• Steven Johnson: Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians. A serialized account of the earliest, pre-historic civilizations, which will also come with its very own LLM chatbot? Sign me up! Johnson has been a subject matter expert for Google’s NotebookLM project since back when it was called Project Tailwind, so it is not a surprise that he is also its promoter. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• Joseph Epstein for The Free Press: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands. Although only mentioned in passing, any essay that highlights the idiocy of transcendetalists gets my recommendation. See also, and in much greater detail, Venkatesh Rao’s description of waldenponding.
• Joan Westenberg: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation. A well-made dig at Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk is also much appreciated, as is this exquisite critique of Joe Rogan and the entire marathon-length podcasting enterprise:

A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can’t fact-check something as easily when it’s buried in hour two of a podcast. You can’t easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

• Molly White: The year of technoligarchy. An account of the last five years in tech with a looks towards 2026, in which “[w]e’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.” Kyla Scanlon hit similar notes last month.
• John Nerst: 2025: The Final Final Year. Always good to see signs of life from a blog I thought was defunct. Nerst is close to publishing a book, “Competitive Sensemaking”, which is a topic he has covered in the blog since 2016 (!?) and one that has gotten ever-more relevant since then (see Westenberg, White and Scanlon above). So, I will gladly add Nerst’s book to the pile once it is out, and would happily preorder it, if only there were a way to do so.
• Nikita Prokopov: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. A beautifully illustrated case against the new MacOS visuals. Like I needed another reason to ditch Apple.

Apple in China was a difficult book to read. Not because of the prose — the words flow beautifully and the chronology is easy to follow — but because after each chapter I was questioning my relationship with Apple products and second-guessing my decision from 2012 ⊕ An interesting year, that one, as I had also decided to detach from Google; facebook account deletion came the following year. Two for three ain’t bad.to go all-in on their ecosystem.

The first issue is what they did: supporting, even enabling, of an autocratic regime that has no respect for personal freedom, privacy, or culture other than Xi’s. Whether they sleepwalked into it at first makes little difference. That Xi Jinping was a dictator-in-waiting was clear to some soon after he came to power in 2013, become even clearer in 2016 when he designated himself core leader and obvious even to the willfully blind in 2018 when he abolished term limits. That last step was seven years ago, and each year from 2013 to 2018 Apple was investing tens of billions of dollars into the economy.

The second is why they did it: to increase shareholder value. This is as far away from the 1984 athletes and the 1997 crazy ones as you can get. There was no reason why Apple products could not have been made around the world — per the book, Samsung has only a token presence in China, and manufactures its chips in Korea in the US. But at what cost? And with what margins? Profits seduced the company right into a quicksand trap. McGee and his interviewees have a difficult time imagining it escape.

The third, and most painful to read, was the how: by being ruthless in negotiating and relentless in what they demanded of their employees. It is a company of sharks that destroy their partners and chew up their employees in pursuit of engineering excellence higher margins. You do net get to a trillion dollar valuation by being a minnow.

I first heard of the book in May 2025, on The Talk Show. I would like to think that John Gruber was under its influence back in March when he wrote that something was rotten in the state of Cupertino. That article was about the false advertising of Apple “Intelligence”, but the rot started much earlier and is infinitely deeper. Warren Buffet was smart to have been selling, and I should get smart about detaching.

Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!

1. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison, who is among my favorite writers. I will also most likely re-read Viriconium, which is among the best short story collections out there, just make sure to get the edition with the “correct” story order. He also has a blog through which I learned about at least two good books.
2. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, while re-reading Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which are part of the same collection.
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which got on my radar after seeing One Battle After Another and learning it was based on several of Pynchon’s stories. So, I picked up an easy one to get acquainted with his work.
4. Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Gross, as recommended by Cory Doctorow whose Enshittification I very much enjoyed.
5. Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which I am reading now and is making me realize what a horrible corporate citizen Apple was and most likely is, though all of those issues are probably more salient so soon after reading Enshittification. Still, you don’t get to a $1T valuation by being a minnow!
6. Breakneck by Dan Wang. At this point I have read so many podcasts and essays by, with and about Wang that I wonder what would be the point of reading the book itself, but I am a completionist.
7. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which was itself recommended in Thinking With Tinderbox, from a journalist embedded in a software development team for a new type of a PIM app (remember those?) called Chandler. Just seeing a few screenshots of the never-quite-released app will help you realize why I have the book.
8. Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. This book is six years old which from its mini-review in the FT seems to be a good case for regulating big tech written by someone from big tech (the author was Microsoft’s general counsel for 17 years).
9. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. I don’t remember who recommended this but I love reading about style guides and writing tips, if not necessarily implementing them.
10. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book 1 by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. A very good friend has been hounding me for years to watch Vervaeke’s 50-part lecture series of the same name, but who has the time? Let me know when he has a book out, I told my friend, and so here we are.
11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurus by Steve Brusatte, as recommended by Matt Wedel of the SV-POW blog. Just keeping up with my kids' interests!
12. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, which I picked up at random at last year’s National Book Festival after seeing it has at least a few pages on Twain’s friendship with Nikola Tesla.
13. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, just so I could learn what on Earth happened with his cancer (non)treatment.
14. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparaouhova and The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by various authors, both released by Metalabel. Dark forests, of course, being very much top of mind for me lately.

