75 essays and musings since 2013.
a few to start with
Farcaster promised decentralized social graphs; three years later it's a token launchpad chasing a billion-dollar valuation.
U.S. businesses weren't vibrant before Covid—they were fragile, hollowed out by decades of financial engineering over building.
Founding doubts persist, but the business succeeded—by conventional measures and otherwise.
Kissinger's meditation on world order raises a question: have America's universal values themselves undermined international stability?
Driving through gutted America, where technological unemployment meets the growing pains of over-rapid change.
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MAFIA: Method as entertainmentFounders Fund's new game show is one of the most honest portrayals of venture-backed tech I've seen—though not in the way the producers intended.
Twenty years ago, engagement with Iran seemed plausible; American policy has grown only more punishing and self-defeating since.
Some Simple Economics of AGI is the most important paper that has been released in years. It's quite long, but the implications are tectonic for individuals' lives and livelihoods.
Carney's Davos address names the rupture in world order; also, Americans should stop pretending this administration is legitimate.
Does Voltaire plant the seeds of divergence, or merely articulate work as the first substance of all worth?
The Trump Administration’s actions in Venezuela overnight are a clear violation of international law, and a distillation of the era we now live in: the age of lawlessness.
I recently finished Anil Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI .
A photograph.
Without intending to, I went deep on four writers this year: Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth, and Eric Hobsbawm.
Open source won't pop the bubble alone, but capital absorption limits and GPU commoditization suggest we're closer to peak than beginning.
Farcaster promised decentralized social graphs; three years later it's a token launchpad chasing a billion-dollar valuation.
When Larry Fink is talking about the tokenisation of real-world assets in The Economist , the game has changed.
Last night I finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 .
Gellner's account of the Reformation prompts a question: are universities facing their own crisis of legitimacy?
Streeck's account of capitalism, democracy, and globalization was the most thought-provoking book I read this year.
Labatut on scientists and madness, Conway on atoms over bits, Kara on cobalt's human cost.
Rao's essay on chatbots and personhood hints at a metaphysical truth: the AI is analogous to humanity.
The big question that I’ve been pondering of late is whether crypto can be a better technology for capital formation than existing options (e.g., banks, capital markets, non-bank financial intermediaries).
An odd year: dozens of books left by the wayside, but French's Born in Blackness among the most important I've read.
I had recently minted my first music NFT on Sound (Daniel Allan’s “ Too Close ”), and the potential for crypto to disintermediate industry incumbents and empower artists was top of mind.
A blockchain-based vehicle to channel global capital into small businesses shut out of traditional finance in developing economies.
In effect, the leaders of the world’s largest economy — with a gross domestic product surpassing $20 trillion in 2020 — seized the assets of a country with a gross national income per capita of $500.
From the Abraaj collapse to zero-day exploits, the year's most thought-provoking reads on power, code, and collapse.
I was one of them.
After Jumia’s IPO a couple years ago, I wrote a brief argument for why I thought African startups would surprise to the upside (see “African Startups” below).
U.S. businesses weren't vibrant before Covid—they were fragile, hollowed out by decades of financial engineering over building.
For the French of 1789, liberty and equality were inseparable—but forced to choose, they would have chosen equality.
From the Cultural Revolution to kleptocracy, this year's essential reading on power, corruption, and survival.
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (cue snark), the builders and independent thinkers escape to Galt’s Gulch whilst a constellation of communists and conformists grind society to a halt.
Too much debt, not enough growth, and rates that can't normalize: six thoughts on the world after the pandemic.
Sitting in my car outside the gym, exhausted, I wondered: where's the line between stamina and stupidity?
A syllabus for the class I wanted to teach: how U.S. power shaped the international order—and why its primacy is ending.
A year away from writing, compressed news cycles, exhaustion—and the books that sustained me through it all.
On failed reading targets, library bargains, and the moment Western Civilization hinged on a $2 hardcover.
Founding doubts persist, but the business succeeded—by conventional measures and otherwise.
