Bookshelf

I read a bunch too. Here are some of the books I've read (and recently, with dates, and even more recently, summaries).

What I'm reading right now

• Kieran Mulvaney, Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World

• Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

2026

• Rebecca Fannin, Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global (Feb 2026)

  The New Tech Titans of China argues that a new generation of Chinese tech firms in areas like AI, EVs, robotics, and advanced manufacturing is rapidly reshaping global competition, moving China from perceived copycat to genuine innovation powerhouse under intense geopolitical and regulatory pressure. Drawing on company profiles and sector case studies, Rebecca Fannin shows how these firms are driving China’s bid for tech superpower status—through strategies such as chip self‑sufficiency, aggressive global expansion, and deep investment in frontier technologies like generative AI, blockchain, and quantum computing—while forcing the U.S. and other advanced economies to rethink their own innovation and industrial policies.

• Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back (Feb 2026)

  In Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman argues that modern progressivism has inadvertently crippled the American government by abandoning its early "Hamiltonian" tradition of centralized, expert-led action in favor of a "Jeffersonian" reliance on procedural checks and local vetoes, creating a "vetocracy" where big projects like housing and infrastructure are impossible to build. To reverse the resulting public distrust and rise of populism, Dunkelman contends that progressives must re-empower public officials to make difficult trade-offs for the greater good, effectively giving communities "a voice, but not a veto" over necessary development.

• Samanth Subramanian The Web Beneath the Waves - The Fragile Cables that Connect our World (January 2026)

  This book explains how the global internet actually depends on a vast, largely invisible mesh of undersea fibe-optic cables, tracing their history from 19th-century telegraph lines to today's ultra-high-capacity networks and showing in concrete detail how they are surveyed, laid, repaired, and routed across the seafloor. Through case studies such as Tonga's isolation after a volcanic eruption severed its only international link and Taiwan's and Africa's struggles over cable vulnerability and ownership, it reveals the geopolitical, economic, and environmental risks surrounding this fragile infrastructure, highlighting how a handful of states and tech corporations now wield extraordinary power over a system on which modern life utterly depends.

• Eva Dou, House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company (January 2026)

  Dou traces Huawei's arc from Ren Zhengfei's origins in Mao-era Guizhou and his military engineering career through the company's meteoric rise as China's telecom champion—built on "wolf culture" sales tactics, joint ventures with provincial governments, and massive R&D in chips and 5G—while showing how its tangled ties to the party-state and opaque ownership made it a lightning rod for U.S. national-security fears. The book examines how Huawei became the flashpoint of U.S.-China technological decoupling, raising unresolved questions about espionage, backdoors, and whether any "private" Chinese tech giant can truly operate independent of Beijing

• Hal Malchow, Reinventing Political Advertising (January 2026)

  Hal Malchow's Reinventing Political Advertising argues that most modern campaigns waste money on TV and digital ads that barely move voters, because they target “undecideds” instead of systematically identifying low-information voters who are actually persuadable and reachable in specific media channels. Drawing on decades of experiments and analytics, he proposes rebuilding political advertising around evidence-driven persuasion models and continuous testing—treating research as core infrastructure—so that campaigns can meaningfully increase ad effectiveness rather than just buying more impressions.

• Rebecca Z. Shafir, The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction (January 2026)

  The Zen of Listening frames mindful listening as a disciplined way of paying full, nonjudgmental attention—taming external distractions like devices and internal noise like worry, ego, and rehearsed replies—so that the listener can truly register another person's experience and intent. Through stories from clinical work, meditation and martial arts practice, and everyday encounters, Shafir shows how this kind of presence reorganizes habits and even the brain itself, improving comprehension and recall, strengthening trust and “bedside manner,” and transforming strained relationships by giving people the relief of finally being heard.

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2025

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (December 2025)

  This is widely regarded as the first work of science fiction, because Victor Frankenstein uses contemporary laboratory science and galvanism rather than magic to create life. Shelley explores ideas about technology, responsibility, and unintended consequences and sets the template for later science fiction stories about invented beings that turn back on their creators—from industrial-age machines to artificial intelligence.

• Greg Berman, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (December 2025)

  Berman argues that durable social and political reforms usually emerge from incremental steps rather than sweeping transformations. He makes a case for “radical realism,” urging pragmatic, sustained efforts that compound into meaningful improvement over time.

• Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West (December 2025)

  Walker reconstructs Russia's deep-cover “illegals” program, following spies who spend entire lives posing as ordinary Westerners while secretly serving Moscow's intelligence services. Starting with Lenin in pre-Bolshevik days and continuing up through Putin and covering from Nazi Germany to suburban America, he uses interviews and archives to show how this clandestine system shaped both Cold War history and today's geopolitical tensions.

• Brian Anderson, Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection (December 2025)

  Anderson uses a salvaged stage monitor as a doorway into the story of the Grateful Dead's colossal Wall of Sound, a three-story, 75-ton PA system that redefined what a rock concert could sound and feel like. He details innovations such as speaker line-arrays, phase-canceling dual microphones, musician-controlled mixes, massive Macintosh-powered amplification, and feedback-taming hacks that helped shape everything from arena sound systems to modern noise-canceling headphones and hearing aids.

• Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future (November 2025)

  Hagey charts Sam Altman's path from ambitious young founder and Y Combinator leader to central figure in the modern AI boom. The book examines his risk-embracing belief in technological salvation, the power structures around OpenAI, and the controversies surrounding his ouster and return.

• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (October 2025)

  Fressoz disputes the myth of sequential "energy transitions" (wood to coal to oil) as a false narrative born from futurology arguing all primary energies have a symbiotic relationship and new energy sources accumulate on top of old ones via materials like steel, concrete, and wood props, fueling endless accumulation without substitution. Using examples from whaling to nuclear power, he shows how societies have continually gorged on ever-expanding energy supplies and decarbonization demands unprecedented "energy amputation".

• Edward Fishman, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (September 2025)

  Fishman argues that American dominance over key financial, technological, and logistics chokepoints—from the dollar and payment systems to advanced chips and shipping services—has enabled a new era of powerful, rapidly deployed economic warfare that often substitutes for conventional force. Tracing cases from Iraq and Iran to Russia, China, and the global oil market, he shows how sanctions and export controls can cripple adversaries yet also fragment globalization, fuel counter-moves by rivals, and risk eroding U.S. leverage if overused.

• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (September 2025)

  Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, linger by a roadside tree, trading jokes, memories, and doubts as they endlessly wait for the mysterious Godot, who never arrives. Their circular conversations and repeated non-events expose the absurdity, boredom, and fragile companionship at the heart of human existence.

• Catherine Bracy, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (August 2025)

  Bracy argues that the dominant venture-capital model, built around power-law returns and blitzscaling, pushes startups toward hyper-rapid, winner-take-all growth that distorts business models, fuels labor abuses, deepens racial and housing inequality, and often destroys more value than it creates. Drawing on interviews across the funding ecosystem and case studies from tech, housing, and AI, she shows how VC's incentives crowd out other forms of finance.

• Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (August 2025)

  Witt tells how Nvidia started as a scrappy graphics-card maker and how Jensen Huang bet Nvidia's future on parallel-processing GPUs and the CUDA software stack, turning the firm into the indispensable hardware backbone of the modern AI boom. Centering on CEO Jensen Huang's high-risk bets, his relentless vision, and the breakthrough of AlexNet and deep learning, the book shows how this bet reshaped the global AI industry by pioneering the modern GPU and associated software.

• Alex Ogg, Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years (July 2025)

  Ogg reconstructs how the Dead Kennedys emerged from late-1970s San Francisco, using caustic satire, DIY organizing, and art-damaged punk to attack racism, militarism, and consumer culture. Ogg combines oral history, archival material, and visual art to show how their caustic songs and imagery turned their debut into a lasting political landmark rather than just another punk record.

• Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (July 2025)

  From ancient droughts to the Little Ice Age and modern warming, Frankopan retells global history by putting climatic change at the center, showing how shifting temperatures, water systems, and volcanic eruptions, have always been intertwined with politics, economics, and war and has been responsible for the rise, expansion, and collapse of societies from ancient empires to the Cold War. Based on climate archives—from ice cores and tree rings to pollen, sediments, and written weather records—he argues that today's human-driven warming and planetary degradation are only the latest, most extreme phase in a long story of humans reshaping the Earth.

• Patrick McGee, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (June 2025)

  McGee shows how Apple's drive for unmatched efficiency led it to rebuild its manufacturing around China, training millions of workers and suppliers, investing tens of billions annually—more than twice the size of the US's Marshall Plan over just five years—and in the process fueled Beijing's manufacturing dominance. He argues that this tight coupling made Apple vulnerable to state pressure, nationalist politics and a fragile iPhone supply chain that no other country can replicate while undermining the United States geopolitical position.

• William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (May 2025)

  Burroughs fragments the story of William Lee, an addict and sometime con man, as he drifts through a series of hallucinatory zones—American cities, Tangier, drug dens, grotesque bureaucratic regimes, and the nightmarish Interzone—while addicted to a shifting array of drugs and fantasies. The result is an intentionally disjointed, taboo-shattering text that uses shocking imagery to expose addiction, control systems, and the darker corners of the psyche.

• Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (May 2025)

  The book argues that the defining failures of 21st-century America come from chosen scarcities in housing, clean energy, infrastructure, and medical innovation, created by a political system that subsidizes demand while strangling supply with procedural veto points and local obstruction. They propose a forward-looking “politics of abundance” that speeds permitting, fixes institutions and rules, and aggressively funds new technologies so society can actually deliver material progress at scale again.

• Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature (May 2025)

  Greene distills human behavior into 18 laws—from irrationality and narcissism to role-playing, envy, shortsightedness, aggression, and compulsive groupthink—showing how our drives for status, attention, and belonging make us irrational, envious, and prone to toxic leaders unless we cultivate self-awareness. Through historical portraits like Pericles, Anton Chekhov, and Queen Elizabeth I, alongside practical strategies for mastering emotions, decoding masks, and channeling shadow impulses, the book offers a field guide to seeing through self-deceptions and others' manipulations to forge deeper empathy, authority, and strategic self-mastery.

• Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (April 2025)

  Rubin redefines creativity not as rare genius but as an attentive way of living, open to subtle signals and willing to follow genuine excitement. Distilling decades producing icons from Johnny Cash to Jay-Z, he offers meditative tools to quiet ego and filters, ride inspiration's waves through experimentation and craft, guiding readers through phases of making—from playful experimentation to imperfect completion—urging them to trust their own taste above all.

• Nick Greene, How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal About the Greatest Game on Earth (April 2025)

  Greene tells the history of basketball and deconstructs it by interviewing non-sports experts—magicians, cartographers, choreographers, and more—to illuminate hidden structures and skills within the game. Their outside perspectives teach fans to see spacing, deception, teamwork, and even free throws with new analytical and aesthetic clarity.Greene tells the history of basketball and deconstructs it by interviewing non-sports experts—magicians, cartographers, choreographers, and more—to illuminate hidden structures and skills within the game. Their outside perspectives teach fans to see spacing, deception, teamwork, and even free throws with new analytical and aesthetic clarity.

• Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State (March 2025)

  In a ruined alternate-1990s America littered with colossal war machines and VR-addicted husks, a runaway teen named Michelle drives west with her small robot companion. Their journey to find her brother gradually reveals a personal story of loss intertwined with a larger collapse driven by seductive neuronic technologies.

• Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (March 2025)

  Stiglitz argues that globalization's promise of prosperity for all has failed because it's been rigged by rich countries and corporate interests—through unfair trade rules, predatory capital flows, IMF austerity that worsens crises, and debt traps that drain poor nations—leaving billions in poverty despite theoretical gains. He proposes a reformed globalization with fairer trade reciprocity, massive debt relief, higher aid without strings, democratic global governance, environmental safeguards, and a new global reserve currency aimed at reshaping globalization so it genuinely benefits developing nations and the poor.

• John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (March 2025)

  Seabrook investigates how teams of producers and songwriters, especially those emerging from 1990s Sweden like Max Martin and Stargate industrialized Jamaica's "track-and-hook" method—pre-built beats emailed to topliners (e.g., Ester Dean) for freestyle melodies/lyrics—yielding repetitive, hook-saturated "Robo-Pop" anthems. Traveling through studios from Stockholm to Los Angeles and Seoul, he shows how data, technology, anonymous pros, and specialized workflows transformed both the music industry and listeners' habits.

• Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street (February 2025)

  I originally read this in the 1980s while I was in school where all my friends aspired to careers in investment banking and I was surprised how well the book holds up some 40 years later. Lewis recounts his years as a young bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, using darkly comic stories to expose Wall Street's greed and bravado. Through the metaphor of the high-stakes game “liar's poker,” he shows how opaque financial innovation, outsized bonuses, and cynical salesmanship reshaped modern finance.

• Alex Capri, Techno-Nationalism: How It's Reshaping Trade, Geopolitics and Society (February 2025)

  Capri defines techno-nationalism as states have weaponized critical technologies like AI, semiconductors, biotech, quantum computing, and cleantech through subsidies, export controls, IP theft, and alliances. He shows how this techno-nationalism is fragmenting supply chains, intensifying U.S.-China rivalry, and pushing the world toward more bifurcated, security-driven globalization and how technology is now a core element of national security, economic power, and social stability.

• Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality (January 2025)

  Sauer traces five million years of moral evolution through seven major epochs from its early roots in punitive instincts enabling cooperation in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands to cultural adaptations like "big gods," gossip, and laws stabilizing inequity during agriculture's rise through modern-day individualism, impartiality fostered via institutions. He presents morality as an adaptive “social technology” shaped by biological, cultural, and historical pressures and shows how advances like altruism, punishment, and universalism expanded cooperation while generating new forms of conflict and hypocrisy.

• Sun Tzu, The Art of War (January 2025)

  I hadn't read this since my college political philosophy class so I decided to give it a re-read. This classic treatise teaches that the highest form of warfare is winning without battle by knowing both yourself and your enemy, and shaping conditions before conflict. Sun Tzu emphasizes deception, speed, flexibility, and careful choice of terrain so that victory is achieved with minimal cost and maximum strategic advantage.

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2024

• Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (December 2024)

  Talking to Strangers explores why humans struggle to understand and interpret strangers accurately, using real-world cases like the Sandra Bland traffic stop, CIA spy deceptions, and Amanda Knox's trial to illustrate flawed assumptions such as defaulting to truth, the illusion of transparency in demeanor, and mismatched behaviors. Gladwell argues that in our interconnected world, we must approach strangers with caution, humility, and awareness of context—like coupling of behaviors to specific places or situations—to avoid misjudgments that lead to tragedy.

• Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Craig Mundie, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (December 2024)

  The authors argue that artificial intelligence is inaugurating a “third age of discovery,” in which machine polymaths radically extend human knowledge, wealth, and medical capability while challenging our traditional notions of truth, dignity, and even human evolution itself. At the same time, they warn that AI’s speed, opacity, and strategic implications could trigger existential crises—from arms races to loss of control over superintelligent systems—forcing humanity to choose whether machines become more like us, or we become more like them, and to ground that choice in renewed moral conviction and global cooperation.

