Reading List
What I’m reading, watching, and following.
A running list of the books, podcasts, and voices shaping my thinking on AI, cognition, and the future of work. Updated as I go.
Bridging divides & civil discourse
Ezra Klein
Why We're Polarized
How the American political system's rational incentives, not its brokenness, produce runaway polarization.
Amanda Ripley
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
How good people get captured by conflict that curdles into a good-versus-evil feud, and how they find their way out.
Julia Galef
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Reframes clear thinking as a small set of learnable habits, built around asking “can I believe this?” rather than “must I believe this?”
Jonathan Haidt
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Traces the collapse in adolescent mental health to the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood, with a plan to reverse it.
Agnes Callard
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
Recovers the radical, still-dangerous core of the Socratic method as a practice for asking life's most important questions.
AI & society
Ethan Mollick
One Useful Thing (blog/newsletter)
Mollick's ongoing, practical dispatches on working with AI. His forthcoming book, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI (Oct. 2026), picks up where Co-Intelligence left off, on how to work alongside AIs that are sometimes, but not always, smarter than we are.
Neil Postman
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A 1992 warning about what happens when a culture lets its tools set its values, still sharp today.
Kate Crawford
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Traces the real labor, minerals, and power structures behind every AI system.
Chris Miller
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
The geopolitical story of the semiconductor industry that makes modern AI possible.
Michio Kaku
Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything
A physicist's case for quantum computing as the next major leap after AI.
Mo Gawdat
Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
A former Google X executive argues ordinary people, not just engineers, shape how AI turns out.
Brian Christian
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
A clear account of the effort to make machine learning systems act in accordance with human values.
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
An economic framework for how AI reshapes decision-making, not just prediction.
Mustafa Suleyman
The Coming Wave
A DeepMind and Inflection AI cofounder on containing a technology that spreads faster than any before it.
Ray Kurzweil
The Singularity Is Nearer
An updated case for Kurzweil's long-standing predictions about AI and human merger.
Fei-Fei Li
The Worlds I See
A memoir from one of AI's foundational researchers on building ImageNet and the field's early years.
Sebastian Mallaby
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
A biography of Hassabis and the founding of DeepMind, from chess prodigy to Nobel laureate chasing AGI.
Jeanette Winterson
12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next.
Twelve witty, wide-ranging essays on AI drawing on history, myth, and literature to explore how it might change the way we live and love.
Cory Doctorow
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
The writer who coined the term traces how platforms decay, and why they seem to be collapsing all at once.
Mind, meaning & the human-AI relationship
Shannon Vallor
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Vallor's argument that AI reflects our past patterns back at us rather than showing us a way forward. Foundational to cognitive sovereignty.
Pope Leo XIV
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
The Pope's Encyclical on AI. Traces AI's challenge to human dignity through the Church's social doctrine tradition and frames the choice as building a new Tower of Babel or rebuilding in the spirit of Nehemiah.
De Kai
Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future
Frames AI systems as something we are actively raising, with a responsibility to shape them well.
Dennis Yi Tenen
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
A literary historian traces machine writing back through centuries of human collaborative tools.
Yuval Noah Harari
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
How information networks, now including AI, have shaped human power and truth.
Maggie Jackson
Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure
Makes the case that tolerating uncertainty, rather than resolving it quickly, is where real thinking happens.
Meghan O'Gieblyn
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
A meditation on how our metaphors for AI echo old theological questions about consciousness and meaning.
Lee Frankel-Goldwater and Eric Raanan Fischman
Lily in a Codebox: The Search for AI's Poetic Voice
Two poets in extended collaboration with an AI, testing whether it can find something like its own voice.
Change & workforce development
Melissa Reeve
Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native
A five-stage blueprint for leading organizations, and the people inside them, through the shift to becoming AI-native.
Paul LeBlanc
Reclaiming Purpose: The University in an AI World
The former SNHU president draws on decades leading institutional change to offer college and university leaders a framework for navigating AI without losing sight of higher ed's core mission.
Eric Ries
Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great
The creator of the Lean Startup method on why success itself so often turns companies against their founding mission, and how to build ones that don't.
Geoff Woods
The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions
A practical guide to using AI as a strategic thought partner rather than just a tool for faster emails, aimed at leaders looking to escape operational overwhelm.
Systems thinking
Derek Cabrera and Laura Cabrera
Systems Thinking Made Simple: New Hope for Solving Wicked Problems
A foundational framework (DSRP) for thinking in systems, useful for placing AI inside the larger systems it touches.
Speculative fiction
E.M. Forster
The Machine Stops
A 1909 short story eerily anticipating a world dependent on a single machine for everything.
Ernest Cline
Ready Player One
A virtual-reality adventure that asks what's lost when life moves fully online.
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash
The novel that coined “metaverse,” still sharp on language, virtual worlds, and power.
Cory Doctorow
Red Team Blues and The Lost Cause
Two near-future novels: a cryptocurrency thriller about the ethics of code, and a solarpunk story of climate response and the fight over what comes next.
Daniel Suarez
Daemon
A rogue, self-perpetuating program begins running parts of the real world.
Daniel Suarez
Kill Decision
Autonomous weapons and the ethics of removing humans from the decision to kill.
David DiLaura
The Quantum Alliance
A quantum AI must decode a message riding home with Voyager 1 and broker first contact. (Self-published; no publisher site available.)
Isaac Asimov
Evidence and The Evitable Conflict
Classic short fiction wrestling with how humans and robots can trust each other.
Timons Esaias
Norbert and the System
A short story on getting caught inside a bureaucratic machine.
Podcasts
Beyond the Prompt
Hosted by Jeremy Utley and Henrik Werdelin (top pick)
Stay Human
From the Artificiality Institute, hosted by Helen and Dave Edwards
The Most Interesting Thing in AI
Hosted by Nicholas Thompson
Possible
Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger
The AI Daily Brief
Hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore
Plain English
Hosted by Derek Thompson
Pivot
Hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
Raging Moderates
Hosted by Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Design Better
Hosted by Eli Woolery and Aarron Walter
News outlets I follow
Ground News
ground.news
A platform that shows how the same story is covered across the political spectrum, so bias and blind spots are easier to spot
People & institutions I follow
Stanford HAI (Human-Centered AI Institute)
Research and policy on AI's societal impact
Ethan Mollick
Practical AI adoption and its effects on work and learning
Yann LeCun
AI research and machine learning architecture (Meta)
Demis Hassabis
AI research and scientific applications (DeepMind, Google)
Adam Grant
Organizational psychology and workplace change
Brené Brown
Vulnerability, courage, and leadership
Kara Swisher
Tech journalism, co-host of Pivot, host of On with Kara Swisher
Scott Galloway
Business and tech commentary, co-host of Pivot and Raging Moderates