Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile (Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaon Naparstek; Thesis; 2025)

    I know from having worked in publishing that the choice of cover art or design is not always up to the authors. Sometimes what is marketable is in conflict with an author’s artistic vision or idea of what might look best. In the case of Life After Cars, I don’t know how Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek feel about Joel Holland’s illustration and design choices for the book’s cover, but I love it. Just like Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, the image riffs on a road sign. In Grabar’s case, the red-and-white cover resembles a No Parking sign on a city street in the United States. For Life After Cars, the choice of yellow as a framing color with black text on a white background recalls a road sign announcing the speed limit near a school or a pedestrian crossing up ahead. The real beauty of this design choice and how it relates to the book’s argument is the art within the sign’s image. There’s a four-way traffic signal that is overgrown with vines and flowers. Had you never seen such an object before, you might think it was intentionally designed to be a place for flowers to grow.

    Turning over to the back cover, there’s a white sedan that has been completely overtaken with flowers and stems. One of the branching parts of this overgrowth reveals a flower that has grown through an orange traffic cone. This image isn’t accidental. In the final chapter of the third part of the book, there’s a section on street-level DIY methods for making streets safer for people who are biking or walking. Tactical urbanism, as the authors deem it, involves taking existing traffic cones and putting flowers in them (or just using small flowerpots from a garden store) to visually mark a bike lane that has only paint separating it from the rushing motor vehicles that are next to it. A related version of that approach involves covering the wooden handle of plungers with electrical tape and leaving them suction-side down in the street. As jarring as that image is, it wouldn’t have made for the prettiest image on the inside back flap of the dust jacket.

    Between the flaps, there is much to enjoy and even more to lament about the presence of cars in our lives. The authors hail from New York City, but they spend plenty of pages discussing the problems cars cause for people all over the world. It’s not just a world city problem, either. Car pollution and production affects all of us quite negatively. Even electric cars or hybrids aren’t the solution either. These cars are still cars at the end of the day, so all of the attendant problems they pose are still relevant. “No one who was ever hit by the driver of an electric car thought to themselves, ‘Sure, I’m severely injured, but at least the driver cares about climate change.’” (p. 227). I mean, there might be someone out there but you get the point. Cars cause more problems than are solved by the electrification of all gas guzzlers. Traffic still happens; crashes are abundant.

    I use crash here purposefully, as do the authors. The euphemism of a “traffic accident” instead of a “car crash” removes the violence of the action and also makes it seem like it’s just one of those things that happens, like spilled milk. Nothing worth getting upset about. Happens all the time. The intent of using crash rather than accident is to illuminate the decisions that went into making the crash happen, whether “the driver did something wrong, or that better road design might have prevented tragedy, or that multiple factors—all of which could be addressed—stacked up to contribute to the outcome” (p. 13). It doesn’t have to be this way and we can do something about it. The smallest thing you can do is to change the way you talk about these violent collisions of metal, plastic, and flesh. A crash has a cause, an accident does not.

    In between this language shift and the DIY approach of tactical urbanism comes the development of laws, policies, and procedures for making the world safer for everyone. There are stories of Vision Zero campaigns, the Dutch Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murder) movement, and the creation of bike buses (community chaperoned packs of kids going to school on their bicycles) that all give a strong sense of hopefulness for the future in a world after cars.

    To shake that sense of what Ian Walker calls motonormativity, which is the idea that driving has completely overtaken our moral view of the world (p. 124), it might help to think back to how societies received the integration of cars over one hundred years ago. The book begins with a tale of life before cars. It stars Superman! In Action Comics #6, he decries the “homicidal drivers” who are causing mass death in Metropolis. He even tells an automotive executive that the choice to chase “profits at the cost of human lives” is socially undesirable (p. 4). I’m as sick of seeing ads for superhero movies as anyone but this element of Superman’s origin story could seriously use a reboot or reappraisal. I suppose that’s as likely to happen as a Super Bowl commercial that exalts the importance of taking the bus or walking to a destination, which the authors discuss in a section on bikelash, the eternal complaint of many drivers when they are faced with the prospect of integrating a few bike lanes into local streets or roads (p. 43). We are so used to giving pride of literal place to motor vehicles that even the suggestion that there are alternatives is beyond the comprehension of many drivers.

