Happy 2026!
For me, 2025 was a good year, a very good year. Part of that was I read a lot. On reflection, three themes jump out.
Communion
A few years ago I was at a dinner party with my friend Niko and he said “Plato says…” and then went on to quote something Plato wrote. I interrupted in jest, something like, “Well, first off, Plato died two thousand years ago so he doesn’t say anything.” This has been on my mind recently because I’ve come to think Niko was right to use the present tense.
Fully engaging in reading good writing is being in conversation with an author. Authors spend a lot of time crafting their art. And when the author is someone you love, or could have loved, it means something extra special. In those moments, reading is a channel to inner dialogues with lost friends, loved ones, lovers, philosophers, intellectuals, business people, activists, really whoever took the time to write something you deem worthy of picking up.
I’ve found reading is the best communion with people I’ve lost, and people I wish I’d known, and people I could get to know better. I’ve felt this deeply while reading this year. Reading letters and emails from lost friends. EO Wilson’s books, though I never had the chance to meet him. Blogs of people I might like to know.
There is so much wisdom stored in writing. To start listening to it, all it takes is a book, intention, attention, and a place to sit quietly -- a couch, bed, bar stool, plane seat, you get the picture.
Courage
There has been a lot of violence around free speech this year. A lot of concern about its place in society, too.
I grew up with parents often riven by political conflict. My father is a Republican formed by military experience who values family above all else. My mother is a hippie at heart, a true “bleeding heart” liberal scientist who values education above all else. In my own political leanings, I am of them both.
In my community (perhaps because of my upbringing, perhaps it’s genetic), I enjoy picking up and playing with hot topics in conversation. I try to do this respectfully.
Yet, this year friends on the left have called me “bomb-thrower,” “instigator,” and “elitist,” and friends on the right have called me “naive,” “idealistic,” and “academic.” Being labelled for voicing a different take or opinion — it’s generally good information to have about what people think, but sometimes it’s a real bummer. Opinions aren’t wrong, and of course folks are free to disagree how they’d like. But sometimes it comes across that it’s not OK to have a different opinion.
Free speech is crucial. Why? Because we need to play with ideas to understand if we believe them or not. We should be free to act them out, to try them on for a few weeks, to consider them from multiple sides, to debate them, to be told we are wrong.
We should also form ourselves to have the integrity to ask, “why am I wrong?” and listen carefully to the person giving the answer.
I highly recommend Greg Lukianoff’s Ted Talk on this, it is only 13 minutes:
Without free speech, we tend to hide opinions, or weird and dark thoughts. Occasionally with this bottling up, violent release towards self and others becomes more likely.
I was chatting to a close friend recently. They told me “I think about killing myself every other day.” I loved this. I loved this, because I love this person, they felt comfortable speaking their mind to me, and I could be there for them because I knew what was on their mind. In my past, I have had a form of this thought, but I have never voiced it. I was too afraid of what others would think. It’s a terrifying thought.
It takes courage (and sometimes, stupidity) to speak your mind, especially when you’re in a group and you believe it’s the “wrong” social context to hold your belief, or you will be judged by the people listening.
On to reading… Developing nuanced beliefs involves reading discourses you may disagree with, testing them, and convincing yourself what discourse, or mix of discourses, you believe in. Reading widely and openly among different discourses is among the best ways to understand complex problems.
Consilience
I was Wilson-pilled this year. E.O. Wilson was a naturalist specializing in the biology of social animals (sociobiology). I find his writing endlessly fascinating for what it contains about the origins of human psychology, behavior, and culture. He was also quite the philosopher.
In 1998, Wilson wrote Consilience. He introduces the term thus,
Consilience is the key to unification [of knowledge]. I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the lnductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation….
The belief in the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning is not yet science. It is a metaphysical world view, and a minority one at that, shared by only a few scientists and philosophers. It cannot be proved with logic from first principles or grounded in any definitive set of empirical tests, at least not by any yet conceived. Its best support is no more than an extrapolation of the consistent past success of the natural sciences. Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and humanities. The strongest appeal of consilience is in the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty.”
One of the great joys of reading a variety of works, politics, and discourses is that at times, consilience punches you in the face. This year I read, among others, belle hooks, BAP, and Peter Thiel. This might as well be a bit starting, “a feminist scholar, a champion of the manosphere, and a gay libertarian business titan walk into a bar…”
Among some stark differences of opinion, I notice a lot in common amongst their ideas: An overarching desire to free humans from oppression. A thought that dominance-based hierarchies suffocate human flourishing. A need to listen to human wildness and instinct, and attendant emotions, in a world that’s trying to neuter you.
No one has all the answers. Frustratingly, sometimes ‘good people say bad things’ and ‘bad people say good things.’ To me, consilience means drawing truth out by engaging with different sources, discourses, and politics, which I ‘ought not’ agree with, or maybe even I think is a little bit crazy.
Books
Anyhow… my 2025 booklist:
Nonfiction:
Fire Weather (John Vaillant) — A narrative account of the Canadian company town of Fort McMurray being vaporized in a wildfire.
Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
Half Earth (EO Wilson) — Phenomenal
Consilience (EO Wilson)
On Human Nature (EO Wilson)
The Meaning of Human Existence (EO Wilson)
The Apology (Plato)
New Atlantis and the Great Insaturation (Francis Bacon)
The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith)
The Prince (Niccolo Macchiavelli)
BOOM: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber) — A fresh take on how innovation occurs. Differentiates financial bubbles (net bad) vs. innovation bubbles (net good). Wonder why life has gotten so expensive, but we still live in an apparently old world? Read the chapter on financialization.
The Technological Republic (Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska)
Impro (Keith Johnstone) — A wonderful book on mental flexibility, pathways to instinct, and repairing miseducation.
The Courage to be Disliked (Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi)
The Will to Change (belle hooks)
Bronze Age Mindset (BAP)
Breakneck (Dan Wang)
Over Ruled (Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze)
Superbloom (Nicholas Carr) — Fill in the blanks: F__k Meta
The War Below (Ernest Scheyder) — A decent intro to the tradeoffs and complexities of mining for resources (metals, industrial minerals) necessary to enable a future of clean energy abundance. Multiple environmental discourses explored.
The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
The Philosopher in the Valley (Michael Steinberger)
Terrible Beauty (Auden Schendler) — Boo.
Fiction: I read more fiction this year. Reading a passage of good fiction is a bit like stargazing. I sit and read and reread and then put my book down and stare at the ceiling and wonder what it all means.
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
“Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…”
A Selection of Poems, e.e. cummings
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question these honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothin.
You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don’t.
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
One night the boy woke from a dream and would not tell him what it was.
You don’t have to tell me, the man said. It’s all right.
I’m scared.
It’s all right.
No it’s not.
It’s just a dream.
I’m really scared.
I know.
The boy turned away. The man held him. Listen to me, he said.
What.
When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can’t give up. I won’t let you.
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros -- dragonrider smut (listened to this triology as a booktape on long drives)
Iron Flame, Rebecca Yarros
Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros