RRR22: Choosing Where to Live, The Looming Tower, Egypt's New City, Stargazing, and Chess in Basketball
🌃📖🇪🇬✨🌠⭐️♜🏀
Hey, friends! It’s good to be back with you.
On March 17th, I published my first ever full-length essay in Junto Club #1, “Why I’m Optimistic About Humanity”. Check it out if you haven’t already.
Since then, I have not bellied up to my desk at night or on the weekends as much as I would have liked to in an ideal world. Sometimes, events in my personal and professional life sufficiently drain me of my creativity.
There’s nothing better than writing when you have panache behind your ideas. There’s nothing worse than writing when it’s an item on the to-do list.
For example, if I’m too mentally drained, how could I question why we collectively scrutinize epidemiologists trying to measure the contagiousness of COVID while we have nothing to say about deeply flawed numbers like the rate of inflation, or unemployment?
If you want to open the can of worms…
In Recent Times…
My mom is moving back into her old house where renters had been occupying it for several years.
What I love about where she lives is that it’s pretty much the only walkable neighborhood in town. There’s a great coffee shop, a couple restaurants / bars, convenience stores, parks, a pharmacy, and even a Dairy Queen (🍦) all within walking distance!
What do you value in the places that you choose to spend your time?
For me, I think walkability and potential for socialization are paramount. I would gladly cede space in my home for the ability to be on foot for most of my days, and the ability to see my friends in an effortless way. I’m definitely a city person 🏙🌆.
That’s not to say I don’t greatly appreciate being in nature and getting somewhere quiet. In fact, I think that every city-lover longs to get away.
It’s just that living away from a city starts to have effects on your lifestyle that become a big problem if they don’t suit you.
For example, there are few things in life that I hate. Hate is such a strong word!
But I do, truly, hate being compelled get in my car to do everything.
For starters, I’m sort of petrified of driving since the proliferation of distracted driving and general carelessness behind the wheel is quickly becoming a staple of American culture (cc:
).Secondly, I just enjoy seeing people, getting fresh air, and exercising. It’s the best when all of that is just an add-on to the fact you are accomplishing something you need to do like grocery shopping or going to the gym.
What things do you like, love, or loathe about living in different environments? Leave a comment and let’s discuss 👇🏻.
Content of the Week 📖🎙📺
The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright
Last weekend I went to go visit a couple of friends in Bucks County, PA. As an aside, Bucks County is one of the coolest places in the U.S. - you should figure out an excuse to check it out!
We visited “Central Books”, a neat used book store in downtown Doylestown. I came across The Looming Tower, which I had read as part of my “Modern U.S. History” class in high-school. It is a book detailing the histories, factors, and the influences of the people behind the 9/11 attacks in New York City.
I remember finding it interesting at the time, and I wondered what the future me would think of it if I were to read it again 14-years later. I’m about halfway through it, and I already have a newfound appreciation for this book.
The book begins with an incredible deep dive on the life of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-1900s, who was propelled to even greater status upon his execution in 1966.
Qutb’s philosophy had profound impacts on Ayman al Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, two of the main perpetrators of 9/11, whos lives are also closely examined in the opening of the book.
Wright is also masterful in drawing a clear line between the six-day war and the resurgence of fundamental Islam.
I was also today-years-old when I learned that there is a TV series called The Looming Tower produced by Hulu that was released in 2018. I’ll definitely be tuning in once I finish the book again.
The Man Who Solved The Universe
I read Aurelius’ Meditations (the version where the language was adapted to be modern) a year or so ago. As you might assume, it’s quite a thought provoking book. Stoicism is really compelling.
This video does an incredible job laying out in simple and relatable terms what made Aurelius such a special person. They crammed a good lesson into fourteen minutes!
Egypt’s New Capital City 🇪🇬
I was surprised to learn that Egypt is building a new administrative capital city within 30 miles of Cairo. Apparently the project was conceived 8-years ago 🤔.
Built on virgin land, the city is designed to serve as a high-tech model for Egypt's future away from the clutter and chaos of Cairo. The government wants it to absorb part of Egypt’s population, which is growing by an estimated 1.6% a year.
Though the pace of works appears to have slowed recently, phase one of the city already includes a 70-storey tower - the tallest in Africa - an opera house with five halls, a mega mosque and the Middle East's biggest cathedral.
An electric train from eastern Cairo began operating last spring and an elevated monorail is due to start from the second quarter of this year, Abbas said.
Up to 100,000 housing units have been finished and 1,200 families have moved in, he added.
I love the idea of investing in building new cities - but I am struggling with the concept of building one in the Sahara desert.
Landscaping has also begun on an irrigated, 10 km-long park, dubbed the "Green River".
