The Open Shelf
A branch of the Open Shelf · for readers of the papers · growing
The Lineage Shelf
The works behind the papers, with doors to borrow them or buy them
The papers and essays on goodprotocols.org lean on other people's work, and many end with a list of it. This shelf holds those works, one card each, so that a reader who wants the source can get to it. Each card says in our own words what the work is, names the pieces that lean on it, and opens doors out: free to read or hear where that is possible, then your library, then a bookshop.
This shelf is kept apart from the family shelves. Those are chosen for reading at home, often aloud, with a child nearby. These are the working books of the house, and many of them are long, technical, or written for a trade. Nothing here is assigned, and nothing on the family shelves asks you to have read any of it.
The shelf is new and it grows paper by paper. It holds the works behind the three doctrine papers: Knowing When Not to Measure, Knowing How to Remember, and Holding the Future Now. For the second of these, a longer note on why each voice is there is kept in The Canon Behind the Ethos. It also holds the reading bench of Provision Without Power and the works in the notes of My Name Is Not Legion.
How the doors work: Libby opens Seattle Public Library's catalog first, and you can switch to your own library inside the app. WorldCat finds a library near you that holds a copy, wherever you are. If a book here does not fit your hands, the Access page says who can help.
Twenty Years at Hull-House
Addams's own account of the Chicago settlement house: the young residents who lived there, the donors who kept it, and the neighbors who held both.
What our writing takes from it The essay reads the settlement house as the older form of the arch of ages it proposes.
Cited in The Membership
Rhetoric Book II
In the middle book of his treatise on persuasion, Aristotle describes the emotions one by one. Chapters 10 and 11 set envy, the pain that wants another person's good taken away, beside emulation, the pain that wants to earn the same good.
What our writing takes from it The paper's fork between the ladder and the knife is first drawn here.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Tocqueville's Dilemmas, and Ours Sovereignty, Nationalism, Globalization
A political theorist reads Tocqueville for the present: what sustains a people's sense of belonging, and what happens to it when governance takes over the space in which citizens act.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes its modern point that belonging cannot be administered into existence; it is sustained only by citizens practicing it on one another.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
We Become What We Worship A Biblical Theology of Idolatry
A biblical scholar traces one pattern through scripture: people come to resemble what they revere, for ruin or for restoration.
What our writing takes from it The paper applies the pattern beyond worship. A person or a community that rehearses its grievance daily is being formed by it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
A New Testament Biblical Theology The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New
A large study of how the New Testament writers saw the promised new creation as already begun and not yet complete.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes the already and the not yet from it: growth and fruit that are real, alongside struggle that remains.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
Expressive Bildung Über Ausdruck, Entfremdung und die Fähigkeit zu lernen
In German. There is no English edition yet.
Beljan asks under what conditions a student can enter a living exchange with a subject, a teacher, and the world, and why schools so often make that exchange harder.
What our writing takes from it The three criteria of our situation rubric, connectability, mobility, and expansion, come from this book.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
The Art of the Commonplace The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
A selection of Berry's essays on land, household, and community, gathered around the idea of membership in a place.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes membership from him: a community as a body one belongs to and answers to, and a past that is soil to be farmed.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · Stickers
It All Turns on Affection The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays
Berry's 2012 Jefferson Lecture and the essays around it. It borrows Wallace Stegner's boomers and stickers and argues that a place is kept by the affection of the people who stay and become answerable for it.
What our writing takes from it Both essays rest on it: citizenship as local affection with responsibility attached, and the affection that cannot be delegated.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing · Stickers · The Membership · Who Takes the Fine
The Wild Birds Six Stories of the Port William Membership
Six stories of Port William, Berry's Kentucky town, in which the farmer Burley Coulter says what the membership is: we are all members of each other, and the difference is only in who knows it and who does not.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes its name and its closing line from here.
Cited in The Membership
The End of Trauma How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD
Bonanno gathers decades of research showing that most people who live through terrible events recover without lasting disorder, and he describes what flexible coping looks like.
What our writing takes from it It is part of the evidence for the paper's claim that resilience is the most common human response to adversity.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Ecology of Human Development Experiments by Nature and Design
Bronfenbrenner describes a child's development as happening inside nested settings, from the family outward to the wider society.
