Link to Heather: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nEF96F4NAEBwkyQntKY5w804A9kZ67h6/view?usp=sharing

“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) English poet

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The great danger is to stand motionless on the bank as the river of your life rushes by. It is not easy, learning how to stop waiting and start living; not easy not to waste your life; not easy knowing whether or not how you spend your time and mind and love is worthy of the improbable fact that you, against the vastly greater odds otherwise, exist.

And yet to the unnerving question pulsating beneath everything — Why you? — the only answer is your life, lived.

Emily Ogden hones the blade of that question in the very first sentence of one of the essays in her altogether wonderful collection On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays (public library):

Is your boat also becalmed? I ask the authors of my books. Your commitments made, your loves chosen, did the wind drop? Did you wonder whether you were meant to wait for the next breeze, or whether you should row for your life?

With an eye to a fear the poet Mary Ruefle once named with her typical winking poignancy — “the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility” — Ogden observes the fractal nature of this fundamental fear, branching into every aspect of what and whom we devote ourselves to. She writes:

In my attitude to these loves of my life, I find the same mixture of conviction and shame. I am devoted. I am embarrassed by my devotion. I cannot help but envision the contemptuous face of the one who sees my idol as a lump of clay.

Suppose a life that might, or might not, be consecrated to an imbecility. What then? What answers are there, beyond trying to answer with a certainty that can never be secured?… To put mattering in the form of a question concedes too much. The question mark’s business with me will never be finished. It stands like a cow in the road, uncomprehending, unmoving.

For my part, I stand with the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska: “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems,” she wrote in her splendid poem “Possibilities.” I prefer the absurdity of devotion to the absurdity of indifference.

At the heart of devotion is a recognition that the reality of the other — whether or not you understand it, that is, can extract personal meaning from it — matters. Iris Murdoch captured this in what remains the finest definition of love I have encountered: “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

Hummingbird divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Ogden considers the poems of Emily Dickinson — those great love letters to reality — as a paragon of art that “evades the demand for ultimate meaning,” an opening something “that will not come to a point.” In Dickinson’s poem “A Bird, came down the Walk,” she observes, the bird is not the bird of the Romantics that sings and symbolizes, not the bird of divinations, but a creature occupied with the “prosaic things” of its own life met on its own terms: surviving, weighing its wants against its needs. Ogden writes:

John Keats’s nightingale warbles continuously across centuries. Walt Whitman’s thrush mourns Abraham Lincoln. Dickinson’s robin comes up close and gets about the work of surviving. This poem is about watching a series of alien troubles managed and dispatched. If poets are like birds, then on the view of this poem, it is not because they sing; it is because they mind their own business. The poem goes down the walk. It does not know I saw. It does not ask itself whether I think it matters. My doubt will not annihilate it.

Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane

Each existence — yours, mine — is a living poem and every experience in it is, if we let it be, a bird. Its business is its own. Our business is not interpretation or rumination but observation, integration, devotion to what is — pure presence, without fear or judgment or the impulse for control, with reality and the infinities nested within it: all those realities different from our own, beyond it, never fully apprehended by means of reason, reachable only, and barely, by love.

This requires what Iris Murdoch so memorably termed “unselfing” — the same difficult practice that offers the best relief I know for the clutch of selfing that is most suffering.

Ogden writes:

The other day I watched a song sparrow perched on the topmost point of my arched bean trellis, feathers on his striped throat erect, his body the trumpet of his territorial call. The entirety of the tiny body became the huge sound. I rejoiced for him; I took a total interest in his interest in singing. In a similar way, I take comfort in walking my hound dog. His is a different world from mine, but one equally organized by keen preferences. Because of what he can smell, areas of grass that seem undifferentiated to me are intensely important to him. Rattled by the passing of another dog, he will carpet the affected area with his snuffling, pulling in the air so hard and quick that his whole snout shakes. Looking back at you from a wild face is striving and a wish for sequence; not, however, a striving or a wish for sequence that is like yours. You can follow along with a different mathematics; you still get to calculate, but not about yourself. It is only because the animal pursues a real project, and not an idle dream, that watching it is a relief.

We don’t know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

A habit is a spell you cast upon yourself that only you can break. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote in his pioneering treatise on the psychology of habit. What we habitually let in — ideas into the mind, people into the heart — shape what we become. In lives that begin as accidents of chance and go on being besieged by myriad chance events beyond our control, the choices that become habits are the most powerful instrument we have for being active agents in our destiny — none more transformative than the habits by which we govern our attention.

