5 Interesting Reads – 10/1/2021

Here are five more interesting reads I’ve come across recently.

1. “Writing Things Down in a Paperless World” by Robert Breen. He is another Field Notes fan; and he has some interesting things to say about where paper fits in a paperless lifestyle.
2. “COVID Pioneer Families” by Deborah Fallows. Deborah coauthored with James Fallows, my favorite book of 2020, Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America. For a while (even before the Pandemic) I daydreamed about moving to a rural place with lots of open space. As Deborah writes about in this piece, some people are really doing it.
3. “Confessions of a Sid Meier’s Civilization Addict” by Spencer Kornhaber, in the October Atlantic Monthly. I think I may have played an old version of Civilization decades ago. But I recently saw that Sid Meier has a new memoir out, and I picked it up because I’ve got a kind of fascination about the behind-the-scenes world of game development. I haven’t read it yet, but reading this piece made me want to bump up Meier’s book on my list.
4. “Farewell to a Lewiston Pawnshop” by Jaed Coffin. Down East Magazine is my monthly escape to Maine when I can’t otherwise be there. I just like this little piece on what a pawnshop means to a small town.
5. “Simple Mathematical Law Predicts Movement in Cities Around the World” by Viviane Collier, in the October Scientific American. With Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation finally released, I’ve been thinking a lot about those old stories, and of the statistical science of psychohistory that forms the basis of the storyline: a mesh of mathematical models that can predict the future of humanity. Every now and then, it seems, little pieces of the equations of the fictional science of psychohistory popup in the real world. I collect them as a hobby and this is one of them.

If you’ve got any of your own interesting reads you want to share, drop them in the comments.