What our writing takes from it The levels at which our rubric reads a decision, the child, the worker, the family, and the community anchor, are adapted from his.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Designing Your Life How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
Two design teachers apply a designer's habits to a person's own life: try small prototypes, learn from them, and reframe the problem.
What our writing takes from it The paper counts it as everyday practice in agency. A person in the middle of a design is not a finished verdict.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change
The paper behind what is now called Campbell's law: the more a number is used to make consequential decisions, the more pressure it comes under, and the more it corrupts both itself and the work it was meant to watch.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper starts here. It is the fifty-year-old warning that the paper says the sector learned to live with.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
When Helping Hurts How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself
Written for churches, it separates relief, rehabilitation, and development as three different responses, and warns against treating a long-standing condition as an emergency.
What our writing takes from it The paper values it as a vocabulary shared with congregations, and for its view of poverty as broken relationships.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Life at the Bottom The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
Essays by a doctor who worked in an English inner-city hospital and prison, on the beliefs he heard from his patients and where he thought those beliefs came from.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads it as clinical observation of how a vocabulary of helplessness can be passed on, and reads it on the ground of belovedness so that the diagnosis does not turn into contempt.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Evaluation Methodology Basics The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation
A working manual for evaluation that reaches a judgment: explicit criteria, defined levels, and evidence set out so that another reader can follow the reasoning and contest it.
What our writing takes from it Our situation rubric stands in this tradition of evaluative reasoning.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
I Swear My Life with Tourette's
The memoir of the man from Galashiels: the six years no doctor could name, the household that asked him in for dinner and kept him, the caretaker who prepared the room, and the decades teaching schools and police.
What our writing takes from it The essay sets his town beside Bend as a town that answered the right question.
Cited in Who Stays
A Demand of Blood The Cherokee War of 1776
A history of the war between the Cherokee Nation and the southern colonies in 1776, including the land purchase by Richard Henderson's company, Dragging Canoe's resistance, and the burning of Cherokee towns and crops.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it as the early case in which dependency was built through trade before a single ration was issued.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Custer Died for Your Sins An Indian Manifesto
Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux writer and lawyer, describes with wit and anger what it is to be administered: by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, by anthropologists, and by missionaries.
What our writing takes from it The paper holds that the critique of paternalism belongs to the people administered, and this is one of its sharpest statements.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Out of the Crisis
Deming taught industry to measure quality, and this is the book in which he says what measurement cannot do. He counts running an organization on visible figures alone among the deadly diseases of management.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper cites him as a friend of measurement who held that the most important figures are unknown and unknowable.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Slavenka Drakulić (Rijeka, 1949; died at her home in Istria on June 20, 2026) was a Croatian journalist, novelist, and essayist who wrote about communism and what came after it in the first person, from the kitchen rather than the parliament. This is the book that introduced her to readers in English: essays on the washing machine, the doll, the lipstick, the queue, and the coffee you cannot drink alone, which together show what a system did to an ordinary Tuesday.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes from it the last unguarded room, the table where a person could be seen wanting, lacking, or laughing without the seeing becoming a file.
Cited in The Unguarded Table · Rooms or Files · Where to Stand · Who Takes the Fine
Café Europa Life After Communism
Essays written in the years after 1989, when the countries of the former bloc were being asked to build civic life out of capacities their old systems had spent decades destroying. The hypocrisy people learned in order to survive, the I that had to flee a grammar built on we, and the first years of a freedom no one had practiced.
What our writing takes from it The essay's two verified quotations come from here, and so does its measure of the cost of going around, saying we, and trusting no one.
Cited in The Unguarded Table
They Would Never Hurt a Fly War Criminals on Trial in The Hague
Portraits of the men tried at The Hague for the crimes of the Yugoslav wars, written by someone from the country they came from, who refused to let them be monsters and so had to ask what she shared with them.
What our writing takes from it The essay reads it as generosity of the costliest kind: full personhood given to the least deserving, paid for with the writer's own innocence.
