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World Store

There was an article last year in the New York Times about a California start-up called Inversion that wants to “speed delivery of important items by storing them in orbit.”

[Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG.]

Their goal is to build “earth-orbiting capsules”—“hundreds or thousands of containers”—that could “deliver goods anywhere in the world from outer space.”

The company’s founders imagine the capsules could store artificial organs that are delivered to an operating room within a few hours or serve as mobile field hospitals floating in orbit that would be dispatched to remote areas of the planet.

Purely in terms of this logistical vision, I’m reminded of a DARPA proposal called the “Upward Falling Payloads” program. For that, critical goods, including weapons and war-fighting materiel—but, why not, perhaps also emergency organs for frontline surgery—could be stored underwater, in the middle of the ocean, using “deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they ‘fall upward.’”

Whether or not either one of these plans is technically feasible is less interesting to me than the underlying idea of caching valuable objects in remote locations for later recovery. The world would become a series of hiding spots for artifacts and tools of potential future importance, the Earth reengineered for its archival utility.

Perhaps the Anthropocene is really just a world denuded of its ecological functions, all life other than human vacuously replaced by landscape-scale storage facilities housing just-in-time detritus—the psychosis of a species surrounded only by things it can store and retrieve at will.

Cleared For Approach

[Image: “Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst.]

When I first saw this painting—“Forest and Sun” (1926) by Max Ernst, a composition and theme he continually revisited and changed over the course of his career—I mistook the tiny white squiggles in the lower right for a procession of human congregants or religious pilgrims, people approaching a huge, alien landform out of some strange act of homage or scientific curiosity. Alas, it’s just Max Ernst’s signature.

Whatever you’re approaching in 2023, may it be unfamiliar, potentially threatening, and new.

Through This Building Shines the Cosmos

[Image: Collage by BLDGBLOG of public domain images from NASA and the Library of Congress.]

An opportunity to explore the use of muons as a tool for architectural and archaeological imaging came up this summer while I was in Europe for my Graham Foundation project, “Invisible Cities.”

Muons are cosmic particles, similar to neutrinos, that pass through us constantly—but also through solid rock and concrete, through cathedrals, pyramids, dams, and roads. In the 1960s, physicist Luis W. Alvarez of UC Berkeley launched a whole new form of architectural imaging when he realized that, if you can capture muons as they leave various structures—in Alvarez’s case, the Pyramid of Khafre outside Cairo—then you can create an image of what they’ve just passed through.

This is now known as muography—muon photography. Muography, as I describe it in a new story published in this weekend’s Financial Times Magazine—my first cover story!—is “one part comic-book superpower, one part cosmic photography.”

Fast-forward to 2022, and muons are on the cusp of being adopted as a new tool for infrastructural inspection, allowing engineers to peer inside the supports of bridges and freeways, inside the concrete of hydroelectric dams and high-rise apartment blocks, even inside the thick, dense masonry of Renaissance cathedrals and ancient temples, looking for signs of corrosion, decay, and impending collapse.

For the Financial Times, I went to Berlin to meet an engineer leading Germany’s federal effort to test and certify muon-inspection technology, with the goal of turning an obscure physics experiment into a commercial tool. The lab I visited there was incredible, an industrial space lit by skylights in the city’s southwest suburbs, filled with massive concrete monoliths, each marked with Agnes Martin-like grids. These dense concrete slabs—modern obelisks—are used to test non-destructive imaging technologies. In the piece, I compare the lab to a Brutalist sculpture garden.

While German authorities (in this case, working with a physicist at the University of Glasgow) work to set standards and protocols for muography in the global marketplace, the most charismatic proof-of-concept for muons’ future use might come from Florence, Italy.

That’s where a muon detector will likely be installed later this year, imaging the walls of Brunelleschi’s famous dome. The cathedral there is a constantly settling, dynamic system—far from static—and the overwhelming weight of Brunelleschi’s dome has produced large cracks in the church walls below. Those cracks have been growing wider for centuries, leading to enough concern that the entire church is now enreefed with measuring devices—“giving it a solid claim as the world’s most carefully monitored structure,” as the New York Times wrote as long ago as 1987.

