In 1998, three ambitious Silicon Valley entrepreneurs established a startup called PayPal. These three hustlers—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek—later merged with Elon Musk’s company and enlisted eight or nine others. Together, they became the PayPal Mafia. The company survived the...
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You might have wondered, as I have, how China could become so prosperous and powerful in less than half a century since Deng Hsiao-ping launched what I might call the Second Chinese Revolution. Certainly, the centralized power of the Communist Party has played a pivotal role. Like the Soviet Union...
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Chances are, you’d never come across the term “artificial intelligence” as recently as a decade ago. And even if you had, it was probably either in reading science fiction or working in the tech industry. For the rest of us, AI was far off the radar screen. Yet today, you...
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A review of The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). One of the freshest and most important contributions in many years to the public discourse about the future of the United States.
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We Americans have long believed that the US military is the most advanced and most capable in the world. But in some respects that’s no longer the case. For example, China’s new, nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles could destroy in an instant the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy’s...
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Since NAFTA took effect in 1994, “more than 60,000 American manufacturers permanently shut their doors. . . In textiles alone, more than a million manufacturing jobs evaporated between 1990 and 2019.” That fact, brought starkly to light in Rachel Slade’s powerful new book, Making...
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As Scott Shapiro points out in the opening pages of his history of hackers and hacking, “there are at least 15 billion computers for only 8 billion people.” And most of us eight billion seem to live in constant fear that some malicious 15-year-old kid in Belarus is going to wipe out...
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Michael Lewis has been getting a beating lately by just about everyone who mentions his name in the news. His latest book, Going Infinite, presents a balanced picture of the failed cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried. Some imply the book is essentially a whitewash. But just about everyone else...
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Genentech launched in 1976 to commercialize recombinant DNA technology. Ever since then, biotech has played an increasingly prominent role in the US healthcare industry. A flood of startups has explored every nook and cranny of the possibilities. Venture capitalists and medical researchers...
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In the four seasons of the award-winning HBO drama, Succession, the sons and daughter of billionaire media mogul Logan Roy fight like children in a sandbox for their father’s favor—and the nod to succeed him in controlling the family business. Now, in a brilliant new book by two...
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Words, words, words. How else might we perceive the reality we live in, much less convey what we see, think, or feel to another? Unfortunately, as the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke once wrote, “So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of...
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Everybody in the world of technology talks about the Metaverse. But no two people among them seem to agree on what it is, how it will be built, who if anyone will control it, and when it will become a reality. Tech investor Matthew Ball sets out to address this problem in The Metaverse: And How It...
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With a population of 1.38 billion and the fifth largest economy in the world, India is a giant among nations. Yet a single family has played an outsize role in building the economic engine that makes India what it is today. In no other large nation has any family loomed so large in modern history...
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes As tech companies go, PayPal is a piker compared to the bold-faced names of the industry. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, not to mention Tencent and Alibaba in China, all dwarf PayPal on all the metrics used to measure success in Silicon Valley....
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In the prologue to his new book, Peter S. Goodman explains that “the term Davos Man was coined in 2004 by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. He used it to describe those so enriched by globalization, so native to its workings, that they were effectively stateless, their interests and...
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Following Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail and arriving on bookshelves the same month as Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Vanity Fair writer Vicky Ward faced an uphill slog with the publication of The Devil’s Casino. Thousands of readers no doubt assumed the book was one more of...
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Until recently, when Amazon emerged as such a deserving target of opprobrium, ExxonMobil was, without doubt, our country’s most-hated corporation. The two companies may compete for that distinction today. Private Empire is Steve Coll’s admirable attempt to explain the truth about...
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How does a company get to be as big as Amazon in just twenty-seven years? And how does a man become as rich as Jeff Bezos? After all, as of this writing Amazon employs nearly 1.3 million people and is valued by the stock market at $1.7 trillion. That’s trillion, with a T. And Jeff Bezos,...
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Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World should be required reading for every foundation board member and program officer, every major donor—in fact, philanthropists of any description. In this tiny volume, Michael Edwards lays bare the fatal flaws in the philanthropic world in America...
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If you sometimes wonder, as I do, what good civilization has done for us, consider food. For most of the 300,000 years during which homo sapiens has walked on Earth, we devoted nearly all our waking hours to finding and securing food. That began to change about 10,000 years ago with the advent of...
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...includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.