Cited in The Unguarded Table
The Balkan Express Fragments from the Other Side of War
Essays from the first years of the Yugoslav wars, written as a nation was being made the whole of what a person was allowed to be, and as the war arrived in ordinary rooms before it arrived in the news.
What our writing takes from it The essay's account of being overcome by nationhood, of saying I when a brand-new we demanded assent, comes from here.
Cited in The Unguarded Table
S. A Novel About the Balkans
A novel about a woman held in a camp during the Bosnian war and about what she carries out of it. It is the hardest of her books and the one that sets the boundary of what the others describe.
What our writing takes from it Named in the bench read behind the essay as the boundary text; the essay itself does not quote it.
Cited in The Unguarded Table
Promises I Can Keep Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Five years of sitting with low-income mothers in Philadelphia and Camden, asking rather than assuming. The mothers revere marriage so much that they postpone it as something to be earned.
What our writing takes from it The essay uses it to refuse the turn that blames the families: the people inside these arrangements did not design them.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
Creative Experience
Follett's account of how people create something new out of their differences. She argues that the best outcome of a conflict is integration, a solution that meets what each side wants, and she sets power with people against power over them.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes integration from her: the conflict is opened until the desires beneath the stated positions show, and something is built that satisfies both.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion
Constructive Conflict and The Giving of Orders
Two talks Follett gave to people who ran businesses. The first names three ways to deal with a conflict, domination, compromise, and integration, and tells the story of the library window. The second gives her Law of the Situation: both parties take their orders from the situation they study together.
What our writing takes from it The paper's working method for conflict comes from these talks.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The New State Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government
Follett's argument that democracy is not made at the ballot box but in the neighborhood group, where people who differ learn to want things together.
What our writing takes from it The essay's claim that the neighborhood group is where democracy actually happens is hers.
Cited in The Membership · Who Stays · Where to Stand
The Gospel of Mark New International Greek Testament Commentary
A commentary on the Greek text of Mark.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes from him the grammar of the man's answer, a singular name with a plural verb, and his caution against reading the word legion as a political code.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
Man's Search for Meaning
Frankl's account of surviving the Nazi camps, followed by a short description of the therapy he built on it. He holds that a person keeps one freedom to the end, the choice of how to stand toward what cannot be changed.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes it as proof that a person can carry the full weight of the past and refuse to be finished by it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Culture Care Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life
A painter's case for tending a culture the way one tends soil, by making and by generosity, in place of fighting over it.
What our writing takes from it The third paper takes his description of culture care as generosity to our neighbors and culture, and adds the future to it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now · My Name Is Not Legion · The Dignity of Owing · The Unguarded Table
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Art and Faith A Theology of Making
Fujimura's theology of making, written from the studio. It includes his account of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery with gold.
What our writing takes from it Kintsugi is the paper's image of a past held sincerely: the break named in gold and the vessel returned to the table.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
The Scout Mindset Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Galef contrasts the soldier, who defends what they already believe, with the scout, who wants an accurate map.
What our writing takes from it The scout is the paper's officer for its symmetric test: the same question, asked with the same face, of claims one favors and claims one resents.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Self and Other in Literary Structure
Reading Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky, Girard argues that we learn what to want from other people, and that the person we imitate can become our rival.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it to explain the funding commons: organizations converge on what the others want, and the convergence creates the scarcity they fear.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion
The Scapegoat
Girard reads myths and stories of persecution for the victim a community blames in order to hold itself together. One chapter reads the story of the man among the tombs at Gerasa.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes his reading that the town and the man had reached an arrangement, and that the healing broke it.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency
The Gluecks' study of five hundred reform-school boys matched one by one with five hundred boys from the same Boston neighborhoods, and the five-factor prediction table they built from it to find delinquents early.
What our writing takes from it The essay tells the history of that table, and of what the same files said when someone kept reading them.
Cited in Who Stays
Thinking in Pictures My Life with Autism
Grandin describes from the inside how she thinks in images, and how that way of thinking shaped her work designing equipment for livestock.
What our writing takes from it The essay cites her for the claim that the world needs all kinds of minds.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion · Who Stays
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
The Life of Moses
A fourth-century bishop reads the life of Moses as the story of a soul that keeps climbing. Perfection, for Gregory, is the stretching forward itself, which later writers called epektasis.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes its picture of the person from him: made for the reach, so that fixing on what lies behind goes against the creature's own grain.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Anxious Generation How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Haidt argues that a childhood moved onto phones and away from free play has left a generation of young people more anxious and depressed.
What our writing takes from it The essay cites it for how a feed can turn a symptom into an identity. The citation is not a verdict on any young person's real condition.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion · Beside, Not Between
Indigenous Continent The Epic Contest for North America
Four centuries of North American history told with Native nations as powers that shaped the continent.
What our writing takes from it It is the paper's guard against telling this history as a story of victims only. Every party is a decision-maker.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Concept Creep Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology
Haslam shows how psychology's concepts of harm, among them abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice, have widened over time to cover milder and more varied cases.
What our writing takes from it The paper cites it for the drift it describes, so that the claim rests on a literature.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Troubled A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
Henderson's memoir of growing up in foster care and making his way to the Air Force and then to university. It is also where he sets out his idea of luxury beliefs.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses luxury beliefs to count costs: positions that bring status to the comfortable while their costs fall on the vulnerable.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Troubled A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
A memoir of foster care and the military that ends at Yale, where Henderson names luxury beliefs: ideas that win their holders standing at little cost to themselves while the bill goes to people with less.
What our writing takes from it The essay sets the luxury belief against the other use of a high position, taking the fine.
Cited in Who Takes the Fine
Your Future Self How to Make Tomorrow Better Today
A psychologist's research on how people relate to the person they will become. When that future self feels like a stranger, people do less for it.
What our writing takes from it The essay uses it to name the second cost of the diagnosis years, a future that has started to feel like someone else's.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
The Apache Wars The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History
A history of the Apache wars in which each party acts for reasons a reader can follow.
What our writing takes from it It is our warrant for the archive: a record in which every party remains a decision-maker is the only archive worth inheriting.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure · Knowing How to Remember
The Undiscovered Country Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West
Hutton's history of the making of the American West.
What our writing takes from it The papers lean on it for the same warrant as The Apache Wars, and the third paper for its people acting with the outcome still hidden from them.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure · Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now
To Hell with Good Intentions
Illich tells a room of North American student volunteers bound for Mexico that their help does harm, and he asks them to come as students and guests.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads it as the sermon to the helpers: help that installs the helper disables the person helped.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Disabling Professions
A short collection in which Illich, John McKnight, and three other writers argue that professions can leave people less able to do things for themselves.
What our writing takes from it It is cited with the 1968 address for the same warning.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Rebuilding Native Nations Strategies for Governance and Development
The findings of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, gathered for people doing the work. Nations that make their own decisions, through capable institutions that fit their own culture, develop. The same programs run from outside do not.
What our writing takes from it The paper calls this the empirical spine of its vision, and holds that the finding reaches beyond Native nations.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Transcend The New Science of Self-Actualization
Kaufman returns to Maslow's own papers and replaces the pyramid with a sailboat: a hull of security and a sail of growth, both needed at once.
What our writing takes from it The third paper uses the sailboat to answer the claim that giving must wait until the present is secure.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now · Provision Without Power · Beside, Not Between · The Unguarded Table
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Good Inside A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be
A clinical psychologist's guide for parents, built on the idea that a child and a parent are both good inside, and that two things can be true at once.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes her two-things-are-true frame for the table where a family receives someone back.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion · Beside, Not Between
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Remarks at the University of Kansas
A campaign speech in which Kennedy lists what the gross national product counts and what it leaves out, from the health of children to the strength of marriages.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it to join the measurement paper to the memory paper: a community's worth was never in its dashboard, and its wound was never the whole of its story.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writes about plants as teachers, and about the gift economy in which a gift creates a relationship because it asks to be answered.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes from it the idea that a neighborhood is thousands of small gifts flowing in every direction, never settled and never meant to be.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
Building Communities from the Inside Out A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets
The founding handbook of asset-based community development. It teaches a neighborhood to map what it has, its people, associations, and institutions, before it maps what it lacks.
