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°2026.04.20.Mon | 15 Minute Cities

As part of planning for the next chapter of life, I used Claude to create a script that pulls public data sources to assess possible 15-minute neighborhoods on the East Coast. I was inspired to use the densities of Little Libraries along with CityNerd’s favorite walk, bike, and transit scores, but both of those data sources are proprietary! Fortunately, I found other sources (click “About data”), for which I am grateful.

I starred a few of the cities I’m familiar with as a reference. I live in Cambridge (too expensive), and visited Pittsburgh (good value, though I wish there were more sunny days), and Asheville (perhaps too small). No city improves on Pittsburgh across all variables (which you can expand, filter, and sort), but I will have to look at Columbus, Ohio more carefully.

Other resources

• Numbeo cost of living

°2025.02.04.Tue | Wood and water

One of my favorite zen proverbs is: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. I suspect, however, that I am romanticizing these activities because I can imagine doing them mindfully. Today, the tasks would be: “sit in front of computer and go to meetings.”

°2023.06.07.Wed | The next stage?

Nora and I have lived in our current apartment longer than anywhere else in our lives – as a couple and individually. Highland Avenue was to be our modest apartment during a one-year Harvard fellowship, but it has been our home for 13 years. Though we love Cambridge, the apartment’s lack of sunlight and leaky walls and the expense of any other place in Cambridge led me to think that we should, at some point, move on. We were able to save money while here, but we won’t be able to live here forever.

I’m sure we’ll think of this period as the Casper years, who passed a few months ago. This felt like the closing of a significant chapter in our lives. And while I greatly appreciate aspects of my job, I feel as if I’m about ready for one more thing, for something else.

Given all this – and that Nora now works at home and Boston is expensive – I’ve been researching places we might move to. I won’t conduct a job search that is hopefully in a place we’d like; I’ll find (a less expensive) place we’d like and figure something to do once there.

This sense of change is also prompted by a financial goal: to FIRE myself (“Barista” style). During my research on life hackers, I delved into the Financial Independence and Retire Early (FIRE) movement. There are different levels of FIRE: “barista FIRE” means you still work part-time or on a passion project; above that is “lean FIRE,” which means you must live modestly. (Lucky are those who can “fat” FIRE.)

Being in your 50s is hardly early – savvy techies can do so in their 30s – but it’s less than 65 or 70. My father died before he hit 65. I could live longer, but I might not.

I’ve long been an advocate of a “good life, good death.” Should I be faced with extended or ruinous ill health, I believe I would exercise my right to die. I’m not so presumptuous as to predict the future, or even how I might feel, but I don’t feel obliged to save enough money to live my last years in a dementia care facility.

But I get ahead of myself. The current chapter is not yet over. The market downturn and inflation have changed my calculations. And I have another book project that I want to make a solid attempt at. I hope to remain on Highland for another three or four years. Then, depending on fate, I will turn a page to the next chapter, whether it’s the penultimate or concluding one.

°2021.11.02.Tue | Education, wealth, racism, and remedies

I’ve been skeptical of student debt forgiveness for the typical reasons: my own sense of frugality (e.g., going to a state school and paying off debt ASAP), concerns about moral hazard (i.e., increasing credential inflation and education costs), and even the ever increasing federal debt (i.e., a ponzi scheme that will one day fall).

That said, I know the world has changed since I was an undergrad. I also appreciate the U.S. has a stark wealth gap along racial lines that needs to be remedied. (And I recognize most conservatives seem to care about national debt only when social programs are being discussed, but lose that concern when considering military spending and industrial subsidies.) This discussion between Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louise Seamster in favor of student debt forgiveness gave me much to think about. This includes the policy issue of debt relief and the ethical issue of equity.

If equality is about ensuring equal opportunities, equity recognizes that neutral-seeming policies aren’t enough to counter historic and systemic biases: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (Kendi 2019, 19). I strongly support equality and removing that which perpetuates historic and systemic bias. But I dither on equity. I wish I could find a taxonomy of remedies, like those sketched below, with which to think about the ethics and pragmatics of remedying injustices.

