The Library

This volume is more than a collection of plays for me; it’s a return to a writer whose work has been part of my life for decades. I first encountered Arthur Miller on the page and on the stage, but meeting him in person left an impression that never faded. His plays are often described as moral dramas, but they are really about the weight of responsibility — to family, to society, to oneself — and the cost of failing to meet it. Reading them together, in one collected volume, you can see the through line: the tension between private conscience and public expectation, the quiet dignity of ordinary people, and the moments when a single choice reveals a lifetime of character.
Because I’ve produced "All My Sons" and read "After the Fall" closely, these plays don’t feel abstract to me; they feel lived. They carry the emotional and ethical complexity that Miller himself embodied — thoughtful, serious, and deeply attuned to the fractures beneath American life. Working on an essay about Miller and Bob Fosse only deepened that sense: two artists, very different in style, but both obsessed with the truth beneath performance. This collection brings all of that into focus. It’s a reminder of why Miller’s work endures, and why returning to it feels less like revisiting literature and more like revisiting a conversation that still has something to say.

Not a new text, but a compelling one. Fustel de Coulanges published The Ancient City in 1864, and it remains one of the most striking attempts to explain how Western civilization moved from family groups to cities, to city states, and eventually to nations. His central idea is that early societies were held together not by laws or governments as we understand them, but by religion — the household gods, the ancestral cults, the rituals that bound families into larger kinship groups. From these sacred foundations grew the first cities, each with its own rites, its own identity, and its own sense of destiny.
The book is old fashioned in its scholarship, but the clarity of the argument is remarkable. Fustel traces how the shift from family religion to civic religion made possible the rise of the Greek polis and the Roman republic, and how the eventual decline of those religious structures opened the door to more universal forms of citizenship and, later, the nation state. Reading it today, you can see why the book was so influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it offered a grand, unified explanation for how societies evolve, rooted in ritual, belief, and the slow transformation of human bonds.
Having spent so much of my own life involved in civic work — historic preservation, neighborhood governance, the long stewardship of Santa Fe’s built environment — I found the book especially resonant. Its argument about how communities form and endure, and how identity is shaped by shared memory and shared space, feels very close to the work of protecting a city’s character in the present. It’s a reminder that the political forms we take for granted — cities, laws, nations — grew out of something much older and more intimate. And that long arc, from the hearth to the polis to the state, is what makes The Ancient City worth reading even now.

A very different kind of book from my usual reading, but one I’m glad I worked through. The 48 Laws of Power has a reputation for turning people into schemers and manipulators, but I didn’t read it that way at all. If anything, it felt like a defense manual — a way to understand the strategies that ambitious or ruthless people have used for centuries, so you can recognize them when they’re directed at you. Robert Greene himself, in interviews, doesn’t come across as someone trying to accumulate power for its own sake; he seems more like a historian of human behavior, cataloging patterns that repeat across courts, empires, and boardrooms.
Having spent much of my career in leadership roles — running arts organizations, managing boards, navigating nonprofit politics — I’ve seen versions of these “laws” play out in real life, even when no one names them. Some people use power gracefully, some use it clumsily, and a few use it with a kind of cold precision that makes Greene’s book feel uncomfortably accurate. For me, the value wasn’t in adopting these strategies, but in understanding them. Awareness is its own kind of protection. The book is brisk, filled with historical examples, and surprisingly useful for recognizing how people maneuver in organizations, sometimes openly, sometimes quietly, sometimes with a smile.