What our writing takes from it The paper's contrast between the needs map and the asset map comes from it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Gospel According to Mark New International Commentary on the New Testament
A verse-by-verse commentary on Mark.
What our writing takes from it The essay follows his reading of the man among the tombs, including the question about his name as a way of calling the person himself to the surface.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
A short essay proposing that the first human tool was a container for gathering, and that a story can be shaped like a bag that holds things together as well as like a spear thrown at an enemy.
What our writing takes from it The paper applies it to community development. A neighborhood told as a battlefield will be developed as one, and a neighborhood told as a bag being filled can carry its hard history among everything else it holds.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion
A Wizard of Earthsea
A young wizard looses a shadow into the world and is hunted by it, until he turns and names it with his own name.
What our writing takes from it The essay uses the ending as the other shape of healing: the shadow is neither outrun nor destroyed, and it is joined.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Toxic Charity How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It)
A longtime urban minister's blunt account of giving that leaves people worse off, with his proposals for doing it differently.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads it for its diagnosis and on the ground of belovedness, so that the diagnosis does not turn into contempt for givers or for recipients.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Ordinary Magic Resilience in Development
Masten's summary of her research on children who do well despite adversity. Her finding is that resilience comes from ordinary things working, such as a caring adult, a functioning school, and a child's own abilities.
What our writing takes from it It is cited with Bonanno for the resilience science under the paper's refusal to narrate people as their damage.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Ambigua
Maximus works through hard passages in earlier church fathers. Along the way he sets out his teaching on the logoi, the intended word that each created thing carries.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads this as grain doctrine: read the logos of a life before reshaping it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Human Side of Enterprise
The book that named Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X assumes people must be directed and controlled, and Theory Y assumes they will direct themselves toward work they are committed to.
What our writing takes from it The third paper takes up his concession that direction and control work on people still struggling for subsistence, and refuses to wait on it.
Cited in Holding the Future Now · Provision Without Power
The Careless Society Community and Its Counterfeits
Essays arguing that professional service systems can crowd out what neighbors do for one another. A map of a community's needs produces clients, and a map of its gifts produces citizens.
What our writing takes from it The paper calls it the modern mirror of White's history, and the most important book on its bench for someone leading community development.
Cited in Provision Without Power
On the Ontological Status of Autism The 'Double Empathy Problem'
Milton argues that the difficulty autistic and non-autistic people have in understanding each other runs in both directions, and is not a deficit located in one of them.
What our writing takes from it The paper widens this to communities and institutions: a practice that puts all the misunderstanding on one side has already failed.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Scarcity Why Having Too Little Means So Much
Two researchers show what having too little of money, time, or calm does to a mind. It narrows attention to the urgent thing, which they call the tunnel, and it taxes the capacity a person needs to plan past it.
What our writing takes from it The third paper takes the tunnel from them: a family inside it survives the present at the cost of the future.
Cited in Holding the Future Now · My Name Is Not Legion
The Tyranny of Metrics
A historian gathers case histories from schools, medicine, policing, and business in which rewarding and punishing by the numbers made the work worse, and he sets out when measuring helps.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper cites it as the modern case file for the tradition of measurement criticizing itself.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
The Soul of a Tree A Woodworker's Reflections
Nakashima's account of his life and his way of working, in which a board's own shape and flaws decide what it becomes.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes the free edge from him: healing that mills a person square is not healing.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
The Heart of Understanding Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra
A short commentary on the Heart Sutra. It opens with a sheet of paper in which a reader can see the cloud, the rain, and the logger, which is how he teaches interbeing.
What our writing takes from it The paper receives interbeing as a practice: the caseworker and the funder stand in the same field as the family. It holds open the difference in the metaphysics beneath.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Miracle of Mindfulness
A short manual on attention to the present moment, written first as a letter to a fellow worker in Vietnam. It teaches washing the dishes in order to wash the dishes.
What our writing takes from it The essay sets it beside the healed man, sitting, clothed, and in his right mind, as a picture of a person returned to the present.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Life of the Beloved Spiritual Living in a Secular World
A short book written for a friend outside the faith, on what it means to live as someone who is loved before achieving anything.