Art by Ofra Amit for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Novelist Samantha Harvey considers how to best resist being turned into passive pawns in the attention economy in her conversation with my friend Natascha McElhone who, besides being a beloved actor in her primary life (and generously lending her time and talent to narrating the audiobooks of Figuring and Traversal), co-hosts the excellent podcast Where Shall We Meet — a guided tour of the minds and worlds of some of the most interesting and creative people alive, from writers and philosophers to astrophysicists and polar explorers.

With an eye to the great heist of mind that is social media — a system built to benefit the bottom line of companies by exploiting our psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, training us to be passive “users” of “content” rather than active participants in the co-creation of meaning that is literature — Harvey offers a compassionate way of meeting ourselves where we (like or or not) are, and beginning there in the project of striking a better balance between passive and active attention:

There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.

Art by Kenard Pak for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Responding to Natascha’s observation that active reading is not unlike dreaming — a kind of sustained and thrilling presence in another world by an act of unselfing that requires, as Natascha puts it, “being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else’s psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else’s” — Harvey reflects:

When I write, and also when I read, and probably in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that is [what good books] invite — they ask for attention in a way that nothing else does, quite… The act of attention and of imagination takes work… but [books] also offer us something… spellbinding… [A great book] will have you enraptured, it will hold you in this dream space. That’s what you want as a writer — to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.

This, she observes, is the difference between reading, which demands the active imagination, and consuming “content” by scrolling passively through a “feed”; the difference between being compelled to stay, by means of a generous offering of another world, and being coerced to stay, by means of nervous system manipulation. It is also the difference between reading for information and reading for illumination. Harvey likens the former to “a corridor along which information is carried” that you passively pace, whereas the latter — the experience great books give us — opens doors on all sides of the corridor so inviting that you begin to actively and joyfully wander all the different rooms, spellbound by what you find there:

Fiction… opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas — and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories… multiple, countless rooms that you walk through, one to the other, and you never really know what’s in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it’s space — in a life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you’re in something quite palatial that is only limited by your own imagination.

Art by Sophie Blackall for A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

This difference between passive consumption and active imagination sounds to me like the difference between a trance and a dream. In a trance, something other than ourselves is in possession of our minds. In a dream, parts of us — the shy, the unheard, the neglected, the wild — come to the fore and begin to live, boldly and imaginatively, returning us to reality a little more integrated, a little more awake to our own complexity. Dreaming, which evolved in the bird brain as a laboratory for practicing the possible, is a highly active and dynamic state in constant, if coded, conversation with the conscious self of our waking life. It is an act of unselfing in order to become more fully ourselves. To refuse to be entranced and choose to be enchanted may be the most important habit in that most important choice of investing our consciousness: to whom and what we gift our attention.

Couple with Doris Lessing on how to read a book and how to read the world, then revisit Virginia Woolf on why we read.

\Marianne Williamson Apr 28, 2026 Marianne’s April 27th Substack Live in which she reflects on the creation of a much better world Subscribe to Marianne’s Substack: MarianneWilliamson.Susbtack.com

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 27, 2026 Debashish Banerji, PhD, is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is author of Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternatate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century. Here he suggests that the current systems of chakras have antecedents going back to the Indus Valley civilization over 5,000 years ago. Much of our contemporary understanding can be traced by to a sixteenth century manuscript that was translated into English by Sir John Woodroffe as The Serpent Power. The discussion focuses on the deities, geometric shapes, mantras, and yantras associated with each of the chakras – as well as the koshas or sheaths that encompass the physical body. He notes that there are many different ways to count the number of chakras. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on October 31, 2020)

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 26, 2026 Philosophy Gabriel Kennedy (aka Prop Anon) is the author of Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. He is also a visual artist and musician. Gabriel explores Robert Anton Wilson’s critique of scientific dogmatism and his concept of “model agnosticism,” which challenges certainty in both science and perception. Drawing on Wilson’s book The New Inquisition, Kennedy examines tensions between parapsychology and organized skepticism, highlighting episodes of intellectual conflict and suppression. The discussion ultimately invites viewers to question rigid belief systems and embrace a more open, exploratory approach to knowledge and reality. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:05:11 Model agnosticism and perception explained 00:10:30 Wilson’s experimental writing and epistemology 00:14:18 The new inquisition and scientific dogma 00:18:29 Origins of Wilson’s critique and conference conflicts 00:24:01 The citadel metaphor and power structures in science 00:28:18 Guerrilla ontology and reader participation 00:33:14 Language, perception, and the “some but not all” principle 00:40:38 The astrological Mars effect upon athletes critique 00:54:40 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on April 5, 2026)

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.”

