Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (2015)

I enjoyed the later biography by Walter Isaacson and picked up this earlier book because it was neither edited nor authorized by Elon Musk. I expected a more critical perspective, perhaps closer in spirit to accounts that emphasize Musk's flaws, conflicts, and darker traits. Instead, I found a surprisingly balanced portrait.

The book traces Musk's early life and follows the chaotic beginnings of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Much of the core narrative aligns with Isaacson's later account, but Vance benefits from interviews with a broader range of friends, family members, colleagues, and critics. Those perspectives add depth and help illuminate both Musk's strengths and his shortcomings.

I was also surprised to discover that many of the controversies surrounding Musk appeared less severe in context than I had expected. The book does not ignore conflicts, management problems, or personal flaws, but it presents them alongside the extraordinary risks and pressures associated with building multiple companies simultaneously.

The result is a broader and, in some ways, more intimate portrait than I anticipated. Readers familiar with Isaacson's biography will find much familiar territory, but the additional voices and perspectives make the book worthwhile on its own merits. 4/5 stars.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells (2026)

The Murderbot Diaries keep getting better. I laughed out loud repeatedly while reading this eighth installment, which is something few science-fiction series manage after so many volumes. Wells continues to balance humor, action, and character growth with remarkable consistency.

The story expands the relationships and personal arcs that have developed throughout the series. Murderbot remains as entertaining as ever, but the supporting characters also continue to gain depth and complexity. The emotional stakes feel earned because the characters have evolved over multiple books rather than remaining static.

I was also pleased to find a renewed sense of scientific wonder. The novel delivers several moments of genuine science-fiction awe that complement the humor and adventure. Those moments broaden the scope of the story without overwhelming the character-driven narrative that makes the series work.

Wells writes with clarity, wit, and confidence. The result is an engrossing novel that succeeds both as a standalone adventure and as another strong chapter in a long-running series. 5/5 stars.

The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin (1998)

I am enjoying the adventures of Erast Fandorin enormously. With each book, the mysteries become more intricate, and the historical backdrop becomes a larger part of the appeal. In this installment, Fandorin finds himself amid the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, where espionage, military maneuvering, and political intrigue intertwine with the central mystery.

One of the series' greatest strengths is Akunin's ability to weave fiction into real history. The military campaigns, personalities, and political tensions feel grounded in the historical record without slowing the story. As a result, the novel works both as a mystery and as an engaging introduction to a conflict that receives little attention in most Western histories.

My only reservation concerns the antagonist. Much like the villain in the second Fandorin novel, the mastermind occasionally stretches my suspension of disbelief. The character's capabilities sometimes seem too convenient for the plot.

Even so, the story is entertaining from beginning to end. The cast is colorful, the mystery is clever, and the historical setting is fascinating. I finished the book feeling as though I had enjoyed both a mystery novel and a history lesson. 5/5 stars.

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1961)

This novel echoes many of Singer's familiar themes: temptation, faith, guilt, desire, and the tension between religious obligation and worldly ambition. The story follows Yasha Mazur, a traveling magician whose charm, talent, and appetite for risk gradually draw him into moral and personal crisis. The resulting arc has more than a hint of Crime and Punishment, and that aspect of the novel is compelling.

As in much of Singer's work, the greatest strength is the immersive slice-of-life portrait of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Poland. The setting feels authentic and lived-in. What distinguishes this novel from some of his others is the treatment of the non-Jewish characters. They feel more fully realized and three-dimensional, which broadens the world and makes the social interactions more interesting.

I admired the writing more than I cared about the characters. The emotional struggles and personal dramas never gripped me as strongly as those in more contemporary fiction. Even so, Singer's prose, insight, and historical atmosphere kept me engaged throughout.

I enjoyed the novel, but I admired it more than I loved it. 3/5 stars.

All that we see or seem by Ken Liu (2025)

This book is fantastic. Ken Liu combines believable near-future technology with a thriller that never loses sight of its characters. The novel explores advanced AI, synthetic media, identity, and the evolution of the criminal scam-compound industry that has already emerged in parts of Southeast Asia. Unlike many AI novels, the technology feels grounded in current trends rather than speculative magic.

The setting is vivid. The characters are beautifully crafted. The plot moves quickly without sacrificing emotional depth. Liu captures both the promise and the danger of increasingly capable AI systems while keeping the focus on the human consequences of those technologies.

I was particularly impressed by the treatment of modern AI and the plausible extension of today's scam-farm operations (that already use over 100,000 slaves to fake product reviews, scam people, etc.) into the near future. Those elements felt uncomfortably realistic. The central dream-related premise is more speculative, but it never undermined my enjoyment.

I was also happy that Liu largely avoided the fantasy elements that sometimes appear in his fiction. The result is a focused science-fiction thriller with strong technical foundations, memorable characters, and relentless momentum.

This novel is a genuine page-turner. I was engrossed from beginning to end. 5/5 stars.