Another great year of reading, and with a back log the length of human history why would every year not be as great?

Fiction

1. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, which if I were being pedantic should be books 1–3 but I view this particular trilogy as really just the final book, That Hideous Strength, with two extended prologues.
2. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, last in the Terra Ignota trilogy, made me want to read The Illiad.
3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, even better than I remembered it from 20 years ago.
4. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir will make for a good movie but please do not watch the trailer unless you want to see a major mid-story spoiler.
5. Babel by R. F. Kuang felt rushed and ultimately forgettable.

Science and technology

6. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows was the best introduction to systems thinking for people in your life who are not into systems thinking.
7. How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, a slice of Incerto applied to large projects.
8. The Notebook by Roland Allen, better than I expected.
9. In the Beginning… Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, an essay that aged very well indeed.
10. A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, a billionaire turned neuroscientist.
11. Thinking With Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein will be useful only to users of the Tinderbox app but if you are reading this you may want to take a look.
12. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, a much needed antidote to the pro-big tech authors I tend to listen and read.
13. The Occasional Human Sacrifice by Carl Elliott, an antidote to the pro-clinical trial authors I tend to follow, though I still question whether it was needed.
14. The Billion-Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth, yes, biotech is broken by design.

Philosophy and religion

15. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis will be on my yearly re-read list because sadly the anti-human movement has gone from strength to strength propelled by useful idiots who think that this time it’s different.
16. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was hilarious.
17. A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher opened my eyes to Shumacher’s work which is as timely as ever.
18. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, the world could have taken a turn for the better in the late 1970s but then something happened.
19. Good Work by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was not as strong as the first two and has an uncomfortable addendum about superior people tacked on at the end so I still don’t know what to make of it.
20. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, who sounds like a delightful person to be around and the half-lotus is in fact my preferred position for reading books but that is as far as my Earth-locked self will go into Eastern mysticism.
21. Books - A Manifesto by Ian Patterson, delightful.
22. Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds was a better introduction to Wittengstein and Poppper’s works than any formal biography.
23. Feline Philosophy by John Gray, mediocre.

And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 though of course the book reviews go way back.

📚 Finished reading: Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, which is a continuation of his blog posts and essays on the word he coined. I was worried that this would be a pointless pad-job, like what David Graber did for his similarly scatological Bullshit Jobs. But no, the topic is deep and Doctorow’s book explores those depths with competency and good humor.

What I most appreciate is that the solutions aren’t of the end-user “use paper straws” type. The point is not to boycott Amazon, leave all social media, move to a Kaczynski-style cottage; rather it is to put pressure on local, state and federal lawmakers to do their jobs and prevent the country’s slide to full-on technofeudalism. This is another delightful term, popularized by Yanis Varoufakis who himself has direct experience working for a feudal lord, Valve. Yes, there is a book and yes, I it is now on the ever-growing pile. Although, I still plan on canceling our household’s Prime subscription and redirecting the money to EFF.

Note that Doctorow describes himself as leftist and calls people “comrade”, a term at which I tend to recoil. He also sings praises to the EU legislature, of which I am profoundly sceptical. Still. We can agree that Big Tech is too big and that their bosses are too cozy with the government, and that between European Union’s incompetence and the American increasingly corporatized state only one has a straight path to totalitarianism, the final destination of end-stage enshittification.

📚 Finished reading: Books - A Manifesto by Ian Patterson, which is the sort of book that leaves you with a long list of even more books to read. A delightful problem to have!