A plant near the Cairo suburb of Maadi will send 800,000 cubic metres per day of scarce Nile water, starting in two years. A second, 700,000-cubic-metre plant is planned. Together the two will consume roughly 1% of Egypt's share of the Nile's water.
ACUD hopes to inaugurate a giant sports area, the Olympic City, with a 93,000-seat stadium, by the second quarter, Abbas said.
It occurs to me that in the past, cities were typically developed on land that was suitable for a particular purpose. Deep ports and rivers served as important trade routes, and economic development followed from there. The idea of finding a plot of land in a desert and deciding to build a mega-city from scratch seems unnatural, and of course, expensive.
Again, most cities don’t just get “built”. Long time horizons allow for demand to be met with supply, culminating in flourishing cities. It seems like the concept of “if we build it they will come” is opening the door to a lot of financial and quality of life risk.
That’s just my gut instinct - I hope that it becomes a booming hub of Egyptian culture!
Here are some super-interesting photos of the ongoing construction.
Dark Sky 🌌
Did you know Oregon is home to the worlds largest “dark-sky sanctuary”?
Earlier this month, DarkSky International certified a remote, 2.5 million-acre area in the southeastern part of the state. From this rugged swath of high desert landscape dotted with sagebrush, visitors who stay up late can see large numbers of stars, planets and other celestial bodies.
“It’s surprising sometimes to see that many stars all at once,” says Bob Hackett, executive director of Travel Southern Oregon, to the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano. “It catches you, and it makes you pause because you feel like you can touch it … That vastness of the whole cosmos up there—it almost makes you get closer to the people you’re with on the ground.”
DarkSky International is a nonprofit that certifies areas that have developed comprehensive protections against light pollution. To date, the group has certified more than 200 Dark Sky Places in 22 countries.
The newly certified area is called the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, and officials spent four years working to earn the designation. They’ve implemented a lighting management plan that will help preserve the region’s unobstructed night sky views, which includes measures such as installing motion detectors and reducing the number of lights that point upward.
Additionally, every light source within the sanctuary’s boundaries will need to comply with DarkSky International’s standards within the next decade, reports KLCC’s Nathan Wilk.
This is definitely something I want to check out. The photos are just 🤯🤯🤯.
NBA Over / Under Check-In
As a refresher, here’s what I wrote back in October about trying to predict this years NBA over / under win totals:
The NBA, in my opinion, will be much harder to predict this year, due to the large amount of teams who will rightly feel like they have a chance to compete. When a team feels they have no ability to fight for any meaningful success, they often engage in what’s called “tanking”.
Essentially, it means stripping the roster of high level talent (or resting players), and looking to rebuild through the draft or by compiling assets (usually young players and future draft picks).
This year we won’t see nearly as much tanking for many reasons.
Primarily, it’s because the NBA talent pool is now such that it supports lots of parity in the competitive landscape.
This means that more teams will gravitate towards .500 basketball, where they win half the time and lose half the time. To determine who will win lots of games, and who will lose lots of games is now significantly harder than it was last year.
For the purposes of wagering, the o/u lines are set very similarly for lots of teams, especially in the Western Conference.
Well, after nearly doubling my small dollar figure last season, sure enough, I am looking at just about 30% returns on this season. I’ll take it!
I can thank my high-conviction predictions for the good results, because I didn’t fare quite as good elsewhere. Here’s where success was realized:
Indiana Pacers over 37.5 wins
Indiana Pacers over 41.5 wins
Memphis Grizzlies under 45.5 wins
Memphis Grizzlies under 42.5 wins
Dallas Mavericks over 44.5 wins
Dallas Mavericks under 6.5 seed in the Western Conference
This means they will finish in 6th place or better
Toronto Raptors under 36.5 wins
Toronto Raptors over 10.5 seed in the Eastern Conference
This means they will finish in 11th place or worse
Philadelphia 76ers under 49.5 wins
Sincere apologies to our strong Philadelphia cohort here in RRR… 😅
With that out of the way, we soon turn our eyes towards the playoffs which begin in almost exactly two weeks. I’ll definitely write a primer on that, but in the meantime, I want to share a beautiful video of what’s been going on in the NBA. The level of play has gotten ridiculous, which I guess makes sense. It’s a professional sport where they players and coaches all make too much money 😂.
That’s it for this week - but before I go, let me leave you with some songs:
Mas Que Nada - Sergio Mendes and the Black Eyed Peas (if you have never ever listened to one of my song recommendations, let it be this one 🙏🏻).
He’s the Greatest Dancer - Sister Sledge
Pon Pon - Khruangbin (requires a good pair of headphones or speakers to get the full effect)
Cheers, everyone :).