My Summer Reading List

A (free) CliffsNotes rundown of the books and articles I’ve been reading.

I read all the time. But over the past year or two, I’ve fallen into something of a rut. I haven’t been reading books. I am still buying books. I’m good at buying books. Reading them? That’s been a challenge.

Instead of delving into my library, I’ve been preoccupied with online articles and digital content that’s focused on politics, energy, and power. Fortunately, this summer, I got back to reading books, and it has been a real joy. Here are two fantastic books that I read cover to cover, along with two recent articles that deserve your attention.

Rickey: The Life And Legend of An American Original

I don’t watch baseball. (Who does?) The games and the season are too long. The only time I care about baseball is during the World Series, and even then, I’m not overly invested. That said, I have an affinity for baseball books, and Howard Bryant’s biography of Rickey Henderson, baseball’s greatest base stealer, is superb.

Bryant tells Henderson’s life story with verve and style. He explains how Henderson came of age in the sport when salaries were soaring, and along the way, he makes a convincing case that Henderson is among the greatest players in the history of baseball. For me, one of the best parts of the book is when Bryant explains why Henderson’s family left Arkansas during the Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South. By landing in Oakland in 1969, Henderson joined a Who’s Who of great African American athletes who came from that city during that same time period, including Frank Robinson, Curt Flood, Dave Stewart, and Bill Russell. Reading Bryant’s story about Henderson and his reporting on the Great Migration led me to another remarkable book.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

This book by Isabel Wilkerson is among the best books — fiction or non-fiction — that I’ve ever read. While growing up in Tulsa in the 1960s and 1970s, I was aware of Jim Crow laws and school segregation. In 1973, when I was 13, Booker T. Washington High School, an all-Black school, became the first in the city to voluntarily desegregate. But my knowledge of the real history of what had happened in Oklahoma and other parts of the South during Reconstruction and the first seven decades of the 20^th century was, well, limited. Like every other freshman in our high school, I was required to take a semester of Oklahoma history. And while we were taught about its status as Indian Territory, the many tribes that call the state home, and its relatively recent statehood (In 1907, Oklahoma became the 46^th state to join the Union), the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was never mentioned. Not once.

I bring up that history because Wilkerson’s book, published in 2010, is a masterpiece of journalism and history. She interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the Great Migration, the largest internal migration in US history. From the 1910s to the 1970s, about 6 million Black Americans fled the South for cities in the North and the West. Wilkerson is unflinching in her reporting about the brutality that prevailed in that era, including the lynchings and everyday violence. The Great Migration, she explains in the first pages of the book, was the “first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.” The Warmth of Other Suns is a riveting read. It’s 550 pages. I read it in three days. Highly recommended.

“If Grid Utilization is Good, Wind and Solar Are Bad”

I’m a big fan of the Energy Bad Boys, Mitch Rolling and Isaac Orr. I always read what they publish here on Substack. Their latest article provides yet another example of why they are so good. In “If Grid Utilization is Good, Wind and Solar Are Bad,” the two analysts make an essential point: the massive increase in deployment of weather-dependent generation has led to a big increase in the need for transmission lines, and that has “led to a significant decrease in the overall utilization rate of the generation resources already serving the grid.” (Emphasis in the original.) They continue, writing that “You can have a grid with a higher utilization rate, or one that incorporates large penetrations of wind, solar, and battery storage capacity. You can’t have both.”

As seen in the graphic above, Orr and Rolling show that as installed generation capacity has soared, grid utilization (which they define as “the average fleet-wide capacity factor of all of the installed generating capacity”) has fallen. Those trends help explain why US electricity prices have increased by 107% since 1990. They note that grid utilization “peaked in the United States peaked in 1999 at 53.7%, and has since fallen to just 39.4 percent as of 2025.”

Orr and Rolling’s article is timely given the big push to build large amounts of new high-voltage transmission across the US. That effort is particularly strong here in Texas, where Oncor (a division of Sempra), AEP, CenterPoint Energy, CPS Energy, and the Lower Colorado River Authority are aiming to build nearly 2,500 miles of new 765-kV lines and 649 miles of new 345-kV lines. (For more on that, see my July 31 article: “Power Grab: Texas’ $33B High-Voltage Heist.”)

In their conclusion, Orr and Rollings say that grid utilization is falling:

Because we added approximately 312,000 MW of wind and solar resources during a two-decade period when demand was essentially flat — which is also a great explanation on why prices have increased as much as they have. Now that demand is surging again, the wind and solar advocates are using load factor as a red herring to hide the fact that they’ve spent billions of dollars increasing the size of the generation fleet, driving down overall utilization rates and increasing electricity prices as a result.”

Again, the Energy Bad Boys are a must-read here on Substack.

It has been a few months since this article, “The Sovereign Signal: Nuclear Energy as Strategic Infrastructure,” was published in American Affairs. But it is still timely and relevant to the US nuclear sector. The article was written under a pseudonym, John Arden. The author, with whom I am acquainted, works in banking and finance. The article is heavily footnoted and takes a high-level look at the challenges facing the revival of nuclear energy in the US. The gist of Arden’s argument is that if nuclear energy is going to succeed, it has to be treated as “sovereign infrastructure.”

Here is a key excerpt:

Conventional explanations — such as regulatory inefficiency, permitting bottlenecks, market conditions, or public skepticism — identify real frictions but miss the underlying inertia. For instance, despite the NRC’s procedural reforms, licensing delays persist because the system lacks a unifying mandate, revealing a deeper misalignment. What we are confronting is a failure of classification: a category error. Nuclear energy is not just one option among many within a diversified clean energy portfolio; it is strategic sovereign infrastructure, analogous to missile defense, civil aviation control, or central banking. It is a system whose development cannot be delegated, whose coordination cannot be crowdsourced, and whose permanence transcends commercial return. As long as we continue to frame nuclear deployment as a market‑based policy challenge, we will remain frozen—not because of bad actors, but because the logic of the frame itself cannot produce motion.

He continues:

All existing efforts to scale nuclear deployment are structurally misaligned, and that only a reframing — not as invention, but as restoration — can return nuclear energy to the policy architecture that makes sense.

The article was prescient. On Friday, the US Army announced it had selected five nuclear energy vendors under its Janus Program to build and operate microreactors on five Army bases in the continental US. In a press release, the Army said it “expects to build and operate more than 20 nuclear microreactors across War Department installations.” The Army’s announcement shows how the government can lead the development, financing, and deployment of new nuclear technologies. And that is exactly what Arden’s article is arguing for. Again, I encourage you to read the entire piece.

I’ll stop there. I will be writing more about the grid and microreactors in the next few weeks.

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