This post is long overdue. I had nearly finished the draft by early January, yet never published it due to the resurgence of a head injury. Alas, life sometimes gets in the way of things.
One of the main ways I digest information is through reading. I primarily read articles and essays (in 2025, I read ~5000 articles), but I also indulge in economics papers, poetry, and books.
Below are some of my favorite works I read in 2025, in no particular order. Categories include: AI, politics, society, progress and abundance, higher education, China, India, miscellaneous (long-form) journalism, profiles, nature, personal essays, living life, economics papers, poetry, and books.
I have tried my best to limit myself to no more than 10 per category. While some are timely, the vast majority can be read at any point. Enjoy!
AI
Zhengdong Wang’s 2025 Letter: a brilliant essay on AI progress, past, present, and future.
Related: Samuel Albanie’s 2025 Letter: more on the Compute Theory of Everything.
Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow: Why, despite rapidly advancing AI capabilities, it may take time for transformative economic effects.
Could AI slow science?: a contrarian take on how AI may slow science. Even if directionally incorrect, we need more thinking like this!
Only Broken Vessels Prove the Clay: on AI’s ability to write poetry.
AI and Labor Markets: What We Know and Don’t Know: despite the pace of economics of AI research, surprisingly little has changed since this was first written.
Do AIs think differently in different languages?: an intriguing premise, with implications for AI idea variance.
AI isn’t replacing radiologists: a favorite piece in Silicon Valley world, zooming in on a single profession to analyze AI’s broader labor market ramifications.
Capital in the 22nd Century: on Piketty in a post-AGI world. I actually disagreed with much of this (Ben Thompson has a nice response), but found it thought-provoking nonetheless.
100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon: on measuring intelligence.
Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) and Where We Are Headed: pieces that pair well together, one on model progress/intelligence and the other on AI applications as agents, in science and in firms.
Politics
This Is the Story of How the Democrats Blew It on Gaza: Ben Rhodes on the morality and politics of Democrats’ stance on Gaza.
Liberals don’t have to lose on immigration: an extended version of Jerusalem’s speech at the Abundance Conference, on how liberals can turn immigration into a winning issue.
What Max Weber would say to Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates: on the Klein-Coates debate on Charlie Kirk.
A Manifesto for Liberal Trans Activism: one possible approach to (hopefully) win more hearts and minds on trans rights.
The Post-Neoliberal Delusion And the Tragedy of Bidenomics: Jason Furman on bringing back economics!
Related writing on expanding the tent, why we must have bigots in the tent, why we must be laser-focused on winning the Senate, and why the responsibility lies not with the left but with mainstream Democrats.
Understanding America’s New Right: explaining the weird, unpopular, racist ideology sitting in the White House.
I Should Have Seen This Coming: a historical and values-driven take on the Trump administration and why there may yet be hope.
Of Marx and Moloch: How My Attempt to Convince Effective Altruists to Become Socialists Backfired Completely: a thought-provoking essay on idealism, personal intellectual struggle, effective altruism, and Marxism.
How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don’t: on one of the current struggles of the left-leaning ideas space, and what Students for Abundance is hoping to help fill!
Society
The Anti-Social Century: wonderful journalism synthesizing strands across disciplines and years to explain why “self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.”
Related: the death of partying, the fizzling of humanity’s 10m year love affair with booze, and a theory of young men as the monks in the casino.
The Decline of Deviance: why people are less weird than they used to be, and the great homogenization of society.
Everything Is Television: how all of our technologies are converging to a form of television, and what it may mean for society.
How did the world get so ugly?: not an article, but a video, on the loss of beauty in our cities.
Does the conflict between cardinal utility and ordinal preferences just keep on getting worse?: observations about advanced capitalism and human agency.
We All Live in a Village Now: humanity’s transition from village to urban and…back to (digital) village?
‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’ and, relatedly, the dawn of the posthuman age: takes on the intersections of the major global trends of the 21st century (so far): AI, demographic decline, global warming, and illiberalism.
Treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco: a new approach to tech regulation.
Ignore the pessimists — we are living through a literary golden age and, of course, the opposite: the dawn of the post-literate society.
Progress and Abundance
Sustained growth through creative destruction: Nobel laureates Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt: Pete on Aghion’s and Howitt’s Nobel.