The Bing U by Neal Stephenson (2001)

This is one of the rare Stephenson novels that has not aged well. The book remains funny, energetic, and inventive. The characters are fantastic; the satire is sharp and many of the themes that would later appear in Stephenson's mature work are already visible.

The story takes place in a sprawling university that has become a self-contained society, complete with factions, bureaucracies, eccentric subcultures, and escalating absurdity. The novel skewers academia, intellectual fashions, student life, and institutional dysfunction with relentless enthusiasm. I particularly enjoyed the old computer technology, the role-playing game references, the mass driver, and the bursts of goofy science fiction.

The problem is not the craftsmanship but the tone. Much of the novel treats violence, wild sex, alcoholism, and other typical campus behaviors as funny. Today, many scenes land differently. I found it difficult to detach from the story and laugh at events involving murders, gun violence, gang rape, and other common activities of that era. 

Even so, I enjoyed the story, 3/5 stars.

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear (2025)

I am often baffled when authors interrupt strong stories with shrill moralizing about fashionable social themes. That problem appears here; it is frustrating because the underlying setting is excellent. Bear’s “White Space” universe remains imaginative and strange in the best way. Humans are projected star trek style into bizarre alien bodies, synthetic forms, and hybrid identities across a colorful interstellar civilization. The setting feels wondrous, immersive, and alive.

The strongest science-fiction elements work well. The aliens are memorable. The mystery holds together. The atmosphere of exploration and transformation gives the story momentum. The writing itself is strong.

Several elements weakened the experience for me. The obsession with gender identity, both human and alien, becomes distracting. The inter-species relationships and tentacle-sex themes often feel inserted for provocation rather than narrative necessity. Some parts of the quasi-magical technology system also strain disbelief because they are inconsistent.

The largest conceptual problem involves the pirates and their economics. Their politics resemble familiar warlord societies where we see mass murders, rapes, etc. such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, etc. So these political evils are believable enough; but their economic model makes no sense inside a post-scarcity civilization that can fabricate anything on demand. The setting’s material abundance undermines the plausibility of the pirate empire.

Despite these shortcomings, I enjoyed the book. The setting is imaginative, engrossing, and frequently awe-inspiring. The characters work. The mystery works. The story remains fun to read even when the thematic obsessions detract from the experience. 4/5 stars.

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson (1988)

Neal Stephenson is currently my favorite English-language author, and since he cannot write books as fast as I can read them, I have been working backward through older novels I missed. I found Zodiac on a shelf and remembered that someone else in my family had read it years ago and gushed about its portrait of the early environmental movement and the public pressure that eventually drove real progress through education and regulation.

The novel follows an environmental activist who doubles as an industrial troublemaker while he uncovers toxic dumping and corporate corruption in Boston Harbor. The story mixes ecological science, political conflict, and thriller pacing in a way that already shows many of Stephenson’s strengths.

I enjoyed the colorful characters, the melodrama, and the constant forward motion of the conflict. The science is excellent, as always with Stephenson. The historical setting is equally compelling. The novel captures 1985 Boston as a vivid slice of life, with enough texture and local detail to make the whole world feel immediate and lived-in.

The book lacks some of the scale and conceptual ambition of his later work, but the energy and intelligence are already there. It was a pleasure to see an early Stephenson novel working so well on its own terms. 5/5 stars.

The history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 1 by Edward Gibbon (1776)

I saw this blog post by Neal Stephenson and was sold on trying Gibbon’s immense seven-volume magnum opus on the long decline of the Roman Empire, beginning with imperial Rome at its height in Italy and Western Europe and tracing the political, military, and cultural decay that would eventually leave the surviving empire centered in Constantinople and Eastern Europe. I was curious whether a work with such a reputation could still command attention across nearly two and a half centuries. In some ways, it does.

I enjoyed Gibbon’s prose. The style often reminded me of Dickens, and at times even of Stephenson himself. Gibbon writes densely, with each sentence packed with meaning and attitude. The colorful anecdotes are entertaining, and his loaded language reveals the assumptions and prejudices of his eighteenth-century world in ways that are often fascinating. The writing itself is a pleasure to read.

The detailed history was too much for me. The book is a vast stream of names, dates, emperors, campaigns, anecdotes, and political details that arrive too quickly to absorb into any cohesive picture. The experience often felt like reading a phone book written by a brilliant stylist. I could admire the craft while failing to integrate the information. The experience reminded me why I was never a history major and why I prefer historical fiction to encyclopedic history or historiographic research.

The prose is excellent, just as Stephenson promised, but the density of information overwhelmed any larger narrative for me. I doubt I will continue through the remaining volumes. 2/5 stars.

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi (2025)

I usually enjoy Scalzi’s books, and this light, escapist space opera was great fun. The novel continues the Interdependency universe with another fast-moving political and military crisis. The story balances interstellar diplomacy, shifting alliances, and looming conflict without losing momentum.

The heroine is plucky and imperfect, which makes her easy to follow. She is cunning, clever, and skilled in the arts of war, but what sets her apart is her empathy for wildly different alien cultures. That quality gives the political maneuvering real weight. The plotting feels sharp and believable. The competing interests and shifting loyalties never collapse into confusion.

