Further reading

This page summarizes high-quality further reading on topics on this website.

It also organizes information for discussion that will lead to new topics in this website.

Neighborhoods, construction, land

• The human powered neighborhood is the future of the poorest urban neighborhood in the Netherlands (Human Power Plant, 2021).
• America's pensions can't beat a Vanguard account or finance a transmission line, but they can close your hospital (Governance Cybernetics, 2026).
• The housing crisis as a land crisis (Progress and Poverty, 2026).
• How Wall Street killed single family homebuilding (Economic Populist, 2025).
• Non-industrial jobs, youth activities, housing top concerns in comprehensive plan survey (The Edge, 2025) and Growth happens, she makes it follow the plan (The Edge, 2026).
• Is your town housing ready? (Strong Towns, 2021).
• Live near friends is a business to help friends buy neighborhoods.
• Assemble's winter garden grows activism in Liverpool (Architect Magazine, 2022).
• Why this Colorado coal town is digging geothermal (Yale Climate Connections, 2026).
• Constable Kentucky's constables serve subpoenas, evict tenants, and transport detainees (The Kentuckian, 2025).
• Engineering in plain sight by Grady Hillhouse (No Starch Press, 2022) is a profusely illustrated field guide to the electrical grid, communications, roadways, municipal water and wastewater, construction, and other public infrastructure.

Primary health care

• No future for healthcare in Kentucky (2025). "Our doctors were there when we needed them, from birth to death including general surgery that did not involve the heart or brain or bones. If they were unavailable, a local colleague was happy to take call for them. Primary care receives less than 5% of US healthcare spending but is responsible for 35% of doctor visits. The PCP understands the needs of patients through long and continuous contact and care, and coordinates multispecialty care when needed. GPs, surgeons, the occasional pediatrician and psychiatrist.... when you needed them, they were there. They were paid well enough to be at the top of the local wealth pyramid, not too different from the bank president or children who inherited one of the lucrative local businesses (until they ran it into the ground in the third generation). They were pillars of their local world, at times somewhat apart as befit their earned authority, but nevertheless always an integral part of the community. A surgeon was on my chemical worker father's team in the scratch bowling league. They were sometime fishing partners. This was not unusual then. Those doctors had long and prosperous careers lasting from the 1950s into the 1990s."
• Iran's health houses provide model to improve rural health in the Mississippi Delta (NIH Fogarty International Center, 2009).
• Open Dialogue film by Daniel Meckler (2011): In the far north of Finland, a group of innovative family therapists converted the area’s traditional mental health system, which once boasted some of Europe’s poorest outcomes for schizophrenia, into one that now gets the best statistical results in the world for first-break psychosis. They meet clients in crisis immediately and often daily until the crises are resolved. They avoid hospitalization, preferring to meet in the homes of those seeking their services. And they avoid the use of anti-psychotic medication wherever possible. They include in the treatment process the families and social networks of those seeking their help, and their clinicians work in teams, not as isolated, sole practitioners. Their approach values of the voice of everyone in the process, most especially the person directly in crisis. And they provide their services, which operate within the context of Finnish socialized medicine, for free.

Computers

• How and why I stopped buying new laptops (2020), How to build a small solar power system (2023), and Reinventing the small wind turbine (2019) by Kris de Decker; Solar laptop (2009) by Paul Blair
• Hold on to your hardware (2025)
• deflock.me and alpr.watch
• r/dumbphones and ITX-Llama, an example of a 486 retrocomputer
• Graphene OS, Free DOS, and FUZOMA
• UCB LOGO and XPL0 programming

Discussion topics

The future of basic research

• Science houses: Let's build a fleet and change the world (Experimental History, 2023)

Films about mayors

• Mayor (2020), directed by David Osit.
• 大同（中国市长）The Chinese Mayor中文字幕 (2015), directed by Hao Zhou.