My Shelf
A personal collection of content that I would recommend to my friends, inspired by Fred Rivett.
🏛️ Politics | ✝️ Faith | ✌️On Being Human | 💭 Current Musings | ☕ Brings me joy
Books
Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino (1972)☕
Inspired the title of this publication! A beautifully imaginative and immersive exploration of how our cities are shaped by human experience.
The Coddling of the American Mind — Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff (2018) ✌️💭
Well-intentioned overprotection may be doing more harm than good, teaching us that disagreement is dangerous and that emotional discomfort is equivalent to physical danger.
Visual Intelligence — Amy E. Herman (2015) ✌️
Most people see but do not observe. Learning to intentionally direct our focus is more important than ever, living in this moment when our attention is such a valuable commodity that it so often is stolen for profit.
The Liturgy of Politics — Kaitlyn Schiess (2020) 🏛️✝️✌️
This book has been foundational in helping me reconcile what it means to be a Christian working in the public sector, reminding me that “time and money spent working toward political measures seeking true human flourishing are never wasted.” And more broadly, it has forced me to be more aware of the liturgies that form me—the unintentional, habitual practices that shape who I am.
Articles
“You have 18 months” — Derek Thompson (2025)✌️💭
So perfectly captures my fears surrounding AI. Is it coming for your job? Who knows. But it is coming for your brain, and your ability to think critically.
being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage — Maalvika (2025)✌️💭
This verbalized a problem that I did not know I had: “The brain can't tell the difference between productive preparation and elaborate procrastination.” It has inspired me to regularly struggle through the creative process, forcing myself to act rather than endlessly plan how to do something “perfectly”.
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. — Max Roser (2018) 💭☕
All three statements are true, but when the news focuses so much on the negative, it can be easy to believe that they are mutually exclusive. In both my work and my discourse, I aim to broadcast Roser’s sentiment: “If we want more people to dedicate their energy and money to making the world a better place, then we should make it much more widely known that it is possible to make the world a better place.”
Quotes
Is the City the Problem or the Solution? | Strong Towns — Chuck Marohn (2025) 🏛️
"Rhetoric that paints our neighbors as villains in a political drama may win points in a partisan campaign, but it’s corrosive to civic life. It divides us. It flattens the complexity of human motivations into binaries: good vs. bad, hero vs. obstacle. I hate what that does to our discourse. I hate what it does to our relationships. And I hate what it does to our souls."
The Liturgy of Politics — Kaitlyn Schiess (2020) ☕
"Coffee shops [are] wonderful examples of humanity's creative authority in the world. It starts when a person takes a part of God's good creation, coffee beans, and cultivates them, harvests them, and to this natural resource applies creativity—roasting, grinding, brewing—and makes something new and beautiful out of it. Then some other people decide they want to sell the fruit of their labors to others, but instead of offering a merely transactional experience, they decide to create something new: a space where people can enjoy the cultural artifact they have created, in community. They apply their human creative capacities to build an aesthetically pleasing shop, design a menu, and promote their vision for their business. Then people come and build their own creative projects in the coffee shop—relationships, businesses, music, writing, art. The place fosters community and creativity of its own."
Way Station — Clifford D. Simak (1963) 💭
"For while one puzzled over a single item, the edges of his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time on the most insignificant of the entire lot."
This is a curated list that I update periodically. Let me know what you think!
Last updated September 24, 2025.