I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them, the way we task them with containing the inarticulable and then come to mistake them for the contents, the way they are still our best hope for bridging the abyss between us in order to be understood. And yet outside of music and mathematics, the dream of a common language is just a dream. We speak of language as if it were unitary, forgetting that within any one tongue are nested infinities — the slang of subcultures, the vernacular of different generations and heritages, the private lexicon of lovers. When the parts we live with try to speak to each other, they speak in different tongues we keep translating to discern the whole and articulate it to others, to say who we are and what we want, how we suffer and how we like to be loved.

bell hooks, 1960s

bell hooks (September 25, 1952–December 15, 2021) takes on these infinities in one of the essays collected in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (public library). With an eye to a line from an Adrienne Rich poem that lodged itself in her soul and became the lever for her reckoning with language, she writes:

Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will… to challenge and assist.

“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” Rich wrote in her epochal collection The Dream of a Common Language. We speak our loves to make them true, to make them tender. To say “I want you” is to walk right up to the edge of the abyss and leap, hoping to be caught; it is to say “I want to live.” A generation after Pablo Neruda made words an object of desire, hooks makes desire the subject of words:

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.

[…]

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language.

Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book

We are not, however, merely the users of language — we are its makers. Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of our lives. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. We can bend ideas with words, we can even break them to make a mosaic of the pieces in the image of the world we want to live in, in the shape of our desires.

Reflecting on desire as the antidote to dualism, the most primal integration of the body and the mind, hooks writes:

To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular… There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do… liberating ourselves in language.

Couple with hooks on hove, then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem and artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated love letter to words.

Forward to a friend/Read Online/

The Beloved’s Door

A man knocked repeatedly on the door of the Beloved, longing for union with the Divine. A voice from within asked, “Who is it?” He answered, “It is I.” But the door remained closed, and his longing grew more intense over the years. Finally, after long years of inner transformation, he returned to the door and when asked again, said, “It is You.” In that moment the door opened effortlessly. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207-1273) Persian Sufi Poet and Mystic   AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Conor Dougherty on the Books That Shaped His Understanding of the Problem

Penguin Press

Conor Dougherty February 19, 2020 (lithub.com)

As a journalist, I’m always doing two things: Reporting and writing. My reading falls along the same lines. I read one kind of book because I’m interested in a topic and want to mine it for details, context or ideas (reporting). I read a second kind of book because I want to see how different people are making and telling stories (writing).

The first kind of book is pretty specific to what I’m working on and tends to be works whose main job is to inform. Sometimes that means academic tomes that maybe five other people have read, but I also read a lot of popular history, especially histories of California. The second kind of book is much more wide-ranging—fiction, nonfiction, essays etc.

Obviously the two piles blend together a lot; anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece. Here are some books (and an art show) that I read or consulted or was inspired by while writing my new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. Warning: They are all over the place, but are a mix of books about housing, cities and places, and works whose narrative methods I found intriguing and useful.

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

For this generation of housing writers, it is the work against which so much else is measured. Desmond calls himself a sociologist and is a professor at Princeton, but actually he’s a journalist who at a relatively young age has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of poverty. Poverty is a tough topic. It’s always there, always sad—and always hard to say something new about. Evicted sparked a national conversation about the never-ending shame of having so much want in a country with so much wealth. By shifting perspectives from a landlord who is exploiting tenants while struggling to maintain a middle-class lifestyle to renters who are constantly on the edge of homelessness, the book sees no boogeymen but only a rotten system that we’re all caught up in one way or the other.

Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

My current favorite book. In a world in which seemingly every reporter is opining too much and tweeting too much and first-person essaying too much, MacFarquhar is a relative enigma. She’s not a hermit or anything; you can find interviews and TED Talks and whatnot. But she steers clear of the first person, leaves out most interview quotes, and tries to inhabit her subjects by using free indirect speech. The effect of these decisions is to elevate her vision while reducing her presence. It’s original, brilliant and makes for some of the best writing I’ve seen in any form.

