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 violenceThe industrial mass-market modern age brought forth intertextuality, hyperreality and meaning implosion. These concepts — that media reflect other media, rather than reality, until we can no longer separate truth from story — is a defining princiople of postmodernism.
That’s how French philosopher and controversial academic Jean Baudrillard put it in his influential 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. I read excerpts as an undergrad, and his other works. I just reread the 1994 English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.
It’s a challenging read, but like all good philosophy, whether you disagree with it all or not, Baudrillard certainly makes you think. Once strawberries were a whole food to eat seasonally and locally. Then they became an ingredient, and then chemically recreated as a flavor. How does that change us?
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Simulacra and SimulationWhat 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 ShockBefore the covid-19 outbreak, public health officials around the world largely agreed that containment of a flu pandemic is largely futile so better to focus on the most at risk populations: speak honestly, encourage healthy behaviors and work fast on a vaccine.
It didn’t all go to plan. In the United States, the Trump administration successfully oversaw a historic vaccine development, while injecting hostile politics into the system. Meanwhile, left-leaning states over-relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as widespread masking and extended school closures, that had limited gains for considerable cost. Right-leaning states contributed to vaccine skepticism, which led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
The new book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, written by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, attempts to put forward an unimpassioned assessment of the American-led public health response. I simplified their assessment of a handful of the most prominent public health measures into the chart below, and in a social video here.
It’s one of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading In Covid’s WakeViewing 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?If there’s even a small chance of a really big thing happening, should you do it?
“The need to be first or to perish” is what set in motion the explosion of consumer use of artificial intelligence. That argument raised billions of dollars, set off one of the largest infrastructure investments in American history and set off a global arms race.
The company that set off the arms race is OpenAI, and its cofounder and public face Sam Altman. Altman wielded this argument widely: If OpenAI doesn’t race toward the possibility of superintelligence than an existing incumbent like Google will, or China will. But no one else, nowhere else, could have done this. At least not now.
Or so the argument goes in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI published this year and written by journalist Karen Hao.
One Chinese researcher told Hao that no one would have been funded outside Silicon Valley with over $1 billion without a clear purpose, so we created the risk and the solution. As she writes: “everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable.”
Altman shares a birthday with the legendary physicist Robert Oppenheimer (“father of the atomic bomb”). Altman loves the comparison of OpenAI to the Manhattan project, though Hao notes that “he never seemed to add that Oppenheimer spent the second half of his life plagued by regret and campaigning against the spread of his own creation.”
At an industry event in December 2024, Altman’s cofounder and one-time chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said that “we have but one internet,” in referring to the source material that the AI industry has already primarily digested. Having consumed all of us, they seek more, Hao argues, in preferring the “empire” metaphor of the AI industry. The book is exhaustive and critical. A very worthwhile read for those following the industry, even though it goes into even greater detail on internal politics than I needed. It reads as authoritative.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Empire of AI