What our writing takes from it The paper's account of worth that is conferred and not ranked rests on it, along with Nouwen's naming of three false identities: I am what I have, what I do, and what others say about me.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
A Question of Trust
Five radio lectures on why the machinery built to hold public servants to account, with its targets, league tables, and constant reporting, was wearing away the trust and the professional judgment it was meant to protect.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper leans on her account of accountability that corrodes what it secures.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
With Justice for All
Perkins sets out the three commitments that came from his work in Mississippi: relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes his insistence that leadership is raised from inside the community.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Beyond Charity The Call to Christian Community Development
A later statement of Christian community development, in which the people of a neighborhood lead its renewal.
What our writing takes from it It is cited with With Justice for All as the Black church's own doctrine of community development.
Cited in Provision Without Power
12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos
Twelve rules for living, drawn from clinical practice, myth, and scripture, built on the claim that a person puts their own life in order before trying to remake the world.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes one claim from it, that stabilization comes before flourishing, in rooms as in lives. The book is read whole and thought with, neither dismissed nor defended.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Quadragesimo Anno
An encyclical on the social order, issued forty years after Rerum Novarum. Section 79 states the principle of subsidiarity: a larger body should not take over what a smaller one can do for itself.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes that sentence as the rule of governance beneath the manna clause.
Cited in Provision Without Power
The Audit Society Rituals of Verification
Power follows the spread of audit through public life and shows how organizations reshape themselves to be auditable, which is a different thing from being good at their work.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper takes from him the redirection of effort from the work to the appearance of the work.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
Unmasking Autism Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
A social psychologist writes about masking, the effort autistic people make to pass as non-autistic, and about what it costs.
What our writing takes from it It is part of the reading behind the paper's warning against over-scaffolding, the help that malforms by doing for.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Uniquely Human A Different Way of Seeing Autism
A clinician's case that the behaviors of autistic people are strategies for coping with a world that overwhelms, and that the useful question is what a behavior is for.
What our writing takes from it It is part of the reading behind the paper's warning against over-scaffolding, the help that malforms by doing for.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember · My Name Is Not Legion · Beside, Not Between
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
High Conflict Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
A journalist follows people caught in conflicts that have become self-sustaining, and reports how some of them got out.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads it as a practical companion to Follett.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Resonance A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World
Rosa's large book on what makes a life go well. His answer is resonance, a relationship in which a person is reached by something and answers it. Its opposite is alienation, a world that has gone silent.
What our writing takes from it All three papers rest on it. Each asks what keeps a moment, a past, or a future able to answer.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure · Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now · The Dignity of Owing · Who Takes the Fine
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
The Uncontrollability of the World
A short book on one idea: the harder we work to make the world reachable, predictable, and controllable, the less it answers us.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper uses it as a limit on what may be scored, and the third paper uses it to say what a gift is.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure · Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now · The Dignity of Owing · Where to Stand
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Situation und Konstellation Vom Verschwinden des Spielraums
In German. There is no English edition yet.
Rosa distinguishes the situation, a moment lived from inside by people who must judge and answer, from the constellation, an arrangement of rules and forces seen from above. His worry is that the room for judgment shrinks as constellations take over.
What our writing takes from it The distinction between meeting a person and addressing a constellation runs through the papers.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure · Knowing How to Remember · Holding the Future Now
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Crime in the Making Pathways and Turning Points Through Life
The Gluecks' thousand boys read again, from files found in a basement at Harvard Law School: childhood sorted them poorly, and bonds to family, school, and later work and marriage sorted them well.
What our writing takes from it The essay's claim that the files answered a different question than the one they were built for rests here.
Cited in Who Stays
Ressentiment
Scheler describes what happens when envy and the wish for revenge cannot be acted on and are swallowed again and again. Over time a person comes to despise what they could not reach.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes his account of how repeated, powerless comparison hardens into a moral system.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Envy A Theory of Social Behaviour
A sociologist's survey of how societies everywhere manage envy, through manners, taboos, and institutions.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes the sociology and binds it with a rule: the book is never used to dismiss a claim from below, and the fruit test governs every use of it.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Seeing Like a State How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Scott shows what happens when a state simplifies a living system so that it can be read and administered from above. His opening case is the German scientific forest, planted in rows that were easy to count.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper takes from him the map that becomes the territory.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
Development as Freedom
Sen argues that development should be judged by the freedoms people have to live lives they value, and that those freedoms are also the means of development.
