What I’ve been reading

1. Constance Reid, Hilbert.  We should all be reading more mathematics these days, right?  Because the field is “on fire.”  Hilbert is not a bad place to start, and I found this book clear and biographical in a good way.  It is less on the math and more closely tied to broader German history.  Soon to come is Jeremy J. Gray, The Hilbert Challenge.

2. Ben Buchanan and Tantum Collins, The Bitter Struggle: Superintelligence, Superpowers, and the Fate of the World.  This will become the standard source on the history of chip bans, the surrounding technological developments, and chip and AI policy under the Biden administration.  Written by the people who were there.

3. Jeanna Smialek, The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics.  Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish writer and novelist, Castle Rackrent being my favorite book by her.  This study of her work is excellent and much-needed.

4. Anton Jäger Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences.  I am sorry, but this book just isn’t very good.  The title and subtitle are spot on, but the author just does not have enough accurate factual knowledge about the world.

5. Robert Alter, The Language of Fiction: The Craft of Writing and the Pleasures of Reading.  A wonderful short take on why reading fiction is so worthwhile.  As one might expect, Alter has exquisite taste.  The last two pages of the work are marred by some not very good comments about LLMs, but overall this is excellent.

There is Ed Conway, Trade World: The Ties that Bound Our Past and May Unravel Our Future.

Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who is Really Rich in America and How They Got There.  Not a b.s. whiner sort of book, based on real data and written by real economists.

Matthew Botvinick, AI & Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond, contains plenty of analysis and social science.  The author is now with Anthropic.

And Branko Milanovic, The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order.  I find his concept of National Market Liberalism useful.