I was less convinced by the Obin and their “consciousness prosthesis.” Even though I am inclined to think consciousness is largely an illusion, the concept felt muddled rather than provocative.

The Consu are a frustrating and humorous part of the setting. Their arrogance, secrecy, and habit of withholding every scrap of information make them both infuriating and fascinating. Their arrogance and technology makes them a great antagonist.

This book is a smart, entertaining continuation of Scalzi’s Interdependency universe. 5/5 stars.

Der Name der Rose von Umbero Echo (1982)

Das Buch lag schon ewig auf meinem Stapel. Ich hatte früher schon einmal angefangen, dann aber aus irgendeinem Grund wieder aufgehört. Diesmal hat es mich gepackt. Ich musste zwischendurch bewusst langsam lesen, um bei den ganzen Hintergründen, Verdächtigen, Entdeckungen im Kloster und natürlich den Morden den Überblick zu behalten. Die Mühe lohnt sich.

Auf den ersten Blick ist das ein grossartiger Krimi. In einem Benediktinerkloster im 14. Jahrhundert geschehen mehrere rätselhafte Todesfälle, und William von Baskerville beginnt zusammen mit seinem jungen Begleiter Adson zu ermitteln. Die Spur führt durch verborgene Bibliotheken, verbotene Bücher und gelehrte Streitigkeiten, die immer düsterer werden.

Was das Buch aber wirklich besonders macht, ist das historische Panorama. Eco zeigt das Klosterleben in allen Details, den Alltag, die Rituale, die Spannungen und Machtspiele. Gleichzeitig wird klar, wie sehr diese kleine Welt mit den großen Konflikten der Kirche verbunden ist. Armut, Macht, Dogma und politische Intrigen prallen ständig aufeinander. Das Ganze wirkt nie trocken, sondern lebendig und glaubwürdig.

Kein leichtes Buch, aber ein unglaublich lohnendes. Anspruchsvoll, packend und voller Atmosphäre. 5/5 Sterne.

When we were Real by Daryl Gregory (2026)

This Nebula Award nominee is another disappointment for me. I have always enjoyed stories about layers of simulation, where our universe runs inside another simulated universe, which itself may be running inside yet another. That idea goes back at least to fiction and non-fiction by Stanisław Lem, especially Non Serviam (1961), and for me the best treatment remains David Brin's Stones of Significance (2000). Daryl Gregory’s version feels as though he never read those stories or explored the idea very far. The science and software are so terrible that reading parts of the book hurt. The arbitrary supernatural events feel like obvious plot devices or symbols rather than consequences of the simulation premise.

That failure frustrated me because I have a soft spot for stories built on the pilgrimage structure of The Canterbury Tales. I loved Hyperion for exactly that reason. Gregory uses the same device well here. A bus full of colorful characters who don't know each other is stuck together and forced to interact. That setup creates friction, revelation, and momentum. Gregory writes rich characters with big-hearted character arcs. The twisting story holds the reader's interest. And the mysterious teleporting traveler adds genuine intrigue.

The whole book would have worked far better as high fantasy with an arbitrary magic system. At least then I would have known to avoid expecting coherent science fiction.

Entertaining in places, often warm and engaging, but conceptually hollow. 2/5 stars.

The Faith of the Beasts (Captives, Book 2), by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing as James S. A. Corey (2026)

This second volume in the Captives series does not disappoint! Abraham and Franck have built another immersive fantastic universe that rivals the scale and atmosphere of The Expanse (failed board game, book series, tv series, . . .). The setting blends survival, mystery, and cosmic awe with strange alien life, inscrutable overlords, and background technologies that remain just opaque enough to sustain awe-and-wonder.

The story expands the series’ central tensions without losing focus. The characters remain heroic without becoming simplistic. Their choices carry weight, and the plot develops through strong arcs that deepen both conflict and mystery. The pacing stays sharp, and each revelation broadens the scope without undermining coherence.

What works best is the balance between the immediate struggle for survival and the larger unanswered questions lurking behind the setting. That balance gives the book both momentum and scale.

This book is an engrossing and satisfying continuation of an excellent series. 5/5 stars.

Slow G-ds by Claire North (2025)

As a Locus Award nominee, this novel sounded intriguing, and its premise delivers imagination. North builds an unusual universe shaped by a distinctive fantasy-like system of power rather than scientific speculation. The setting is inventive. The characters are well sketched. The conflicts hold interest. The plot moves through enough twists to keep the pages turning.

The book falters in execution. The speculative framework has little scientific coherence, which weakens the setting for readers who expect rigor from science fiction. The alien races feel arbitrary rather than convincing. The ethical questions raised by the two god-like civilizations remain shallow and underdeveloped despite their central role in the story. Repeated digressions into gender discourse also feel intrusive and distracting rather than organic to the narrative.

The imagination is real, and the storytelling has momentum, but the weak conceptual foundation undermines the experience. 2/5 stars.

The Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen (2026)

I followed a link into this book and kept reading for reasons I still do not fully understand. The subject never matched my interests, yet the argument pulled me through. Cowen traces the history of marginalism, the economic idea that value emerges at the margin rather than from some fixed intrinsic worth. He explores how that framework shaped pricing theory, resource allocation, and modern economic reasoning. He also examines the recursive question of applying marginal analysis to the use of marginal analysis itself, which gives the book its most interesting philosophical dimension.

The book is dry. The prose is dense. Much of the historical detail feels academic rather than engaging. My interest flagged often. The subject matter rarely rose above abstraction.

The most interesting sections explain how AI-driven economic modeling has revived forms of marginal pricing that had fallen from fashion. That argument gives the book some contemporary relevance.

I am not especially interested in economics, and the book did little to change that. Still, the intellectual structure is sound enough that I kept turning pages. 2/5 stars.

Circle of Days by Ken Follett (2025)

When my family was visiting Vancouver in 2024, we saw a new-at-that-time traveling Stonehenge exhibit that had great displays of the latest archeological information about its construction and the life & times of the people who lived in Bath at that time. Follett builds a setting around early communities near Stonehenge, tracing labor, belief, and conflict as the monument takes shape. The story follows a small group of protagonists whose lives intersect with power, survival, and ritual in a harsh landscape.

The book shows familiar Follett patterns. The moral lines between good and bad characters are stark, with motives that can feel simplistic. Several antagonists act from flat impulses rather than complex drives. The portrayal of women lacks the depth given to many male characters.

Even with those limits, the narrative holds attention. The setting feels grounded in current archaeological ideas. The protagonists earn investment, and the plot sustains momentum. An engaging historical novel with uneven characterization. 4/5 stars.

Classic Science Fiction short stories (2026)

This collection gathers mid-20th-century science fiction, largely from the 1950s, with a focus on ideas over character depth. The stories explore familiar themes from that era: Cold War anxiety, hidden infiltration, first contact, and the social impact of emerging technologies. The tone reflects the period’s optimism about science mixed with unease about its consequences.

I had read Let's Get Together in 1968. The reread was not worthwhile. The rest of the collection was new to me and generally solid. However, stronger stories from the same period exist, and this selection does not represent the best work of 1957. 4/5 Stars.

Empowered by Marty Cagan (2020)

I read this after Transformed when I realized I had skipped the second book in the series. It holds up. Cagan focuses on the behaviors, priorities, and methods of strong product teams. He argues that ordinary people can perform at a high level within the right system. Success does not require the “smartest person in the room.” It requires clear roles, strong coaching, and disciplined execution.

Cagan contrasts empowered product teams with feature teams. He defines product, design, and engineering responsibilities. He emphasizes coaching, strategy, outcome-based measures, and trust across functions. As in his other books, he details the friction, pain, and failure modes that appear during any transition. That focus on difficulty gives the guidance weight.

The extended case study of a job placement company feels overlong and, at times, irrelevant to the core argument. It slows the pace without adding much insight.

The rest of the book is sharp, practical, and consistent with his broader framework. 5/5 stars.

Murder on the Leviathan, by Boris Akunin (1998)

I am enjoying the Erast Fandorin series, and this third entry is wonderful. The novel places a classic closed-circle mystery aboard a luxury ocean liner traveling from Europe to Asia. A small group of passengers becomes the focus after a violent crime, and the confined setting drives suspicion, interrogation, and deduction in the style of a Golden Age puzzle.

The characters are deliberately melodramatic, almost satirical in tone, which fits the homage to Agatha Christie. The familiar trope in which the least likely figure (a baby) becomes central to the crime appears here as well, handled with humor. The clash of cultures among nineteenth-century Europeans is sharp, including the period’s prejudices and stereotypes. Akunin’s expertise in Japanese history adds texture through a well-drawn Japanese character, which broadens the cultural context of the story.

This book is a  fun and entertaining mystery with strong character work and a playful structure. 5/5 stars.

Empire of Silence (Sun Eater, Book 1), by Christopher Ruocchio (2018)

I really like this book. The world-building is rich and coherent. The galactic empire, ancient technology, and enigmatic aliens deliver classic space-opera scale. The close combat sword fighting adds energy. The politics hold interest. The plot moves with purpose.

The story follows Hadrian Marlowe, a noble-born son in a far-future human empire that spans many star systems. The narrative frames his life as a retrospective account of how he becomes a figure of legend. Early events push him out of privilege and into exile, forcing him to navigate new cultures, harsh environments, and shifting power structures. The setting blends feudal hierarchy, interstellar travel, and remnants of lost technologies, while an alien threat lingers at the edges of human expansion.

The weaknesses sit in the ideological framing. The official religion, with its bureaucracy, leaders, and zealots, reads as one-sided, with no spirituality, piety or internal complexity. The protagonists have no empathy for competing worldviews outside their Humanist, Enlightenment core value. That narrow lens limits the moral tension the setting could support.

Even with these limitations, the story works. The setting carries weight. The narrative sustains momentum. I am glad I found the series. 5/5 stars.