What our writing takes from it It is the paper's secular frame for the manna clause and for handing back the pen.
Cited in Provision Without Power
The Developing Mind How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
The founding text of interpersonal neurobiology. It describes how a mind is shaped by relationships, and it defines health as integration, the linking of parts that stay distinct.
What our writing takes from it The paper borrows integration as its working definition of integrity.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Mindsight The New Science of Personal Transformation
The same ideas written for a general reader, through cases from his practice. Mindsight is his word for the ability to see one's own mind and another person's.
What our writing takes from it It is cited with The Developing Mind for integration: the parts of a story differentiated, acknowledged, and linked.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Brainstorm The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain
Siegel describes the adolescent brain as one being remodeled on purpose, and reads the intensity, the pull toward peers, and the hunger for novelty as that remodel at work.
What our writing takes from it The essay uses it to tell the age apart from the condition.
Cited in My Name Is Not Legion · Beside, Not Between
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
NeuroTribes The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
A history of autism, from the first clinical descriptions to the neurodiversity movement.
What our writing takes from it It is part of the reading behind the paper's warning against over-scaffolding, the help that malforms by doing for.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Diminished Democracy From Membership to Management in American Civic Life
Skocpol traces how American civic life moved from large associations that ordinary people joined and ran to professionally managed organizations that people support with a check.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it for the civic structure of the shift McKnight describes on the ground.
Cited in Provision Without Power
A Conflict of Visions Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Sowell describes two views of human nature that sit beneath many political disputes. In the constrained vision, people and institutions face trade-offs that cannot be designed away. In the unconstrained vision, problems have solutions that the right design could reach.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes the constrained vision's humility about institutions, and its question: what is being traded against what, and who bears it?
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Last Yugoslav Generation The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism
An oral history of the young people who ran the youth organizations, magazines, radio programs, and student centers of 1980s Yugoslavia, and what they made of a state that studied them.
What our writing takes from it Both pieces take their witnesses from here: the Student Cultural Centre, the editors who paid the fines, the farewell coffee, and the rule of loyalty over competence.
Cited in Rooms or Files · Where to Stand · Who Takes the Fine
The Content of Our Character A New Vision of Race in America
Essays on race in America after the civil rights movement, written from Steele's own experience. It introduces his term race-holding.
What our writing takes from it The paper cites his term for one mechanism, a grievance held in a way that becomes an exemption from risk and from agency. It is used for diagnosis only.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
White Guilt How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Steele's later book on how guilt, and the wish to be seen as innocent, shaped American institutions after the 1960s.
What our writing takes from it It is cited beside The Content of Our Character, for diagnosis only.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs Living and Writing in the West
Stegner's late essays on the American West, where he divides its people into boomers, who come to take what a place has and move on, and stickers, who settle and love the life they have made there.
What our writing takes from it The distinction Berry made his own, and the one the essay keeps returning to.
Cited in Stickers · The Membership
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of Association
An essay on civil society that reads the government-funded, professionally staffed nonprofit sector through Tocqueville and asks whether it has become part of the gentle power rather than a check on it.
What our writing takes from it The essay carries its uncomfortable argument into the author's own line of work: we were hired to replace the bond, and we took the contract.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
The Unpersuadables Adventures with the Enemies of Science
Storr travels among people who hold beliefs that the evidence does not support, and asks how a mind defends what it believes.
What our writing takes from it Storr is used as an instrument for how things are heard. He is never consulted on what is true or good.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Science of Storytelling
What psychology and neuroscience say about why stories hold attention, written for writers.
What our writing takes from it It tells the paper how a narrative lands with a reader.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Status Game On Social Position and How We Use It
Storr argues that people everywhere play for status, through dominance, virtue, or success, and that the game explains a great deal of social life.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it to describe how grievance can become a status economy, with rank conferred by wound.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
And You'll Be Okay Forever Selected Essays
A collection of Storr's essays on status anxiety, grief, depression, love, and art.