    My first knowledge of this book happened during my commute while I was listening to an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us that featured Goodyear and Gordon. One of the critiques they advanced in that appearance was that cars make drivers adversarial. Everyone is going to the same place or in the same general direction, so driving becomes a competition for scarce resources. As I merged with the car next to me when the road went from three lanes to two, I realized the wisdom of their words. Commuting in a car is miserable. Bringing that misery into a place of work or into the home pollutes the remainder of the day. I wanted to avoid that stress, so I looked up bus routes from home to work. I can drive to work in 25-30 minutes, but it would take at least two hours to get there via bus, and that includes over an hour of walking. It would also involve leaving my house before 5:00 A.M. instead of just after 7:00 A.M. That’s untenable. It is one more reason that life after cars will be better for us all. Instead of thousands of people taking their “$75,000 living room” (p. 90) from point A to point B and back each day, we could have expanded existing transit systems to make the motonormative era as baffling as the era of smoking on airplanes and in restaurants.

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

Neo Cab (Chance Agency / Fellow Traveler)

Get in the Van: On the Road with BLACK FLAG by Henry Rollins

None of This Rocks: A Memoir (Joe Trohman, Hachette, 2022)

    The last time I saw Joe Trohman in person was at the Fireside Bowl at a THROWDOWN / BLEEDING THROUGH / NO WARNING show in December 2001 when he gave me the CDR of the new band he was doing with Pete Wentz. He said they made the name three words so Matt Groening wouldn’t sue them. In the two or three years prior to that, we spent a lot of time hanging out at shows, listening to music, and playing video games. He was one of only a few friends at my school who were straight edge and actively involved in a scene beyond our suburbs. We had bonded so much that my mom felt the need to intervene with a passive aggressive note. 

[image removed to save myself from embarrassment.]

    I wish I had other mementoes from our friendship. Given that cameras were yet to become ubiquitous, so we don’t have random candid photos, and that we lived in the same area, so we didn’t exchange letters, there’s not much else to show from our time together. Even his signature in my yearbook was of the nickname some of the older Chicago dudes gave him instead of his given name.

[image removed to preserve some mystique.]

    We were only one grade level apart, but he was chronologically more than a year younger than me. This age gap makes no difference these days, but reading his account of his pre-FALL OUT BOY days in this book makes me scratch my head at times. Was he really only 15 when he scabbed for ARMA ANGELUS? He would have been 15 until September 2000, so the story of Pete Wentz convincing Joe’s mom to let him go on that tour would have happened in March of 2000. This was a time when we were hanging out pretty frequently and I don’t remember him ever talking about it, so I don’t know what to think about the credibility of this anecdote. It seems a little more likely that he would have scabbed for them in the summer of 2001 on the tour with 7 ANGELS 7 PLAGUES, when he would have been 16 and starting his senior year in the fall. In the end, the accuracy of this detail has zero impact on his subsequent musical success and on my life in general, but engaging in the performance of being correct after the fact in this review sure made me feel good for about five minutes.

    I selfishly read the book for the possibility that my name or a vague recollection of an older, taller friend would grace the page. It was not to be. I supposed that makes me one of the vapid and faceless moonlighters from high school who were not long for the scene, as he tells it. He does recall the kids who were a grade above me treating him with kindness before brutally telling him that not one of them actually liked him as a friend. Which one of these guys do you think best matches his description of being the “portly, pig-nosed, Buzz McCallister look-alike” who delivered that line?

[images removed for privacy and the presumption of innocence.]

    It was hard to read that part, given that I remember how he looked up to those guys and how they seemed to welcome him just the same. That ease with making friends seemed to have served him well with connecting with the scene elders in the city as he was putting together the idea for FALL OUT BOY. He was the one who introduced himself to me at the RACE TRAITOR / BURN IT DOWN / GOOD CLEAN FUN / BROTHER’S KEEPER / The JUDAS FACTOR show on March 6, 1999 at the Fireside. (Let me know if you have the flyer for this show.)

