2025 in Books: Hinge Years

In 2025, AI became impossible to ignore. I submitted to the siren song, and returned to industry, this time with headquarters in Redmond. The SF-Redmond commute brought transit time, more reading time, and twice as many books as last year (109 vs. 54). My focus reverted back to English, though AI translated Chinese is creeping into short-form content. Books settled into three foci: AI (mostly disappointing), 20th-century presidents (useful grounding), and escape—fiction, with a few deliberate turns toward print and poetry.

AI: Winter is coming, but we dream of Spring

AI is a technological revolution. We treat that as obvious. Its economic and social consequences are not. Most AI books right now are weak. The ones that sell tend to focus on misconduct by current tech giants—Apple in China, House of Huawei, Mood Machine, Careless People. Useful, but narrow.

The better books step back. They pattern-match. A general-purpose technology appears, spreads unevenly, and slowly forces a reorganization of everything around it. Their configuration takes a decade or more.

The framing is cyclical. Since the modern era, the sequence resets roughly every fifty years: technological revolution, financial bubble, collapse, deployment, then political reckoning. The echoes feel loud because we’re still inside the noise.

Early phases are always disorienting. The old paradigm frays. Idle capital meets radical entrepreneurship. Productivity arrives in bursts—real, but uneven—while speculation races ahead of use. Finance floods in, sometimes accelerating adoption, often distorting it. The result is a frenzy: redistribution toward those closest to the casino, funding creative destruction without much regard for outcomes.

What turns a breakthrough into a true revolution is quieter work: standards, sub-technologies, process, discipline. Only when production capital displaces speculative capital does deployment become broad and stable. Only then does a genuine golden age appear—and only then do its political contradictions become visible.

Hobsbawm’s warning lingers: the challenge is recognizing turning points in real time, not preparing for the last war. Revolutions are obvious in hindsight and chaotic up close.

If the pattern holds, we’re living in the hinge years. Financial winter is coming, but long term so is spring.

20th Century Presidents: America was always first

This year I finished out reading on the presidents of the 20th Century. Reading them side by side makes history feel less like a sequence of doctrines and more like shockwaves moving through a small, durable elite. Policies repeat. Alliances change.

One conclusion stuck: “America First” is not new. It is the reversion of the Truman Doctrine. The post-1945 project—multilateral alliances, security guarantees, managed trade, international adventurism—was historically anomalous. Before WWII, tariffs were normal, argued openly, raised and lowered as conditions changed. The default posture was national interest, not global stewardship.

Rather than review each book, here’s how the reading shifted my view of the presidents themselves:

• Hoover (+): The last engineer president. Deep faith in systems and expertise, badly matched to a political moment that wanted reassurance more than mechanism.
• FDR (-): Master of image and coalition. Less clear that he understood the economics as well as the theater. The confidence often outpaced the clarity.
• Wilson (-): More of a domestic president than a foreign policy one; personality combined with incapacitation led to a disastrous end to WWI that dramatically increased the chances of WWII.
• Truman (++): Salt-of-the-earth competence. No grandiosity. He built the transatlantic order almost accidentally—Marshall Plan, NATO—out of necessity rather than ideology. That world held for seventy years. Its expiration date is now visible.
• Eisenhower (+): The consensus candidate. Everyone wanted him. Truman hoped he’d run with him; instead he chose the Republicans and governed as a careful custodian of the system Truman built.
• JFK (-): Image-driven and unlucky. Bay of Pigs was a fiasco. Vietnam escalated. The Cuban Missile Crisis came within inches of catastrophe, salvaged despite the advice he was getting, not because of it.
• Ford (+): Honest, steady, unflashy. A reminder that competence scales when expectations are low and power is used sparingly.
• Reagan (-): Anti-communist enough to surf the McCarthy–Nixon afterwash. Missed a real chance at deeper arms reduction, constrained by domestic politics and Star Wars theatrics. Talked “big picture,” then cut taxes without cutting spending and called it strategy.
• Taft (+): Probably never should have been president. Similar policy aims to Roosevelt, but was always going to be overshadowed by his predecessor.
• Bush 41 (+) / Clinton (+): As similar in policy as Wilson / Roosevelt. Pragmatic centrism and balancing the budget. Both took flak for and successfully reined in budget deficits. This was a golden era of American centrism.
• Coolidge (-): Didn’t seem to have much to say as president, or in his biography. Perhaps the most disinterested president of the century.