[Image: Looking up into Brunelleschi’s Dome, Florence; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Because Brunelleschi left behind no drawings or even textual descriptions of how his dome had been assembled, today’s engineers remain in the dark about how to reinforce it. With walls up to two meters thick, the masonry is too dense for traditional imaging methods, such as radar and ultrasound. But muons can easily pass through the entire cathedral; they are generated freely by natural reactions between cosmic rays and the Earth’s upper atmosphere; and they can be detected with a device that requires almost no electricity to run.

In any case, I’ve been obsessed with muons for more than a decade, so this was an absolute thrill to report. The Financial Times has a rigorous paywall, however, so it will be hard to read the piece without a subscription, but if you see a copy of the magazine kicking around at your local newsstand, grab a copy and dive into the cosmic future of large-scale architectural imaging.

[Thanks again to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for funding this research. A great, but not widely known, book on Brunelleschi’s dome, with superb illustrations, is Brunelleschi’s Cupola by Giovanni Fanelli and Michele Fanelli.]

Numbers Pool

[Image: “Solomon’s Pools & ancient aqueducts…,” via Library of Congress.]

There’s a beautiful description over at New Scientist of a hypothetical new form of computing device, a “liquid crystal computer” in which calculations would move “like ripples through the liquid.”

According to researchers Žiga Kos and Jörn Dunkel, calculations would be performed by—and registered as—crystal orientations in the liquid, induced or controlled by electromagnetism: “Electric fields could… be used to manipulate the molecules to perform basic calculations, similar to how simple circuits called logic gates work in an ordinary computer. Calculations on the proposed computer would appear as ripples spreading through the liquid.”

Liquid-supercomputer facilities of the near-future might thus resemble not server farms but aquatic centers, sealed interiors lined with reflecting pools kept in different electromagnetic regimes. Although the air inside is utterly still, you watch as small ripples bounce and roll across the surface of each pool, depths triggered by equations. Thinking machines masked as hydrologic infrastructure. Cisterns and aqueducts. Computational hydrology.

There’s a line by William S. Burroughs that I probably quote too often, but I’m nevertheless reminded of again here. Burroughs once described “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal,” but perhaps this new vision is more akin to an oceanic consciousness thinking in slow tides and currents, liquid crystal waves of calculation breaking through the deep.

[Image: “The ancient swimming pool at Bath,” via Library of Congress.]

Briefly, given the prevalence of cauldron imagery in Western myth, there is something almost folkloristic about the idea of liquid technologies such as this—pools that can model the future or offer visions of other worlds.

In fact, it tangentially brings to mind another wild proposal: constructing the “Ultimately Large Telescope” [PDF], a vast spinning cauldron on the moon, reflecting astral light from a facility constructed inside the darkness of a lunar crater.

This hypothetical telescope, Universe Today explains, “would rely on liquids rather than coated glass (making it much cheaper to transport to the Moon). One type of liquid would be arranged in a spinning vat while a second metallic liquid (like mercury, which is reflective) would be positioned on top. The vat would spin continuously to keep the surface of the liquid in the correct parabolic shape to work as a mirror.” A witches’ cauldron on the moon, peering into space.

Potsdamer Sea

[Image: From Kiessling’s Grosser Verkehrs-Plan von Berlin (1920).]

It’s funny to be back in Berlin, a city where I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life, first arriving here as a backpacker in 1998 and temporarily moving in with a woman 14 years older than me, who practiced Kabbalah and had twin dogs and who, when seeing that I had bought myself a portable typewriter because I was going through a William Burroughs phase, blessed it one night in her apartment near the synagogue in a ceremony with some sort of bronze sword. It’s almost literally unbelievable how long ago that was. More years have passed since I spent time in Berlin—supposedly to study German for grad school, but in reality organized entirely around going to Tresor—than I had been alive at the time.

Because I’m here again on a reporting trip, I was speaking yesterday evening with a former geophysicist who, when the Berlin Wall came down, found work doing site-remediation studies and heritage-mapping projects on land beneath the old path of the Wall. He was tasked with looking for environmental damage and unexploded ordnance, but also for older foundations and lost buildings, earlier versions of Berlin that might pose a structural threat to the city’s future or that needed to be recorded for cultural posterity.

