Reading – CGW's Blog

A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

There was not just one American war for independence, and there are whole nations inside the United States that do not conform to state boundaries. Linguists in accents, anthropologists on material culture and political scientists on voting patterns recognize this.

That’s from American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the influential 2011 book by writer-researcher Colin Woodward. It sparked much follow-on research, and the Nationhood Lab, which continues developing the book’s premise today.

Below my notes for future reference.

Vulture: war correspondents in novel

Why would any journalist born into a rich country choose to be a correspondent in a war zone?

Pay, sure: it’s part of why most of us do some kind of work, but the pay isn’t that good. A median salary of $100k USD is a lot by reporter standards, especially when living in a low-cost, economically depressed country but is the risk worth it? Mission and legacy too.

But rich nations have gone to poor places for many bad reasons for a long time too. Like a twisted voyeurism, where those seeking distinction and violence and terror go. Perhaps One such character is the protagonist of Vulture, a 2025 debut novel by former war corresponded Phoebe Greenwood.

It’s been compared to Heller’s Catch-22, and it is funny and incisive to be sure, reflecting the American hegemony of today: rich, fat and distant, a place where very few of us experience the wars that are waged in our name. The book is delightful, I strongly recommend it. Its writing is light, insightful and vivid. One of my favorite voices is when an experienced journalist is unshackled to write freely.

Below I have a few notes from points that stuck out to me for future reference.

The invention of modern journalism

Newspapering is so old, and its chief champions are fusty enough that it’s easy to set aside its histories as the relics of an extinct industry — like beeper sales or switchboard operation.

But 20th century newspapers weren’t just a light-manufacturing industry. This trade developed how we gather and distribute news and information in ways that shape us today. That’s my continued interest in the “invention of the news,” and its many histories.

One of the most influential publications in shaping today’s information ecosystem was that century’s Wall Street Journal, and its longtime leader Barney Kilgore. It’s worth reviewing their origins.

That’s the focus of Restless Genius : Barney Kilgore, the Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism, a 2009 book written by Harvard-trained lawyer Richard Tofel, who became ProPublica’s founding general manager. Today he is a thoughtful, and prolific journalism commentator.

Though I follow Tofel’s writing, I hadn’t read this particular book yet. It reads primarily as a history of the Wall Street Journal, and this one particular leader, but there are more lasting lessons Tofel draws. It’s still worth reading.

The broadest reading: High-quality news and information can be assembled into a product that solves clear enough problems for people to spend money on.

After the peak of Gilded Age “yellow journalism“, many modern journalistic standards were established in the 20th century. This mass-media era developed a positively-reinforcing dual incentive: quality was a distinction, especially first in business news, that attracted paying subscribers, who were valuable and hard-to-reach enough that advertising was lucrative, which in turn justified more investment in news gathering and product quality. That particular bundle was famously disrupted by various internet-enabled platforms, but the lessons remains true. Tofel helped lead a ProPublica team that attracted philanthropic and reader-donors. National and business media have also had success with new subscriber models, many newsrooms today have robust event strategies that differently package their news. In our own way, my news organization Technical.ly has come out of the pandemic selling our reporting as a service that addresses a communication gap that economic development faces (which has required entirely new language, which other journalists often sniffle at). Plenty other examples exist, and more to come.

Below my notes for future reference.

Nervous States: the decline of reason

Elites worship the seeming objectivity of data and statistics. But people don’t live them.

Just about no one lives in the averages of income growth and GDP. So we begin to doubt them. One telling example: leading into Brexit, one research team showed data about immigrants made voters more distrustful, but telling them a story about people did.

That’s from the 2019 book Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, where Davies argues that as economic and political systems became harder to understand and less trustworthy, public life shifted toward feelings as a kind of evidence—especially fear, anger, resentment, and humiliation.

Contemporary politics is being driven less by reasoned debate or material interests and more by collective anxiety—a “nervous” condition where people constantly scan for threats, react viscerally and look for emotional certainty when trust in institutions, experts, and shared facts has eroded.

He links this to the rise of populism and culture-war politics, showing how leaders and media can weaponize emotion, how “security” logics blur into everyday governance, and how people seek belonging and recognition in a landscape that feels unstable. The book isn’t saying emotions are irrational or illegitimate; it’s warning that when anxiety becomes the default political atmosphere, it can crowd out deliberation and make societies easier to polarize and manipulate.

Below I have my notes for future reference.

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.