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The cover describes Stratfor (the intelligence company Friedman founded) as a “Shadow CIA”. By this book’s description of the CIA, this implies it has a lot of details right but misses many important broad trends. The book tends to have weaknesses of this nature, being better as a history of Al Qaeda’s conflict with the […]

Rare Earth : Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe provides some fairly strong (and not well known) arguments that animal life on earth has been very lucky, and that planetary surfaces are typically much more hostile to multicellular life than our experience leads us to expect. The most convincing parts of the book […]

Book review: A Theory of Everyone – The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going Energy, culture and a better future for everyone, by Michael Muthukrishna. I found this book disappointing. An important part of that is because Muthukrishna set my expectations too high. I had previously blogged […]

Book review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney. Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book. Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are […]

Book review: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, by Peter Zeihan. Are you looking for an entertaining set of geopolitical forecasts that will nudge you out of the frameworks of mainstream pundits? This might be just the right book for you. Zeihan often sounds more like a […]

Book review: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman. An author with substantial AI expertise has attempted to discuss AI in terms that the average book reader can understand. The key message: AI is about to become possibly the most important event in human history. Maybe 2% of […]

Book review: Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia. This year’s book on aging focuses mostly on healthspan rather than lifespan, in an effort to combat the tendency of people in the developed world to have a wasted decade around age 80. Attia calls his approach Medicine 3.0. He wants people to […]

Book review: How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. This is a well-written review of why different countries have different wealth, i.e. mostly about the industrial revolution. The authors predominantly adopt an economist’s perspective, and somewhat neglect the perspective of historians, but manage to fairly […]

Book review: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Paul Scharre. Four Battlegrounds is often a thoughtful, competently written book on an important topic. It is likely the least pleasant, and most frustrating, book fitting that description that I have ever read. The title’s battlegrounds refer to data, compute, talent, and institutions. […]