• systemic reform
  • removing the white/wealthy advantage of preferential admissions
  • reforming drug policy
  • reforming policing policy
• reparation
  • Coates’s reparations
• equity
  • affirmative action: quotas
  • affirmative action: “preferences” (non-quotas)
  • Kendi’s Department of Anti-racism

I am a strong advocate of systemic reform: ethically necessary and practically achievable though distressingly difficult to achieve. On affirmative action, I am ambivalently moderate: cautiously supportive of the balance struck in Grutter v. Bollinger, though it is usually bureaucratically incoherent—often requiring doublethink—in practice. I am sympathetic to the obligation of reparations to those directly harmed (e.g., the internment of Japanese Americans), but the passing of time decreases its relevance. I dislike Kendi’s authoritarianism for many reasons. I wonder if there is there a comprehensive treatment on this topic that attends to the ethics and pragmatics of these and other options?

References

°2021.02.20.Sat | Punx (Hair) Not Dead

As a young goth or punk, you learn to give yourself and friends haircuts. This past year takes me back: Nora, working from home, has been opting for edgier styles, and I’ve been implementing them with scissors and trimmers in hand.

°2021.02.18.Thu | Returning to Old Dog Hill

Amidst the slushy doldrums of February I find myself thinking of a return to old dog hill.

The new extension of the old Cambridge library straddles a small hill. The rain sluices off, making for a comfortable and dry position from which to survey the park and its denizens.

When Casper was younger, we’d pass the hill on the way to the corner of the park where the dogs chase and wrestle. Casper had balls to snatch from the air and dogs to best in tug. We never gave the hill any thought until a middle-aged man and his old retriever became evening fixtures. He sat beside his Golden, idly petting her as she held a tennis ball in her whitened muzzle in remembrance of more active days. That’s when we took to calling it old dog hill.

After a few years, the man and his dog relinquished the hill. Shortly thereafter, we claimed the spot as our own.

Casper’s mid-air collisions and tug battles have left him with a bad back. Weather permitting, we sit on the hill, speaking to passersby, idly petting Casper, and tossing a ball every few minutes for him to leisurely fetch in remembrance of more active days.

We sometimes still see the man walking to the library, alone. And as he passes I wonder if he thinks as we once did, “there they are, on old dog hill.”

✽

How tug-crazy was Casper? Witness.

°2020.12.21.Mon | What counts as meat?

Rebecca Schuman’s Schadenfreude, A Love Story reminds me of my favorite zines from the naughts, and I’m enjoying her stories of high-school angst and collegiate travel from that era.

Last night I laughed with recognition when she learned, as a vegetarian in Germany, that the little cubes of ham on her broccoli and cheese was not meat but ham (“Das ist doch kein Fleisch – das ist Schinken.”)

I’ve had similar experiences traveling the world as a vegetarian:

• In Europe and Asia, ham, chicken, and fish are not necessarily “meat.”
• In Asia, a “vegetarian” dumpling can have fish sauce.
• In Asia, asking for “vegetarian” food can also mean no onion or garlic because the diet is closely associated with Buddhist monastics who swear off pungent vegetables.

°2020.09.23.Wed | Mr. Neuman’s overhead projector

COVID19 has meant the end of many things. This bin of overhead projectors – displaced by fancy new “solstice pods” – made me think of my high school astronomy teacher, Mr. Nueman.

Sitting next to the glowing glass, with colored pens in hand, he illustrated his lectures on acetate sheets. I’ve yet to see this teaching technique rivaled.

What a privilege it was to have a small planetarium and astronomy teacher in high school!

°2020.03.17.Tue | On the ethical differences between prepping, hoarding, and profiteering

As an anxious pessimist, I’ve joked that preparing for the Corona Virus has been my moment to shine. But I’ve also been thinking about the ethics of preparation and the distinction we might draw between prepping, hoarding, and profiteering.

I’m intrigued by prepping, but don’t identify as a prepper – I live in a city apartment. Nor would I want to spend thousands of dollars on the off chance I could make a go of it post-apocalypse. I find such folks amusing, a bit deranged, and, at times, a little too gleeful; but everyone needs a hobby, and I see no social harm.