Methods aside, Strangers Drowning is a timeless story about extreme altruists—do-gooders whose lives are so dedicated to helping people that they end up sacrificing most of their personal, professional and family lives. It seems weird to call such a cerebral book a rollercoaster, but the emotional progression of reading it is intense. You start the book feeling like a selfish piece of garbage. Toward the middle you’re convinced that her subjects are defects who have been cursed with the mirror image of psychopathy. By the end you just go “people are crazy, man,” and leave it at that. It’s a journey into the soul that becomes a journey into the mind and leaves you scratching your head at the remarkable complexity of kindness. I’ve bought maybe ten copies of this book to give out as gifts, and gave two to sources during the reporting of Golden Gates.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law  

Every reporter who has expressed even a modest interest in history has at some point had an editor say some version of “this is a newspaper not a library.” Hannah-Jones has become one of the most decorated journalists of her generation by breaking that rule, most prominently with The New York Times’s 1619 Project, and here in Living Apart, which is essentially a long magazine article turned eBook.

The premise of this piece is how the federal government neglected to enforce the 1968 Civil Rights Act by refusing to use the cudgel of Housing and Urban Development infrastructure money to force exclusive suburbs to build affordable housing and curb restrictive zoning practices. This decision, originally made by the Nixon Administration, continued for four decades, perpetuating segregation long after fair housing—passed in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—was the law of the land.

Given that this piece was published in 2012, the trick of the story, like a good amount of Hannah-Jones’s work, is to pull history into the present by showing how decisions made decades ago continue to guide us today. The most remarkable thing about the reporting is that it leaves zero question that the Nixon Administration knew exactly what it was doing in neglecting to enforce fair housing. They also knew this decision would cause great harm to American unity and have consequences for many generations.

In a batch of talking points for the president, George Romney, Nixon’s HUD chief and the father of Senator Mitt Romney, warns that de-segregationist housing policies are needed to prevent “our nation from being torn apart.”

President Nixon refuses, but understands the consequences. “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools,” Nixon wrote in a memo Hannah-Jones unearthed.

This is one of those “both buckets” pieces. I consulted it several times while writing Golden Gates, first for the housing stuff, but also to guide my thinking on how to make Chapter 4, which starts at the close of World War II and ends in the early 1980s, resonate today. My solution was to weave in the story of a developer who moved to California as a 10-year-old during the state’s 1960s population boom and started his career during the housing crisis of the 1970. Later, the book catches up with him as 65-year-old developer today, to show just how little had changed.

Joan Didion (audiobook by Diane Keaton), Slouching Towards Bethlehem

There’s nothing I can say about Joan Didion that hasn’t already been said, so let me take this opportunity to say that I don’t care how many times you’ve read Slouching, you haven’t experienced it in full until you’ve heard Diane Keaton’s reading of the audiobook. I missed my BART stop listening to it because I got so carried away by her voice.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

For years I’ve wanted to write a brainy essay about the differing ways in which Joan Didion and Jane Jacobs handle the chaos of youth and urbanity, but it’s never really gelled and therefore remains more of a feeling than a coherent thought. The writers are just so different, and their fields of study so distinct. And yet, in my mind I always pair them because of the opposite emotions I walk away with after reading them. Whereas Didion sees chaos everywhere, Jacobs—who is a better pure reporter—sees the underlying logic of systems that appear disorderly on the surface. There’s a basic optimism in that: Messy stuff works. People are adaptable. Life goes on. One of the most discouraging things about politics is the way people become advocates for policies over outcomes, which means the same batch of advocates can sometimes be the cure and other times be the disease. Jacobs was an advocate, but she’s also fluid and thoughtful, presenting guidelines for good urbanism yet allowing that they have to flexible and malleable for cities to remain vibrant.

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

I read Karen Russell the way novelists read poets: To see where the boundaries are. Fiction or nonfiction, writing is a bizarre exercise. You encounter a person, idea, dream or scene or emotion, then try to recreate the same details and feeling with a bunch of marks on a page. And you do this in hopes of forging some strange telepathy with people you’ll never meet. It’s hard stuff, so even though I’m squarely into journalism, I still find it enriching to spend time reading novelists and short story writers who are opening new pathways. It reminds me that nothing is impossible, that the word “indescribable” is bullshit, and that however much difficulty I’m having rendering some scene, someone else is struggling with something infinitely more difficult.

