Danny Crichton on Technology, Global Risk and Strategy

It’s extraordinarily pleasing to read field reporting from deeply embedded foreign correspondents, a vocation that is shamefully underfunded today given the myriad of crises engulfing the world.

North Korea’s opacity is all but impregnable.

I tend to read older cultural criticism with one of two minds.

I have to admit: I’ve had a really bad run of nonfiction books lately.

A decade ago in graduate school, I was part of a reading circle on the sociology of quantification.

2025 was a dizzying year.

This is a syndication of my update from the Riskgaming newsletter, where most of my writing lives these days.

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).

I write almost exclusively on Riskgaming by Lux Capital.

Every year, I read way too much, and that includes a surfeit of essays, articles and news (also check out my favorite books and my favorite columns that I wrote from 2023).

In 2023, I read 37 books, including 3 books in French and 2 Korean graphic novels.

It’s been a busy year, with 42 issues of my newsletter “Securities” by Lux Capital in the bag alongside 22 podcast episodes.

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.

As I noted back in my year-end roundup of my favorite books of 2021, I considered Alistair Horne’s book A Savage War of Peace to be the best book I read that year, and arguably, one of the best books I have ever read in my life.

The sleepy suburban streets of Silicon Valley, with Stanford at its epicenter, were once well-tended farmlands, a lush region of physical toil and abundant agricultural exports that fed the frontiers and the fronts of world wars.