And there’s much to say for being prepared for likely events that span a few weeks or months. I have a lot of toilet paper, but I usually do as I buy it in bulk from Amazon. I have a box of surgical masks, that we wear to dremel the dog’s claws. I bought a new box of N95 masks, which I use during allergy season and air travel. I bought some more gloves, which I use for bleaching my hair and doing stuff around the apartment. I stocked up on food, but will be able to eat all of it in a couple months. I got some money out before the market crashed, but my 401ks are in the same dump as everyone else’s. This was ego-centric but not anti-social behavior, done before the panic.

To prep is to skim bountiful capacity for later use. In this way, it distributes and decentralizes essential resources. My twenty pound bag of rice – plus some dried beans and tofu tetra packs – could be handy to me and others in an unforeseen crisis. There’s still the quandary of if and how to share those resources when asked by those less prepared. (See The Twilight Zone’s episode “The Shelter.”) And I wrestled with shorting in the market, but didn’t have time to open a margin account in any case.

To hoard, on the other hand, is to deprive others of resources you don’t need. To buy more than what you need when others are trying to do the same is excessive and anti-social.

Profiteering then, such as that fellow in Tennessee, is benefiting at the expense of others – he’ll never use seventeen-thousand bottles of hand-sanitizer. The anarcho-capitalist might excuse the profiteer because there’s no formal coercion, but I use a social-good test: is this a behavior that adds value to society? The profiteer is not creating more resources or value, he’s only extracting it. If he’s extracting value from purchasers who are desperate, this is exploitative. If he’s extracting value from the wealthy who can afford it, this is an unjust redistribution of resources.

Whereas the profiteer is able to extract far more value than they contribute to society, the prepper, as a type of decentralized storage, adds some.

°2019.08.01.Thu | Why even reasonable people disagree

I’ve been thinking a lot about interpersonal conflict, especially around something I’ve been struggling with this past year.

Interpersonal conflict arises for many reasons, the bulk of which are manifestations of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Cognitive biases and disordered thinking contribute as well.

However, putting aside all of that, it’s possible for even reasonable people to disagree.

Having taught conflict management for a couple of years, I’m well acquainted with “I-statements,” Nonviolent Communication (speaking of observations, feelings, needs, and requests), log-rolling (and other non-zero sum interactions), and separating positions (I need your orange) from interests (I’m hungry, can you help?).

All of these tactics are about identifying and expressing interests, which are informed by values, understanding, and circumstances.

Each of us has values, a priori beliefs, which can be unexamined or even in conflict between themselves. A useful maxim for speech is to ask: is what I want to say kind, true, and necessary? It’s great when these three values are aligned, but sometimes they are not; sometimes I have to suffice with one or two out of three. Sometimes people have different values (e.g., individualism vs collectivism), though there’s often more overlap than we think. Learning to express our values, even when conflicted, is a step toward finding common, or at least not dissimilar, interests.

Yet, people with the same values can still disagree: they can bring different understanding to bear. You and I can both value friendship and a mutual friend, but I happen to know that she dislikes cilantro, and you do not. For a time, we might disagree about where to take her for dinner. This is a toy example, but what we know affects our understanding of more important concerns. Again, sharing what we understand is an important skill—though personal experience is frustratingly difficult to communicate.

Finally, even if we share the same values and understanding, our interests can diverge because of our different circumstances. It can be as simple as you are at the top of a narrow staircase and need to come down, and I am at the bottom and need to go up. Sometimes, our circumstances (our commitments, jobs, and relationships) put us in conflict. In this example, one of us will have to wait. That said, we too often fail to consider our shared values and to communicate our understandings.

Even if I disagree with a person, I need not feel enmity, which can make things even worse. I can’t blame you for needing to come down the narrow staircase. And it is better for one of us to cede than for both us get caught in an angry stalemate. Since you can come down more quickly, I’d likely invite you to do so if I can do the same next time. Life is rarely as simple as a toy example, and we ought always look for agreeable opportunities.