Reading – Christopher Wink

How ‘common knowledge’ works

The recursion of what most of us call common knowledge is endless: We know that they know that we know that they know, and so on.

No trivial matter, this form of communication is a likely driver of the very development of language so that humans could better coordinate.

So argues Steven Pinker, the public intellectual and Harvard cognitive psychologist, in his new book “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.”

Though no specific accusations appear to be public, the timing proved awkward. He’s one of several prominent intellectuals named in a tranche of new correspondence with notorious financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. One of Pinker’s prominent book endorsements is Bill Gates, who is even more exposed.

I read the book before fully understanding this, and it’s not clear what it all means now. Though no great revelation, the book gathers perspective on a widely familiar concept.

Below my notes for future reference.

What I read in 2025

I like reading the long form of books: Sitting with someone’s big idea that took them years.

I surprised myself by staying up later, and getting up earlier, in 2025 to read nearly as much as I ever have before. Below I share the list.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Nonviolence should be a tactic of resistance movements, not a holy covenant As famed South African activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.”

Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?

That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.

As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:

moral: we are the good guys, so nonviolence is the only option and
strategic: it is always taken too far, so it is actually the better option

Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.

As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What Works (and doesn’t) in Community News

This is primarily a place for my notes from this book for my future reference, but I have also included below an essay about the book I originally posted on Linkedin.

American journalism leaders rightly view local news models as worryingly limited. After nearly 20 years founding and operating a local news org, I believe many take too narrow a view of how to address that worry.

That’s why I was interested to read What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate, published in 2024 and written by Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, two well-regarded journalism insiders who also host a podcast on local news. (Clegg is a longtime Boston Globe veteran who founded hyperlocal news site Brookline News; Kennedy is a Northeastern University faculty member.)

The book came out two years ago, and for fellow local news nerds, it’s still worth adding to you collection. Buy it!

Below, I share my reflections, and I have criticisms, but they’re more about the broader local news discourse than the book itself 🙂 I come with peace and love.

How to prepare for facing violence

Violence is rare. Even those who seek it might encounter only a few hours of direct and active violence

For of the rest of us, a few minutes could shape the rest of our life. Better prepare.

That’s from the 2011 self-defense book Facing Violence by Rory Miller, a longtime corrections officer who worked in Iraqi prisons and developed self-defense training courses.

Miller has a vibe and a viewpoint, including personal stories alongside tactical advice. This book is a philosophical and practical guide that would be a good accompaniment to self-defense training. The book’s chapters are the seven stages that he identifies are part of navigating violence. Those stages:

Legal and ethical frameworks
Violence dynamics
Avoidance
Counter ambush
Breaking the freeze
The fight itself
The aftermath

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Simulacra and Simulation

The industrial mass-market modern age brought forth intertextuality, hyperreality and meaning implosion. These concepts — that media reflect other media, rather than reality, until we can no longer separate truth from story — is a defining princiople of postmodernism.

That’s how French philosopher and controversial academic Jean Baudrillard put it in his influential 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. I read excerpts as an undergrad, and his other works. I just reread the 1994 English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.

It’s a challenging read, but like all good philosophy, whether you disagree with it all or not, Baudrillard certainly makes you think. Once strawberries were a whole food to eat seasonally and locally. Then they became an ingredient, and then chemically recreated as a flavor. How does that change us?

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Is a river alive

What if a river isn’t just scenery or infrastructure—but a living being with rights, memory, and agency? If a corporation has personhood, then certainly ecological systems can.

That’s from the much-publicized lyrical 2025 book Is a River Alive by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It’s gotten heaps of praise, though I’ll admit I found it an over-stretched poem at times. It felt a bit pompous but I so appreciate the book’s premise.

Below I share notes for my future reference.

Improving gender equality at home

Becoming an equal partner is the man’s glass ceiling.

Most American households are dual-income earners, and even in these, men contribute less domestically than women. Gender plays an outsized role. But even in same-sex relationships, one partner seems entirely aloof of what the other does domestically. Culture seems to make this all difficult to overcome, so a manual helps.

That’s the spirit of the 2022 book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, written by Kate Mangino, who has a PhD in social development.

“It is harder and more time-consuming to be a good mother than to be a good father, and it is easier for a woman to fail in motherhood than for a man to fail in fatherhood,” Mangino writes. “We have set the caregiving bar too high for mothers and too low for fathers.”

Mangino makes great effort to speak to relationships with different genders, while reflecting that close to 90% of American households have those in a male and female roles. Those “male-coded” and “female-coded” dynamics are a theme. I found the book challenging at times — sometimes productively, and a few times because I just flatly disagreed with the author’s framing. But I respect and appreciate Mangino’s contribution. It helped me marriage, and will help others. I recommend it. Buy it here.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Present Shock

“We tend to exist in a a distracted present where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”

That’s from Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.

Rushkoff is a media theorist and professor who is credited with the term “viral media.” In the early 2010s, as social media and digital tools were in the ascent, he put forward his “present shock,” as a kind of response to the 1970s concept of “future shock.”

Toffler’s “future shock” was the stress and disorientation caused by too much rapid change arriving from the future, while Rushkoff’s “present shock” is the stress and disorientation caused by an always-on, real-time culture that collapses time into a perpetual now.

New technologies can reduce the time and energy we spend on less complex tasks. As Rushkoff writes: “We are also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus in the trivial pursuit of the immediately relevant.”

Below I share my notes for future references.

How to write short

All writers are either putter-inners, or the taker-outers.

We either write sparingly, and then add more in. Or, we over-write, and then edit down. (Count me as an over-writer). It helps to know who we are, so we can then focus on how to keep tight and clear prose.

That’s from the 2013 book How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by the journalist and journalism scholar Roy Peter Clark. Below I share my notes for future reference.