My daughter read Gideon the Ninth a year or two ago, and she's been talking about it ever since. A few weeks ago, she recommended that I read it, so I spent a credit on Audible and "read" the book over the last week. I just finished it this morning while mowing the lawn. I'm … Continue reading Gideon the Ninth →

My employer, the OEF, went through making our OKRs for this quarter a few weeks ago. It was the second time I’d been at an organization that uses OKRs; we also had them at Wikimedia. The process was also very different, and it made me realize that I only knew OKRs through folk wisdom and … Continue reading Measure What Matters →

I started reading The Golden Bough by James George Frazer late last year, and it took me many, many months to get through. I have been trying to write about books as I finish them, but this one has been a big block in the pipe for me, so I haven't been writing about the … Continue reading The Golden Bough →

I finished reading A Sand County Almanac last week. Many of the writers I've been reading on the topic of biodiversity refer to this book and its author, Aldo Leopold, as a must-read to understand how conservation can work and why it's so important. It's also a slim volume (which I listened to as an … Continue reading A Sand County Almanac →

I got my Amazon subscription credit renewed a few days ago and decided to listen to another Douglas Tallamy book, Nature's Best Hope. Long story short: it presents very little new material from his previous book, Bringing Nature Home. But that's good. Hope makes the same argument that Home did a few years before: we … Continue reading Nature’s Best Hope →

With back to school time, everyone else in my household was leaving in the morning, except me, who continued to work at home. I started feeling that I wasn't getting the basics of my life handled every day. I've found myself just getting everyone out the door before I start my first meetings in the … Continue reading The Social Conquest of Earth →

I've been trying to avoid news and current affairs podcasts, which is leaving a big gap in my audio listening schedule. I've been filling it by going through The Guardian's list of the best 100 novels in English in haphazard fashion. The list's editor, Robert McCrum, called The Moonstone (1868) the greatest English detective novel, … Continue reading The Moonstone →

My daughter and I finished watching LOST last year; her for the first time, me for the second. One part of LOST is that the writers and producers dropped references to related books and movies and historical figures loosely related to the events of the show. One of them was The Third Policeman, which sounded … Continue reading The Third Policeman →

Last year we bought a house in Richmond, Quebec, on the banks of the Saint-François River. We've got a big backyard, and a main source of joy for me in the last few months has been working in the garden. Inspired by The Ministry for the Future, a near-future scifi novel about climate change and … Continue reading Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants →