Writing

Before we get to my best reads, here are the three pieces of writing I published this year:

• Notes on China - Some reflections on China after spending two weeks there. People are still underestimating and under-appreciating the competition that China offers the West. I’ve started to see more sentiment recognizing this, e.g. from biotech people and regarding luxury brands.
• MEV and the Limits of Scaling - A long form thesis arguing that MEV is the dominant limit to scaling blockchains further. Includes a lot of interesting and new data.
• What I’ve been reading - March 2025 - The books that I read up until March and a brief review of Blindsight (one of my favorite books of the year).

I hope to write more in 2026. Now, onto my best reads. As an experiment, this year I’ve shared more books and some more color along with them.

Non-fiction

• The Venture of Islam - Rich three volume history of the rise(s) and fall(s) of Islam throughout its history. It deals not just with the religion, but more broadly the cultural, political, and social world associated with Islam (“Civilization”). I was particularly interested in Islamic civlization’s inability to effectively respond to the arrival of modern European nation states, and the diagnosis for why. I did not know much about the initial response, or the different serious efforts that occurred trying to turn Islamic countries into European style nation states.
• Coercion, Capital, and European States - A book about the feedback loop between war and state-building. I had not appreciated the extent to which state capacity was related to war in the early days of the nation-state. I also appreciated the idea that the development of the state was really a negotiation between those with capital and those with coercive means, and that sometimes coercion dominated (Russia), sometimes capital dominated (Genoa), and sometimes coercion and capital were balanced (England).
• Escape from Rome - This book notes that China and Rome had empires of roughly the same size at about the same time. But while Rome fell and stayed fragmented, the Chinese empire repeatedly reunited. We still deal with the consequences of this simple fact today, as China’s much-vaunted history of centralization and stability is often cited to explain this or that event. The thesis of the book is that Europe’s “Escape from Rome” was central to its eventual rise, and that the stability of China’s empire was precisely why things like the Industrial Revolution did not happen there. An interesting premise and content.
• China’s Economy: What everyone needs to know - There were a few books in this category for me, but I liked this one the most. It is a relatively easy introduction to how China’s economy actually works.
• Breakneck - Dan Wang’s excellent book contrasting America and China as a “Lawyerly Society” vs an “Engineering State.” I appreciate the effort to reframe the two societies into new dimensions other than what’s typical, and Dan’s writing is excellent.
• Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History - I hadn’t been exposed to a good case for why the Iranian state was actually a highly rational actor before this book.
• Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski - Brzezinski's master’s thesis was that the Soviet Union was unstable because people in its satellites identified more with their ethnic or national identity than as Soviets. That singular insight, decades later, ended up driving US foreign policy and was arguably right. It is striking to see that kind of long-range thinking play out at the highest levels of history. I also liked Zbig’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard which is quite prescient.
• Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Tells a story about the history of science and faith, and gives some arguments for how to reconcile these two using contemporary quantum physics thought. I enjoyed the history of science, and particularly the introduction to John Wheeler’s ideas, like the notion that consciousness is fundamental to the universe because the universe needs observers to collapse wave functions. Or his time-bending delayed choice experiment.

I spent much of this year reading at a high level of abstraction. The history that interested me the most was a very deep kind, the sort that reaches far across both time and national borders. There wasn’t a precise thesis upfront, but looking back the rough lines of inquiry were something like: What have the great civilizations of history been? How have they differed? Why did West overtake them all when it did? And what does this say, if anything, about its ongoing decline?

If you put together all the works I read this year, the resulting model of the world is something like this: After the Romans there was never a single empire that sustainably ruled Europe. That political fragmentation led to a dynamic environment for invention, and escalating Darwinian pressure for state capacity. Eventually the states that survived were the most competent at accumulating capital and coercive means. When these states burst out of Europe they outmatched everything else they came into contact with. The rest of the world was not the same kind of pressure cooker Europe was, nor did it have time to reform and respond to Europe’s advance. Indeed, a few of the other great civilizations of history had been too stable, so they had little incentive to pursue the radical reforms that Europe was forced into by its environment. Thus, Europe became the hegemon of the world, at least for a time.

This is a reductive model of history, and it leaves out other obvious explanatory variables (culture, geography, institutions, etc) that some of the books on my list treat at more length. But even still, I think it is an interesting lens to look at the world through and a good model to keep in mind whenever something like the The End of History worldview is invoked. In contrast to the End of History placing liberal democracy as the inevitable, rational endpoint of humanity, this picture of history suggests that the West’s institution were specific adaptations that survived a specific, brutal tournament. A sort of winning technology for a set of historical conditions best suited for accumulating capital and wielding coercion, and certainly not destined to organize the world according to its whims.

Indeed, it also suggests that if the conditions of the world shift or the West loses its raw state capacity then the future is not guaranteed to look like the present. History not as logical process towards a moral destiny, but an evolutionary tournament towards whatever marshals resources best in the long run.

And yet there is also a strange optimism to be found in this interpretation. If the atrophying of the West has been from a lack of competition, then the return of genuine evolutionary pressure may serve as a forcing function to break us out of our stasis. If you squint you can already see some of this happening today.

Fiction

• Blindsight - A thought provoking first contact story whose central idea is that consciousness is an evolutionary disadvantage. It challenges a lot of commonly accepted notions about intelligence. That being said the ideas redeem the writing. I wrote a review of Blindsight at more length here.
• Permutation City - Written in the 90s, this novel explores a near future where technology has grown advanced enough for people to copy themselves into a computer simulation that experiences itself as if it was real. A thought-provoking and prescient book.
• The Years of Rice and Salt - An alternate history work of fiction that explores how history would be different if Europeans had been entirely wiped out by the Black Plague. There are a lot of interesting counterfactuals explored, like the Chinese reaching America first, or the Industrial Revolution happening in India first. The book got a bit long for me and I didn’t like the conclusion, but I still liked it a lot.
• Asimov’s Robot Series - In addition to the three Robot Series books (Caves of Steel, etc) I also would add in I, Robot as well as Robots and Empire. I enjoyed these books a lot. As standalone works, they seem to me to be the best in the entire Robot/Foundation series. Asimov was thinking about what we’d call AI alignment today decades before even the Internet was created. Even given their age, these continue to be interesting meditations on AI and how alignment might go poorly or well. I also appreciated Asimov’s world building, where different worlds each serve as a sort of experiment that he uses to explore something about sociology. Usually in relation to technology.
• Foundation and Earth - This is a book that represented for me the arc that I was looking for in Asimov’s Foundation series otherwise. I actually skipped most of the Foundation canon, and instead sought out specifically Daneel’s story. So that meant Foundation’s Edge, the Prelude to Foundation/Forward The Foundation, as well as Foundation and Earth. What compelled me the most here was the centuries long look at competing ways of organizing society and their associated governance problems. These books meditate on rationality, central planning, stability, agency, and related ideas. But, you should read them for the ideas without much expectation for the story itself, which was lacking at times.

This year I went through a couple of the greats in the hard sci-fi canon. It is a bit trite to say, but it is remarkable how applicable some of these were to the present day. Parts of Blindsight are quite prescient regarding AI, and the compute markets and private compute hoarding for agents in Permutation City seem plausible.

Most striking and enjoyable for me was the Asimov Canon. I like the way that Asimov treats culture, incentives, institutions, and technology as drivers of history. His stories read like vehicles to convey these ideas, which means you’ll suffer if you read primarily for storytelling. I also appreciated the sheer scale of Asimov’s ambitions. Few authors write treatises that seriously grapple with civilizational and galaxy scale ideas in the way Asimov did.