Hi, I'm Dalton

I'm a rising second year law student in Sacramento. I write about what I learn studying law and reading about history.

Explore my pages and posts:

  1. Posts about books
  2. Posts about reading
  3. Posts about history
  4. Posts about writing
  5. Posts about people

Writing

2025

    Misconceptions About Gift-Giving
    Felix Frankfurter’s Letter of Advice to a Young Person Interested in Going into the Law
    Justice Stanley Mosk
    Blog Questions Challenge
    My Reading Year, 2024
    Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

2024

    Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow
    83 Years Ago, One Man Was Happy
    Why save in your twenties when you'll earn in your fourties?
    Concurring opinions
    The Art of Money Getting by P.T. Barnum
    A New Coat of Paint
    My blog’s identity crisis
    Static blogs are like printers
    Heavy is the Crown
    Your site should let you do what you want
    Justice Holmes
    Markdown sans front matter
    There are no rules
    Probably your fault
    Ambiguity is where the work is
    Book Notes on 'Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman'
    Do The Hard Work That's Required
    Notes on Thoughts for Young Men by JC Ryle
    How to make timestamps for multiple versions of a podcast
    Recently (June '24)
    How to learn like Sherlock Holmes
    Book Notes and Review of 'The Patriots by Winston Groom'
    Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
    Fix the fridge
    You can just
    Don't let it fade to black
    Don't take non-practitioner advice
    Rental car envy
    Explanation vs. excuses
    Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas
    Specific directions or shut up
    Most things just need to be done
    Foolishness leads to mastery
    Visible progress makes doing hard things easy
    How I choose what to read: bullets vs. cannonballs
    Sailing the Graveyard Sea by Richard Snow
    A love letter to old books
    Don't Create a Horse Storm
    1776
    The Gathering Storm
    Success is found in the minutiae
    Advice from Grandpa
    25 quotes from my commonplace book
    Who you are is who you will be (but you can change)

2023

    Some questions to ask yourself
    My Reading Year, 2023
    Reading plants seeds
    JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century
    Who are you when someone Googles you?
    TWR: Political Parties, Friday 13, Democracy
    An example of Chekhov's Gun
    TWR: Work, Position, Reading, Economists
    Should I go back to school?
    TWR: Oscars, Positioning, Reading, Economists
    How to handle critics
    You can just ignore things
    Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Collins
    One must do
    Gather intellectual scraps to shape ideas of your own
    There doesn't have to be an end goal
    Charles Dickens and Active Patience
    David McCullough on The Art of Writing, History, and Success
    What Actually Happened in Oppenheimer
    Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, And the Birth of the American Political Scandal
    Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
    Break the Mold
    Beat writer’s block
    The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World
    221b: Get Up and Write
    Telling old stories in new ways
    Isaac Asimov on writing and reading
    Write stuff down
    Shake things up
    221b: Poetry and Politics
    221b: Unlocking Success
    Notes: American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin
    221b: Work, Places, Sentences, Problems, Timeless
    221b: Reading, Nobody Cares, Wealth and Wisdom, AI and Writing, Van Cleaves
    The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
    How to Approach Life: From Leonardo da Vinci
    The weekend has too much free time
    The Wright Brothers
    2 Ideas for Realistic Time Management
    9 Lessons on Curiosity and Adventure from Richard Feynman
    6 Rules for Self-Mastery | 'Discipline is Destiny' by Ryan Holiday
    Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
    7 Life Lessons from 'The Splendid and the Vile' by Erik Larson
    5 lessons from 'Novelist as a Vocation' by Haruki Murakami
    Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami
    How to read more (if you have trouble reading)
    Transplant
    221b: Irrationality, Mistakes, Ego, Third-Place, & Impressions
    221b: Fish, Thinking, Knowledge, Waste, Genius
    221b: Kubrick, Reputation, Star Trek, Time, & Observation
    Annie Dillard’s Advice on Keeping a Daily Routine
    The Splendid and the Vile
    Working by Robert Caro
    January Reading List
    221b: Sandwich, Death, Fitzgerald, Sitzfleisch, Genius
    A day well spent
    The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    221b: Comparison, Simplicity, Details, Silence, Responsibility
    3 Lessons on Human Psychology and Project Management
    221b: Da Vinci, Brevity, X-15, Ballomania, Thinking
    The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
    221b: Curiosity and Edison
    Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
    221b: Edison, Einstein, Pursuit, Gödel, Rest
    Be prepared for the disaster to be worse than before
    Check all kinds of unusual things
    What I Read in December
    A few funny things about time
    Just get something on the page
    The best thinkers are ‘wonderers’
    221b: Time, Moonshots, Artistry, 26.2 Miles, & Genius
    A Practical Summary of How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
    221b: Writing, Detectives, Libraries, Leadership, Reading
    Why I Wake Up at 5:00 am
    How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett
    The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
    221b: Droste Effect, Rules, History, Work, Death
    My Analog and Digital Productivity System for 2023

