Category: Living in Society

Politics mostly social commentary.

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Living in Society

Politics and Public Health

Photo by Jimmy Chan on Pexels.com

I recently met a friend for lunch. They read the chapter of my autobiography about time we shared on the county board of health, ending in 2010. Rather than continue a discussion on email, we decided to meet in person. Ambient temperatures were above freezing and that made for a sloppy day. The restaurant parking lot was full of puddles.

One of our joint projects was working to reduce toxins in the environment across the state of Iowa by advocating with other boards of health. As chair, I wrote a letter to every board of health in the state about reducing reliance on coal as a source of energy. Likewise the two of us made our case to several boards of health in person. It is difficult to know the impact we had, yet projects to build new coal-fired power plants in Waterloo and Marshalltown were killed by the public utilities after we began our campaign.

One board of health said they wanted to keep politics out of it. Is public health political? If you have any familiarity with a health department, you know it is. My friend emailed me the following after our meeting:

When we were talking about the folks in the other Health Departments I was about to say something then forgot. It was about “politics” er. the fact that public health is political — it is a social science and reflects competing interests of those who would choose to pollute with impunity in the name of their god-given right to pursue profit in their business, and the interests of the public that require clean air, water, and a livable climate.  

If we don’t these days believe public health is political we never will.  But, at the time, I thought it important to remind people of that simple fact because so often (not unlike now) people want to say things like, I understand you want to control or study or advise about…. but don’t make it political.  Yikes.  And that’s the whole story.

I think the word “political” was a precursor to “woke.”

There is nothing political about mobilizing a public health work force to deal with an infectious disease outbreak. Likewise, there is nothing political about providing clean water by using drinking water standards to regulate what is and isn’t in public water supplies. These procedures and regulations don’t come out of the blue. A political process is behind them.

Part of the board’s work was to lobby the Iowa legislature on multiple issues. I spent most of my lobbying time working to make Iowa a tobacco-free state with clean air. We also wrote letters to the editor on timely topics. When the Smoke-Free Iowa Act was signed into law, banning tobacco smoke in most public places, through effective political lobbying, the gambling industry got an exemption for casinos. We had to compromise to get the bill passed. Oh, yeah! It’s political.

Our local boards of health have been charged with leading the effort to prevent disease and improve physical, mental, and environmental health in the community. Few members of the public attended our public meetings or offered comments. Citizens should be first in line to attend these meetings and offer solutions on how Iowa can improve its public health system. Until they do, volunteer members of boards of health do the best they can to promote health and prevent harm. We even had that printed on coffee mugs.

I don’t know if it’s political but there is one area that could improve: More licensed medical practitioner volunteers are needed to supplement the work of the public health system. In an era when government spending on public health can be expected to decrease, volunteers enable us to get more work done within the existing public health infrastructure. For the number of per capita medical practitioners in Johnson and Linn counties, our performance in this area has been disappointing.

So yes, of course, public health is political. It’s the nature of the beast, even if it is rooted in a time when there was a broad consensus about what government can do to further the public good. You know, back when we were Iowa nice. Sadly the sun set on that a long time ago.

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Living in Society

A Bitter Weekend

Driveway cleared of snow on Dec. 7, 2025.

By late Sunday night, I was ready for the deathly weekend to end. An acquaintance my age, with whom I worked at a transportation and logistics firm, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. His obituary was in the Sunday newspaper. There were the shootings in the news: Brown University in Rhode Island, and Bondi Beach in Australia. Then came the apparent murders of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer in California. It was public death overload.

It didn’t help the bitter cold kept me inside most of the weekend. I cleared snow from the driveway, but that’s about all the time I was outdoors. The saving grace was the visit of our child beginning Friday. They couldn’t make it home on Saturday because of the blizzard. They left Saturday morning, then turned the vehicle around, and headed back when the Interstate proved to be impassible. The extra night was a blessing for parents.

Despite the deaths, things weren’t all bad this weekend.