In terms of my reading experience, I liked the title story of Vampires most, but the one that made the greatest impression on me is “The Barn at the End of Our Term.” It’s a story about President Rutherford B. Hayes being reincarnated as a horse. If you asked me to explain why I found this interesting, I couldn’t do it. But Karen Russell could, because she can do anything.

Walter Mosley, White Butterfly

Look, everyone needs to unwind with a little detective fiction now and then. And if you’re going to do detective fiction, you might as well dive into one of America’s greatest literary traditions, which is detective fiction about LA. There’s so much out there—Raymond Chandler, Michael Connelly—but I always come back to the Easy Rawlins series.

Easy is a stereotypically complicated protagonist, and his best friend is a sociopathic murderer, but once you get past all that, you realize that some of the best stuff in these books is all the domestic juggling Easy has to deal with in the midst of his detective work. Property is central to this story and Easy’s evolution as a character. He’s struggling with the mortgage in the first book, upgrades to landlording in the second, and by the time of White Butterfly is a small-time mogul who has gone to some lengths to hide this fact. Real estate is a hustle that a stunning number of people—rich, poor and middle—have all got their hands in. In this way Easy is just another ordinary American trying to find his way to passive income.

George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

The New York Times called this a “nonfiction masterpiece.” It is nothing short of that. The premise of the book—democracy in crisis—is the sort of amorphous topic that seems impossible to execute in nonfiction. There’s just so much going on. But Packer unpacks his tale one character at a time, and in doing so manages to accomplish his audacious goal of constructing an “inner history” of America.

The main stories are deep and well-told—the decline of a factory town, the growth of Silicon Valley, a starry-eyed optimist turned cynical political consultant—and along the way Packer gives readers a kind of cultural download via short, interlude biographies on subjects including Oprah Winfrey, Sam Walton, Raymond Carver, Andrew Breitbart and Jay-Z. Like all the best writers, you know exactly what Packer thinks without ever hearing him say it. The effect of reading this book is not unlike the effect of fading into a nine-minute Prog Rock song with multiple solos and time signature changes. You wonder how something so vast and complex can work while simultaneously appreciating that somehow it just does.

Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

On the surface, it seems like a risky idea: The history of one year in New York, tracing crime, the mayoral election, and baseball. New York is a big and important place, but it’s not so big or important to make an easy sell of a book about a World Series whose outcome is well-known or a local election whose results most of America doesn’t care about. And yet, Mahler pulls it off. What makes this book so great, beyond the depth of reporting and the easy, vivid writing, is that it’s less a story about New York than a story about the nadir of American cities. Reading the book—the city teetering on bankruptcy, the Son of Sam murders, the 1977 blackout and looting—you wonder how the place can ever recover.

With hindsight, however, we know that shortly after the story closes, New York and big US cities across the country begin a slow recovery that 40 years later would result in the gentrification fights we see today. This makes Mahler’s book feel like a prequel to the modern American city, and the experience of reading it is a reminder of the adage that predictions are hard, especially about the future.

I suspect that in the year 2040 or so, someone (maybe me), could write a great book about how the San Francisco of 2019 or 2020 told us much about where America, cities and the economy was headed. In a way I tried to do that with Golden Gates, but as time goes on the implications will become clearer and gift some future author with a wealth of political and cultural detail of the sort that Mahler mines so expertly.

Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

“Throughout history, the treatment and arrangement of shelter have revealed more about a particular people than have any other products of creative arts. Housing is an outward expression of the inner human nature; no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”

So begins Crabgrass Frontier, the definitive history of American suburbs. The book was published in 1985 but remains the best look at suburbanization and its consequences for American society. I suppose that’s not surprising, since an event as epochal as suburbanization would be expected to have staying power. Jackson goes through the whole thing, tracking suburbs from pre-history through early America and the Postwar boom. The suburbs, then and now, are built on transportation. As the book progresses, Jackson lays out how each successive leap of mobility opens more land—linear carriages and trains gave way to geometric freeways—available for urban development.

What’s most remarkable about this work is its capacity to look forward. At the end Jackson predicts that inner-city crime rates will fall precipitously and that over time far-flung suburbs would become poorer and less desired as central cities become safer and richer. Pretty bold prediction in the mid-1980s, but it was spot on, and we’re now living with the consequences.