I have been using OmniFocus since 2016 and from the very beginning have kept a running list of blog post ideas which I almost never use. ⊕ “Write about Taleb’s VC quote” says an entry from October 11, 2024. More than a year later I did write about it, but not because I saw it on the list and have in fact only just now realized that it was on the list in the first place. The oldest active entry is from August 15, 2021: “Write about theoretical biology”. The second-oldest is from four days later: “Write about Waddington’s epigenetics”. This was a few months before I had read any of his books, so maybe it was just mine discovering what Waddington did? In any case, consider this post as a way to cross both of these tasks off the list.

And yet again, the writing is not prompted by any list, but rather by this question on X — what are the major breakthroughs in biology that were idea-driven arguments based on existing data — which duly reminded me of CH Waddington (or, as iOS 26 autocorrect misspelled it just before I had hit return, “CH Washington”). Waddington, a proponent of theoretical biology as a parallel to theoretical physics, organized symposia in the late 1960s on the topic. Alas, it never took off. He died in 1975, age 69, just in time to see research funding for experimental biology skyrocket making everyone an experimental biologist. The theoretical part is now mostly mathematics: see, for example, the Mathematical Oncology newsletter, but what Waddington proposed was not really maths. Interestingly enough the man behind the newsletter, Jeffrey West, has co-authored a paper with Taleb that was very Waddingtonian, with a recent follow-up and a whole book (which I am yet to read).

For an example of what Waddington wrote about see his most well-known work: the epigenetic landscape, proposed before we even knew what genes were. To me these were incredibly useful when thinking about differentiation of complex cells and how it can go sideways. It is also incredibly annoying that the term epigenetic has been hijacked by molecular biologists to mean solely chemical changes to DNA and adjacent proteins which are more likely than not merely a sideshow to what really controls gene expression (3d structure, mRNA, other genes, i.e. everything that goes into a gene regulatory network). Ask a doctor what epigenetics means and the first thing they say will be acetylation and methylation, and if they are oncologists they will talk about “epigenetic drugs” whose job is to inhibit methylation (“hypomethilators”), or what not. I would wager that GLP1 inhibitors like Ozempic are more epigenetic than the most active hypomethilator, but I may as well go after windmills.

Now, the person who asked the question that kickstarted this thinking is the founding editor of Assimov Press which is a charming publication about science and scientific progress. I hope his asking questions will lead to more writing about what happened to theoretical biology and that I’ll learn more about people who carried the flame (or, more likely, rediscovered the concept after everyone forgot about poor old Waddington).

Update: Dr. West has pointed me to the work pf Sui Huang from the Institute for Systems Biology who has tried to bring to terms the two different meanings of epigeneticts with explicit tie in to GRNs. I am sure that very paper is where I got the notion from, but have of course completely forgotten about it. Thank you, Jeff!

📚 Finished reading: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, which I had first read 20-some years ago and found merely amusing. Well, Vonnegut was in his late 40s and I turn 42 next month, and I found the entire thing more than just amusing this time around. Listen:

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. “The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything. “They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ “And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness. “Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.

Ain’t that the truth…

The Billion-Dollar Molecule tells the story of the late 1980s and early ’90s world of biotech. The only change since then has been that ⊕ Well, there is one more difference. One billion United States dollars in September 1989 is 2.5 billion of 2025’s USD. one no longer faxes a manuscript and sends supplemental materials by snail mail when submitting to the journal; the personalities, incentives, tradeoffs and challenges are all the same.

Also typical of biotech, and sobering, is that 95% of industry-led research Werth described in the book did not matter: for all the lofty ideals of rational drug design espoused at road shows in investor slide decks, Vertex would chase one fad after another hoping for a hit. Once it got one, a truly life-changing set of drugs for cystic fibrosis, it had burned through so much money and became so profit-driven that it actively blocked low and medium-income countries from developing generic versions. Score for big pharma, which has no qualms about giving away drugs where they are needed.

The story was engrossing enough for me to tolerate Werth’s pulpy writing style, full of adjectives for tortured scientists and smoke-filled rooms. One could easily imagine it serialized on Netflix with distinct chapters, and it had indeed been shopped around, apparently without success. That last link ends with a side note that a movie about Theranos was also planned, and the juxtaposition is apt: more than once Werth notes the dramatic discrepancy between what Vertex management tells investors and the ground truth in the labs. There is certainly a difference between the sociopathy of Elizabeth Holmes and the goings on at your typical fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants private startup, just not as large as you may think. This is, after all, why most of them go bust.

If you liked Ted Gioia’s reminiscence of David Foster Wallace that I linked to yesterday, you will love Gioia’s follow-up post with recommendations on where to start if you would like to read DFW’s work. To this I would add a plug for The End of the Tour (2015) which is now on my to-watch pile.