Transformed by Marty Cagain (2024)

I always enjoy Marty Cagan’s books. He does not just describe features, benefits, and processes. He explains the reasoning and data behind them. More important, he dwells on the friction, sabotage, and failure modes teams face when they try to adopt his methods. That pattern continues here. The book is clear about the pain required to move from output-driven delivery to true product organizations.

Cagan lays out the core ideas in practical terms. He contrasts empowered product teams with feature factories. He defines the roles of product, design, and engineering. He explains continuous discovery, product operations, and leadership responsibility for creating the right environment. The goal is an organization that can learn, adapt, and ship valuable products at speed.

He is also blunt about talent. Success depends not only on skills and experience but also on innate talent, intelligence, capability, and capacity. He treats those factors as prerequisites, not optional enhancements. That stance is rare in management books and central to his argument.

The transformation focus is where the book stands out. He catalogs blockers in detail: legacy processes, weak leadership, misaligned incentives, and cultural resistance. He describes how teams will struggle, stall, and sometimes fail. That warning is credible because it matches the reality most practitioners face. His vision remains aspirational, but he does not hide the cost of reaching it.

The timing matters. Large enterprises are under pressure to adopt generative AI as a baseline capability. Cagan’s framework helps organizations build the product discipline required to absorb that shift, even though the book is not about AI mechanics.

I value Cagan's clarity, his honesty about difficulty, and the insistence on high standards.

5/5 stars.

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1962)

I enjoyed this novel. Singer tells a long, direct, and engrossing story that opens a vivid window into Jewish life under persecution in Eastern Europe. The novel is set in the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky massacres in the 17th century during a centuries-long era where 3 million jews were killed before the holocaust, reminding me of this book. That setting gives the book much of its force.

The protagonist, Jacob, is a devout Jewish survivor who is captured and enslaved after communal violence destroys his world. Later redeemed by a Jewish village, he struggles to rebuild a life while carrying grief, faith, and desire. He returns for Wanda, the non-Jewish woman he loves, and she must hide her identity within a rigid religious community.

Singer uses Jacob’s journey to explore several themes: trauma after massacre, the pull of love against law, exile, communal suspicion, and the meaning of devotion amid suffering. The novel also shows how ordinary people understood fate, sin, duty, and God in a brutal age.

The prose feels simple, but the moral and emotional questions run deep. The suffering is visceral, yet the book never becomes mere spectacle. It remains humane, intimate, and psychologically sharp.

A powerful historical and spiritual novel. 4/5 stars.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2017)

This is the best book I have read this year. Rovelli compresses physics, philosophy, and human reflection into a short, lucid work. Without mathematics or technical formalism, he explains how modern science has unsettled the common idea of time as a single universal flow.

The book sketches several major concepts with rare clarity: relativity’s rejection of one shared clock, thermodynamics and entropy as sources of time’s direction, quantum theory’s challenge to fixed sequences of events, and quantum gravity’s suggestion that time may not be fundamental at all. Rovelli also explores memory, perception, and consciousness as parts of how humans experience temporal order.

The achievement is not simplification but precision. Complex ideas remain concise, clear, and free of jargon. Rovelli joins scientific rigor with philosophical depth, showing how fragile and contingent our ordinary sense of past, present, and future may be.

It is a profound and elegant book. 5/5 stars.

Never Flinch by Stephen King (2024)

Like most fans of Stephen King's writing style, I was pleased to see another Holly Gibney story that contains very little or no supernatural horror. I dislike horror and I also avoid the Dark Tower universe entirely. This book delivers a fun thriller with enjoyable characters and some solid comic relief.

The protagonists come across as a little too goody-goody while the antagonists and their networks feel similarly one-sided and purely evil with no redeeming qualities. It is by no means Stephen King's best work. I felt sad to read about the author's health issues in the afterword, which perhaps explains some of the political dogma and shrill indignation sprinkled throughout the story.

3/5 stars.

The Dual-Use Instrument: AI's Golden Age of Breakthroughs and the Erosion of Human Cognition

Sam Kriss wrote that in 1931, Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria trekked to the remote foothills of the Alai Mountains and discovered something profound: basic literacy didn't just teach people to read. Literacy rewired how they thought. Illiterate peasants grouped shapes by lived experience (a circle was the moon, a square a drinking bowl). A few years of Soviet schooling flipped the switch.  These same people grouped by abstract geometry and solved hypothetical syllogisms about white bears in the Far North. Literacy birthed a new mind, one capable of abstractions, counterfactuals, and the kind of imaginative leap that fuels revolutionary politics and scientific progress.

Fast-forward to 2026. We're living through the mirror image of Luria's observation, but in reverse. AI chatbots, transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) are delivering superhuman feats of synthesis, prediction, and creation. Yet they're quietly undoing the cognitive habits that literacy once instilled. The same tools that are saving doctors time and accelerating Nobel-worthy science are fostering what one researcher calls "cognitive surrender" - the outsourcing of reasoning itself.

