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The holidays finally gave me some quiet to finish Lee Dugatkin's "Dr. Calhoun's Mousery." It's a very readable account of the the life and work of a fascinating figure in rat and mouse research after World War II. John Calhoun used his research on crowding and population dynamics in experimental mouse/rat colonies to muse about the human condition. What do rat experiments tell us about the design of cities? about "the population bomb" in humans? Calhoun himself and those who receive his work swing back and forth between wild extrapolations from mouse to human and careful framing of the research about being only about animals. Today, Calhoun's work is all but forgotten.

Not an easy read and it took a long time to finish. I did enjoy it, though.

Heute vor drei Jahren verstarb der Anarchist und Anthropologe David Graeber. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber #RestInPower

Excellent sociological account how our society and ourselves are measured, ranked, ordered in ever multiplying ways. Healy and Fourcade write clearly and forcefully, making this an enjoyable read.

The content overall was good, especially for people who aren't as familiar with what zoning is and isn't, and what it does and doesn't do. The structure of the book starts out well, but in the later sections of the book, repetitiveness in themes and language start to creep in. It's also a bit unclear who the audience for the book is: Is it trying to convince people who are already open to zoning being problematic to follow Gray's full zoning abolitionist project? Is it the abolitionist rhetoric employed to get proponents of zoning to give in a little and at least achieve reform?

Time to move this off my "Currently reading" shelf. I could not stand this book and gave it too much time.

Did I really start reading this in October? That can't be right. Another very enjoyable and weird Murakami.

This is coming out in a couple days and I'm very excited to read it, based on having read some of Healy's previous works.