2022

    The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
    Reflections on Calculus
    American Moonshot by Douglas Brinkley
    Not Long Ago in a Galaxy Not Very Far
    Thinking About Blogging
    getStaticPaths in NextJS Explained (Simply)
    How to time travel
    Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
    What I Read in November
    David Starr Jordan on Life, Education, and Politics
    Ernest Hemingway by Mary V. Dearborn
    John von Neumann on how to safely progress with technology
    On Ribbonfarm's Portal and Flags
    Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
    Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
    Leonardo da Vinci
    Adventures of a Curious Richard Feynman
    The Care and Culture of Men by David Starr Jordan
    2 Habits for a Better Intellectual Life
    The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steven Brusatte
    On Viewquakes
    What I Read in October 2022
    Why I Read
    Kevin Kelly's 103 Bits of Advice, Expanded
    Beware of the curse
    What Do You Care What Other People Think? By Richard Feynman
    Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday
    On Being an Inconvenienced Guesser
    Make learning a reality
    The Library: A Fragile History
    The Mountain of Knowledge (And Why Dumb Smart People Never Escape It)
    What I read in September 2022
    My Manifesto
    Deliberare Otium
    God-primes and Social Behavior
    Book Review and Summary: Revolt of the Public
    On Writing Well by William Zinsser
    Leadership by Henry Kissinger
    New Ideas Suck
    The Man From The Future
    Dulcius Ex Asperis
    Some Questions
    Plan for Future Conduct
    Which is better: instinct or reason?
    Pieces of the Action
    What It Takes To Be a Great Teacher
    Political Parties. Interesting...
    A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
    Book Review: da Vinci
    Creative procrastination
    Documenting what you do
    Why you feel stuck in life
    The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick
    An attempt to understand the Kolmogorov Complexity of human values
    The value of niche secrets
    Ubi Caritas
    Revolt of the Public
    Personality creates behaviors. Circumstances reveal them.
    On Celebrating Tiny Learning Milestones
    The passage of time
    The Value of Science 67 Years Later
    Where the term 'zero-sum' comes from
    What I do when someone asks to borrow a book
    The best system I've read for synthesizing knowledge
    You can't go there by doing that
    On Physiognomy
    Sometimes your room for error, isn't enough
    How to Increase the Chances of Becoming a Genius
    Building a Custom React Form Hook
    Season-Long Friendships
    Thursday's Assorted Links
    If, By Whiskey
    Looking like a fool at first leads to mastery at last
    Thursday Assorted Links
    Wednesday Assorted Thoughts
    Moravec's Paradox
    Reading advice from Tyler Cowen
    12 Rules For Life
    Where Dead Cells in the Body Go
    Popular sayings
    The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company
    The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
    Think Like a Rocket Scientist
    What We See When We Read
    The Dip by Seth Godin
    Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
    Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising
    Private Eye: 1, Everyone Else: 0
    Essentialism by Greg Mckeowen
    Einstein: His Life and Universe
    How to Add Conditional Class Rendering in Next JS
    How to Enable Word Wrap on Only MDX in VS Code
    How to Redirect Users to a Different Page After a Set Interval with Next.js
    Solving the vague errors
    15 Quotes from Albert Einstein That Reveals His Philosophy on Life
    2 Strategies To Help You Remember What You Read
    How Record Players Work: The Science Behind That Beautiful Sound, Simplified
    Media Consumption (February, 2022)
    Examining the Life that Communicated With the Universe - Albert Einstein
    Why I Publish My Notes Online
    Chef and The Line Cook: Going Deeper
    Being Okay With Negative Capability
    How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Look Back in Time
    How to Be Great? Be Okay With Being Bad
    How to Build Rome in A Year
    How to Change the World With Your Ideas (Like Albert Einstein)
    Why Legacy Career Paths Can't Innovate
    Be prepared for the disasters you can't imagine
    Are you playing a game you want to win?
    Writing in Your Head
    How We Got to Now
    The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
    Range by David Epstein
    Book Summary - Think Again by Adam Grant