“The Protagonist of an Endless Story” by Angel Rodríguez-Díaz is a 1993 portrait of Sandra Cisneros, whose 69th birthday was yesterday. It would have been even more striking had my iPhone not decided to paint the National Portrait Gallery’s teal wall blue.

The best newspaper article I’ve read in ages is also about government dysfunction. The Washington Post lays out in great detail all the ways in which much of D.C. is vulnerable to flooding, and some of the ways to overcome it, yet:

It is the quintessential story of how Washington works that none of these proposals has reached senior decision-makers. That’s because more than a dozen federal agencies own land and buildings there, each with its own congressional appropriation committee to please.

But that is just a wrinkle in a dissertation about climate change, urbanism and governance. Highly recommended.

This morning’s Axios DC newsletter has a few words to say about the city’s political dysfunction:

Last Tuesday, after racing to Capital One Arena to counteroffer Ted Leonsis with Mayor Bowser, Council chair Phil Mendelson gaveled a hearing about school truancy two hours late. Truancy!

But of course, you already knew the place was a mess. It’s almost as if ineptitude had consequences.

🏀 Living two blocks down from the Capital One Arena, I am completely biased in thinking that the plan to move the Wizards and the Caps to Potomac Yard is bonkers. The slightly less biased Tyler Cowen shares my opinion, and for the same reasons. For what it’s worth, the summer spike in crime was just that — a spike — and with the winter months came the Downtown Holiday Market and 2+ patrol units per block, so the neighborhood is as safe as could be.

Side note: Tyler’s commenters underestimate how many visitors to DC go to a Wizards game just to have their selfie taken with the court as a backdrop. The Capitols may be another matter — they are actually good — but it always seemed to me that passers by account for a large chunk of the Wizards' audience.

One of the better DC landscapes I’ve seen. And by a Serbian artist, no less. The painting hangs in the Residence of Serbia’s Ambassador to the United States, which just opened, and looks like it’ll be a nice venue for exhibits and gatherings.

Janice Kai Chen at the Washington Post on pigeons versus the internet:

At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

And not just rural America. As I write this from the nation’s capital, speedtest.net reports 24 Mbps up. Federal agencies should bring back pigeons for sending large files back and forth.

They are converting a modern office building into condos a few blocks down from my apartment, and by the looks of it they may as well have torn everything down and built it anew. I hope they will do that will all the brutalist federal garbage downtown, the FBI building first. Meanwhile, the late 19th-early 20th century townhouses scattered around DC have been switching seamlessly from commercial to residential and back for a hundred years now for little to no cost.

Optimization and scale: they work great, until they don’t. Just ask a salaried physician working for a conglomerate in the medical-industial complex, a large-scale operation which is being optimized to death (sadly not its own, but that of its component parts — patients and health care workers alike). All those large reptiles and mammals are extinct for a reason.

We discussed the problem of scale at the first RWRI I attended back in August 2020, the Beirut explosion still fresh in everyone’s mind. Less than a year later, a big ship blocked the Suez channel, as if to reinforce the message. I expect Nassim Taleb’s next book will have a chapter or three on the problem, even if “scale” doesn’t make it into the title.

What goes for biology, architecture, and logistics also goes for industry, and if there is one hyper-optimized massive-scale operation around, it’s Apple’s iPhone production. If and when its production chain comes toppling down, it will not be a black or a gray swan event, it will be snow-white, which is why I suspect (or, as an iPhone user, hope) they have contingencies.

And in practicing what I preach, I have slowly been transitioning away from GTD levels of hyper-productivity and into a 40,000 weeks mindset. Whether this is a sign of wisdom, experience, or just plain old age, well, who is to say? Why not all three?

In Washington DC Subway Memory Game you have to guess the names of as many DC Metro stations as you can. There are no extra points for guessing the location, though I would happily pay for that in-app purchase. After seven years of staring at those ceilings while commuting to Bethesda one would think I would be most familiar with the red line, and one would be correct — I had 23 of 27. My worst was the orange: 7 of 26, and two of those were overlaps with other lines.

If you liked the previously mentioned Secrets of… videos and station layout maps, this one is well worth checking out. (↬r/washingtondc, whose users of course had some rather uncharitable comments about bugginess of a free game made by an enthusiast. Never change, DC!)

Gorgeous weather in DC today. Even the sky was smiling.

So if not daily world news, what then? Well, Axios Local is a good option for DC, and has daily newsletter for more than two dozen other cities. StreetSense is a DC-only enterprise, and more relevant for me than whatever this is from The Washington Post. If the Council does start handing out vouchers to support local news, I know where mine will be going.