I like reading the long form of books: Sitting with someone’s big idea that took them years.
I surprised myself by staying up later, and getting up earlier, in 2025 to read nearly as much as I ever have before. Below I share the list.
Continue reading What I read in 2025Nonviolence should be a tactic of resistance movements, not a holy covenant As famed South African activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) said “ I called for nonviolent protest for as long as it was effective.”
Yet today’s climate change movement, advocating against environmental destruction, have calcified into purely nonviolent pacifists. A whole range of tactics have been deployed by successful movements, even excluding violence on people but focusing on property destruction. Was the fall of the Berlin War a violent attack on a wall?
That’s the short, provocative and effective 2021 climate activism book by Andreas Malm entitled: How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. It inspired a film of the same name. The movie is a fictional narrative, but the book is a challenging, but important, nonfiction read for activists.
As the author argues, the two most common defenses of nonviolence:
Yet this “strategic pacifism is sanitized history,” Malm writes. All so-called nonviolent movements benefited from “the radical flank effect,” in which a more violent group pushed the issue even farther. In contrast, the nonviolent movement seemed sensible. In this way, even if radical and more centrist groups despite each other, they actually work together.
As the author writes: “There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How to Blow Up a PipelineViolence is rare. Even those who seek it might encounter only a few hours of direct and active violence
For of the rest of us, a few minutes could shape the rest of our life. Better prepare.
That’s from the 2011 self-defense book Facing Violence by Rory Miller, a longtime corrections officer who worked in Iraqi prisons and developed self-defense training courses.
Miller has a vibe and a viewpoint, including personal stories alongside tactical advice. This book is a philosophical and practical guide that would be a good accompaniment to self-defense training. The book’s chapters are the seven stages that he identifies are part of navigating violence. Those stages:
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How to prepare for facing violenceWhat if a river isn’t just scenery or infrastructure—but a living being with rights, memory, and agency? If a corporation has personhood, then certainly ecological systems can.
That’s from the much-publicized lyrical 2025 book Is a River Alive by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It’s gotten heaps of praise, though I’ll admit I found it an over-stretched poem at times. It felt a bit pompous but I so appreciate the book’s premise.
Below I share notes for my future reference.
Continue reading Is a river aliveBecoming an equal partner is the man’s glass ceiling.
Most American households are dual-income earners, and even in these, men contribute less domestically than women. Gender plays an outsized role. But even in same-sex relationships, one partner seems entirely aloof of what the other does domestically. Culture seems to make this all difficult to overcome, so a manual helps.
That’s the spirit of the 2022 book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, written by Kate Mangino, who has a PhD in social development.
“It is harder and more time-consuming to be a good mother than to be a good father, and it is easier for a woman to fail in motherhood than for a man to fail in fatherhood,” Mangino writes. “We have set the caregiving bar too high for mothers and too low for fathers.”
Mangino makes great effort to speak to relationships with different genders, while reflecting that close to 90% of American households have those in a male and female roles. Those “male-coded” and “female-coded” dynamics are a theme. I found the book challenging at times — sometimes productively, and a few times because I just flatly disagreed with the author’s framing. But I respect and appreciate Mangino’s contribution. It helped me marriage, and will help others. I recommend it. Buy it here.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Improving gender equality at home“We tend to exist in a a distracted present where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”
That’s from Douglas Rushkoff’s 2013 book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
Rushkoff is a media theorist and professor who is credited with the term “viral media.” In the early 2010s, as social media and digital tools were in the ascent, he put forward his “present shock,” as a kind of response to the 1970s concept of “future shock.”
Toffler’s “future shock” was the stress and disorientation caused by too much rapid change arriving from the future, while Rushkoff’s “present shock” is the stress and disorientation caused by an always-on, real-time culture that collapses time into a perpetual now.
New technologies can reduce the time and energy we spend on less complex tasks. As Rushkoff writes: “We are also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus in the trivial pursuit of the immediately relevant.”
Below I share my notes for future references.
Continue reading Present ShockViewing the world as a binary between rich and poor is too simple to be helpful.
A century of economic development has created a far bigger middle, so better to simplify with a four-level (quartile) income split. Despite this success, most people when surveyed assume the world is getting worse. It’s important to understand in what ways progress is being made.
That’s from the 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, which argues people consistently misunderstand global trends, believing the world is worse off than it is due to inherent biases and misinformation.
