Books - Q2 2026

• The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (3/5) Since we are having a new Gulf War, we decided to read about the Secretary of State during the the first Gulf War. (This is sort of how we are coping with our annual Trump Crash.) Trump and Hegseth make us nostalgic for George H.W. Bush, Baker, and Cheney. James Baker was Reagan's chief of staff and secretary of the treasury and secretary of state, as well as George H.W. Bush's chief of staff. Born in 1930, he's about to turn 96. Baker came from a family of Houston lawyers - his great grandfather founded Baker Botts. He went to the Kinkaid School, Princeton, and the UT law school. He played tennis at the Houston Country Club, which is where he met the older Bush - they became doubles partners. During the Korean war, he was assigned to a ship patrolling the Mediterranean. ("I fought the Korean War on the French Riviera.") His start in politics was as an under secretary of commerce in the Ford administration, and then the campaign manager for Ford in 1976 (which lost to Carter). He then managed Reagan's campaign in 1980. Baker was sort of running the country for parts of Reagan's presidency, so this is a good "deep state" studies book. Baker would for sure want to get the Strait of Hormuz under American control now, but likely would not have risked a showdown over it, the way that Trump has. He is an uber-Episcopalian, the Special Counsel to the Vestry of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Tanglewood (Houston). The Bushes were members as well, and Baker gave a eulogy for HW there. Conservatives never trusted Baker. They perceived, correctly, that he was interested in personal advancement more than ideological principle. ("When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.") As Reagan's chief of staff: "It said something about Reagan's pragmatism that he wanted someone who was not an ideologue to run his White House and something about his nature that he held no grudges." Baker said to Volker: "the president is ordering you not to raise interest rates before the election." Something interesting: Trump took out full page ads in newspapers in the 1980s to say that the U.S. should charge countries such as Japan for protecting oil tankers traveling through the Persian Gulf. Never knew that Baker picked Alan Greenspan to be Reagan's Fed chair. Baker said to Bush about Gulf War I: "this has all the ingredients that brought down three of the last five presidents - a hostage crisis, body bags, and a full fledged economic recession caused by forty dollar oil." After the Bush administration, Baker cashed in by working for David Rubenstein (Carlyle), with the idea that he would attract walthy clients via "star power." Baker also ran the Florida election fight for George W Bush in 2000: "if we try to fight this battle at the Supreme Court, the liberals will vote against us because we're not liberals and the conservatives will vote against us because they're conservatives and will want to show constitutional deference to the state." Ted Cruz was a campaign aide who worked on the recount fight. Something that comes through in the book is that Baker really neglected his family so that he could have this political career. While he was in Washington at the White House, he was not with his kids in Houston. 
• Love & War In The Apennines (5/5) This is a great autobiographical adventure story by Eric Newby (1919-2006), who got captured during a Special Boat Service operation during WWII (in 1942) and was imprisoned in Italy. He escaped during the armistice and was helped by Italian civilians, including the woman who would become his wife. It's a high agency story. While retreating from the failed SBS attempt to blow up an airfield, he was smart enough not to fire upon Italian perimeter guards. (And they were smart enough to leave his group alone, too.) In general, he was smart enough to try to survive, not follow the rules (whether Britain's or his captors'), and not try to be a hero. He seemed to see at a quite young age that the war was pointless. I wonder if his experiences working at an advertising agency and then as a lowly apprentice sailor helped him to realize that everything is a scam, and keep his head down? He was fortunate to have spent most of the war as a POW or on the lamb in Italy. He was recaptured by the Germans in late 1943, who were oddly obsessed with rounding up these escaped POWs who were just doing things like laboring on Italian farms.
• The Last Grain Race (5/5) Also by Eric Newby - his first book, about that experience as an apprentice sailor on a four-masted steel sailing ship that carried grain from Australia to the U.K. The ship itself survives and is now a restaurant on the Philadelphia waterfront! Very dangerous work to climb the rigging in storms to change the sails. Atrocious food and uncomfortable conditions aboard the ship. His voyage was in 1938-1939 which was both right before WWII and the very end of the era of sail (wind) energy propelling ships carrying freight. They were passed by steamers over the course of the voyage, which took about eight months. Somewhat baffling why he went from a white collar (or at least clerical) job to a virtually unpaid job on an obsolete sailboat. Wonder if he knew that he wanted to be a writer (something he achieved only later in life) and that writers need unusual life experiences to tell good stories?
