“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.” The aphorism, attributed to the poet W.H. Auden, sparked an idea. We would ask Cantabrigians to identify the last good book they’ve read — and to report what the book says about them. Yi-An Huang, the City Manager, gave us an exemplary answer. — John Summers, senior editor
The last good book I’ve read, one that continues to be lodged in my mind, is “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better,” by Jennifer Pahlka (Metropolitan, 2023). If government is a Shakespearean play, Pahlka’s book makes us out to be more tragedy than comedy. While she focuses on how the federal government navigates digital transformation, what’s stuck with me is a broader critique of how government struggles to deliver: policy written without understanding the process of implementation; unwillingness to make important trade-offs; a focus on compliance over outcomes. The picture emerges of dedicated, well-meaning, hard-working civil servants laboring in a system that’s no longer designed to deliver. Our work in local government is mostly spared, as it is so close to the people we serve. Our proximity automatically produces transparency and accountability. Snow is a case in point. No one is confused over whether the streets are getting plowed. But I still feel the weaknesses in our system as I navigate procurement law and wrestle with how to make change happen faster.
I felt my heart thumping while reading “Recoding America” because the ideal that informs the critique speaks to why I got into public service. One story in the book has stuck with me.
During the rollout of Obamacare, the initial Healthcare.gov website catastrophically crashed, and a team was called in to help rescue it. People were working day and night trying to address systemic problems in the design and coding. Language access was a priority, and amid the crash, the higher-ups asked when the Spanish version would be ready. Someone finally spoke up and answered: “You can have either one site in English that works or two sites that don’t.”
Part of what makes government difficult is that there’s often not a right or wrong answer. Different versions of right answers matter to different constituencies. Government is meant to help mediate, to weigh when to defer to the majority and when to protect the minority. At issue is fairness, equity, justice, and sometimes, plain common sense. But if we can’t deliver, if we can’t get the job done, then what good is our deliberating and decision-making?
I have political opinions, but what matters to me is that government works. That’s what led me here and what continues to drive me every day as I help lead this important work in Cambridge.
A stronger
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