  • The bean soup and cornbread tasted good and was well-received Friday night.
  • I finished reading The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. It’s the kind of novel I enjoy reading, set in a time before electronic devices dominate society.
  • I read Adrienne Rich’s 1991 book of poetry, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. I found it hard to access yet there was at least one relatable poem.
  • Preparing enchilada sauce began a process of re-thinking how I make it. I tried substituting a slurry of all purpose flour, vegetable oil, and spices for arrowroot as a thickener. This approach has potential. More to come.
  • Used an aging can of pumpkin puree to make pumpkin bread. The results were so-so. Next time, I’ll use pumpkin I preserved myself.
  • I drafted another chapter in my autobiography.
  • Boxed up a donation of books for the public library used book sale.

Ambient temperatures warmed to the upper-20s on Monday, which meant a break from bitter cold. I’ll work to make this week better than the bitter weekend just past. Hard to keep a positive outlook sometimes, yet we must.

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Living in Society

The Health Care Abomination that is America

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Dec. 15 is the deadline to sign up on the ACA marketplace for health insurance effective Jan 1, 2025.

When I left the company and career of 25 years, securing health insurance was an issue. That was July 2009. There were no easy options, so I stayed on COBRA coverage.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. Qualified individuals may be required to pay the entire premium for coverage up to 102% of the cost to the plan. (U.S. Department of Labor website).

COBRA was expensive, so I looked around. I found the Iowa Farm Bureau offered a health insurance plan which was less expensive with reasonable coverage. More than farmers bought their plan, and so did my spouse and I. It wasn’t the best policy, yet it was good enough and met our needs.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law on March 23, 2010. When the ACA marketplaces were organized, I completed an online form and found that with subsidies, I was eligible at a lower cost than we were paying the Farm Bureau. I signed up for a plan and stayed with the ACA until I was eligible for Medicare.

Today, with Medicare supplemental insurance costs, our health insurance bill for two people is about $935 per month, not including dental or vision coverage. I looked at buying a plan for dental, yet the cost of paying regular care out of pocket was less expensive. The same with vision. Eye treatment related to a health condition was covered under the health plan. The cost for this is slightly less than what I was paying for COBRA in 2009.

The poverty guideline for a household of two is $21,150, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our income is more than that, yet many struggle to bring that much home. Health insurance on such income? Without government help people can’t afford it.

All of this serves as a long build up to the significance of today.

I previously wrote the following about deadlines to sign up for health insurance on the ACA marketplace:

To be covered Jan. 1 you have to be enrolled by Dec. 15 and have paid your first premium. At this late date, I doubt Congress is going to act on the subsidies. In fact, last week, the U.S. Senate rejected extension of ACA subsidies proposed by both Democrats and President Trump. Here is from the website:

December 15: Last day to enroll in or change plans for coverage to start January 1. January 1: Coverage starts for those who enroll in or change plans by December 15 and pay their first premium. Open enrollment continues until Jan. 15 but there would be a lapse in coverage if you wait until then.

For people who don’t have health insurance now, the Dec. 15 deadline is meaningless. Even the Jan. 15 deadline can be difficult without the means to pay for a policy. There is a lot more to say on this topic, yet Tick! Tock! Life is going by at the speed of an eighteen wheeler with the hammer down.

I agree with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders it is time to guarantee healthcare for all in the United States.

According to the most recent data, the United States spends $14,570 per person on healthcare compared with just $5,640 in Japan, $6,023 in the United Kingdom, $6,931 in Australia, $7,013 in Canada and $7,136 in France. And yet, despite our huge expenditures, we remain the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right. (It’s time for the US to guarantee healthcare for all, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, The Guardian, April 29, 2025).

President Obama was handicapped by the influence of insurance companies while he negotiated the ACA. It is remarkable any healthcare bill at all was enacted into law. Step-by-step, Republicans are stripping away the meat of the ACA, and will continue until all that is left is its bones, which they will grind up for fertilizer. Eliminating the ACA subsidies is just one part of a long plan to remove all the good things the ACA accomplishes.

If you look at my personal journey on retirement health insurance, it was only with Medicare that my worries about how I would pay a medical claim were addressed. Before that, my privileged status as a white male who was able to find a job with health insurance enabled me to find care. The care was never what I wanted, but I didn’t go broke because we had bills after our child was born in a hospital, or a major surgery.