Ironically, in a phase of my life I rarely think about, I wrote my graduate thesis on almost exactly this topic, focused specifically on Potsdamer Platz—once divided by the Wall—and the role of architectural drawings in communicating historical context. When I was first here, in 1998 into early 1999, Potsdamer Platz was still a titanic hole in the ground, an abyss flooded with groundwater, melted snow, and rain, a kind of maelström you could walk over on pedestrian bridges, where engineering firms were busy stabilizing the earth for what would become today’s corporate office parks.

As I told the former geophysicist last night, I remember hearing at the time that there were people down there, SCUBA diving in the floodwaters, performing geotechnical studies or welding rebar or looking for WWII bombs, I had no idea, but, whatever it was, their very existence took on an outsized imaginative role in my experience of the city. Berlin, destroyed by war, divided by architecture, where people SCUBA dive through an artificial sea at its broken center. It felt like a mandala, a cosmic diagram, with this inverted Mt. Meru at its heart, not an infinite mountain but a bottomless pit.

What was so interesting to me about Berlin at the time was that it felt like a triple-exposure photograph, the city’s future overlaid atop everything else in a Piranesian haze of unbuilt architecture, whole neighborhoods yet to be constructed, everything still possible, out of focus somehow. It was incoherent in an exhilaratingly literal sense. In Potsdamer Platz, what you thought was the surface of the Earth was actually a bridge; you were not standing on the Earth at all, or at least not on earth. It was the Anthropocene in miniature, a kind of masquerade, architecture pretending to be geology.

The more that was built, however, the more Berlin seemed to lose this inchoate appeal. The only people with the power to control the rebuilding process seemed to be automobile consortiums and international hotel groups, office-strategy consultants not wizards and ghosts or backpacking writers. Perhaps the city still feels like that to other people now—unfinished, splintered, jagged in a temporal sense, excitingly so, a city with its future still taking shape in the waves of an underground sea—but it seems to me that Berlin’s blur has been misfocused.

In any case, with the caveat that I am in Berlin this week for a very specific research project, so many people I’ve met have pointed to the fall of the Wall as an explosive moment for geophysical surveys in the East. Engineers were hired by the dozen to map, scan, and survey damaged ground left behind by a collapsed imperialist Empire, and the residues of history, its chemical spills and lost foundations, its military bunkers and archaeological remains, needed to be recorded. The ground itself was a subject of study, an historical medium. On top of that, new freeways were being built and expanded, heading east into Poland—and this, too, required geophysical surveys. The future of the region was, briefly, accessible only after looking down. The gateway to the future was terrestrial, a question of gravel and sand, forgotten basements and fallen walls.

The SCUBA divers of the Potsdamer Sea now feel like mascots of that time, dream figures submerged in the waves of a future their work enabled, swimming through historical murk with limited visibility and, air tanks draining, limited time. Their pit was soon filled, the hole annihilated, and the surface of the Earth—which was actually architecture—returned with amnesia.

Luminous Dreamlight

I spent part of the weekend down in Orange County, looking at birds, then the better part of an hour scrolling around on Google Maps, trying to figure out where we’d been all day.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

In the process, I noticed some incredible street names. I love this development, for example, with its absurdist, greeting-card geography: you can meet someone at the corner of Luminous and Dreamlight, or rendezvous with your Romeo on the thin spit of land where Silhouette meets Balcony.

The same development has streets called Symphony, Pageantry, and Ambiance—and don’t miss “Momento” [sic]. Nearby is a street called Heather Mist.

I live on Yacht Defender; please leave my packages at the front door.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

As you can probably tell, I have nothing particularly interesting to say about this; I’m just marveling at suburban naming conventions. I’m reminded of when we moved back to L.A. a few years ago and we were looking for paint colors, finding shades like “Online,” “Software,” and “Cyberspace.” A paint called “Download.”

A beautiful new house on Firmware Update, painted entirely in Autocomplete. Spellcheck Lane, painted in a color called Ducking.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

In any case, Orange County is actually a fascinating, Ballardian landscape of freeways built for no apparent reason other than to connect one grocery store to the next as fast as possible, residential subdivisions forming interrupted crystal-tiling patterns, migratory bird species flying over car parks, and vaguely named corporate research centers on the rims of artificial reservoirs.

Anecdotally, it has always seemed to me that fans of J.G. Ballard—or ostensible fans of J.G. Ballard—are suspiciously quick in condemning the very landscapes where so many of Ballard’s best stories take place, the suburban business parks, toll motorways, and heavily-policed private infrastructures of real estate developments outside London, in the south of France, or here in Orange County, where subdivisions seem named after the very animals whose ecosystems were destroyed during construction.

But, I mean, come on—where else should a J.G. Ballard fan read Concrete Island or Super-Cannes than in a $3 million rented home on Gentle Breeze, pulling monthly paychecks from ambiguously-defined consultant-engineering gigs, studying schematic diagrams for water-treatment plants at your kitchen table, all while driving a leased luxury car?

One such engineering firm, based near the developments described here, describes its expertise as tackling “earth-related problems” on “earth-related projects.” Earth-related problems. There should be a DSM-5 entry for that.

[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]

Anyway, all future Ballard conventions should take place in landscapes like this—enormous rented homes impossible to climate-control, overlooking electric-SUV dealerships constructed atop former egret nesting grounds—at the metaphorical intersection of Luminous and Dreamlight.

Molten Roads and Airbursts

[Image: Max Ernst, “Landscape with a view of the lake and chimeras” (1940), via Archive.]

While we’re on the subject of astronomical events leaving traces in our everyday world, here’s another story, this one from November: “an airburst over the Atacama Desert 12,000 years ago melted the ground into glass,” according to new research aimed at explaining why “twisted chunks of black and green glass” lie scattered all over Chile.

The airburst—likely an exploding comet—“probably generated strong winds that flung the glass as it formed,” giving the glass an unusual “folded look.” This “folded look” suggests that “the glass had been thrown around and rolled. It was basically kneaded like bread.”

Given that this was only 12,000 years ago, it’s not impossible that some of it was witnessed by human beings; either way, the immediate aftermath would have been astonishing to behold, a 50-mile line of molten sand, warped and roiling like the sea, forming spheres and waves, freezing and shattering, a road of glass disappearing with an eerie glow over the desert horizon.

In fact, imagine such an event occurring in, say, the Middle East around the same time, thus forming the basis for bizarre future folklore, legendarily strange Biblical scenes, tales of molten glass roads appearing in a flash from the sky.

(Max Ernst painting included here purely for illustrative effect. Circumstantially relevant: Brainglass.)

Home Star

This was all over the news back in October, but I am a sucker for stories like this, in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are architectural in form.

In this case, it was “the imprint of a rare solar storm” that left traces in the rings of trees cut into logs by Vikings and used to build cabins 1,000 years ago on the Atlantic coast of Canada.

The wood grain itself was an archive of solar radiance, a warped record of the heavens: “scientists using a new type of dating technique and taking a long-ago solar storm as their reference point have established that the settlement [known as L’Anse aux Meadows] was occupied in AD 1021—all by examining tree rings.”

[Image: Wood analyzed in the study described here; image by Petra Doeve, via The New York Times.]

While there is obviously more to say about the science behind this discovery—all of which you can read here—what interests me is simply the idea that astral events, cosmic storms, stellar weather, electromagnetic pulses from space, whatever you want to imagine, leave traces all around us. That in the depths of our buildings, in our walls and floors, even in the wooden dowels of mass-produced furniture, there can be evidence of immensely powerful and beautiful things, and I would like to remember to look for that again. It’s been a miserable couple of years.

[Image: Reverse of “Saint Jerome” (1494), Albrecht Dürer, courtesy National Gallery, London.]