My career-long reporting on entrepreneurship has always colored my belief that most people on most days want to make their lives a little better, and so that creates a better place over time. But this book is a canonical example of arguing too many of us overlook remarkable progress we must understand.
The book’s authors, Swedish husband-wife team Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola’s father Hans, are insistent that theirs is not a naive or overly optimistic view, though this sort of “globalization has made the world richer and healthier” writing has become deeply unfashionable. Progressive advocates and activists I know deride a class of often-Boomer liberal writer as apologists for an entrenched world order by throwing facts and figures at people.
Still Rosling and team argued they were never apologizing for elites who could rest-easy, but rather doing research to put into context what had worked, so as to motivate the best behaviors to be continued. After Hans’s passing, the husband-wife duo continue leading a research nonprofit called Gapminder. It didn’t help that Rosling gave prominent talks at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at TED, often seen as the heart of this global liberal order.
So though I’m familiar with the arguments and Rosling’s reputation, I wanted to read what he described as the best distillation of his research.
Books like this (and one that came out the same year by Steven Pinker) tend to have two flaws: They overlook how many people are only focused on their personal life not broad global trends, and even many academics consider what these authors describe as an exceptional century, not an enduring trend. For example does slowing productivity and an aging secular business cycle, helped by geopolitical uncertainty and AI technology, portend a reversal of standards for most of us? Economic mobility and wealth equality reached notable highs during the author’s life, but declined since: so is he describing a world that is already changing again?
As they wrote: “Things can be both bad and better.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading In 2018, Hans Rosling argued the world is getting better than most of us think. Was he wrong?Are algorithms creating a new kind of language development, or just speeding the method we’ve always had?
“Words aren’t just diffusing from human to human anymore: they’re now moving from human to algorithm and back to human.” That’s from Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, the new, charming and insightful linguistics book by Adam Aleksic, a Harvard-trained, 20-something influencer creating under the ‘etymology nerd’ handle.
As he writes: “Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon and you, dear reader are the victim”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading AlgospeakThe American-led political order that started in 1945 at the conclusion of the Second World War is 80 years old and due for a major reordering.
That’s from How Countries Go Broke, the most recent in the “Principles” series by Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who has written a collection of books on economic systems and investment strategy. I read “The Changing World Order” a few years back.
This, like others in the series, is backed what Dalio vaguely refers to a research team he employs. This makes sense, that a billionaire investor would employ research to develop an ever more detailed view of the world, but he’s become best known for a more expansive view than current economic conditions. Beyond his Bridgewater hedge fund, Dalio pumps out content now that attempts to put today into a broader historical context. No doubt simplified, his “big cycle” is the idea that eternally human qualities result in governments following predictable patterns, of relying on a hard, fixed currency before devaluing it long enough until there is a collapse.
He argues we’re something like 90%-95% through this pattern. Dalio has a reputation of prescience, if not precision: His prediction of a coming internet bubble bursting came five years too early (a half decade of earnings). I struggle with this. The books and research are compelling and interesting, but exactly because they’re comfortingly simple, they also read is unhelpful in any specific or actionable way. The interpretation is nonetheless welcome.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading How countries go brokeKatalin Karikó’s neurosurgery department chair kept asking her about hitting his preferred metric of “dollars per net square footage,” in terms of funding her lab time with grants, or even prestigious publication. It’s amusingly anodyne and corporate when recounted by a now eminent scientist, who had just told her boss about beginning to collaborate with a cross-disciplinary immunologist Drew Weissman, with whom she would later share the Nobel Prize.
That’s from Breaking Through: My Life in Science, the October 2024 autobiography by biochemist Katalin Karikó, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on mRNA which contributed to the rapid deployment of the covid-19 vaccine. I admire her greatly.
In an over-simplification, cell and gene therapies directly influence DNA, whereas her research focused on using mRNA to send a temporary message to cells. mRNA is considered more unstable and difficult to work on, so it had long been dismissed as not an effective means of treatment. She’s become a canonical example of a delayed payoff for hyper-fixation on a particular problem (almost 20 years with limited academic or industry recognition).
The autobiography is an enjoyable read, starting with her being raised in Soviet Hungary. She criticizes the surveillance system, but remembers fondly its elevation of science and spotting kids with promise from households with less education. She remembers that her school transcripts always had an “F”, for “fizkai” to clarify her parents had worked “physical” jobs and were low educated, which got her extra attention from educators in communist Hungary.
She says half of her elite biology college cohort came from this working class tradition: can any elite American institution claim this?
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Katalin Karikó on “Breaking Through”