    Later that year, he was doing an online zine called A Helping Hand and he interviewed CLUBBER LANG and FIGURE FOUR over email. I was supposed to help with the zine in some way by doing show reviews but I never did. I think he gave me the nickname of the Angry Green Giant and used a picture of Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z as my avatar. He also put his own spin on Adele Collins’ mainstay question from I Stand Alone by asking both bands “When was the last time you made someone cry?” If you’re not familiar, all of the interviews in ISA featured the questions “When was the last time you cried?” and “Pick a scar and tell a story about it.” Steve Wiltse memorably used them in his interview with The A-TEAM in Town of Hardcore #6. In light of the way he was so clearly driven to do more than fuck around in the suburbs and go off to college, it makes sense that he wouldn’t include these experiences in his memoir. They probably don’t register because they were just part of him finding his way.

    As for the content related to the band that made him famous, the book is informative without being boring. Some of the writing probably sounds better in an audiobook or stand-up performance because the jokes don’t quite land in print. The reference to a bat mitzvah being a good deed involving purchasing his father one of Hank Aaron’s bats is indeed hilarious (i.e., it's a mitzvah related to a bat, not a bat mitzvah in the sense of a Jewish girl reaching religious maturity). The fact that his mom later gave the bat to a contractor who was admiring it while working on their house tells you a lot about how she navigated the world and caused problems for their family.

    Rock memoirs aren’t a genre I read extensively, but it is really interesting to hear him explain how dissatisfied he was with the band’s last two albums because they featured so little in the way of guitars. That and his candid discussion of struggles with chemical dependency are honest without being gratuitously depraved. As he says in the title, none of this experience rocks. He has not always enjoyed the road to fame but it seems like he has at least found some kind of comfort in it.

(This is a lightly edited version of a review that originally appeared in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.)

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs by Benjamin Herold

TRIAL Are These Our Lives?

Home But Alone No More by John Abendshien

Unpacking (Witch Beam / Humble Bundle, 2021)

    Like many undergraduates in training to become a teacher, I read and reread and discussed and wrote about Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” It was a pivotal text in my cohort of mostly white students who aspired to be secondary English teachers. A few years and a master’s degree later, I thought I knew better than my past self and anyone who would bring it up as a relevant critique of the world as it was then. We had a Black president at the time! Hadn’t a lot changed in the U.S. with regard to race relations by 2009? I was colorblind, so everyone else must have been, too… right?

    Man, being in your mid-twenties and living in your own apartment for the first time leads to some pretty foolish conclusions. As the saying goes, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I even went so far as to proclaim the surely-we-have-moved-on argument on a message board for the local punk scene. I should have been ostracized immediately. We are all for the better that I have grown and matured since then. I have as much to pack as almost anyone—just about every privilege imaginable.

XXX

    When our family bought our OLED Switch, my kid was unfamiliar with playing console games, but just the right age to be interested in them. I wanted to share the joy that games could bring, so I searched up lists of games that would be good for a young-ish child to play on the Switch. Literacy wasn’t an obstacle, but reaction time and challenge were. One of the lists I’d found mentioned the recently released Unpacking by Witch Beam as an option. The description of a “zen puzzle game” seemed like it would work for me even if it didn’t for my intended audience. There was no reason for me to have had any concern, though, as the controls are intuitive, the pace is chill, the music delightful, and the sound design exquisite. It’s a game with a low barrier to entry and a high level of polish.

    Really, what could be easier than opening boxes and putting away one’s personal effects? There’s very little that needs to be explained in the game itself. The low amount of text is not just a positive aspect of the game’s accessibility, it allows for the narrative to proceed through what I’ve often heard called environmental storytelling. That is, when the programmer doesn’t use dialogue, voiceover, or vignettes to explain that “hey, something important has happened here,” or “this cause has many effects.” In a game where the action is the repetitively calming process of opening a box, assessing its contents, and placing them in a logical location, the storytelling happens through the objects themselves and the nature of the rooms and buildings the character occupies. Which objects will appear throughout the eight levels (representing 21 years of time) you spend unpacking? What does it mean if certain objects obtain wear-and-tear befitting their use? Why do certain objects get pride of place in some homes but not others? What does your character do for a living? What are her interests outside of work? Who is important to her? What happens if you try to put the toaster in the empty sink (just-for-a-second-I-swear-I’ll-put-it-somewhere-else-it’s-just-so-cramped-in-here)?

