When I began reading The Beginning of Infinity I was a little miffed to see how seldom the percent completed marker on my kindle changed when I flipped a page. Only an additional percent every fifteen page turns? How long is this book?? This admission betrays my laziness, but I’ve been burned before by dense tomes with more anecdotes than original ideas. As Shakespeare said, brevity is good. Besides, I’m a product of my time, baby.

As I drew near to the end of this book, around 90% completion, I began to have the opposite feeling. My pace of reading slowed down. I began to highlight more and more passages, as if trying to take them with me to go. I never know how much of a book’s end contents are going to be references and marginalia, so I feared with every page turn I’d be at the closing remarks.

Such was my experience of The Beginning of Infinity. A central idea so good that any number of words spent elaborating on it I would have consumed hungrily.

I can’t say definitively all of the ways that my thinking has been changed by this book. That self-knowledge will need time to percolate. But I can try to list some of them.

I grew up in what you might call a "streetcar suburb", though the streetcar was ripped out a long time before I was born. The neighbourhood I grew up in is a bit over 100 years old; grid streets, with brick houses spaced apart by gaps just wide enough to walk between. I walked to school. These kinds of neighbourhoods are fashionable now, and mine has lots of young families these days; when I visit my parents I see kids playing on the sidewalks. But when I was growing up I was lonely on weekends. I had friends at school who lived in newer suburbs. They would tell me stories about their Saturdays, waking up to streets and inter-connected backyards full of other kids their age, going out after breakfast and not coming in until dinner. They had their school friends and their neighbourhood friends. I had school friends and my computer. As I got older, I was able to roam further, and my social life benefited.

It’s all folk music now.

The importance of musical movements and the innovation of new genres has been declining for some time now. I know that people have been saying this forever. I also realize that, at 26, I’m the prime age to join the “music is dead” camp; the bands I loved as a teenager are old now. But, in my mind at least, it’s not that I’m disappointed by the new styles of music coming out; I’m not even claiming that new music is particularly bad. I’m really asking: where is the new music? Not that there aren’t a billion songs being made every second, but where are the new styles? Where are the sounds that will define the early 2020s in popular culture? Listen to the first 30 seconds of this song:

Someone who is familiar with popular music of the last 50 years or so will probably be able to place this song in a timeline of musical movements with a decent amount of accuracy – i.e. they would be able to guess that the song was released in the 1980s. Will we be able to identify 2020s music the same way?

Montreal, Quebec is the second largest city in Canada after Toronto, and only about 5 hours away by car. Until last week, I had never been there. I am much more familiar with Toronto, having grown up nearby in Hamilton. I now live in Waterloo, Ontario, also close to Toronto – about 100km to the West. Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo actually share a lot of similarities in their built forms (at different scales) that are recognizable across a lot of North America. They are dominated by detached homes, often set back from the road by lawns. Multi-family housing is generally confined to the downtown, and mainly comes in the form of high-rise towers. Toronto is a large city, but I am always amazed at how suburban the metropolis is. Sure, the downtown core is stocked with very, very tall skyscrapers. But venture just a little bit outwards and you’re more likely to find single-family detached homes than anything else. Take a look at this Google streetview photo:

In which humans try to control complex systems at their peril.

Seeing like a State by James C. Scott is an exploration of the ways that governments have shaped the world to their ends over the past few hundred years. The enlightenment created a new faith in science, and the use of the scientific method to understand and dramatically reshape society and culture. Scott ambitiously groups together many separate social phenomena, as disparate as the creation of standardized units of measurement, the adoption of permanent surnames, the central planning of economies, scientific agriculture, and modern city planning, into a coherent process of centralization and standardization undertaken by states, calling the philosophy underlying all of these developments high modernism. High modernism is essentially the belief that “traditional” forms of knowledge and ways of doing things are backwards and outdated, and that the application of central planning by trained experts using science ought to replace these traditional ways. In the case of standardizing measurements, this looks like replacing local, colloquial measurements, which are based on the industries that use them and vary greatly from region to region, with standards like metres, kilograms, etc. In the case of city planning, this means replacing ancient, dense, unplanned cities with centrally planned grid cities zoned to create order and regularity. The book is generally a critique of high modernism, and especially the application of this philosophy in authoritarian settings like communist states and European colonies.