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The Color of Law is framed as something between a very long essay and a legal argument. In the introduction Rothstein lays out his case for America’s racially homogeneous neighborhoods being a consequence of de jure segregation (segregation by law or public policy) versus de facto segregation (segregation resulting from private practices). It’s a fascinating framing. As I read the book, I kept thinking about a theoretical court case in which black Americans could sue their government for the vast wealth transfers that occurred via lost housing wealth. How many trillions would it add up to?

Thus, while my tastes gravitate toward sprawling, character-driven books, the power of this one flows from the simplicity of the argument and Rothstein’s relentless focus in proving it. Rothstein did not discover racism, and he didn’t discover the Federal Housing Administration’s redlining guidelines or restrictive covenants either. Various authors, historians and essayists have trod this ground several times before. But the way he assembles this history is unique and abundantly helpful. Page after page and example after example he leaves zero doubt that segregation is not something that just happened but was planned and executed by a federal government whose societal debt will take centuries, if ever, to repay.

Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance

Ask anyone who is even remotely serious about California history what you need to read to get started, and the answer is always Kevin Starr. And it’s always the correct response: He is the master. This is where I note that, as much as I wish everyone was as fascinated with California as I am, Starr is not for casual readers. As the former state librarian and foremost chronicler of the Golden State, his books sag under the weight of their comprehension. Take Golden Dreams, which covers a relative burp of history—California from 1950 to 1963—yet is almost 600 pages and roughly 250,000 words. To get through Starr’s entire Americans and the California Dream series, which covers about 150 years, you’ll need to put aside time for seven more volumes and well in excess of a million more words.

I have them all, but if you’re going to read one book from the canon, Golden Dreams is it, because that was the period when California really took over the nation’s politics and economy. The book goes deep into the West Coast psyche, pulling together a vast trove of cultural, economic and political history mixed with long chunks of literary criticism. By the end you’ve covered subjects ranging from the architectural marvel of stacked multi-level interchanges to the horticultural tinkering that gave us freeway landscaping to the instructional images of Sunset magazine, the styles of Williams-Sonoma, the religiousness of Big Sur, and the highbrow strategy of the San Francisco 49ers’ offense. The book has an entire chapter analyzing the “Baghdad by the Bay” metaphor that Herb Caen deployed in his columns for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a lot.

Speaking of metaphors, after all this excess, Starr ends with stunningly elegant conclusion, which is that the result of California’s wealth and abundance was a rebellion to the simple designs and style choices that have come to define Apple products and gave rise to the concept we call “coolness.” “There was, to put the matter simply, a lot of money flowing through the society, hence a lot of jobs and careers open to talent, hence the filling in of domestic space with iconic manifestations of the new consumer lifestyle— stereophonic sound systems, electric appliances, modernist furniture, abstract art and sculpture, Space Age silver and flatware, fabrics in unprecedented colors, designer jewelry and eyewear,” he writes. “Hence the effort to keep this consumption under control by banishing clutter from interiors, appliance design, and related items… Coolness, from this perspective, constituted a kind of asceticism, an insistence upon choice and restraint, in a world filling up with consumer goods.”

Honorable Mention: Sandow Birk, In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias

Technically this isn’t a book (though you can buy one). It’s an art exhibit that I saw at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, shortly after I moved to LA from San Francisco. The premise of the show, more than 120 artworks, is that NorCal and SoCal fought an actual war and these are the paintings that documented it. The result is a bunch of epic, oil on canvas scenes with names like “The Bombing of the Getty Center” and “SF MOMA and the Battle of San Francisco.” The concept is hilarious, the paintings are gorgeous, and the story is sly. If you’ve spent any amount of time in either SF or LA, this will resonate.

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Golden Gates: Fighting For Housing in America by Conor Dougherty, is available now from Penguin Press.

Conor Dougherty Crabgrass Frontier Evicted George Packer Golden Dreams Golden Gates In Smog and Thunder Jane Jacobs Joan Didion Jonathan Mahler Karen Russell Kenneth T. Jackson Kevin Starr Ladies and Gentlemen Larissa MacFarquhar Living Apart Matthew Desmond Nikole Hannah-Jones Penguin Press Richard Rothstein Sandow Birk Slouching Towards Bethlehem Strangers Drowning the Bronx Is Burning The Color of Law The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Unwinding Vampires in the Lemon Grove Walter Mosley White Butterfly

Conor Dougherty

Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter at The New York Times. He previously spent a decade in New York covering housing and the economy for The Wall Street Journal. He grew up in the Bay Area and lives with his family in Oakland.