2025 was a dizzying year. I can’t make heads or tails of it, the coin (almost certainly a Trump-faced 250th commemorative) just keeps spinning around on its edge like the inchoate end of Inception. What even happened? I consider my job as a writer to be a pretty simple one: to suck in the chaos of the world and offer each of my readers some sanity in return. Instead, the only sanity on offer is a zen-like acceptance of the chaos of the world, and a Serenity Prayer-esque koan that we should accept the world’s invariant chaos.
With that said, I feel like it was a fun year for imbibing chaos. Events around the world are the most substantial they have been in years. Old orthodoxies are being walked to the flames, even as new ideologies struggle to take root. AI is upending whole professions and industries, and the combination feels like a crucial turning point in history.
This year, I read 41 books, viewed 26 movies, watched 32 live Broadway and West End performances and read thousands of articles and essays. I do keep reasonable track of all of this, and so this is my selection of the best that I read and saw this year. I unfortunately didn’t finish a video game this year (open-world games take so long), and I only watched a single television show (White Lotus, Season 3).
First Place: In Praise of Floods by James C. Scott
James C. Scott is an absolute legend in the social sciences for his magisterial and lucid works, including Silicon Valley’s favorite Seeing Like A State. This book, published
Well, 2025 was a very quiet year. Minus, of course, the trillions of dollars in venture capital appreciation thanks to the AI boom and the insane pace of geopolitical news going on around the world. Who the hell am I kidding: I feel overwhelmed trying to encapsulate all that took place the past twelve months. So in lieu of a comprehensive summary that will take historians eons to work out, here are the highlights from Riskgaming, including my favorite posts, newsletters and scenarios we published this year.
For those counting, we published 104 newsletters, 47 podcasts and four new scenarios. We also hosted about 24 events including runthroughs of Riskgaming scenarios, community meetups and geopolitical dinners. In total, about 500 people got to join us live for an experience — definitely an upgrade thanks to Laurence Pevsner joining as my partner at the tail end of 2024.
As always, thanks for reading, listening and attending — your commitment has allowed Riskgaming to turn into a powerful institution for profound thought on some of the most complex issues facing the world today.
Highlights from 2025
We hosted 60 senior leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom for a biotech summit at the U.K.’s embassy in Washington DC as part of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s trade mission to the United States.
I pissed off some Pennsylvania politicians with an op-ed in The New York Post on President Trump’s horrifying deal approving U.S. Steel’s acquisition by Nippon Steel.
2024 was the year of elections, with more than half of humanity voting (and Germany coming up in a few weeks and maybe Canada as well). So there was a little over-indexing on global politics than even I would normally read. Meanwhile, technology coverage has really hit a nadir. Thanks to awful media economics, our best writers have struggled to find long-term purchase in the industry, so quality has absolutely declined. Artificial intelligence, biotech, quantum computing and nuclear are extremely interesting areas, but coverage remains either superficial, ridiculously over-critical or just plain wrong. It’s really frustrating.
If there’s any pattern I have enjoyed this year (and in 2023), it’s simple stories that belie complex global narratives. Sometimes these essays can be overwrought, but it’s great to see writers tackling the complicated world we inhabit.
This year, I read 36 books and thousands of articles, watched 21 movies and 30 West End and Broadway shows, and played 3 video games, plus I listened to a smattering of live orchestra and opera. Below, the best of the sets.
This year, I’ve decided to bring together my favorite articles and books alongside other media into one look-back post. All of my previous posts from almost the last decade are available here.
The Best Books I Read
First Place: Human Acts by Han Kang
Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year in a surprise victory over Haruki Murakami and a long list of other notables waiting for their turn to head to Sweden. I read Kang’s The Vegetarian years ago, and found it difficult and not all that engaging. Critically lauded, and one that I probably would appreciate on a re-read, but one of those “not for me”-type books.
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It was a year filled with milestones at Riskgaming in 2024, including the debut of our first scenario (and then numbers two and three), 47 newsletters and 69 podcast episodes plus several hundred of our Lux Recommends from across the Lux partnership.
I’ll list out my favorite newsletter columns and podcasts in a bit, but what were some other Riskgaming highlights this year?
Building an AI election security riskgaming scenario for senior leaders of CISA and the Department of Homeland Security plus officials from across local and state governments.
Hosting multiple three-star generals (including one who just got promoted to four stars), congressmen, think tank leaders and others around Pentagon procurement of AI technologies in partnership with Mike Bloomberg. “No Man’s Land” was my most synoptic game design ever, and it will be published publicly in early 2025.
Giving a briefing down at Fort Liberty on AI and national security for the U.S. Army.
Recruiting and installing Laurence Pevsner as our new Director of Programming.
Publicly launching our AI election security game in New York and DC with Senator Mark Warner.
Lecturing and seminar-ing at Yale, Cornell and Wharton — I’m really excited by the energy and intense intellect of the next generation.
Launching our China electric vehicle scenario by Ian Curtiss all around the world and having dozens of journalists, tech executives and policy leaders play out the future of the auto industry.