It is easy to say there should be, as Senator Sanders says, Medicare for all. Getting that done in the United States is nearly impossible with the influence of special interests and their money in Washington, D.C. This is what makes healthcare an abomination in America. I know we can be better than this.

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Living in Society

Sunrise at Autumn’s End

Sunrise on the state park trail on Dec. 9, 2025.

Everyday I am out in the weather for at least part of the day. This December has been weird with heavy snowfalls coupled with spells of above freezing ambient temperatures. The talk on the trail is about how the trail surface varies with snowfall and temperature. We are all of retirement age so our concern is testing new muscles and stress on our ankles and joints. Thus far I have been able to navigate rough surfaces without mishap.

The outdoors temperature was 37 degrees Fahrenheit when I woke. By the time I was ready to walk on the trail it had dropped to below freezing. As I entered the state park, the wind picked up and snow began to fall. The trail surface had frozen unevenly around snowmobile, wildlife, and pedestrian tracks. I had to be careful to preserve my joints and ankles. I knew the weather forecast before I left home.

I’m not the only one who takes accurate weather forecasts for granted. My resource is the Weather Channel with its hourly forecasts and radar images. Mostly I seek short-term weather forecasts in order to do something like mow the lawn, take a walk, or work in the garden. Existing technology gives me accurate forecasts that facilitate what I want to do.

Hannah Ritchie is a Scottish data scientist, senior researcher at the University of Oxford, and deputy editor at Our World in Data, according to Wikipedia. Her work focuses on sustainability, in relation to climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, and public health. She recently wrote the following about weather forecasting:

The potential for AI to improve weather forecasting and climate modelling (which also takes a long time and uses a lot of energy) has been known for several years now. AI models have been tested for one- and two-week forecasts with promising results. Scientists will often need to wait weeks for a complex, high-resolution climate model to run; AI might be able to do this hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on Oct. 27, 2025).

Naturally, I asked ChatGPT about this, “When scientists like Hannah Ritchie say weather forecasting can be much improved with artificial intelligence, what do they mean.” As is usual for artificial intelligence, the answer was very long. Here is the crux:

When scientists say weather forecasting can be dramatically improved with artificial intelligence, they usually mean something more specific than “AI makes everything better.” They’re referring to concrete technical bottlenecks in current forecasting and the ways AI can overcome them. Hannah Ritchie, and researchers at ECMWF, NOAA, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, the UK Met Office, and others, are all pointing to similar developments. (ChatGPT query result, December 2025).

More specifically, in explanation, the machine listed multiple bullet points:

  • Weather prediction is limited by physics-based models.
  • AI models can “learn the atmosphere.”
  • AI lets scientists blend physics and data.
  • AI makes weather forecasting more democratic. By that, it means cheaper and more broadly available than on expensive, physics-based computers.
  • AI enables longer-range and global risk forecasting: seasonal climate forecasts, agricultural and drought planning, energy-grid load forecasting, and catastrophe-risk modeling.
  • But: Scientists emphasize that AI is not a replacement for physics.

The machine summarized: forecast faster, forecast at higher resolution, run at vastly lower cost, improve extreme weather warning lead times, complement physics with learned patterns, and democratize forecasting globally.

According to the machine, consumer-scaled artificial intelligence models might be available by 2032. In the meanwhile, I’m just glad I didn’t turn an ankle on the trail this morning.

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Living in Society

Afternoon at the Tavern

Entryway to the Hilltop Tavern in Iowa City.

My veterans group asked about having a social hour at the Hilltop Tavern in Iowa City last Friday. I don’t visit many taverns yet I like folks in our group and it was located across the street from the grocer from which I needed provisions. I drove the 14 miles to the county seat, parked in the grocery store parking lot, and walked across the street to get there.

