Analysis of Technology, Global Risk and Strategy + Random Thoughts
It’s extraordinarily pleasing to read field reporting from deeply embedded foreign correspondents, a vocation that is shamefully underfunded today given the myriad of crises engulfing the world. Even more scintillating is when those same correspondents transform their routine work into a synthesized volume, offering us both a panoramic
North Korea’s opacity is all but impregnable. Its neighbors, Russia and China, are dictatorships that work ever more diligently to control the speech of their citizens, but the two have got nothing on the Hermit Kingdom’s totalitarianism. Even the most rudimentary facts about what’s
I tend to read older cultural criticism with one of two minds. One is the delectable schadenfreude of witnessing previous moral panics that ultimately turn out to be hysterical outpourings of stupidity (I’m thinking of Dungeons and Dragons and how it will cause children to become Satan-worshippers)
I have to admit: I’ve had a really bad run of nonfiction books lately. All of them have been positively reviewed, some in terms that are magnificently glowing. Many of them have even won prestigious global awards. Time after time after all of the hubbub, I finally get
A decade ago in graduate school, I was part of a reading circle on the sociology of quantification. It’s a small lacuna of an academic field with a massive scope: the incredible quantification of society and the politics behind how people and institutions construct those numbers. It encompasses
2025 was a dizzying year. I can’t make heads or tails of it, the coin (almost certainly a Trump-faced 250th commemorative) just keeps spinning around on its edge like the inchoate end of  Inception . What even  happened ? I consider my job as a writer to
This is a syndication of my update from the Riskgaming newsletter , where most of my writing lives these days. Well, 2025 was a very quiet year. Minus, of course, the trillions of dollars in venture capital appreciation thanks to the AI boom and the insane pace of geopolitical news going
2024 was the year of elections, with more than half of humanity voting (and Germany coming up in a few weeks and maybe Canada as well). So there was a little over-indexing on global politics than even I would normally read. Meanwhile, technology coverage has really hit a nadir.
I write almost exclusively on Riskgaming by Lux Capital. If you aren't a subscriber, you should really sign up ! It was a year filled with milestones at Riskgaming in 2024, including the debut of our first scenario (and then numbers two and three ), 47 newsletters and 69 podcast
Every year, I read way too much, and that includes a surfeit of essays, articles and news (also check out my favorite books and my favorite columns that I wrote from 2023). This year, according to my tracker (I use Reeder ), I saved and read 1,039 essays and longer
In 2023, I read 37 books, including 3 books in French and 2 Korean graphic novels. That’s quantitatively down from last year, mostly due to a couple of books that oversold and under-delivered that made me skip reading a few weeks here and there (it doesn’
It’s been a busy year, with 42 issues of my newsletter “Securities” by Lux Capital in the bag alongside 22 podcast episodes . But the most exciting part of the year was my new editorial focus on “ riskgaming ,” a new form of wargame scenarios that
I was reading a book review in Le Monde this morning about “ecospiritualists” and the wide literature emanating from France on the subject of connecting humans back to nature . One theme that emerges is the need to tend to the “garden” of one’s self
As I noted back in my year-end roundup of my favorite books of 2021 , I considered Alistair Horne’s book A Savage War of Peace to be the best book I read that year, and arguably, one of the best books I have ever read in my life.
The sleepy suburban streets of Silicon Valley, with Stanford at its epicenter, were once well-tended farmlands, a lush region of physical toil and abundant agricultural exports that fed the frontiers and the fronts of world wars. Over the course of the last century, that rustic life was transformed first