An interesting case is this Substack post, about a general practitioner (GP) medical doctor and digital health leader. The author dove headfirst into ambient AI scribing for 18 months. The promise was intoxicating: walk into a 10-minute consultation, maintain eye contact, speak naturally, and emerge with a complete, structured note. Burnout dropped. Documentation time plummeted by ~26%. It felt like getting the consultation back.

Then the second-order effects hit. Consultations stretched because he stopped curating in real time—why steer when the machine records everything? Follow-up notes were accurate but ailien: comprehensive transcripts lacked his clinical voice, synthesis, or "illness scripts" (those experiential mental models GPs build through thousands of encounters). The act of writing the note had been doing invisible cognitive work, prioritizing, reflecting, & reasoning. Offloading those thought processes broke the feedback loop. The doctor stopped using the tool not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well, causing subtle, deleterious side-effects.

We're not returning to pre-literate sensory immediacy. We're entering something stranger: a world of infinite generated content where direct experience is mediated by AI, and where abstract, counterfactual thinking is disappearing.

The Golden Age: What AI Has Already Delivered

AI breakthroughs are breathtaking.

Transformer models and LLMs have supercharged science in ways that were science fiction five years ago. AlphaFold and its 2024 Nobel Prize-winning successors, including AlphaFold 3 solved the 50-year protein-folding problem, predicting structures for over 200 million proteins with near-experimental accuracy. It now models how proteins interact with DNA, RNA, small molecules, and ions, unlocking rational drug design at unprecedented speed. AI-powered pipelines are delivering drug candidates 75% faster than traditional methods. Autonomous AI agents like Kosmos are compressing six months of PhD-level research into a single 12-hour run.

In materials science, AI has screened millions of candidates to discover new battery chemistries, carbon-capture materials, and quantum-computing components. Weather models run with hyper-accurate long-range forecasts. Self-improving labs iterate experiments in real time, slashing waste and cost. The 2024 to Q1 2026 period alone saw AI contribute to breakthroughs in fusion plasma control, exoplanet classification, and even new mathematical insights.

Economically, the gains are compounding. Generative AI is projected to add 1.5% to U.S. GDP by 2035, rising to 3.7% by 2075 through productivity alone. Industries with high AI exposure saw 10% productivity jumps, 3.9% job growth, and 4.8% wage increases in 2024-2025. Documentation tools like the one Gooch used are slashing administrative drag across veterinary medicine, human medicine, law, and engineering. Code generation, creative ideation, and data synthesis are freeing humans for higher-order work.

Many of these concrete accomplishments are not hype cycles. They are measurable, peer-reviewed revolutions in capability.

The Regressions: Literacy, Rationality, and the Extended Mind

Just as writing once pulled minds into abstraction, AI is pulling them back toward “fake it til you make it” fluency without friction, answers without effort, and sensory immediacy without synthesis.

Literacy rates and deep reading have been sliding since 2014 and the back slide is accelerating with AI. Elite university students increasingly can't finish a novel or parse a complex sentence without AI. One Kansas study found English majors struggling with Dickens' Bleak House—treating a metaphorical Megalosaurus as a literal dinosaur in Victorian London. These students respond like Luria's illiterate peasants: tethered to immediate, concrete reality.

Cognitive science gives insight into the relationship between literacy and cognition. "Extended mind" theory shows that writing isn't just recording thoughts; writing completes these thoughts. Gooch's experience mirrors these findings: AI notes broke the loop that built clinical expertise. Broader studies show AI users exhibit "cognitive offloading," that in turn causes declines in working memory, analytic reasoning, and critical thinking. People accept faulty AI outputs 73% of the time in controlled experiments lending evidence to the deleterious effects of "cognitive surrender.” Attention, skepticism, and the scientific method itself erode when LLMs do the synthesizing.

Steven Pinker's Rationality (2021) warned that we aren't born rational; we build rationality through deliberate practice in logic, probability, Bayesian reasoning, and causal inference. AI short-circuits and prevents skill growth from practice. Why wrestle with a syllogism when the model answers instantly? Why cultivate skepticism when the output is fluent and confident? The Enlightenment ideals, including empiricism, skepticism, & evidence-based progress rely on the very cognitive muscles we're letting atrophy with AI.

Backsliding in Human Potential

This phenomenon is not only about doctors or students. It's about the quiet diminishment of what makes a life meaningful.

In the arts, AI generates poems, paintings, and music at superhuman volume. Why labor through the frustration of original creation when the machine delivers polish? Personal artistic potential, the struggle that forges voice and vision fades in our “Age of AI.”

Economically, wealth creation has always come from human ingenuity: spotting unseen opportunities, iterating through failure, building novel systems. When AI handles the ideation and execution, the incentive to cultivate deep expertise or entrepreneurial grit weakens.

Philosophically, the great explorations of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology demand solitary wrestling with ambiguity. AI offers instant summaries and counterarguments. The joy of building your own worldview erodes. We risk a generation fluent in AI outputs but starved of the internal scaffolding that once produced  Socrates, Newton, Kant, Einstein, da Vinci.

Politics itself may regress from reasoned debate over imagined futures to tribal sensory immediacy. Streamers repeat formulas rather than abstract justice.

A Realistic, Guardedly Optimistic Future

None of these cognitive declines and their effects on society are inevitable.

We stand at an inflection point with enlightenment, wisdom, and agency. The post-literate age does not inevitably mean cognitive collapse. The “Age of AI” can mean augmented humanity if we treat AI as a seductively dangerous instrument, not a prosthesis.

Imagine "AI literacy" curricula that teaches not just prompts, but deliberate cognitive preservation: handwritten notes alongside AI drafts, Socratic challenges to model outputs, mandatory "unplugged" reasoning drills. Doctors like Gooch can (and some do!) use AI for transcription while reclaiming note authorship as a sacred clinical craft. Scientists could let agents run rote experiments while humans focus on the counterfactual leaps AI can't yet replicate.

The same transformers accelerating AlphaFold could help restore rationality.  Personalized tutors that drill children in skepticism, Bayesian thinking, tools that flag our own cognitive biases in real time. Economic gains could fund equal universal infrastructure: clean air, clean water, sanitation, energy, roads, railways, & telecommunication, that could free more people wealth creation, and personal “pursuit of happiness,” including creative and philosophical pursuits.

In the end, the future will not be purely post-literate or pre-AI literacy. It will be hybrid: a new extended mind where AI handles the volume and humans reclaim the voice, the synthesis, the purpose. The kids raised by AI dolls won't inevitably lose abstraction; they will almost certainly evolve a meta-literacy we cannot yet imagine.

We know that society shapes thought. Now you and I get to shape this society. The instrument is in our hands. We must use it carefully to cut away drudgery while sharpening the blade of the human mind. The breakthroughs and progress are themselves accelerating.  

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

I never read any Russian authors while growing up because of the Cold War, so Russian literature was completely new territory for me when I retired. We had read a translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in school, but that was framed more as Cold War history than literature. After finishing Anna Karenina (which disappointed me; see my review here: https://mitchwyle.blogspot.com/2024/11/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy-1875-1878.html) I complained about it over dinner with friends. One of them suggested I try Tolstoy’s short stories instead, so I picked up this collection.

The stories are technically excellent. The plots are tight and strong, the characters are painted in rich three-dimensional detail, and there are moments of sharp humor that I genuinely enjoyed. This volume includes the famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich along with several other shorter pieces that showcase Tolstoy’s skill at concise storytelling.

What wore me down, however, was the relentless moralizing. Every story hammers the same theme: oppressed Russian peasants suffer under the weight of blind, self-serving oligarchs and bureaucrats, while the powerful remain oblivious to the obvious immorality and unsustainability of the system. The Christian theological preaching and sense of outrage felt heavy-handed and repetitive. Unlike Anna Karenina, these stories do not linger on the neurotic inner lives of the elites, but the sermon-like tone still grated on me.

I am glad I read the collection for the craftsmanship and the characters, but it has put me off Tolstoy entirely. I will not be moving on to War and Peace or his other major works. I may explore Pushkin next, though I worry I lack enough historical context to appreciate him fully.

3/5 stars.

First Command by Michael Simon (2025)

I picked up the first volume because the series has been getting press as a fun, accessible space opera. Unfortunately readers' complaints about the weak science turned out to be much worse than readers said. Spaceships list and roll like sailing vessels, belch smoke and flames in hard vacuum, and crash into asteroids that are packed so closely they might as well be in a traffic jam. The sheer volume of basic physics violations made it impossible to stay immersed.
The story itself is also relatively weak. The antagonists are cartoonishly one-dimensional — evil simply because they are evil — while the protagonists are much better drawn: heroic, self-doubting, and colorful. The core space-opera premise could have been enjoyable if the science had not been so distractingly awful, but the writing never rises above serviceable.
2/5 stars. Disrecommend

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929)

This book was my first Thomas Wolfe novel, which feels embarrassing to admit because he was my mother’s favorite author. I still have her copy of You Can’t Go Home Again sitting on my shelf, untouched. In high school American Literature we read only excerpts, but we did learn the colorful details: Wolfe was a giant of a man (6'6", 2m), used a refrigerator as a writing desk, filled yellow legal pads with a Cross pen, writing just 3–4 words per line, every third line, and shipped entire orange crates of manuscript pages to his editor, who would eventually telegram him to stop so they could carve a book out of the mountain of prose.

Look Homeward, Angel is a classic “roman à clef” — essentially Wolfe’s own life turned into fiction. The protagonist Eugene Gant is a thinly veiled version of Wolfe himself, and the large, chaotic family, the small Southern town (based on his native Asheville, North Carolina), and many of the events are drawn directly from his upbringing, though heavily exaggerated and melo-dramatized.