A Nobel for Innovation: more on the 2025 Nobel, with a focus on Mokyr’s work.
Why women should be techno-optimists and, relatedly, pro-progress will win when it wins women: seeking to understand the gender divide on progress studies.
The Constitution of Innovation: proposals for how Europe can catch up once again.
28 Thoughts on Abundance and Growth: arrayed thoughts on the possibilities of growth.
Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn’t you?: there are always more problems to be solved.
California’s City on a Hill: a profile of California Forever.
Varieties of abundance: it is a diverse coalition, indeed.
Capitalism needs honor and ethics: why the social responsibility of business is not just to increase its profits.
The Problems Democrats Don’t Like to See: on the so-called “abundance theory of power.”
Related: Abundance for the 99 Percent: Jacobin on Abundance.
Higher Education
The Idea of a University: Michael Oakeshotte (in 1950) on the unique role of the university.
Learning is Augmentation: investing in AI’s potential to transform learning.
The humanities should be harder: maybe part of the solution to save the humanities is: no more easy A’s!
I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is: an essay thinking through what represents real academic progress (hint: not citations!), in light of fraud.
What Ethiopian runners taught me about reading scientific literature: a lovely essay on how Ethiopian runners run and lessons for academic research.
American higher education is adrift: what are universities for, really?
China
🌻 america against china against america: travel notes on China.
Dan Wang’s 2025 Letter: a dizzying array of connections, from culture to tech to politics and more.
The Players on the Eve of Destruction: on the resilience of Taiwan, and what we hope may never come to pass.
The Xi Jinping School of Journalism: the education and reeducation of a Mongolian reporter.
Story of A Beijing Vibe Coder: $50,000 in Claude tokens per month.
Will this be the Chinese Century?: and how will China’s and America’s greatness differ?
Where Mao’s Peasants Tilled the Soil, Tourists Now Pay for the View: transformations in Dazhai.
The China Tech Canon: and how does it differ from the Silicon Valley canon?
Reading Abundance from China: a book club with Chinese immigrants.
A Science Fiction Writer Wrestles With China’s Rise, and His Own Decline: a profile of Han Song.
India:
The Paradox of India: how India contains multitudes that still coexist.
The world’s most audacious railway project: a bridge in the otherworldly Kashmir Valley.
The Diaspora Paradox: perspectives on what happens when Indians leave India.
What explains India’s peculiar stability?: how India has remained calm in a region of tumult.
Dispatches from India: travel notes from India.
The Precipice: how India walked back from the precipice and towards progress.
How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?: the story of a Cold War mission.
The mystic, the cricketer and the spy: Pakistan’s game of thrones (technically about Pakistan): the story of Imran Khan’s marriage, and what it means for the country.
Would you pass the world’s toughest exam?: the arduous path to work on the railways.
How Kerala got rich: the remarkable transformation of a beautiful state.
Miscellaneous (typically long-form) journalism
Inside America’s Death Chambers: a personal journey exploring why capital punishment must end.
What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?: a proposal for a new kind of history.
How to spot a genius: the science of superstar talent.
The Disappeared Children of Syria: a heartbreaking account of some of the worst of the Assad regime.
The school for wildlife traffickers: an important piece on why there are deep human costs to the ivory trade, too.
The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai: investigating how the haven for tourists and capitalists is also a haven for international criminals.
Are You a $300,000 Writer? Inside The Atlantic’s extremely expensive hiring spree: how the Atlantic has thrived while journalism declines.
They Killed My Source: the story of a double life in Iran, from the outside.
Europe’s Free-Speech Problem: insights on the worrying decline of critical civil rights protections (it’s not happening just here!).
‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison: this is, still, America.
Profiles
Tyler Cowen: Silicon Valley’s favorite economist.
Reverend Jeff Hood: the last face death row inmates see.
R.F. Kuang: the life of a very ambitious writer.
Kilian Jornet: the world’s greatest athlete, conquering the continental U.S.
Josh Shapiro: “The Operator.”
Jeff Yass: the Susquehanna International Group founder’s single-issue political advocacy.
H: the Afghan refugee who ICE wants to deport.