The hill in “hilltop” refers to what was known as Rees’ Hill. This is from the Our Iowa Heritage website:

The area was generally known as Rees’ Hill – reflecting the winery and wine garden owned by Jacob and Agatha Rees across from the Hilltop Tavern location. The wine garden was well known and popular with Goosetown residents during the 1880s (and likely earlier). Jacob’s death in 1889, and Agatha’s (and son Frank’s) deaths in 1893 likely resulted in the closure of the winery. For many years, the property was either unused or planted for strawberries or general nursery. This property is where the Hy-Vee grocery store and gas station exist now at the corner of North Dodge and Prairie du Chien and occupied two acres. (The Origins of Iowa City’s Hilltop Tavern by Derek (D.K.) Engelen, Our Iowa Heritage).

The tavern opened after prohibition ended and has been in operation ever since. When I entered through the door in the photo, the bar was right there on the right, maybe 20 feet from me. People behind the bar immediately recognized that I entered and inquired what I wanted. I found my friends in a large, adjacent room with three pool tables and ordered a draft beer.

My friend, a banker before retirement, brought a roll of quarters so we could play eight ball. I hadn’t played since grade school but we formed teams and racked the balls twice. None of us were talented at the game, yet it helped pass the time by encouraging conversation.

What do aging septuagenarian veterans talk about on a Friday afternoon?

One of us recently had hip replacement surgery, and that took a bit of time. I obviously know hip surgery exists, but haven’t discussed it with someone who had it. I had questions. It turned out someone else had knee replacement surgery, so that led to a discussion of the differences between the two procedures.

About that time, someone walked up to ask if we minded if he played music on what in earlier years would be called a jukebox. We didn’t mind, and one of our party asked him to play some Kenny Rogers, which he did.

Being veterans, we discussed the extrajudicial executions of people suspected of being drug runners in the Caribbean Sea, and whether Admiral Mitch Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, would be the scapegoat for the president and secretary of defense to avoid responsibility for two specific killings that were clearly illegal. We drew no conclusions.

The prior day, the Iowa Legislative Services Agency released the first county supervisor redistricting plan. The Iowa Legislature earlier voted to require certain counties that elected supervisors at-large to divide into districts. Their idea is that creates an opportunity to elect some Republicans, although the logic is based on deceptive arguments. A lawsuit was filed to stop this process. Our group agreed the court system had little time to make a decision because of the long lead time to plan an election. We were in a wait and see mode until the lawsuit is resolved.

We talked some organizational business, finished our beverages and game, and headed out. It was a pleasant way for aging peace warriors to spend an afternoon in these trying times.

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Living in Society

Sleep and Loneliness

My apartment on Mississippi Avenue was on second floor, far right window.

My experience living by myself in my first apartment after university was formative in how I approach loneliness. The one-room apartment was located in this building on Mississippi Avenue in Davenport. I would lie in bed and feel my heart beating before falling asleep. While I was alone, I didn’t feel lonely. Because of an active youth, it took no effort to fall asleep and stay asleep until morning. I wrote about this apartment multiple times:

This new apartment already begins the rebirth which is so much needed by my soul at this time. The neighborhood is quite quiet and the apartment that I rent is at the end of a small hallway off the main one. Across the street is another large house which has been subdivided into apartments and it is quite a ways away. Further up the block there is a Jewish synagogue Temple Emmanuel. The river is about three or four blocks away. It seems there are some well-to-do neighbors to the south of this building who at this time are having a dinner party of some sort. But at the same time I believe that the area is on the fringes of the poverty area which is mostly to the West and the wealthy area of town, the Heights, which is to the East. The landlord’s brother lives upstairs in the attic and he mysteriously comes and goes. The landlord said. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not. Ask him if you need anything, said the landlord. Time will tell as I ask God to manifest his will. My major tasks at this time are to set up my own household for what is to be the first time. (Personal Journal, Sept. 11, 1975)

On Dec. 29, 2010, I wrote a post titled A Normal Winter. It expanded on this time of my life:

It has been so long since we had a “normal” winter in Iowa that we forget what that means. Snow and cold, dry weather are de rigueur and what we have had thus far has been relatively normal. No repeated blizzards, no continuous sub-zero temperatures. A “white Christmas” that was almost storybook in the appearance of the landscape. We could do with snow cover to reflect the heat of the sun back into space.