The novel is driven by Eugene’s intense longing for meaning, his obsession with time, memory, and mortality, and a soaring, almost mystical romanticism. Wolfe’s prose is dense, lyrical, and richly descriptive — it frequently reminded me of Proust in its lush detail and of Thomas Hardy in its emotional weight. The writing is immersive and often beautiful, even if the book itself is very long and occasionally meandering. This book is a powerful, passionate, and deeply personal coming-of-age novel. It is worth reading for the sheer force of the language alone.

4/5 stars.

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2026)

This fourth volume in Tchaikovsky’s wildly inventive Children of Time space opera series continues the story with a universe overflowing with grotesque, wildly imaginative biology. This time we encounter planetary-scale living systems, distributed intelligences, and growth rates 50 million times faster than physics would allow. The rapidly growing and morphing biology strongly reminds me of Neal Asher and his vivid, vivisection-like obsession rapid transformation.

Getting past the hard-to-swallow science, the story and character arcs remain strong. Tchaikovsky writes compelling characters you end up genuinely caring about, even when the overall tone stays bleak and pessimistic. I do not enjoy dystopian stories as a rule, but the quality of the writing and the depth of the personalities kept me invested in what happened to them.

That said, the heavy pessimism and the particular brand of biological horror on display this time made this my least favourite entry in the series so far. It is still well-crafted and thought-provoking, but it did not click with my taste.Skip this one unless you are a committed fan of the series and do not mind dark, visceral, and deeply strange far-future biology.

3/5 stars.

A brief history of intelligence by Max Bennett (2023)

This was another recommendation from Senthil that had been sitting in my queue since December 2025. I expected the book to focus heavily on AI, using neuro-physiological and neuro-anatomical insights to guide the development of more human-like, self-improving systems. Instead, it delivers a broad evolutionary history of intelligence itself.

Bennett traces how life on Earth gradually evolved the ability to survive and thrive, beginning with social "politics" among early organisms and the manipulation of their environment. What we call cognition, sentience, qualia, and even our (possibly illusory) consciousness emerge as accidental side-effects of traits that simply proved useful for survival and reproduction. Intelligence, in this view, is less a grand design and more a useful byproduct of fitness.

I enjoyed the book a lot. Bennett does a good job addressing counterfactual evidence and the main controversies surrounding his claims. The references to AI and software are present but clearly secondary. When he does touch on artificial intelligence, he frames it as simulations of biological processes on our planet, which may not always be the optimal path for building the systems we actually want.The book is a thoughtful and well-reasoned exploration of how intelligence arose in nature.

5/5 stars.

Ensh*ttfication by Cory Doctorow (2025)

I've been skimming Cory Doctorow's daily links and rants on Pluralistic for years, so I walked into this book already fluent in most of his ideas. What surprised me was how much richer and more coherent everything became once he had an entire book to breathe. Ensh*ttfication is the definitive deep-dive into the "Ensh*ttocen" - the Great Ensh*ttening era we're all living through, laying out his core theses with far more historical context, evidence, and narrative force than any blog post could manage.

The book is long, dense, and occasionally meanders into broader territory: labour rights, liberty, social justice, and the politics of technology. I actually loved those side-quests. They served as powerful reminders of how extraordinarily lucky I am to have the freedoms and tools I do. Doctorow's sales pitch for Mastodon and the Fediverse was particularly interesting, even if reality has already moved on: walled gardens have largely won, gateways have been shut down, and most of the people I actually talk to will never install Mastodon. (The one bright exception I'm excited to try is matterbridge — https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge. The universal chat client (theoretically) lets one client bridge WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, and more. If I ever find the time, I'll clone, build, and try it.

At its heart, this book delivers a razor-sharp diagnosis of exactly how enshittification works: a three-stage pathology that turns once-great platforms into "giant piles of shit." First, services are genuinely good for users to draw them in. Then they abuse those users to please business customers (think ad-choked feeds and algorithmic manipulation). Finally, they squeeze the business customers themselves to extract every last drop of value for executives and shareholders. Doctorow backs this up with devastating case studies—Facebook, Amazon, Google, Uber, TikTok, and more, showing how weakened antitrust rules, regulatory capture, lock-in tactics, and "twiddling" algorithms created today's techno-feudal system of rent extraction. He doesn't stop at diagnosis; he also maps out concrete cures: aggressive interoperability mandates, breaking up monopolies, stronger data rights, and rebuilding the open internet we once took for granted.

I don't always agree with Cory's values or speculations, and I occasionally have counter-evidence that undercuts some of his stronger claims. Yet I never resent the ride. His extreme points of view and the mountains of data he cites are consistently thought-provoking and valuable. The book is daunting in scope, but it's also comprehensive, well-crafted, and deeply informative. I'm genuinely glad I ploughed through every page.

The book is highly recommended if you want to understand the forces quietly degrading the internet (and society) around us.

5/5 stars.

X Minus One Old Time Radio Episodes (1955)

Similar to the Perry Rhodan space opera archives over which I stumbled and am now enjoying in serialized book format, the old Astounding stories from the 1950s were dramatized into Radio plays.  These Radio Plays were digitized and made available by fans on the public Internet. Some of the stories are timeless and others I had read are very entertaining as audio theater.  4.5 Stars.