• The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story (2/5) Author Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, is related to Leonid Eitingon, the NKVD General who organized the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. As John Maxfield points out, her brother Robert G. Wilmers was an American billionaire and chairman of M&T Bank until his death in 2017. (Readers may recall Special Tasks from a couple years ago, an autobiography of Sudoplatov, who was Eitingon's superior.) We never knew that Soviet citizens had to write an "autobiographical statement" from time to time, which could subsequently be used against them. Highlight: "Stalin more than most believed in the power of the single malevolent individual - he was his own model - and though Trotsky may not have been as much of a threat to the Soviet Union as Hitler he compounded that threat a hundredfold." Orlando Figes gives an accurate review: "The trouble is that Wilmers wants to give us everything from her research, even when it goes nowhere, and to put herself into the narrative at every opportunity. The result is an over-long and sometimes self-indulgent book, which sits uncomfortably between historical writing and a literary version of Who Do You Think You Are?"
• The Scaling Curve: Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the Race to Build and Survive Superintelligence (4/5) Something funny about this is that it seemed noticeably AI-written.... because it was! The author is listed as "Claude St. John" which seems to be a pen name for Tod Sacerdoti, who used Claude to write the book. That will probably be the new normal, especially for books about current events that need to be written quickly. I wonder whether Robert Caro could finally finish his last LBJ volume if he just put Claude to work at the presidential library where he is turning every page? Highlights: "The model had been given one objective, predict the next word. And in learning to do that well, it had learned to do a great deal else besides." "And they were working, he noticed, not because anyone had discovered the right algorithm or the right architecture. They were working because people had finally thrown enough computing power at them." "The company, on paper, loses money every year. It lost eight hundred million in 2024 and eight billion in 2025. It looks like a catastrophe. But if you think of each model as its own company, each one is profitable. What creates the appearance of loss is not the underlying economics but the exponential scale-up—the fact that each new generation costs an order of magnitude more than the last." "If AI models became a commodity, the value would flow to the company with the largest distribution network and the most data, which was Meta." "Just as a child raised with strong principles and a clear sense of identity was better equipped to navigate novel situations than a child raised with a rigid list of rules, a model trained on principles generalized better than a model trained on prohibitions. Anthropic’s own research was increasingly confirming this: high-level training at the level of character and identity was surprisingly powerful and generalized well to situations that the constitution’s authors had never anticipated." "This paralleled the discovery in Constitutional AI that principles generalized better than rules." "The idea [of superposition], grounded in the theory of compressed sensing, was that neural networks could represent far more concepts than they had neurons by encoding multiple concepts in overlapping patterns across groups of neurons." "In knowledge-work settings—finance, law, healthcare, pharmaceutical research—a mistake was worse than silence, and flattery was worse than honesty." "Could powerful AIs invent a new religion and convert millions of people to it? Could most people end up addicted to AI interactions?"
• A Small Place in Italy (3/5) Another Eric Newby, not quite as good as his first two stories (about being a POW in Italy and about being an apprentice sailor on a four-masted barque), but how could it be. In this one, he and his wife Wanda restored a dilapidated farmhouse, "I Castagni," in the Apuan Alps of northern Italy, starting in 1967. Probably the most interesting thing was his discussion of taking part in the annual vendemmia, the grape harvest. (For making wine, of course. The locals only drank their own wine and did not trust wine that had been produced in other regions of Italy.)
• Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games (3/5) Best known as the creator of the Civilization strategy game series. He was working for a company that made cash register software, and another employee picked him to be a computer gaming company co-founder. It was the classic pairing of the nerdy programmer (Meier) and the charismatic salesman type (Bill Stealey), and in this case they respected each other's strengths and abilities well enough to succeed. (Here's a telling example: "Converting our games to the Commodore would be a purely financial move for the company, and I kind of felt like that was Bill's problem, not mine. The work wouldn't involve anything new or interesting; it was just a way to sell more of what we'd already made.") His cofounder was a pilot and they started with flight simulator games. Meier always had to fight for his strategy games that gaming company execs thought were less marketable than action genres. (When he left the first firm he founded, it was a reasonably easy separation because "they didn't want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators.") He met Tom Clancy when they worked on a submarine simulation, and Clancy gave him career advice. By 1989, their company had $15 million in revenue, which was a lot of money back then. (Now you'd probably raise $15 million from VCs just to start an overstaffed software company.) He is a "train autist," when he was a kid he read the Swiss railroad timetable for fun and imagined the paths that the trains were taking in his mind. As a child he played the violin and read music theory and was passionate about Bach, so he made a computer game that generated Bach-like music. (Which wasn't commercially successful.) Bach wrote "puzzle canons." Other highlights: "Mostly I was tired of hyperrealism. If real life were that exciting, who would need videogames in the first place?" Non-transitive: "the balance of artillery, cavalry, and infantry created a classic rock-paper-scissors scenario." He says that games aren't the defining theme of his life, it's "the interesting decision," and "a game just happens to be a well-curated series of them."