In any case, just a few weeks before this news broke, Lapham’s Quarterly published a short piece, promoting a new episode of their podcast, with some unexpected relevance here. The following quote is a little ungainly taken out of context, but here you go: “‘Hidden round the back of Albrecht Dürer’s St. Jerome of 1494, one of his first paintings… is this enormous star,’ Philip Hoare writes in Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World. ‘You would have seen it only if you knew its secret: the galactic event going on, on the other side. Radiating orange-red rays, careering through the perpetual night. A thing of darkness created in light.’”

Hidden on the backs of famous paintings, in the beams of our attics, in the timbers of ancient homes, are galactic events, black stars, things more interesting than this world, burning, and I suppose depression is what happens when you no longer think it’s possible to find such details. When they become inaccessible to you, or when you believe the world’s supply of revelation has been permanently depleted.

It’s been an unremittingly bleak year, a situation I almost certainly made worse for myself by drifting further and further away from a daily writing routine, but I figured I should open up the villain’s lair here and post again briefly, even if only to offer proof of life. So, hello! Hope you had a more rewarding year than I did, and that we all enjoy a better 2022.

Looming Matter With Light

“When light collides with other light, it can transform into particles of matter,” science writer Corey S. Powell posted on Twitter the other day. He was referring to recent evidence from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that “pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons.” In other words, the “conversion of energetic light into matter” might be physically achievable: you can create matter with light.

I am in no position to comment on the science of this beyond the sheer poetry of the description; if you want to learn more about the actual experiment, I’d strongly advise going to the source material, not to BLDGBLOG. But so many metaphors come to mind here—precipitation and snow; depositional 3D printing; shining looms of light, bringing matter into the cosmos.

Imagine an industrial printing facility of the far future whose only input is light. Factories of weird mirrored rooms where objects flash into existence one at a time, in a new manufacturing process extruding matter from illumination.

In any case, I was also reminded of a piece published in Nature back in 2011: “Moving mirrors make light from nothing.”

The hypothesis there was that a single mirror “moving through a vacuum at nearly the speed of light” could, through something called the Casimir force, actually generate photons—the mirror could create light. This was apparently given experimental support when “a shower of microwave photons [was] shaken loose from the vacuum” by a highly sensitive superconducting device known as a SQUID.

The scientist behind that experiment now “hopes to see a moving piece of metal generate detectable light from the vacuum,” as if farming light from nothingness, coaxing photons into appearing like seeds, shaking them loose from the void.

Mirrors moving through darkness at the speed of light can create light—the sheer poetry of this is astonishing to me, like a statement from the Gnostic Gospels.

Anyway, now put these two experiments together: use a moving mirror to pull light from darkness, then collide that light back into itself to generate matter. You could design a kind of internal combustion engine made of moving mirrors, turning darkness into light into matter.

Again, though, read the original articles if you prefer science over speculation.

Until Proven Safe

[Image: Dressed in 21st-century personal protective equipment (PPE), I am standing next to Dr. Luigi Bertinato, wearing period plague doctor gear from the time of the Black Death, inside the library of the Querini Stampalia, Venice. Photo by Nicola Twilley.]

Long-time readers of this blog will hardly be surprised to hear of my interest in quarantine, a topic I’ve been posting and lecturing about since at least 2009. The Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture, curated with Nicola Twilley back in 2010, was the beginning of a much larger project that we eventually returned to, several years ago, for a book on the subject.

Originally titled—and sold to our editor as—The Coming Quarantine, we had to change the book’s name when COVID-19 hit. Surreally, we ended up finishing a book about quarantine while in a state of medical detention—indeed, at one point late last spring, more than half the world’s human population was in some state of quarantine or lockdown.

Our book’s hypothesis and prediction was, in fact, that we would all be quarantining more in the future, not less, relying on this seemingly medieval tool of spatial isolation to protect ourselves from emerging diseases for which we had no natural immunity, no available vaccination, and no cure. Why quarantine? It is the use of space and time to overcome uncertainty, creating a buffer between ourselves and a potentially infectious other until that suspected threat can be proven safe.

[Image: An arch inside the abandoned lazaretto, or quarantine hospital, on Manoel Island, Malta; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine—the book we have been traveling for, reporting, and working on since summer 2016—finally comes out tomorrow, July 20th. I am unbelievably excited about this book, for millions of reasons. On one level, it combines so many of the long-running interests here on this blog, from quarantine itself to architectural ruins, mythology & horror, science fiction, space exploration, the Army Corps of Engineers, agricultural landscapes, strange animal diseases, extraordinary engineering controls, the ethical dangers of smart homes, even nuclear waste.

Having posted little to nothing about this book over the past few years—indeed, having posted almost nothing about COVID-19—it’s also immensely relieving to finally release this thing into the world.

[Image: Inside the lazaretto at Ancona, Italy; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

Some highlights that I think would appeal to BLDGBLOG readers include Nicky’s and my travelogue around the Adriatic and Mediterranean seas, exploring ruined lazarettos in the footsteps of 18th-century British prison reformer—and quarantine critic—John Howard. We climbed locked fences into ruins on Malta, took a night ship across the Adriatic to disembark near the extraordinary pentagonal lazaretto in Ancona, and we got to tour the then-closed Lazzaretto Nuovo in Venice, Italy, with the local man intent on preserving it. (His original plan, he admitted, was to turn the island into a martial arts dojo.)

In other parts of the book, we sit down with the head of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, based in North London. That group collects rare pieces of mail sent to and from sites of quarantine; like characters in a Thomas Pynchon novel, their postal archaeology has revealed previously forgotten outbreaks and odd geopolitical details about the formation of international borders.

We also visited the first federal quarantine facility, then under construction, in the United States in more than a hundred years, mere months before COVID-19, and we spoke with the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers about plans for retrofitting hotels, convention centers, and stadiums, as well as the prospect of pop-up home quarantine kits in the near-future. We visited the Ebola high-level isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London—where Nicky climbed inside.

[Image: Nicola Twilley inside the high-level isolation unit’s Trexler Ebola system; photo by Geoff Manaugh.]

In the latter half of the book—primarily dedicated to nonhuman quarantine, or quarantine applied to the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms, capped off by a look at “planetary protection” and the risk of alien microbes—we were able to see a brand-new high-level animal-disease research lab in the middle of U.S. cattle country. This is the nation’s replacement for the aging facility on Plum Island, subject of countless conspiracy theories.

Elsewhere, we went deep into WIPP—the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, to see nuclear waste being buried and isolated from the Earth’s biosphere for a federally-mandated time periods of at least 100,000 years. We got to see the Apollo moon rocks and learn about the history of lunar quarantine, and even sat down with two of NASA’s Planetary Protection Officers—and their counterpart at the European Space Agency—to discuss the quarantine challenge of bringing Mars geology back to Earth. Along the way, we got to see Perseverance, the Mars rover, before its long (and successful) journey to Mars.

[Image: Walking inside the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a salt mine 2,150 feet below the surface of the Earth, where the United States is permanently burying nuclear waste; photo by Nicola Twilley.]

Reporting the book also led us to a series of high-level pandemic simulations over the course of several years—all the way up to the incredible experience of sitting in on a simulation in October 2019, the premise of which was a global outbreak of a novel coronavirus. As we sat there, listening to government figures role-play what they would do, the very earliest cases of COVID-19 were likely circulating in China, undetected.

We also look at the limits of mathematical modeling, the encroachment of algorithms and Big Data into the future of quarantine, and the dystopian potential of involuntary medical isolation automatically enforced by today’s smart homes.

And, through all of that, one of our biggest coups, I think, was recording hours of interviews with the head of the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine, visiting him in his office at the CDC and recording anguished, on-the-record discussions during the Trump Administration about the nation’s COVID-19 response.

A great way to get a flavor of the book would be to check out excerpts published in WIRED and The Guardian—and, tomorrow morning, The Atlantic—or to listen to the Gastropod episode we did on quarantine, agriculture, and threats to the world’s chocolate supply.

[Image: Until Proven Safe, with a cover design by Alex Merto.]

If you’re tempted, you can order a copy from Bookshop, Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookshop, etc. etc.

Note: This post contains affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop from which I might draw a small percentage of any book sales.