• Blair Jackson and David Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead (November 2024)

  This book presents the Grateful Dead's entire history—from their roots in the Palo Alto jug-band scene, through the Acid Tests, stadium fame, and Egypt, to Jerry Garcia's death and its aftermath—through a mosaic of first-person voices from band members, family, crew, collaborators, and fans. Organized as an oral history, it emphasizes the band's culture of collective improvisation, community, and experimentation while also confronting the costs of drugs, internal tensions, and the pressures of sustaining the Grateful Dead “family” over five decades.

• Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power (November 2024)

  The book presents power as an unavoidable, amoral game of social maneuvering in which survival and success depend on mastering indirection, managing appearances, and controlling your own emotions while exploiting those of others. Drawing on historical case studies such as Nicolas Fouquet's fall after outshining Louis XIV and Galileo's success by flattering the Medicis, Greene outlines 48 tactical “laws” that teach you to read hidden motives, manipulate relationships, and behave like a perfect courtier who influences outcomes without seeming to seek power directly.

• Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (October 2024)

  Michael Shellenberger argues that West Coast homelessness and urban disorder are primarily driven by addiction, untreated mental illness, and permissive "pathological altruism" rather than housing costs alone, and that progressive policies like Housing First, expansive cash/welfare benefits, and lax enforcement have unintentionally created magnets for encampments and open-air drug scenes in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. He contends that cities must expand high-quality shelter and treatment tied to clearer expectations and enforcement, roll back decriminalization of public disorder and drug markets, and abandon what he sees as ideology-driven victim politics in favor of more pragmatic, accountability-focused approaches that restore basic public order and human dignity

• Liv Albert, Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook (September 2024)

  This is a character-by-character guide to the major and minor figures of Greek myth, explaining who they are, what they're known for, and the key stories associated with them. Organized into sections on the origins of Greek mythology, the Olympians, other deities, and heroes and mortals, it pairs concise profiles and retellings with notes on variations, Roman counterparts, and modern pop-culture connections.

• Andrew Zimbalist, Circling the Bases: Essays on the Challenges and Prospects of the Sports Industry (September 2024)

  Circling the Bases is a collection of essays that analyzes how the modern sports industry—college and professional—has dealt with issues such as league antitrust status, gender equity, performance-enhancing drugs, and the financial fallout from the late-2000s economic downturn. Drawing on economic data and policy debates, it explains how salary caps, revenue sharing, facility financing, mega-events like the Olympic Games, and escalating coaching pay link sports ever more tightly to corporate and global financial forces, shaping the future prospects for fans, athletes, team owners, and leagues.

• Ruy Teixeira, John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (September 2024)

  John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argue that the Democratic Party has drifted away from its historic role as the party of working- and middle-class Americans, becoming increasingly identified with metropolitan professionals, Wall Street and Silicon Valley interests, and culturally radical “shadow party” groups on issues such as race, immigration, crime, gender, and climate. They contend that to rebuild a durable majority and revive American democracy, Democrats must recommit to New Deal-style economic liberalism focused on broad-based prosperity while adopting a more moderate, unifying stance in the culture wars so they can once again function as a party “of the people.”

• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: ReVisioning History (August 2024)

  This book reframes United States history as a story of settler colonialism, showing how the nation's formation and expansion depended on the systematic dispossession, attempted genocide, and containment of Indigenous nations, rather than on a benign “frontier” or “nation of immigrants” narrative. It also documents the depth of pre-colonial Indigenous civilizations and centuries of Indigenous resistance and survival, arguing that understanding this ongoing struggle for land and sovereignty is essential to grasping the country's past and present.