This week I have been thinking about the first time I lived without a room mate in late 1975. I was working at the Carroll’s Dairy Store at Five Points in Northwest Davenport. While working part time, I earned $0.85 per hour and somehow could pay the rent, and other bills while I figured out what was next in my life. It turned out that what was next was joining the Army, enlisting to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia and serving for almost three years in Mainz, Germany after a year of military schooling.

I lived in an large house that had been divided into apartments on Mississippi Avenue. My vehicle was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala, bought from a woman from whom it had been stolen and then returned. Occasionally, I walked the three miles from my apartment to work to get exercise, but to avoid burning fuel as well as even in 1975, it was a struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage. Seven Eleven started opening up convenience stores in Davenport and I used that as leverage to get a raise at Carroll’s.

Google map of Mississippi Avenue in Davenport, Iowa.

The single room apartment had a stove, refrigerator and sink, with a shared bathroom was down the hall. Somehow I crammed my book collection, vinyl records and all my possessions into that small space. My mother came for dinner for one of the few times I have cooked her a meal, making tuna casserole of dubious quality. We took a walk to nearby Prospect Park that evening. Cooking and entertaining were skills to be developed later in life.

Laying on the single bed I could feel my heart beating. That feeling is drowned out when there is a room mate. For the first time, I realized what it meant to be alone in the world, although I was not particularly lonely. Being alone drove me to seek out others and work on a life of my own. I started writing a journal, heard Chaim Potok speak about his then new book In the Beginning at the synagogue across the street and pursued what I believed to be the life of someone who had graduated from college. I was living a life, but driven to make something more of it. In many ways, I am pursuing that same life thirty five years later.

What I didn’t know in 1975, was how unique that time of my first apartment would be. That I would set patterns of behavior that would follow me until the present. Knowing now, what I didn’t know then, I look fondly to those few months on Mississippi Avenue, close to the river and on the edge of economic viability. While that life was unsustainable, it became a platform from which I took a bigger leap into life. I never looked back to say I would have chosen things to have been different. (Blog post on Dec. 29, 2010).

As I age, my loneliness has not changed. It may be there, yet it does not dominate my awareness. In recent years I have been sleeping through the night less often. My current project is to increase awareness of my biology and circadian rhythms. By doing so, I have been sleeping better.

Loneliness is something to deal with. I recently found this in the Washington Post.

An increasing number of middle-aged and older adults — especially those in their 40s and 50s — are lonely, according to a report released by AARP, a nonprofit advocacy group for older Americans. Among the loneliest are adults 45 to 49 years old (49 percent identified as lonely), as well as respondents who never married (62 percent); are not working (57 percent); or whose household income fell below $25,000 a year (63 percent). (Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2025).

Click here for the AARP survey.

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Living in Society

Public Health Time

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I served on the county board of health for six years from 2005 until 2010. Of all the volunteer work I have done, this was the most engaging. When I applied for the position, Johnson County had, and still has, a strong medical community. There were those who felt members of the board should be physicians. I secured my position because I was in fact different from others with my experience in managing rural water and wastewater systems for my home owners association.

Volunteer governmental boards and commissions are what a person makes of them. For example, when I was in my first term on the board in 2006, more than a hundred students from Longfellow Elementary School in Iowa City called off sick with stomach flu symptoms. The department activated its process for disease containment. One way for a board member to handle this is to educate themselves about the situation, study data, and discuss whether any change in process was warranted. My approach was to drive down to the department of health and field phone calls from concerned parents and try to handle their concerns in real time. This hands-on approach characterized my time on the board.

Department members weren’t always used to my approach. After my first year, I requested to get involved with operations, including shadowing the food inspectors at the county fair. After hearing about it, one employee responded, “Would someone please fill me in as to who this person is, what is the goal of the request to shadow…” Being different has consequences. Once I got to know this employee, we developed a good relationship. I found food inspections to be something. Let’s just say, I’m glad the health department does them. This kind of hands-on experience seemed essential to my understanding public health in the community.