    You’ll have time to ponder these questions as you meditatively open each box, select each item, and consider its placement. Although you begin in your childhood bedroom, you’ll soon have a larger place to inhabit, with roommates or significant others sharing the space. Most of the time, your packing job is logical: the boxes that appear in the bathroom mostly have toiletries. Not always. There will be times that you wonder why a book or a kitchen utensil is in with the soap and shampoo. Sometimes, the objects are difficult to identify. These moments are where the game can be most enjoyable. When I was faced with an unknown object, I would place it on different surfaces and listen closely to the sound it made. That’s right—the foley, the sound design in this game is beyond belief. A pair of nail clippers will make different sounds depending on whether you place them on the bathroom sink, the medicine cabinet, the bathmat, a couch, the stove, or the kitchen cabinet. These subtle sound clues are often enough to give a hint of the true identity of the object you’re placing. If not, then the game indicates when you’ve misplaced an item, but only when you have unpacked all of the boxes in the level. There are definitely some objects I still can’t identify, but I know to place them in the kitchen or the living room whenever they appear in my virtual hands.

    In addition to playing as a woman whose minoritized faith and sexuality are revealed further into the game, Unpacking also stands against common video game features such as high scores, leveling up, and time trials. Attempting to speedrun this game would defeat its purpose entirely. (There are achievements to unlock but they aren’t the main point of the game; they’re fun little extras.) Carly Kocurek refers to these kinds of accomplishments as demonstrations of technomasculinity. In this construct, the only kind of gamer is young, intelligent, and white. Any mistakes a person like this makes are just forgivable whoopsies! These are the kind of people that are expected, allowed, to fail upward endlessly.

    Although Unpacking has an end state, there is no way to dominate, conquer, or defeat it. You are tying together the threads of various narratives over time. In fact, there is arguably a point where a relationship with a technomasculine boyfriend (hello, XBOX) fails because he is too insecure for the character to display her college diploma on the wall and so she has to hide it under her bed. That’s as close as you’ll get to a final boss. All of it is said without words, but through clues and cues that imply something about the life the character is unpacking.

XXX

    I wonder. Would someone who had access to the packing lists and boxes that I have used over the past 21 years also be able to trace the development that I think I’ve made in that time? Would they see my change from a wide-eyed undergrad who is eager to learn about and explore his privilege before needlessly hardening against the world in an attempt at maturity a few years later? When that shell of a second, stunted adolescence cracked, would they see a different person in 42-year-old me, or would I be just as twisted up as I was at the boundary of independent adulthood? I think I know the answer, but the truth lies somewhere in between my self-concept and the way others perceive how I’ve been able to unpack my invisible knapsack.

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:

Final Fantasy IX

Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right by Adrienne Massanari

Citizen Sleeper

Collegiate Dictionary (12th Edition) (Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2025)

    The iconic image associated with Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything… is that of John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler. He’s holding up a boombox, a portable stereo, playing a cassette of PETER GABRIEL’s “In Your Eyes” so that Ione Skye’s Diane Court, his ex-girlfriend, can hear it through her open bedroom window. The song played during one of their intimate moments earlier in the movie, and Lloyd apparently thinks that the sounds of the “really good song” will be enough to change Diane’s mind about breaking up with him.

    As someone who first learned of the movie in high school and then modeled my personality after Lloyd Dobler’s, I can relate to this scene. I mean, I’ve never done something so demonstrative or possessive—and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a The CLASH shirt—but the way this scene feels is resonant with teenage me. (Teenage me is still a big part of me.)

    There’s a smaller moment earlier in the film that ended up being much more of a life-imitates-art inspiration for me. When Diane’s getting ready for a date, Lloyd peruses the effects in her room. One of which is “a mother dictionary.” It appears to be Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, first published in 1961. Diane tells Lloyd that she “used to have a thing of marking the words she looked up.” Lloyd then flips through pages annotated with an excess of x’s. I have done a similar thing with the dictionaries I’ve owned over the years, including one of my two copies of the Third.

