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.

🍿 The Family Plan 2 (2025) was, much like its predecessor, a tame mid-budget family action comedy of the kind they don’t show in theaters any more (and for good reason): perfect for post-prandial viewing in this holiday week.

• Ruxandra Tesslo and Asimov Press: Clinic-in-the-Loop

The case for faster bench-to-bedside-and-back type of research, with which I agree. It is remarkable, however, how each generation interested in biomedical research reinvents the wheel without checking prior art. I would also argue strongly that the (correct) thesis of the essay is not a refutation of the biotech-as-casino hypothesis but rather its confirmation, unless you enlarge “biotech” to include academia and government research but then what are we even doing. Investors have no patience for nuance and view clinical trials as dichotomous regardless of how companies try to present them, and interpreting translational research results requires even more patience and tolerance of ambiguity.

• Elizabeth Ginexi: The Quiet Power of Program Officers

Ginexi has been a program at the NIH for more than two decades, so caveat lector, but many POs are indeed mini-Moseses in their scientific domains. On one hand they perform important and valuable work, on the other the importance of a single human being to the careers of investigators young and old tend to favor those with soft skills of communication more than those of scientific and intellectual rigor. No judgements on my end because I genuinely can’t tell if the alternative would be any better.

• James L. Olds: A Grant Reviewer’s New Year Advice to Proposers: What I’d Tell My Younger Self

Some genuinely good advice on how to write grants in a way to increase the odds of them being funded, with emphasis on accepting the reviewers' comments and suggestions and approaching the grant resubmission as one would an offer to revise and resubmit a scientific manuscript, with much thanking and back-bending. Do keep that in mind when you read the next item.

• Laurel Raffington: Academia is just a job

This is true for most, as there are far too many academic right now for all of them to have soul in the game. However, academia continues to ask for more than it gives back out of too many people, while at the same time putting a negative selection pressure against people who are stubborn, single-minded and thus predisposed to a soul-in-the-game phenotype (see above). The only reason why the system survives at all is that the churn has been too low to fully reveal the tension, but it continues to creep towards the breaking point providing yet another case study of things that happen gradually and then suddenly.

• Trowaway_whistleblow on r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ‘Priority Fee’ and ‘Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. Big if true, and of course it’s true. Our family has stopped using DoorDash last year and we have never used Uber Eats so I will allow myself a moral victory lap, but the reasons for not using them were more prosaic (too slow and too many missed orders).
• Dan Wang: 2025. Wang’s yearly letter starts off with thoughts on Silicon Valley and its similarities to China. It is hard to square his generally positive disposition and stories about charming San Francisco billionaires who don’t have time to set up a bed for their mattress in a nearly-empty flat with the above product of Silicon Valley culture. In this I will agree with Wang: SV bros and the Chinese Communist Party are equally abhorrent, and for similar reasons.
• Doug Belshaw: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us. A fairly short blog post that added many new-to-me rabbit holes to a well-trodden topic that has seen many other metaphors. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Hun will likely join the pile though as a slight 72-page essay I hope it won’t stay there for too long.
• Henry Desroches: A website to destroy all websites. Another familiar topic with some clear call-to-action advice, including “Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)”, while of course being beautifully typeset and designed. So, let me get on my soapbox and state the obvious:

Key assumptions that underly this and many similar essays is that people involved have (at least) a laptop computer, know how to use it beyond Zoom and the Office suite, and want to spend time on it over and above what they need to spend on their day job. There will never be a flourishing bazaar of personal websites made by people who are not at the very list interested in web design and/or programming, if not card-carrying members of various IT professions.

I consider myself a dabbler and you are reading this via a product of said dabbling, but if the likes of Nassim Taleb or Frank Harrel or Vincent Rajkumar or whatever other luminary of your field of interest decides it’s too complicated or time-consuming to have personal websites that interact through a muddle of comments, web mentions and whatever other new standard some whiz kid comes up with. So they just keep using X or Bluesky or Mastodon, because that is also where their readers and followers and friends and family members are, so I will also have those accounts despite my best efforts, and so the wheel will keep turning and churning and spitting in and out anyone who is not IT-adjacent and many of those who are, which is to say most of the world.

This is why I am excited about what Dave Winer et al. are doing with 2-way RSS. Winer’s one-man projects have ben technically terrific but ultimately too challenging to use, so here is hoping that broader involvement will add some spit-and-polish. With social media more splintered than at any time since the late 2000s the time to strike is now.

Happy New Year, dear reader! Will 2026 be the year humanity makes it across the ravine without falling down? Let’s hope so.

(ᔥGIPHY)

📺 I will have more to write about each season of Stranger Things after the holidays. But how refreshing was it for a show to clearly distinguish between good and evil, for that evil to be cosmic not personal, and for the ending to be unambiguously happy and satisfying? Bravo, brothers Duffer.

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.

• Guru Madhavan: Compulsive tracking doesn’t measure what really counts. And this is not even taking into account Goodhart’s Law
• Diana Mariska and A. Anantha Lakshmi: Move over, Tokyo — the world has a new biggest city. It is Jakarta, which its own citizens call — and I don’t know if they actually do or if it is an FT-ism but I find it delightful — the Big Durian.
• Stephen Bush: Creativity thrives with constraints. I nod my head in agreement even as the whole family is giddy in anticipation of what will inevitably be another polished turd to premiere on Netflix tonight at 8pm EST.
• Jonathan Vincent: How the AI ‘bubble’ compares to history. But why the scare quotes, oh FT?
• Janan Ganesh: The case for denial. It all makes sense until you find yourself missing the last train out of Berlin.
• Hannah Shuckburgh: Should you have a library in your loo?. Without getting too personal I would like to point out that my reading history would have been dramatically different — and poorer — had there been smart phones back in the day.
• Chloe Fox: **I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done **. A better way to keep books, though realistically the loo is more in my wheelhouse.
• Aimee Farrell: Green Knowe, the house that inspired a children’s classic. It is about the oldest inhabited house in Britain, which is all well and good with some great-looking photos but then I imagine walking in and hitting a wall of mustiness.
• Mark Ellwood: Instagram is coming for your house move. Good. Lord.
• Oliver Smith: I went in search of spiritual renewal in Japan — and ended up being dangled off a cliff. Good. Lord. Though in a different way.

Enjoy!