Manhattan, 1931. A city without skyscrapers, save for a handful in the Financial District and the brand new Empire State. A city of 3-5 story buildings.
Chris Ryan on The Press Box talking about the early blogosphere. Three things I loved about this:
Chris’s natural creative energy
What it was like for Chris when he didn’t know how his career would turn out
Chris’s blog gave Free Darko its name 🤯
Things Brian Potter has learned
Number 30 was my favorite:
Whenever there’s a major bridge incident in the US we hear stories about the US’s crumbling infrastructure, but the worst bridges in the US are steadily getting fixed. Between 1992 and 2023, the number of US bridges in critical condition declined by more than 70%.
An exploration on where the value from AI will come from that also starts to articulate specific bottlenecks that (currently) AI faces in improving R&D work. Somewhat related to my reaction to Situational Awareness, I suspect that more of these bottlenecks exist than people think. Coding might be a unique application for LLMs: relatively closed loop, fast feedback, lower diversity of tasks.
Self-importance, contempt, and arrogance is rewarded online. Virtue rarely is. In this way, technology is inverting many of the incentives for developing character.
Bias hacking for progress?
“Once you put that first stake in, they’ll never make you pull it up.” — Robert Moses, from The Power Broker.
I’ve seen this same dynamic in all sorts of projects. Creating the impression that it is happening unlocks funding that is unavailable before it has begun. It occurs to me that this is a way of hacking peoples sunk cost bias to get things done.
I’ve been hearing whispers in the parents-of-young-children circles about Chattanooga since we moved back to the Atlanta area 3 years ago.
We would discuss family friendly travel destinations and Chattanooga would come up, but I never really got it. What’s in Chattanooga?
They’d say things like “they’ve got the Chattanooga Choo Choo” or “there’s a great aquarium”. My children like a train and some fish as much as anyone’s, but I struggled to see what would make this worth the 2 hour drive.
This spring break, we finally went for it, and now I get it. It’s a beautiful, accessible city with a ton of options for things to do with children under 5. Not many of those things are unique to Chattanooga per se, but I’m not sure how much that matters at this stage.
The city itself
I have to say, I was surprised and more than a little bit charmed. The city itself is like a combination of Pittsburgh and Raleigh. The downtown urban core clearly came of age in the ~1880s to ~1920s and was formerly industrial. There’s a ridge above the city and a river that runs through it. It’s small. You could walk across it in an hour or two, even with a stroller.
The city is clearly prioritizing tourism. There’s a free electric bus that connects the city and makes it easy to get around (and for children the age mine are, it is an activity in an of itself). It’s clean and well marked. The aquarium and children’s museum are new and have a lot of local support. There’s a hint of Disney World about it, but it’s fun (to be fair, the North Shore neighborhood seemed a lot more vibrant, like people actually live there).
Things to do
The Chattanooga Choo Choo, a classic steam engine in the old train station that kids can climb up on and play in. Things I learned: Chattanooga’s claim to fame is that it connected the Northern and Southern railway systems in the 1880s.
There’s a great aquarium, at least as good as Atlanta or Monterrey Bay.
Great parks — Coolidge Park was my favorite. It’s got fountains and a carousel. It used to be that you could walk from the Riverfront (where the aquarium is) to the North Shore (where Coolidge Park is) but that’s currently closed for renovations.
Rock City is just outside of town. This is probably the most unique Chattanooga thing that we saw. It’s tough to describe, but worth it. Plenty to see and do — and an incredible view of the valley.
Children’s museum. Is it just me, or have these gotten way better since I was a kid? Basically everywhere I travel with my kids has one (Pittsburgh, Hendersonville, apparently Chattanooga). Do they actually exist year round or are they pop ups that get set up when I book a trip?
Musings
Walking through the beautiful old train station made me a little bit sad. It’s a gorgeous building that clearly isn’t being maintained. It’s an elegant building with a sense of place, but the big central corridor is just empty. It reminded me of Buenos Aires: all those beautiful buildings slowly falling into disrepair.
This sadness seeped into the rest of the trip. Chattanooga is clearly doing great. There’s a lot of investment in downtown. It’s safe and clean. Many of the restaurants and stores are obviously new. My family will definitely go back.
And yet, I couldn’t help but noticing a lot of empty storefronts. Not enough to detract from the experience and all well maintained. But one in four, in some places as many one in two are empty.
Observing this in the background of Liberation Day and all the discourse that followed had me wondering: how prosperous can a city be if it is only a tourist destination, rather than a place that people live and create?
The combined number of hidden Christians in China and India is estimated to be 120 million, large enough to be the fifth largest religion in the world. Via Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Worth your time
“A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum.” — Donald Knuth via Mark Larson.
I noticed that many parents of young children, despite having significantly more on their plates, seemed to get burnt out less. I even noticed this in myself, and didn’t have a real way to explain it – my first kid’s birth coincided with the busiest working period of my life (do not recommend), but I found that I had a more positive attitude towards work, for no reason that I could really explain. When I read this post, it all clicked – when you have young children Mission Doubt entirely disappears because you need to feed them.
I have also noticed that having a baby in the house is good for my creativity and relationship to my work. While I have less time for work, what I get out of that time is much, much higher quality.
An incredibly ambitious book by Diarmaid MacCulloch. He really does cover it all, from the Council of Nicaea to the intricacies of African Christianity in the post-colonial era.
I picked this one up mostly to get a better understanding of the 200 years after the birth of Christ and then stuck around for the rest because I’m a completionist. Despite growing up in the church, there’s a bunch of tradition outside of the gospels that I wish someone would put in one place. As an example, Thomas went to India! I continue to think that this would make a great podcast.
After listening to this book (I did the audiobook — no way I was ever going to get through this one in print), I think I have a better understanding of why: “tradition” is a friendly stand in for “sources outside the Bible” and discussion of these makes people uncomfortable. I’m not particularly sure why, but this is a theme of the book — what goes into the cannon of scripture gets people riled up!
Some other topics like this:
What is the nature of Jesus? Fully God? Fully man? How exactly can one be both?
What is the trinity? Is the trinity one or three?
What is the human role in salvation? To what degree are we choosing Christ or being chosen?
One of the benefits of the breadth of the book was seeing these topics reoccurring throughout times, places, and cultures. It made me feel better about the parts of my faith I simply don’t fully understand.
I was surprised at how much of the story I already knew. Between The Rest Is History, Literature and History, and Dominion, I have a pretty workable understanding of the story of the beginnings of Judaism and Christianity. I'm also surprised that less of this is taught in churches.
There parts of the history, say from between 500 and 1700 in Europe, where centering the history on what was happening within the church rather than what was happening with political leaders clarified the story for me. A reminder that the separation of religion and state is a modern one. It also helps explain why religious details that seem uninteresting in 2025 were all consuming. These were the organizing principles of society, in the way that gender, sexuality, and citizenship are today.
I gained a deeper appreciation for Eastern Christianity and Syrian Christianity in particular. I might be mangling some of the details here, but the book mentioned that one of the Syrian churches has chants that seem to be unchanged since the early 100s AD. Isn’t that an incredible lineage? Augustine also seems more important to me now.
My next book in this area is going to be on the early Christian sources. Suggestions are welcomed!
