| 1. You start thinking about Ghana’s oil-city of Takoradi, and who knows where you end up. "Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highlighting an array of urban locations—from military installations, pre-colonial ports, and imperial-era trading outposts, to oil service centers, and training academies—the complex cohabitations of on and off-shore, pre- and post-colonial, city and sea comes into view through a logistics-centered optic. The result is a distinctive brand of 'terraqueous urbanism' where elite, state, and transnational strategies of maritime governance and extraction-based accumulation become embedded in urban space. 2. I can't quite put my finger on why I find this (insightful) essay about "owning the demand" so terrifying. "Given a choice, would you rather own the world’s supply of Brussel sprouts, or its demand? I say you should pick the latter. Owning all the supply would allow you to dictate your own prices, which is nice; but it would also require owning all the land on which Brussels sprouts can grow. That would be absurdly expensive and a nightmare to operate efficiently, on top of being quite a precarious position. How do you know you haven’t forgotten one piece of land somewhere? Or stay ahead of innovations like indoor farming? Controlling all the demand for Brussel sprouts, on the other hand, gives you the same pricing power, without the need to own and operate all that land. 3. Deep, fascinating look at Michael Young, the man who named the meritocracy. "Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited. The new ruling class was determined, the author wrote, by the formula 'I.Q. + effort = merit.' Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest—'not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.' This is the first published appearance of the word 'meritocracy,' and the book aimed to show what a society governed on this principle would look like. Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian." 4. And some good news: you are now less likely to die from breathing in America. "Concentrations of both fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3) in the United States (US) have decreased significantly since 1990, mainly because of air quality regulations. Exposure to these air pollutants is associated with premature death. Here we quantify the annual mortality burdens from PM2.5 and O3 in the US from 1990 to 2010... We conclude that air quality improvements have significantly decreased the mortality burden, avoiding roughly 35800 (38%) PM2.5-related deaths and 4600 (27%) O3-related deaths in 2010, compared to the case if air quality had stayed at 1990 levels (at 2010 baseline mortality rates and population)." 5. It's almost like in every dystopia, there is a shard of utopia, and vice versa. "No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black? I went on to buy a weekend's worth of hotel room snacks -- a meat and cheese plate, some pretzels and almond butter, two cans of wine. It was the wine that prompted my only human interaction in Amazon Go: An employee who stood in front of the shelves of alcohol asked to see my ID before I could get my hands on my rosé. He warned me that my license was about to expire, then stepped aside so I could continue shopping. No hassle. Amazon Go isn't going to fix implicit bias or remove the years of conditioning under which I've operated. But in the Amazon Go store, everyone is just a shopper, an opportunity for the retail giant to test technology, learn about our habits and make some money. Amazon sees green, and in its own capitalist way, this cashierless concept eased my burden a little bit. " Bonus: I contributed an essay to Anxy magazine's masculinity issue: It looks back at a highly influential book, The Lonely Crowd, to consider wellness advertising to men on Instagram. "In 1950, a team of sociologists published a powerful book about 'the American character' called The Lonely Crowd. Arguing that Americans had become 'other-directed' in contrast to their ancestors, who had been 'inner-directed' for centuries, the book become a surprise sensation, selling 1.4 million copies. Americans navigated their social identities by 'radar' rather than using an 'internal gyroscope.' People had come to really, really, really care what other people thought, making those judgments constituitive of their own identities. It wasn’t a mental health crisis, per se, but it was a wild transformation, and not one that people appreciated. 'The great majority of readers,' they wrote in a 1961 introduction, 'have decided that it was better to be an inner-directed cowboy than an other-directed advertising man.' Despite their aspirations, most never regained that inner orientation. In a too-on-the-nose twist, the most famous cowboy, The Marlboro Man, was literally created by an Advertising Man, Leo Burnett, to assuage the fears of men who worried about what other people thought of them." + If this book sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend Todd Gitlin's foreword to this edition. [terraqueous urbanism] | 