mother without a loving partner, two grandparents without a son who had been through so much and was just beginning the best days of his life, a younger brother without his protective older sibling, and countless other people for whom Eric's existence simply made life a little better, myself included. Eric welcomed me like a friend and opened up to me in a way no one else I've interviewed ever has (or, indeed, in a way he ever had, his girlfriend later told me). He trusted me to tell his story. It's something I will always be honored by and grateful for.

My hope in writing this has not been to make you sad, although that has probably happened and I'm sorry about that. But I'm sending this email out for two reasons. First, I want people to know who Eric Thompson was, because I think he was someone worth knowing. Second, I want you to call that someone you have been meaning to call, or check in on a friend you haven't spoken to in a while, or simply hug your loved ones extra tight tonight. If you do any of those things, then this email would have been worth sending.

I've spent the last week-plus trying to wrap my head around the unspeakable sadness of Eric's death. But there is nothing to come to terms with. There's no point in trying to make sense of the world or rationalize tragedies. The only thing to do is act in such a way that, when the senseless world becomes especially cruel, we have a story to tell ourselves. A story about how we tried our best, how we tried to do right by one another, and how we loved with all of our being. That was Eric Thompson's story.

With love,

Aaron