reading
Things I've read and found insightful. In case you're interested in what shapes how I think.
Jared Diamond · 1997
Diamond asks why wealth and power accumulated so unevenly across the world. His answer starts with geography: which plants and animals could be domesticated, how crops and technologies spread, and what happened when populations with different disease histories met. An ambitious argument about how much of history was shaped by conditions nobody chose.
Colin Woodard · 2011
Woodard maps North America as eleven regional cultures whose origins predate today's political boundaries. The argument is that settlement patterns and inherited ideas about authority, freedom, and community still shape how people vote and what they expect from government. A useful way to think about why the same national debate can mean very different things in different places.
Ron Chernow · 2004
Chernow follows Hamilton from his Caribbean childhood through the Revolution and the creation of America's financial system. The biography makes the founding feel contingent and personal: debt, ambition, political feuds, and arguments over how much power a national government should have. It is also a story about the institutions that outlast the people who build them.
Robert A. Caro · 1974
Robert Moses was never elected to anything, and for forty-four years he shaped New York more than the people who were. Caro spends 1,200 pages on the machinery that let him do it: the public authorities, the bond covenants, the way a routine piece of enabling legislation can quietly hand one man a permanent power nobody meant to give him. Still the clearest account I know of how unelected power actually works, and of how much of it hides in documents that were public the whole time.
David Halberstam · 1981
Halberstam spent the 1979-80 season with the Portland Trail Blazers, two years after the championship, as the team came apart. What he actually wrote about is money, race, television, injury and what a city does with a team it loves. The best sports book ever written, and it happens to be about Portland.
John Clayton · 2019
John Muir and Gifford Pinchot get taught as opposites: wilderness kept untouched against forests managed for use. Clayton's argument is that they were collaborators before they were rivals, and that public land in America exists because of the argument between them rather than in spite of it. A good corrective if you like your history without heroes and villains.
Tim Urban · 2023
Urban's subject is not what people believe but how they hold it: the difference between reasoning your way to a position and defending one you were handed.
Mark Twain · 1901
Twain's essay is a savage critique of American imperialism in the Philippines and Western powers' colonial exploitation disguised as "civilizing missions." He skewers the gap between democratic ideals and imperial practice: the way powers frame conquest as benevolence.
This is as relevant as ever. Watch how great powers justify intervention in Ukraine, Venezuela, and the Middle East. The language has evolved ("spreading democracy," "humanitarian intervention," "responsibility to protect") but the pattern Twain identified remains: powerful nations wrapping strategic interests in moral language, claiming to liberate while consolidating control. Whether it's Russia's "denazification," America's regime change operations, or various powers' Middle East interventions, the person sitting in darkness is still being sold the same story. Twain saw through it in 1901. We should too.