I was surprised by the attitudes of some of our staff. For example, one person was opposed to the new casino being proposed in Riverside. They felt it would encourage alcohol and tobacco use, and associated health problems. We don’t hear any of that talk with the new casino today in Cedar Rapids.

The most impactful thing I did during my tenure was to recruit a replacement for the department head. The board supervises this position and writes performance reviews. When a replacement is needed, that job fell to me as board chair. I formed a committee of ten people from different walks of life: elected officials, attorneys, physicians, and people from health-related non-governmental organizations. The committee we recruited included some of the smartest people I have known. The lesson I learned is that if you have talented people doing this work, the job gets done well. The replacement we hired was a keeper who lasted long after my tenure on the board ended.

In my home town, board of health members tend to stay on the board for a long period of time, in some cases, for decades. I didn’t feel that way. My plan was to stay on the board for a single term. Once I dove in and found how important and engaging the work was, I agreed to a second term.

My advice is simple. Find a way to help on governmental boards and commissions. The work is rewarding and needed. Having citizen input to governmental departments is as important now as it was 20 years ago when I began my time on the board of health.

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Living in Society

Daily Routines

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The idea of a routine is anathema to my way of life. All the same, one of the most significant struggles during and after the coronavirus pandemic has been making my days productive. While economic concerns have not disappeared after retiring on Social Security, I don’t want to be locked into a routine. Personal preferences aside, there is a scientific reason to develop and follow a routine.

Routines are linked to better health, academic success and even resilience. We can all take simple steps to synchronize our activities with our circadian rhythms and biology. Small tweaks in the timing of things can pay off. (As a doctor, here’s my simple, science-backed schedule for a healthier day, Dec. 1, 2025, Washington Post by Trisha Pasricha, M.D.)

That damn biology! How limiting!

Working with ChatGPT, I developed a daily plan to help structure my time at home. I had not thought about compartmentalizing routine activities, yet this plan does so and has produced better results that free me of worry about how I spend my time. The three morning and two afternoon work sessions with a short break between them has been revolutionary.

I began developing this Daily Plan a few years ago. Then, it included only items in the first three bullet points. By expanding it to encompass the whole day, and implementing some basic science about circadian rhythms, my life has been better. It’s a never-ending process to refine this. My daily plan will get its first major test as I finish my second book this winter.

In general, I take Sundays off a plan and let my life free-form for a while. That has proven to be a useful break from regimentation.

Daily Plan

  • Wake-up: Physical regimen, weight, waist, coffee, pills, reading, blood pressure, newspapers, social media, photos.
  • Downstairs: Banking, orders, record information.
  • 5 a.m.: Creative writing; blog post.
  • 20 minutes before dawn: Exercise, breakfast, cleanup. If weather is inclement, change exercise to indoors at 11 a.m.
  • After breakfast: Work block. 3-55 minute sessions w/5 min break.
  • After work block: Household tasks and lunch. Includes outside errands.
  • 12:45 p.m.: Midday recovery routine. Take five-ten minutes of quiet in the sun.
  • 1 p.m.: Work block. 2-55 minute sessions w/5 min break.
  • 3 p.m.: Kitchen work.
  • 5:30 p.m.: Dinner, take medication.
  • 6 p.m.: After dinner active period, followed by runway to sleep.

Do you use a daily routine?

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Living in Society

November Snowfall

After a November snowfall.

The storm was brewing while we were in Des Moines enjoying a meal on Thanksgiving Day. In Iowa, we have excellent storm system visibility as they develop. This one was expected to dump 8-12 inches of snow beginning the Friday after the holiday. We made sure to get on the road in plenty of time to beat the storm home.

Snow cleans up the landscape and muffles neighborhood noise. Everything looks pristine for a while. We need the moisture this snowfall brought.

I got a good workout of a different set of muscles while blowing the snow from the driveway. I dispatched the first 6 inches on Saturday as it continued to snow. That made it easier to finish the rest on Sunday after this storm had finished. Snow is welcome for the changes it brings to our daily routine. Snow removal can be one of the few forms of outdoors exercise during winter.

