Discover more from Good Reading
*Programming Note*
“Good Reading” started as an email exchange with a friend almost 15 years ago. It’s grown into a way to share reading material with the thousands of people on this list, and I love and appreciate the recommendations and comments I get from many of you.
Some years ago, this list outgrew other platforms and I moved it over to Substack. That’s been mostly good, but there have been some some issues. One of the problems is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off the promotional emails you’re occasionally getting. A recent one said “we’re offering you a limited-time offer of 20% off a paid subscription,” which was news to me. I think Substack’s marketing tactics are obnoxious, to say the least, and I’ll start looking at alternatives. Rest assured that no paid subscription will ever be required. — Phil
Facts and Figures
99% — the percentage of people on Earth experiencing daylight simultaneously (96% in full sunlight, with another 3% in astronomical twilight) at 11:15 Universal time, or 7:15 a.m. EDT, on July 8th, the day of maximum sunlight coverage. (There are actually several weeks in which a few minutes per day feature 99% population-coverage of daylight.)
49% — the percentage of U.S. homes with equity of at least half the value of the home, up from 27% pre-Covid.
79,535 — the population decline in Miami-Dade county between 2020 and 2022 (as measured by net American migration; accounting for foreign immigration, the decline was reduced to 21,664).
102.7 — the average temperature in degrees Fahrenheit for the month of July 2023 in Phoenix, AZ, the hottest such temperature ever recorded by a U.S. city. The previous record was 99.1 degrees, set in August 2020. (Average temperature in this case is the daily high temperature plus the daily low temperature, divided by two, and averaged across the 31 days in July. The average high was 115 and the average low was 91 during July 2023.)
July in Phoenix featured 17 days with a temp of at least 115, three days at 119F, and 19 days on which the temperature never fell below 90 degrees. Only one day — July 31 — had a high temp below 110 degrees, breaking a streak of 31 consecutive days at or above 110 dating to June 30th.
Phoenix did not record measurable rain at the official site from March 22nd through August 17th, a streak of 147 days.
Quoted
“Imagine a tiger and a lion talking. They’re slightly different, they do different things, but they’re really formidable in their own arenas.”
— Sina Nader, FTX’s former head of partnerships, referring to the dialog between former FTX CEO and Founder Sam Bankman-Fried and former NFL QB and FTX Ambassador Tom Brady. (Source: How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided with Reality)
Books
Leadership in Turbulent Times — I loved this collection of mini-biographies around the topic of leadership in the face of extreme challenges. It features the four presidents (Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ) the author spent her life studying. Highly recommended.
Is This Anything? — I took a cursory glance at some glowing reviews and just assumed this was Jerry Seinfeld’s autobiography. Oops. It does have a brief and interesting introduction along those lines, but then it’s just hundreds of pages of his jokes/material. The sheer volume and effort are impressive, and of course some of it is very funny, but yeah, not exactly what I thought I was getting when I bought the book.
Articles
Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind — This is not a new study (it’s from 2014), but wow: “For 15 minutes, the team left participants alone in a lab room in which they could push a button and shock themselves if they wanted to. The results were startling: Even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think.” That is taking the famous Blaise Pascal line (“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”) to a whole new level.
When Money Is No Object — In response to a “facts and figures” in April about the decline of cash, superstar writer Jason Zweig replied with a fascinating history of the subject he wrote in 2021.
Why We Get Scammed and What to Do About It — The power of “truth bias” and the mental shortcuts that are mostly good but sometimes very, very bad (as for the “22% of people [in a study] who received a suspicious work email about password recovery [and] clicked through and typed in their password.”
Hidden Fees Exist Because They Work — “Consumers themselves are to blame” for many of the pricing schemes they so often whine about.
He has flown 23 million miles. Here are his travel secrets. — Amazing — absurd? — story about “the man who’s flown more miles than any human being in history — 23 million so far, or 22 million more than Apollo 11…a 69-year-old New Jersey car dealership consultant….and the biggest mistake United Airlines ever made. In 1990, United offered a lifetime pass for $290,000. Stuker jumped on it and has pretty much lived in seat 1B — his favorite — ever since. He once went 12 straight days without sleeping in a bed. Just kept jetting from Newark to San Francisco to Bangkok to Dubai and back again, the equivalent of four trips around the world, leaving the sky only for the airport lounge. “Best investment of my life,” Stuker says. According to Stuker, 2019 was his best year. He took 373 flights that covered 1.46 million miles. If he had bought all these flights in cash, it would have cost him $2.44 million
Don’t Let Good Ideas Get Away — From David Epstein’s excellent Substack. “In his new book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, Adam [Alter] recommends that everyone stimulate their curiosity by keeping “an ongoing list of facts, ideas, and experiences that puzzle you. Science writer Steven Johnson keeps (and re-reads every few months) a ‘spark file,’ which, he says, contains ‘all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books.’ Dan Pink, another writer I admire, keeps a spark file too. He calls it a ‘holding pen for your ideas that you want to deal with later.’ You don’t want to lose them, but you’re focused on something else at the moment they arise, so also don’t want to be distracted.”