Reading

Books that have shaped how I think about intelligence, agency, and the long arc of ideas.

The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin
Strategy under radical uncertainty: what intelligence is worth when the game is civilizational and information is adversarial.

The Cheese and the Worms

The Cheese and the Worms
Carlo Ginzburg
A 16th-century miller assembles his own cosmology from stray books — how a mind builds a world model from scarce, noisy evidence.

Pax Britannica Trilogy

Pax Britannica Trilogy
Jan Morris
How a global system is built, run, and let go — institutions as long-horizon agents, seen from inside.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
The longest horizon: how robust systems degrade, and how slowly the failure becomes visible.