Ahmed-al-Sharaa: the unlikely journey of Syria’s new leader.
Zohran Mamdani: the famous NYT magazine profile.
Ziz LaSota: the Rationalist accused of pushing for murder.
Lena Rowat: the account of an onerous ski mountaineering expedition.
Nature
Humans killed millions of vultures. Now people are paying the price: A very well-done story on the causes and effects of losing vultures in India.
The Coyotes of San Francisco: wildlife living among us!
‘Their resilience is a lesson to us all’: The maritime lions hunting seals on the beach: the lions of Namibia.
How to dig up 55 tons of dinosaur bones from the world’s fiercest desert: the story of a bold, miserable, and spectacular fossil hunt.
Have we been measuring mountains all wrong?: a long-overdue approach to measuring mountains by “jut.”
Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf: a remarkable account behind the people fighting a difficult, uphill battle, right here at home.
A journey into the world’s most mysterious rainforest: the people, technology, biodiversity, and environment of the Congo basin.
Personal Essays
The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons: Yiyun Li seeking to put into words what defies language.
Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy: on what writing really is.
When Your Inheritance Is to Look Away: cutting, personal prose on family and ancestry.
When I lost my intuition: what happens when you have lost a skill that you cannot describe?
My Brother’s Keeper: Vuong on brotherhood.
Out of Order: creative nonfiction on the realities of school shootings.
Eat, Memory: a life without food.
The Tune of Things: a beautiful essay on life, consciousness, and divinity.
Living Life (one of my personal favorite sections!)
A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible: an essay on the capacity to be seized, for a passion to be inflamed, to pursue something so fully that you are willing to suffer for it.
Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot: on self-handicapping, moral circles, and progress without despair.
Why I Run: Nicholas Thompson on running and fatherhood.
Working Past 100? In Japan, Some People Never Quit.: inspiring accounts of those who choose to work, even when they need not.
The Concept of Experience: on the paradox underlying the pursuit of experience.
When is it better to think without words?: on the rare moments when we are so fluent we can avoid compression into language.
Radical fun: on how life is really about having fun—a challenging proposition without friendship.
On Solitude: why sometimes, we all need to be alone.
Face it: you’re a crazy person: on how to really unpack jobs, and what that means for your career.
Learning to work: a wonderful piece by Virginia Valian on work problems, and how to solve them.
Economics Papers
“On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.” Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn. Quarterly Journal of Economics. May 2013.
“The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?” Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang. American Economic Review. June 2019.
“Measuring Group Differences in High-Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech.” Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Matt Taddy. Econometrica. July 2019.
“The G.I. Bill, Standardized Testing, and Socioeconomic Origins of the U.S. Educational Elite Over a Century.” Ran Abramitzky, Jennifer K. Kowalski, Santiago Pérez, and Joseph Price. NBER Working Paper. November 2024.
“Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress after Slavery.” Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt. Quarterly Journal of Economics. July 2024.
“Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration.” Ellora Derenoncourt. American Economic Review. February 2022.
“Superstar Extinction.” Pierre Azoulay, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang. Quarterly Journal of Economics. May 2010.
“Firm-Level Political Risk: Measurement and Effects.” Tarek A Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Laurence van Lent, and Ahmed Tahoun. Quarterly Journal of Economics. November 2019.
“When Did Growth Begin? New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870.” Paul Bouscasse, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson. Quarterly Journal of Economics. December 2024.
“Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The
Maghribi Traders’ Coalition.” Avner Greif. American Economic Review. June 1993.
Poetry
“Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Matthew Olzmann
“Midnight is a Beautiful Curse” by Dorianne Lau
“summer, somewhere” by Danez Smith
“Aubade with Burning City” by Ocean Vuong
“Buffalo” by Kai Carlson-Wee
“Notes on the Below” by Ada Limon
“The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Humpbacks” by Mary Oliver
“A Dog Has Died” by Pablo Neruda
“The Malice of Innocence” by Denise Levertov
Books (reviews linked)
Wilderness Essays, by John Muir
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
Breakneck, by Dan Wang
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, by Urvashi Batalia
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
Edinburgh, by Alexander Chee
Students for Abundance mention!
wtf idk how u exist….but thanks for the recs . 🥸🥸🥸🥸