What our writing takes from it It is cited with his other books, for how belief and story land.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Jesus and the Disinherited
Thurman writes for people who live with their backs against the wall. He names fear, deception, and hatred as the hounds that pursue the disinherited, and he sets the love ethic of Jesus against them.
What our writing takes from it The paper reads as his student where it says that hatred completes the oppressor's work inside the oppressed.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Also on the family shelves: see its card there.
Democracy in America
The French visitor's account of the American republic in the 1830s, including the chapters on the art of association and on the gentle, provident power that could keep a people in a kind of childhood.
What our writing takes from it The essay rests on volume two: association as the science a self-governing people must practice, and the warning about a kindly power that resembles a parent who never intends its charges to grow up.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
Mary P. Follett Creating Democracy, Transforming Management
The full biography: Follett's years at the Roxbury Neighborhood House and the Boston school centers before the business world found her.
What our writing takes from it The essay's account of her Boston years, and the geography she shared with the Gluecks' boys, comes from here.
Cited in Who Stays
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Native America from 1890 to the Present
Treuer, who is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation, writes Native history from 1890 forward as the story of people who went on living, working, and governing themselves, against the habit of ending the story at Wounded Knee.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes from it a sincere past held without the death narrative, which Gerald Vizenor named survivance.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Trust-Based Philanthropy Project
A funder-led project that asks grantmakers to give multi-year unrestricted support, simplify their paperwork, and build relationships of trust with the organizations they fund.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper names it among the funders whose view of accountability is close to its own.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
No Future Without Forgiveness
Tutu's account of chairing South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where amnesty was offered in exchange for full disclosure.
What our writing takes from it The paper takes the commission, in his account of it, as its institutional case that naming atrocity fully can be the ground of a shared future.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
Assessing Student Threats Implementing the Salem-Keizer System
The handbook of the Salem-Keizer threat assessment model, which describes a team process that assesses the level of risk in a situation rather than profiling students by characteristics.
What our writing takes from it The essay reads the model as a table that already knows what was wrong with the Gluecks' table, and asks what it would take to keep its promise for six years.
Cited in Who Stays
Decolonizing Wealth Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
Villanueva writes about philanthropy from inside it: where the money came from, who decides how it moves, and what it would take for money to heal.
What our writing takes from it The measurement paper names his critique among the influences on funders who are changing how they give.
Cited in Knowing When Not to Measure
The Good Life Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
The directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development on what eighty years of following the same men, the sons of Boston's streets and of Harvard Yard, showed: the quality of relationships predicted health and happiness in old age better than anything in a file.
What our writing takes from it The essay's line that somebody kept coming to the kitchen for eighty years is this study's method, as its director describes it.
Cited in Who Stays
Neuroqueer Heresies Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities
Essays by an autistic scholar that set out the neurodiversity paradigm and much of the vocabulary now used for it.
What our writing takes from it It is part of the reading behind the paper's warning against over-scaffolding, the help that malforms by doing for.
Cited in Knowing How to Remember
The Roots of Dependency Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos
White follows three nations, the Choctaws, the Pawnees, and the Navajos, from feeding and clothing themselves to depending on others, and shows how trade, damage to the land, and federal policy worked together to bring that about.
What our writing takes from it It is the scholarly test of the paper's thesis. Where White complicates the thesis, the paper takes the complication as the truth.
Cited in Provision Without Power
Blood Struggle The Rise of Modern Indian Nations
How tribal nations came back from the federal termination policy of the 1950s to self-determination, told through the leaders and lawyers who did the work.
What our writing takes from it It is the paper's account of how the pen was taken back.
Cited in Provision Without Power
When Work Disappears The World of the New Urban Poor
A sociologist's study of what happens to a neighborhood when steady work leaves it, and of how the loss of work, not the loss of values, hollows out family and community life.
What our writing takes from it The essay takes from it the disappearance of the steady work that once made young men marriageable.
Cited in The Dignity of Owing
Luther on Vocation
A Swedish theologian's study of Luther's teaching that a person serves God through ordinary work done for a neighbor.
What our writing takes from it The paper uses it to ground its keeper principle in theology, and as shared language with congregations.
Cited in Provision Without Power