The change is welcome for the reminder it provides: it is time to buckle in and finish the book. The last five weeks have been a time of figuring out where I am with the structure. I now know. My first focus will be drafting the remaining eleven single-topic chapters. After that, the entire book needs review and a re-write, taking it from draft closer to the finished product. Winter cold and snow makes it easier to focus on this indoors work.

Snowfall reminds us we are heading into another winter. This year, I welcome it.

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Living in Society

Favorite Reads in 2025

Book shelf on Nov. 29, 2025.

In late November I’ve read 63 books this year. Not all of them were good, yet many of them were exceptional. This post is about books I am glad to have read this year.

The Politics of Resentment by Katherine Cramer

Cramer’s examination of rural political consciousness — and the resentment often directed toward “liberal elites” — is essential reading for any Iowan trying to understand where our politics may be heading. I remember the mass demonstrations in Madison during Scott Walker’s tenure, and Cramer uses his administration as a springboard for a broader exploration of government’s place in everyday life. Her account is grounded in the many conversations she held with rural Wisconsinites while conducting her research, giving the book both texture and credibility.

Queen Esther by John Irving

Beginning during my university days I had a small number of authors whose work I read with great anticipation shortly after a new book was released. First it was Saul Bellow, and then Joan Didion. When they died, that author became John Irving. Queen Esther is what I expect from an Irving novel.

The reason I enjoy reading Irving is when he writes about his time in Iowa City, it is the place I came to know. The Water Method Man was set there and he specifically mentioned 918 Iowa Avenue, with which I am very familiar. That feeling, along with other common experiences, gives me entree into the world he describes in his latest book.

There are some naysayers about Queen Esther, yet it is familiar fare which I am glad to access. Having traveled there myself, I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Vienna and Amsterdam. He describes the same Vienna I came to know and that draws me into the book. My review is here.

The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes

There are other books about the attention economy, but Chris Hayes The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource comes at a time when we need to hear his message. I hear the word “distraction” multiple times each day from friends and family. There is more there and Hayes gets to the heart of it. My review is here.

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates

Source Code: My Beginnings is a straight up autobiography of Bill Gates’ early years through development of Microsoft. The early coding he wrote was impactful in my life and in the broader society. To hear it directly from the source was a quick, informative read.

This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is credited as being the inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989. His autobiography explains what happened. It is something that affects most people and worthy of reading.

Apple in China by Patrick McGee

The relationship between Apple and China is part of the news each day whether mentioned explicitly or not. I remember Iowa firms establishing a business relationship in China when I was in my 50s and found it curious that China would not let them own a majority stake in businesses they managed there. Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company explains the risk and what happened to the company because of it.

Breakneck by David Wang

While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing mega-projects, the U.S. has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. This book makes the case why China is so far ahead of the United States in manufacturing and in other areas of the economy. When we consider the United States, the concept of “lawyering up” is a negative for the betterment of society. Just look at our president and the number of lawsuits in which he is engaged.

The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff

I previously read many of the stories in this oral history of the making and use of the atomic bomb. What sets Graff’s book apart is collecting first person accounts of that history. It brings a form of immediacy to a topic modern people tend to forget when discussing nuclear weapons and disarmament.

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

I know many people looking for work without much success. Jessica Bruder wrote an autobiography about her experiences in a workforce unhinged from a predictable, daily schedule of work. She worked all over the country in seasonal or part-time positions, the most recognizable of which is the Amazon CamperForce program. Amazon leverages people displaced from regular work and have taken to living in recreational vehicles. They have a formal program to hire them in their warehouses during peak sales activity. This is just one example. This one is well worth your time for its window into a world most of us didn’t know existed. My review is here.

Eleven Days by Donald Harstad

The county sheriff recommended this book about a crime in the area where I live. I don’t read many crime novels, yet the local setting drew me in, and the tightly written narrative had me turning every page as quickly as I could.

2025 was a good year for reading. In retrospect, I should have read more poetry, so I’m making that a goal for 2026. To conserve resources, I expect to read more books from the public library and my own collection. I maintain my daily reading target of 25 pages, although that creeps up when I find a compelling book.

I’d be interested in what readers are reading in the comments.