Seen this way, the American arc is bending less toward progress than toward pre-WWII reversion.

Escape: Fiction and wonder

As SFO–SEA travel increased to a weekly cadence, I relied more on physical books. That started with graphic novels. Saga was better than expected: sentimental, visually precise. Akira confirmed that the film captured the core. Y: The Last Man was bad enough to end the experiment entirely.

Poetry worked better.

Short lines. No narrative inertia to maintain. It pairs well with delays and mild irritation. Reading Mary Oliver, it’s easier to imagine waiting quietly in a forest for a deer than to care about gate changes. Wind, Sand and Stars may not have been fiction, but it was close enough. Saint-Exupéry writes about flight the way others write about religion: with discipline, danger, and restraint. The planes are fragile, the desert is indifferent, and the miracle is not transcendence but survival. What stays with you is the scale.

As the year went on, I gravitated back toward more structured fantasy and science fiction—books with sharper edges and moral weight:

• The Strength of the Few and The Trouble with Peace push power to its logical conclusions. No clean victories. Competence creates new liabilities. Systems punish idealism faster than corruption.
• The Rose Field trades spectacle for atmosphere, more concerned with memory and decay than plot velocity.
• Blood Over Bright Haven was the standout: controlled, unsettling, and unwilling to let intelligence excuse cruelty. It understands institutions the way good political history does—through incentives, not intentions.

The common thread wasn’t escapism so much as order. Clear rules. Consequences that follow actions. When the real world feels diffuse, fiction that respects structure feels almost restful.

Earlier in the year, I mined Eastern European science fiction—the most reliable source of genuine estrangement. Solaris, read alongside the soundtrack, turns speculation into humility. Roadside Picnic teaches fear of the unknown without spectacle. Metro 2033 perfects resignation: the quiet horror of endurance. These books assume scarcity, uncertainty, and indifference as baseline conditions. A standard American life rarely does.

Finally, I fell into the rut of the Honorverse. Campy military sci-fi with a Mary Sue protagonist, the plot runs through three wars with a Horatio Hornblower–style arc as Honor Harrington rises from junior officer to First Lord of the Manticoran Space Navy. It isn’t subtle. Perhaps that’s the point. Order, hierarchy, and competence—an effective antidote to living inside and trying to change one of the largest organizations on earth.

Family and Algorithms

This was a fun family year, with our two kids (5, 3). Between The Anxious Generation and Behind Their Screens, I feel increasingly confident and conservative with a no-screens policy. The argument isn’t moral panic so much as developmental timing: attention, boredom, and frustration should come before they are problems.

Fatherhood didn’t offer much practical guidance. A long history of emotionally absent, status-obsessed, or simply negligent fathers. Useful mainly as a reminder that tradition can be a poor guide.

The Price of Privilege was more clarifying. Pressure, not neglect, is the modern failure mode. Over-parenting dressed up as opportunity. Anxiety mistaken for ambition. It made me more skeptical of “enrichment” as a default good, and more interested in slack—unstructured time, manageable risk, room to fail without an audience.

I also found gendered parenting books more useful than generic ones. Wild Things works not because it essentializes, but because it pays attention—to energy, aggression, and the need for physical outlets before abstraction. It treats development as something to be shaped, not optimized. Between the two kids, we got through about 40 workbooks as we started studying math in earnest, but our math sojourn is a different topic entirely.