Books of 2026

2026: Work-in-Progress.

H

How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going by Vaclav Smil is a cold shower for anyone intoxicated by techno-utopian optimism. The book dismantles fashionable narratives about rapid decarbonization, exponential progress, and frictionless transitions by grounding everything in physics, energy flows, materials, and scale. The book is brutally realistic: civilization runs on steel, cement, ammonia, and fossil fuels, and changing that is slow, expensive, and constrained by hard limits. I won’t say “pessimism,” but rather “unfashionable,” which is why it matters. Read it to recalibrate your expectations of the world around you, while, of course, still feeling inspired.

N

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari is a familiar read if you have read his prior works, such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. You will go through the provocative claim, historical anecdote, philosophical zoom-out, mild warning, and the whole shebang. I found myself doing my quick speed-reading on many pages of the book. My interest, of course, was the section on AI. The book frames AI as the information network that can generate, modify, and act on information without human understanding or consent at scale; something categorically different.

T

Everyone who likes sci-fi seems to have read The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I’m starting it just now. The book is a lot more science-sy, complete with physics, history, and philosophy. Read slowly, and enjoy the alien and intellectually bracing world the book takes you to.