Walking through Maasai villages with cattle and goats, pondering who counts as wealthy in this world.
Four years ago I predicted populist reckoning; youth activism suggests the response may yet come.
Investment income holds flat, but royalties are surging—clues to how value creation has changed.
Building a company and raising a child left less time for books—here are the six that mattered.
Anyway, two of the House Bill’s provisions are raising concerns about the future of postgraduate education:
At 32 (small) pages, Sir Herbert Butterfield's The Discontinuities between the Generations in History: Their Effect on the Transmission of Political Experience —delivered in 1971 as part of the Rede Lecture series—is a superb way to spend half an hour.
You should watch it.
In any event, given the slimmer pickings, I am limiting this year’s list to the top five.
The most beautiful painting I’ve seen hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The piece is easy to miss if you’ve seen the highlights and are in a hurry to move on; it’s in one of the last rooms and faces the exit.
Burnout, terminal illness, and a toddler forced the question: what deserves the little energy I have left?
Father Joseph, a barefooted Capuchin monk, served as an advisor to Cardinal Richelieu. This pious man—who spent hours a day in orison contemplating Calvary, and who wrote poems about the Crusades betraying a deep sense of bloodlust—pushed for policies that led to the Thirty…
Augustine, drunk beggars, and the futility of chasing happiness through ambition and lies.
Kissinger on world order, and other books that shaped a year of reading and introspection.
But that opening scene encapsulates a feature that seems to be appearing with more frequency—at least in the handful of shows and movies I’ve watched recently: verisimilitude.
Tocqueville explains why revolutions happen where least expected—and why liberty so often ends in tyranny.
Why are tech companies spurning IPOs, and what does it mean for capital formation?
Blowouts, vomit, and two hours' sleep: a status update from the parenting trenches.
From Iraqi death squads to emerging markets: the path from counterinsurgency to private equity.
The Mahābhārata on intellectual vanity: each man lauds his own mind, bewildered in his own way.
If technology drives deflation faster than central banks can inflate, monetary policy becomes a wet noodle.
Sometime within the next three months I shall become a father. So begins the last big adventure, a maelstrom of unequal parts agency and cupidity.
Kissinger's meditation on world order raises a question: have America's universal values themselves undermined international stability?
In the article, Fallows discusses the crisis in civil-military relations that has been building over the last 15+ years, and argues that this state of affairs has negatively impacted the country’s ability to fight and win wars.
Following the smashing success of last year’s post on my favorite books from 2013 , I thought I’d aim for a repeat and perhaps inspire some gift ideas for the holidays. Here are 11 standouts that I remember from this year.
Six years of unconventional monetary policy, and central bankers still pretend not to know who benefited most.
Kissinger's essay suggests the crisis isn't tactical but civilizational: the West imposing norms on cultures with incompatible histories.
Somehow you can earn a degree in international relations without reading the one book that explains everything.
Some people show up to look good; others show up to become capable when decisions actually count.
That a Yale English professor wrote the sharpest Obama critique—in a UK publication—says everything about American discourse.
Capital markets signal the best of all possible worlds; the real world whispers that order is giving way to chaos.
A chart on regional life satisfaction—and no, it's not measuring the country you assumed.
Marcus Aurelius on the sameness of human striving across ages, and proportioning effort to what actually matters.
Expectations for Lagos were subterranean; the reality proved appalling, fascinating, and stranger than imagined.
Henry Adams on Rome as the monument to civilization's failure, and the city that dwarfs teachers.
The New Yorker piece brought to mind a relatively recent weekend layover in Munich that ended with a pretty sweet, impromptu techno music experience.
On the tradeoff between freedom and happiness, and Plato's account of how prosperity destroys character.
David Rubenstein's hypothesis that humanities yield more cash than STEM—and why I have my doubts.
Driving through gutted America, where technological unemployment meets the growing pains of over-rapid change.
Eight books that stood out in 2013, from Packer's unwinding America to McMaster in Tal Afar.
Pope Francis attacks the invisible hand: growth in justice requires more than economic growth alone.