- Antifragile (Nassim Taleb) – Instant Fogbanking canon. Sweeping ideas on “antifragility”, hormesis, iatrogenics (applied beyond their usual fields)
- Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Rachel Maddow) – How gently changing structural process has changed culture and policy
- The Signal and the Noise (Nate Silver) – Pro-Bayesian Propaganda. Accessible, light.
- TRSF (Stephen Cass) – Sci-fi stories.
- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Larger (Marc Levinson) – Simple tech, big ideas.
- The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Corey Robin) – More on Burke and “intellectual conservatism” here.
- The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (Richard McGregor) – Source for original sequence on Apologetics
- Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Tony Judt) – “An Atheist View of History”
- Simpler: The Future of Government (Cass Sunstein) – An extended addendum to Nudge, really, but the new examples are very useful (OIRA etc.)
- From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ (Paula Frederickson) – Source for Apologetics II specifically.
- Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Daniel Dennett) – Predictably brilliant. Easy to digest and useful.
- The Long Descent (John Michael Greer) – Fueled my dig into DownWing thought.
- Finite and Infinite Games (James Carse) – Confusing paradox, interesting food for thought.
- Mystery Teachings from a Living Earth (John Michael Greer) – Gave some form to mysticism in a way that didn’t make me cringe (a feat).
- A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Manuel De Landa) – A unique, dense, and opaque refactoring of history into something nonhuman.
- The New Digital Age (Schmidt and Cohen) – Predictably conservative view of the future, considering the authors.
- A Gentle Introduction to UR (Mencius Moldbug) – Fueled my dig into the neoreactionary world.
- Normal Accidents (Perrow) – Scared me.
- The Everything Store (Brad Stone) – A fun romp on Bezos and Amazon
- Surfaces and Essences (Hofstader and Sander) – Fun read, although maybe I was too familiar with the argument beforehand.
- The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes) – Fueled a sequence of posts. Very unique thesis.