Interests

Currently Reading

  • Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities

Reading Docket

  • Paul Scharre's Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
  • Malka Older's State Tectonics
  • Cho Chongnae’s The Human Jungle

Updated June 12th, 2018

Send me book recommendations!

Recently Read

  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game
  • Eliot Peper's Bandwidth
  • Suzy Hansen's Notes on a Foreign Country
  • Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire
  • Dan Drezner's The Ideas Industry
  • Gideon Rachman's Easternization
  • Gary Rivlin's Katrina
  • Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost
  • Gabriel Wyner's Forever Fluent

Current Obsessions

  • Political Risk: The risk from elections, changes in government, war, etc. have seemed to increase signifniacntly in the last few years, and yet our tools to understand how political risk affects companies and individuals have remained stagnant. How can we revolutionize the field?
  • Competitive Cities: After Amazon's bid for its HQ2 got hundreds of proposals from cities across the United States, how might cities more efficiently use economic development dollars to create job growth? How can we analyze what works and what doesn't?
  • Cost Disease: Costs for many services in the US have skyrocketed, including industries as diverse as housing, health, education, and infrastructure. What is driving these prices, and what can be done to bring prices more in line with inflation in other industries?
  • New Approaches to Political Lobbying: Lobbying remains completely ancient compared to the technological change that has happened to nearly every other form of brokering industry. What can be done to improve its effectiveness, with the hope of improving access for all people to politicians.
  • Next-generation Media: Media businesses are still struggling, yet it is clear that a persistent focus on audience development and subscriptions is the way forward. What tools need to be built to bring this world to fruition faster?
  • Graph Databases and Learning: This is more broad-based – how can we use knowledge maps to improve learning (specifically thinking around foreign languages).