    Maybe it’s unsurprising then that I was eager to get my hands on the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I’ve already got a copy of the 10th edition at work, among many other dictionaries from various publishers and years. I’ve also got the company’s app on my phone, where I pay an annual premium for ad-free access to the same words. This same information is also available for “free” online. So, why acquire a hard-copy of a dictionary in 2026? The main reason is guide words.

    Let me explain.

    A couple of jobs ago, I had a copy of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary in my cubicle. During slow times when I was waiting for pages to edit, I would flip through it to check definitions of certain words. This was company property, so I wasn’t about to mark it up. But, I did learn quite a bit about syllabication, pronunciation, and etymology in the process. One of the most memorable elements of the book was the set of guide words on page 304. Atop the page were the words cue, as in an actor’s signal, and cumber, as in to get in someone’s way or make their life harder. Do you get it? It says cue•cumber. Yes, cucumber. The vegetable! That’s hilarious! Even better, the final word in bold is cumbering, an inflected form of cumber in the headword’s definition. In my mind, this pair of guide words was an intentional error. Instead of having the header read cue•cumbering, some editor had ensured it would read cue•cumber. This was purposeful. I was sure of it! I wrote a letter explaining my thought process and complimenting the editor who had put that funny joke into the guide words. 

    I sent my letter on December 27, 2006; I received a reply on January 5, 2007.

    In the reply, Susan L. Brady explained to me that I had misinterpreted the guide word rules and that I could find more information about them in my dictionary’s front matter. Basically, using cumbering as the second guide word on page 304 would make the use of cumber as the first guide word on 305 a mistake. So, for consistency’s sake, the guide words across the top of the spread need to be in alphabetical order themselves. There went my case. The banality of style guides and alphabetical order had made my supposed discovery nothing more than a little coincidence. Still, I was excited to have received a reply, especially because it came quickly (and during a week that contained New Year’s Eve, no less!).

    You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by this point.

    A few months later, I noticed that on page 1239 of the 11th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary appeared another humorous guide word pairing. This time, it was strut•stuff. I knew immediately who needed to know this information: Susan L. Brady. Knowing that my original letter featured a naïve misunderstanding of how editors chose guide words, I decided to change things up. I reprinted my original letter and treated it as a first pass of a page I was editing. So, I changed 304 to 1239, cue to cumber, strut to stuff. I deleted the whole paragraph about the guide words being some kind of intentional joke and inserted text that explained what I had learned about guide word selection from the previous letter. Not wanting to have this letter be a mere copy of the original, I thought of the importance of the idiom “strut your stuff.” I figured why not ask for a chance to “strut my stuff” in a job interview for an editorial position? Remember, this is not a new letter. It is a marked up copy of my original message. The number of changes I made to it had turned it into a palimpsestic mess. I was sure I’d be put on some kind of DO NOT CONTACT list or maybe sent a cease and desist. This feeling only grew as the days passed. What had I done?

    Three weeks later, Susan L. Brady replied once again. I could tell the letter was different this time. It still bore the Merriam-Webster heading, complete with the slogan “From the Inkwell to the Internet.” The letter was shorter. Whereas the first letter’s body text had filled the middle third of the folded letter, this reply’s heading, body text, closing, and signature all fit within that middle third with room to spare. My heart sank to my stomach. I took a breath and read the letter.

    “Thank you for your recent letter and for sharing your latest guide word discovery. The dictionary can be so much fun, don’t you think?”

    That’s it. That’s all it was. That’s all I needed.

    There was no need to write another letter, even if I ever found a fun guide word pairing. Forget the idea of working for a major publisher as a dictionary editor. I learned an important lesson and had a deeply fulfilling experience. Someone else out there knew, just as I did, and as you may, that the dictionary can be so much fun. It still is.

YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:

High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape by Marc Masters

More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner

The Landscape Model of Reading Comprehension by van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm