and here's some helpful background, from 2002, on the idea of "competitive authoritarianism": scholar.harvard.edu/levitsky/fil...

Mostly I mean to post about work and life and things I find beautiful, trivialities in the storm, things that keep me going. Necessary exercise for me. Hope it helps someone else a little, in between the bigger work.

Anyway, 10/10, highly recommend library+kid+random number generator.

Then huge smiles as we started hitting shelves he was interested in (animals! movie animation! … the Beatles! dude is all right…). Left with a big stack of books.

So I started pulling random numbers from my phone, 0-999, then finding the matching nonfiction shelf with him. Had a couple of false starts but he got *into it* — like, racing me to read the shelf numbers and find just the right set of books.