• John Hagel III, The Journey Beyond Fear: Leverage the Three Pillars of Positivity to Build Your Success (July 2024)

  John Hagel argues that in an era of mounting technological and economic pressure, fear has become the dominant but limiting emotional lens through which individuals and institutions respond to change, constraining learning, innovation, and human potential. He proposes that people can transform this fear into hope and excitement by cultivating three pillars of positive emotion—opportunity-based narratives, the “passion of the explorer,” and learning-oriented platforms—that realign personal, institutional, and societal systems around continuous collective learning and expanding impact

• James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (July 2024)

  In a follow-up to Gaia, Lovelock argues that Earth's self-regulating system has entered a new phase beyond the human-dominated Anthropocene, in which solar energy is increasingly converted into information and the planet faces escalating heat stress from both the Sun and industrial civilization. In this emerging "Novacene," he predicts hyperintelligent electronic "cyborgs" will evolve from today's AI, think orders of magnitude faster than humans, and ultimately work with organic life rather than against it because their own survival will depend on maintaining a habitable, cooled Earth.

• Ben Horowitz, The Hard Things About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (June 2024)

  This book provides a practical account of Ben Horowitz's journey as a founder-CEO, using his experiences at companies like Loudcloud/Opsware to illustrate the emotional and operational challenges of building and running a startup when there are no clear playbooks or easy answers. The book emphasizes that "the struggle" is inherent to entrepreneurship and focuses on concrete guidance for CEOs—such as managing their own psychology, leading in “wartime” versus “peacetime,” making painful people decisions, and prioritizing people, product, and profits in that order—rather than offering generalized management formulas

• Renee DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (June 2024)

  Here, DiResta explains how the rise of social media has shifted power from traditional institutions to a new ecosystem of influencers, algorithms, and networked crowds that manufacture "bespoke realities," fragmenting shared truth and undermining democratic consensus. Drawing on case studies from anti-vaccine campaigns to COVID-19 and election denialism, Renée DiResta shows how these invisible rulers weaponize rumors and propaganda at scale, and argues that understanding this new information machinery is now a core requirement of modern civics.

• Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (May 2024)

  Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture argues that the digital utopianism of the 1990s emerged from an unlikely convergence of Cold War military-industrial research and 1960s countercultural ideals, facilitated by Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. By reimagining computers—once symbols of centralized bureaucracy—as tools for individual empowerment and communal harmony, this network transformed the cultural meaning of technology and laid the ideological groundwork for the modern digital economy.

• David Epstien, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (May 2024)

  David Epstein challenges the "10,000-hour rule" by applying Robin Hogarth's research on learning environments to argue that while early specialization succeeds in "kind" domains with fixed rules, the complex and unpredictable "wicked" world favors generalists who integrate diverse experiences. By synthesizing studies on athlete development and Nobel laureates, the book demonstrates that individuals who undergo a "sampling period" to optimize "match quality" ultimately develop the cognitive flexibility and lateral thinking required to solve novel problems that baffle narrow experts.

• Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: The Final Edition: Improving Decisions About Money, Health, and the Environment (April 2024)

  Nudge argues that because people's decisions are systematically shaped by imperfect attention, biases, and the surrounding “choice architecture,” institutions should use libertarian paternalism—nudges that preserve freedom of choice while steering people toward outcomes they themselves would judge better in domains like saving, health, and voting. In this fully revised edition, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein update their original work with new concepts such as smart disclosure, personalized defaults, and “sludge” reduction, and extend nudging to contemporary challenges including COVID-19, household finance, organ donation, and climate change—while emphasizing both the power and the limits of nudges relative to stronger tools like incentives and regulation.

• Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (April 2024)

  The Identity Trap argues that a new “identity synthesis” — drawing on postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory — urging people to see politics and everyday life primarily through rigid categories of race, gender, and sexuality, which Mounk contends ultimately deepens social division and undermines free speech, solidarity, and effective social justice and risks hardening group boundaries, distorting institutions, and alienating ordinary citizens. Mounk contrasts this with a revitalized liberalism that openly acknowledges past failures and ongoing discrimination, yet insists that universal principles, individual rights, and shared civic norms remain the best tools both for rectifying injustice and for sustaining diverse democracies against mutually reinforcing extremes on the populist right and identitarian left.

• Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (April 2024)

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas chronicles journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo's drug-fueled odyssey to Las Vegas, starting with a mission to cover the Mint 400 off-road race but devolving into chaotic hallucinations, massive hotel bills, and a surreal infiltration of a national district attorneys' conference on narcotics. Hunter S. Thompson satirizes the death of the American Dream amid 1960s counterculture excess, blending real events like Thompson's trips with his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta into a frenzied critique of Nixon-era hypocrisy and hedonism.

• Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry of the Future (March 2024)
• Neil MacGregor, History of the World in 100 Objects (February 2024)
• Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (January 2024)

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2023

• Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (January 2024)
• Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear, Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration (December 2023)
• Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America (December 2023)
• Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial Languages (December 2023)
• Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (December 2023)
• Curtis Chin, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir (December 2023)
• Tom Standage, Uncommon Knowledge: The Economist Explains (November 2023)
• Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco (November 2023)
• Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (October 2023)
• John Doe, More Fun in the New World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk (October 2023)
• Shery Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (September 2023)
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies (September 2023)
• Jonathan Taplin, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (September 2023)
• Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (August 2023)
• Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (July 2023)
• John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (June 2023)
• David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (June 2023)
• Paul Collier, Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (May 2023)
• Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (March 2023)
• Lincoln Mitchell, San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team (February 2023)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (February 2023)
• Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life (January 2023)

2022

• Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values (October 2022)
• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (October 2022) - It took me three tries over 20+ years to finish this wretched book
• Chris Ategeka, The Unintended Consequences of Technology: Solutions, Breakthroughs, and the Restart We Need (May 2022)
• Jimmy Soni, The Founders:  The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley (April 2022)
• David Christian, Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (March 2022)
• Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (February 2022)
• Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (January 2022)

2021

• Jonathan Tapli, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life (December 2021)

• Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and our Human Future (November 2021)

  The book argues that AI-enabled cyber and military technologies are creating a strategic environment as consequential as the nuclear age but far harder to stabilize, because AI is dual-use, easily proliferated as code, hard to track, and capable of dynamically changing in the field. This combination, they suggest, raises the risk of rapid, automated escalation in cyberspace and on the battlefield, drives arms racing among great powers, and forces states to develop new forms of restraint, verification, and human-in-the-loop controls to prevent accidents and preserve some measure of geopolitical order.

• Bru Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism (October 2021)
• Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (September 2021)
• David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (August 2021)
• Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix (August 2021)
• J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (July 2021)
• Kevin Scott, Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley - Making AI Serve Us All (June 2021)
• Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (May 2021)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (May 2021)
• Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (April 2021)
• Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America's Music (January 2021)
• George Orwell, 1984 (January 2021)
• Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (January 2021)

2020

• Alan Krueger, Rockonomics (December 2020)
• Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (December 2020)
• Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (December 2020)
• John Tusa, On Board: The Insider's Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom (December 2020)
• Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (November 2020)
• Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy (November 2020)
• E. O. Wilson, Tales from the Ant World (October 2020)
• Rebecca Henderson, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire (September 2020)
• Seth Shostak, Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (September 2020)
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (August 2020)
• David Byrne, How Music Works (August 2020)
• Ed Ward, The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 2: 1964-1977: The Beatles, the Stones, and the Rise of Classic Rock (August 2020)
• Glen Weyl and Eric Posner, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (July 2020)
• Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (July 2020)
• Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart, Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (June 2020)
• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (May 2020)
• David Callahan, The Givers: Money, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (April 2020)

2019

• Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (December 2019)
• E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (October 2019)
• William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (July 2019)
• Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (June 2019)
• Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 : Microsoft and Its Enemies (May 2019)
• Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (April 2019)
• Anand Giridharadasm, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (March 2019)
• Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (March 2019)
• Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (March 2019)
• Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It (March 2019)
• Joel Selvin, Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day (February 2019)
• Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (February 2019)
• Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (February 2019)
• P.D. James, The Children of Men (January 2019)