This year, according to my tracker (I use Reeder), I saved and read 1,039 essays and longer form articles this year, and highlighted 51 of them. There are almost certainly gems that I forgot to save for this end-of-year article, but welcome to the chaos of modern life.
I was fairly negative in my comments last year, noting that many feature pieces lacked quality editing and failed to capture the intensity of the moment we are all facing. This year felt better holistically, despite an historically bad year for journalists, writers and other media professionals. Prolix has been replaced with the profound, and more writers seem to be standing up and grappling with the reality we are facing.
Here’s the best articles I read in 2023, plus a slew of honorable mentions.
I’m a sucker for extraordinarily complicated policy, governance and global affairs problems — the ones that have no easy solutions or solutions at all, where a dozen intelligent people can sit around a table and no one walks out having convinced others on what to do.
Tad Friend wrote an epic on wildlife trafficking, connecting the dots from the markets in countries like China to the intermediaries that process these illegal goods to the hunters that track down exotic animals and shoot them cold. In the process, he carefully tunes his attention to human behavior and motivation in order to understand the links across the entire supply chain. Most of it is greed, some of it is ennui, but all of it is
In 2023, I read 37 books, including 3 books in French and 2 Korean graphic novels. That’s quantitatively down from last year, mostly due to a couple of books that oversold and under-delivered that made me skip reading a few weeks here and there (it doesn’t always happen, but one bad book can really put a dampener on the entire bookshelf).
First Place: The Order of the Day by Éric Vuillard
In a world where more than 500,000 books are published annually (just in English and just in the United States), it is so dreadfully rare to run into something completely novel, alien, soul-crushing and yet delightful. French author Éric Vuillard’s work falls into this near-barren category. Extraordinarily crafted into compact stories, Vuillard interrogates the turning points of political history and uses broiling irony and droll juxtaposition to place justice as he conceives it into the strongest possible relief.
I started earlier this year with The Order of the Day (French title: L’Ordre du jour), which won France’s top literary prize and covers the Nazi takeover of Austria in the Anschluss. Vuillard excoriates the French political and industrial leadership during the crisis, writing with acidic lucidity juxtaposing the historically important junction underway with the decadent idiocies under debate in the National Assembly during the period. Every sentence forces a gasp, a scream and a question: what could they be thinking? And by extension and through the looking glass, what are we thinking every day? Are we making the same mistakes?
This book triggered a deep dive across his work, including his most recent 2023 book An Honorable Exit (French title: Une sortie honorable), The War on the Poor (French title: La guerre des pauvres), and Congo (in French, untranslated to English). I also have
It’s been a busy year, with 42 issues of my newsletter “Securities” by Lux Capital in the bag alongside 22 podcast episodes. But the most exciting part of the year was my new editorial focus on “riskgaming,” a new form of wargame scenarios that I have been developing with colleagues over the past year. Three scenarios have nearly reached production, two written by me and one from a contributor. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite finish all the layout designs by the end of 2023, so while all the work took place this year, unless you were one of the hundred people who got to experience them live, you’ll have to wait until 2024 to see them published.
The biggest theme this year was obviously artificial intelligence, where there was just an overwhelming flood of news, progress, debate and theory about the field’s implications for the future of engineering, scientific discovery, creativity and society writ large. I remain deeply bullish on AI’s opportunity to transform the economy, but I’d say my skepticism is starting to grow on some of the most extreme perspectives, particularly in regards to the timeline for AI’s ready deployment. A much more automated world is coming, and coming soon, but nearly as soon as some commentators seem to think.
Another major theme was international relations and the return of hard power. I think 2022 shocked many people given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year, and that shock has only expanded with Israel/Palestine and a whole slew of active and brewing conflicts in all regions of the world. Economic and ecological stresses have a way of inducing conflagration, and I see nothing abating in 2024 (and in most cases, only intensifying).
I was reading a book review in Le Monde this morning about “ecospiritualists” and the wide literature emanating from France on the subject of connecting humans back to nature. One theme that emerges is the need to tend to the “garden” of one’s self just as much as the garden of the Earth when it comes to ecological consciousness. It’s a theme that has become trenchant in American publishing as well through books like Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, which encourages readers to release their attention on devices and the modern economy and redirect it to nature.
The Le Monde writer Valentine Faure is clearly empathetic to the movement, but is also a bit perturbed by the motley set of ideas, beliefs, and practices that are combining into France’s version of ecospirituality (what she describes as a “bricolage”). The criticism seems apt — people are pulling in so many ideas from so many indigenous and other cultures that they are deconstructing entire cosmologies into easily replaceable parts. It’s almost like the Costco-ization of church.
What’s driving the popularity of these movements? A general “pulling back” from modern life: a retreat from burnout and overwork, of urbanization and concrete, of the frenetic pace of social relations driven by digital media. Alienation — a theme in the criticism of industrialization since the era started — has seemed to hit something of a popular zenith as people confront the immense mass of humanity and the unfathomable scale of the systems required to keep those humans alive, fed and happy.
The need for more spirituality seems necessary for people (and for society writ large), but I struggle to understand exactly the path from our urban lives to ones of the “forest” or “river”. The potentially great democratizing force of communing
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Partner, Research at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