• Lunch with the FT (3/5) The weekend edition of the Financial Times has an amusing column, Lunch with the FT, where a writer for the FT takes a celebrity out to lunch for an interview, expensed to the FT. (Although: “What we view as a declaration of editorial independence has often been taken as a cultural insult or a poor reflection of the guest’s own financial standing.”) In 2026 they have interviewed Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson. Nobody likes when the Lunches are dry: “Anxious not to have one of those teetotal Lunch with the FT’s that prompt mocking letters from readers, I receive reassurance that wine is on its way.” This 2012 article has good background on the Lunches, including the fact that Gore Vidal had the second most expensive one up to that point. FT editor Lionel Barber says, “Lunch should be done with panache but not indulgence.” He defines that as “excellent food but not vintage wine”. The six types of people you meet at Lunch with the FT: the star, politician, the thinker, the executive, the maverick, and the humble achiever. 
• Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary (3/5) This new biography focuses on 1985-1997 period, the time between when Jobs was kicked out of Apple until Apple bought his successor company, NeXT. As we know, Steve was a fanatic. This led him to nearly destroys his companies many times, but it also let him create the best smartphone, a trillion dollar product. One idea would be that you should invest in this type of person, since the joint-stock option translates their volatility into a valuable call option for you. ("[Susan Barnes] had somehow managed to help Steve eke out a $50 million credit line from J.P. Morgan. He treated it like found money: 'If we can't pay it back,' he said, 'too bad.'") And it seems like Larry Ellison figured this out early. He backed Jobs and, later on, Musk - both extremely volatile entrepreneurs. When Musk bought Twitter, Ellison said that he would invest “a billion... or whatever you recommend.” Another concept in the book is that it you can create value in a startup by doing things that big companies are too sclerotic or incompetent to do, and then they'll buy your company even if it is not profitable. A good idea right now would be drone defense. For whatever reason, the incumbent defense contractors seem unable to build this, so get a team together and get a prototype and sell to them.
• Peace and War: Growing Up in Fascist Italy (3/5) Written by Eric Newby's wife, who helped him after he escaped from POW confinement in Italy. Her family was Slovenian, and when Slovenia was annexed in 1941, and she and her parents were forced to move to Fontanellato, in northern Italy (Parma) because the Italians did not trust the loyalty of Slovenians. Both Eric and Wanda's books give a sense that the fascist governments of Germany and Italy were highly officious, meddlesome, and tyrannical. They were doomed to lose because they repelled intelligent people - much like today's Republican Party. Something else amazing is that she was one of 11 children but only she and her brother survived - shocking infant mortality and she was born in 1922! Her life in Italian speaking Slovenia a century ago was more like life 500 years ago than life today. She and Eric had two children and two grandchildren, which is rather blue-coded.
• The Political Economy of Pipelines: A Century of Comparative Institutional Development (3/5) "Pipelines are the quintessential choke points on trade." "The average cost of pipeline capacity decreases relentlessly with larger pipelines, as cost rises linearly while capacity rises exponentially. That means that a single pipeline is the least expensive way to serve the market for any conceivable quantity shipped - the definition of a natural monopoly...""Land is the ultimate scarce commodity, and major gas pipelines need lots of it..." However: "long-distance pipelines do not have the characteristics of gas distribution companies' local area networks, which effectively and 'naturally' bar the entry of competitors." Long distance gas pipelines were made feasible in the early 20th century by better welding. "The Interstate Commerce Commission became an effective government-underwritten cartel device in the railroad industry, although it had been invented for quite a different purpose." Talks about the Natural Gas Act and the unbundling of pipelines." Gas pipelines went from being the dominant buyers and sellers of gas in the United States to owning none of the gas they shipped."