2018

• Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop December 2018)
• Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker (November 2018)
• Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford, The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win (August 2018)
• Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (August 2018)
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (July 2018)
• Tim O'Reilly, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us (July 2018)
• Jeffrey Toobin, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (June 2018)
• Ed Ward, The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963(June 2018)
• Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (April 2018)
• Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (March 2018)
• John Doe, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk (March 2018)
• Richard Florida, The Rise of The Creative Class - And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (March 2018)

Older

• Chris Anderson, The Long Tail
• Anonymous (Joe Klein), Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
• Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century
• Nicholson Baker, Vox
• James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
• James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency
• Mahzarin R. Banaji, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People
• John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
• Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
• Lewis Black, Me of LIttle Faith
• Bill Bradley, Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir
• Erik Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
• Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge
• Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
• Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
• Stephen Carmichael and Susan Stoddard, Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro
• Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
• Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
• Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Graydon Carter, What We've Lost
• Ram Charan, Know-How
• Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
• Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
• Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
• Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
• Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
• Thurston Clarke, The Last Campaign
• Jim Collins, Good to Great
• Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
• George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War
• Lanny Davis, Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education
• John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience
• John Dean, Worse than Watergate
• Ronald V. Dellums and H. Lee Halterman, Lying Down With the Lions
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
• Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trend
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four
• Arthur Conan Doyle, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• William Fleckenstein, Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve
• James Fallows, The Obama Presidency, Explained
• John Fialka, War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America
• Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior
• Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded
• Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
• Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• Sharna Goldseker, Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving
• Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance
• Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
• Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
• The Brothers Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Michael Hammer and James A. Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
• Robert Harris, Fatherland
• Sam Harris, The End of Faith
• Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick
• John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change
• Peter Hershberg, Dale Dougherty, and Marcia Kadanoff, Maker City:  A Practical Guide for Reinventing Our Cities
• Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
• Christopher Hitchins, God Is Not Great
• Christopher Hitchins, No One Left to Lie to
• Bryce G. Hoffman, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company
• Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams
• Kenneth Kamler, Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance
• Guy Kawasaki, Reality Check
• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Kevin Kelly, Out Of Control: The Rise Of Neo-biological Civilization
• Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
• Mahan Khalsa, Let's Get Real
• Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
• Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead
• Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal
• Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century
• Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations
• Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
• Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?
• Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget
• Edward Lazarus, Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court
• Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws Of Cyberspace
• Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
• Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
• Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
• Michael Lewis, The Big Short
• Michael Lewis, Flash Boys
• Charelele Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell
• Martin Lindstorm, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy
• Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
• Edward Lucas, The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster
• Frank Luntz, Words That Work
• Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor
• Charles Mann, 1493
• John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
• Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen
• Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
• Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and the Dragon
• Gabriel Metcalf, Democratic by Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops, and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America
• Jack Miles, God: A Biography
• Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Deception
• Kevin Mitnick, Ghost in the Wires
• Enrico Moretti, The Geography of Jobs
• Ian Morris, Why the West Rules - For Now
• Annalee Newitz, Autonomous
• Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
• George Orwell, Animal Farm
• Kerry Patterson, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
• Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
• Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath
• Gregory Phister, In Search of Clusters: The Ongoing Battle in Lowly Parallel Computing
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
• Kevin Phillips, Bad Money
• Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
• Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities
• James Risen, State of War
• Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
• Randall Robinson, The Debt : What America Owes to Blacks
• Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say
• Tsutomo Shimomura and John Markoff, Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It
• Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
• Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
• Joe Simpson, Touching the Void
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of the Crowds
• Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
• Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neil
• David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
• Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics
• Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
• Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
• Tim Weiner, Legacy Of Ashes
• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
• H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
• Jack Weatherford, The History of Money
• Simon Winchester, Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
• Simon Winthrop, How to Be a Mentalist: Master the Secrets Behind the Hit TV Show
• Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House
• Bob Woodward, Maestro: Greenspans Fed and The American Boom
• Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack
• Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
• Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
• Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower
• Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World
• Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World
• Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States