Prelude

In an initiative so brave, so groundbreaking, and so entirely unique, I am starting a weekly newsletter dedicated to what I have read this week. The kicker, however, is that it’s just for me to curate my own reading list and synthesize the vast swaths of ideas that I consume. So if you’ve found this, you’re most likely stalking my website, which I highly welcome.

This issue is the Prelude, meaning “an action or event serving as an introduction to something more important.” Also an iconic pre-orientation program I did at Georgetown. Throughout my five-year career in tech, I was constantly looking for that something of higher importance. I felt I was building solutions in search of a problem. My title was literally Data Solutions Manager. The heaviest problems I encountered were small, deeply unsexy technical challenges that made executives slightly less productive in an 8-hour period.

I realized I had to pivot, and pivot fast, out of this path after reading the following pieces:

Is this a career? by Benn Stancil

This article hit me hard. Benn, founder of a BI tool called Mode, depicts how it’s pretty easy to find yourself in the 95th percentile of any activity you dedicate a certain amount of time and rigor to. Anyone can get pretty good at playing Overwatch or learning an instrument — simply doing it more than others is all it might take to reach a high percentile. However, the gulf between the 95th and 100th percentile is maddeningly wide and unfathomably deep. A man can dedicate his life to running a fast marathon time (sub-3 hours) and still be farther away from the best Kenyans than I am to him.

“For almost its entire span, it is a shallow hill that most of us can climb, if we put in a bit of effort. And then, it is a cliff, straight up. And lots of people are hopelessly stalled at the bottom, perhaps better than 95 percent of the world, but a mile below the world’s best. Because, even when great climbers think a cliff looks impossible to scale, there will be somebody who can go straight up it.”

As someone working ‘in data,’ as an analytics generalist, there is no cliff that we are even attempting to climb. There’s no award season for tech consultants. Simply put — this is not a career.

We have forgotten how to build things outside of apps by Stephen Jacob Smith

This narrative piece uses the elevator to explain how the US has lost its ability to build in the physical realm, due to “labor, building codes, and sheer lack of political will.” The US invented the passenger elevator, yet most new luxury 5-story buildings in NYC are built without them. The writer compares this to his mother’s apartment in Bucharest, which has a fully-functional lift. Why the disparity, when wealth favors NYC?

It seems that elevators function as an interesting proxy for the housing crisis. Since NYC requires that elevators be able to fit full-size gurneys, they are prohibitively expensive. Boom, there goes your building height, your density, and your walkable neighborhood. This is a real insight, and a problem worth solving.

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So, after seeing these provocative posts, my mind whirred with exit opportunities. I needed to get down from my current ladder, choose a damn fig, and find a cliff to climb. Luckily, I had a demonstrable interest in city planning, housing affordability, and urban economics after living in Brooklyn for five years. Here’s a quick reading list that got me where I am today, an incoming Master of City Planning at UC Berkeley.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

“Housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated simply as a business, a crude investment vehicle, something that just ‘cashes out.’”

There is a business model at the bottom of every market, says American sociologist Matthew Desmond, which is why poverty and exploitation prosper in American slums. Desmond spent two years living in a Milwaukee trailer park to build his exposé, following eight families through the housing crisis of 2008. By reading this book, I learned two major lessons. First, housing is foundational to the human condition and psychological stability, on which everything else rests. Second, vouchers and universal housing programs are far more effective than new construction. While new supply is critical, we cannot fully build our way out. It’s a both/and.

Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul by Jeremiah Moss

“And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”

I picked up Vanishing while touring apartments in the East Village in 2021, disheveled, anxious, and taking a breather at Book Club Bar. Inside was the most enthralling screed against the forces of gentrification ever to be collected in a complete book. At that moment, I remember thinking that I could never belong in Moss’s beloved EV, replete with “poets, punks, and queers, activists and anarchists, dominatrices and drug addicts, graffitist, nudists, and underground cartoonists.” Moss’s point is that New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling — the ones who breathe life into the city. Corporate and governmental forces (Giuliani, Bloomberg) embrace redevelopment and renewal at the cost of displacement.

Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser

“Cities don’t make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.”

Harvard professor Edward Glaeser acts eponymously here, glazing cities as humanity’s greatest invention. Triumph was written in 2011, but its messages are still extremely relevant in 2026. Glaeser covers a lot of ground in this book, creating his case that cities are centers of human progress, even when they may sometimes look like a slum. They may rise and decline, as with his detailed portrait of Detroit, but with a varied and agglomerative labor force, good education, sanitation, and appropriate density, cities are indeed a triumph.

In this newsletter, I plan to explore the themes and ideas of compelling pieces I happen upon — like assigning myself a book report. I hope you find them resonant too.