Also exciting weekend reading

I had to restrain myself due to luggage, but London book 'haul' from Daunt, Foyles, Waterstones plus Blackwell's at University of Manchester. Yes I am very behind on Jacaranda – I forgot to pick up a copy in Paris

Glorious views of SF out the plane window ❤️

Speaking of global nuclear war, I wrote about @AnnieJacobsen's new book "Biological War: A Scenario" and how it compares with "Nuclear War: A Scenario." In short: the two books highlight the difference between well-defined catastrophes compared to the infinite uncertainty of bio

Maybe the next gen is going to be okay? We had our delightful f(lux) fellows play Four Forks this week, and they pretty much all ended up with positive outcomes! Meanwhile, I led us to global thermonuclear war :( Find out where you end up: fourforks.riskgaming.com

A quick post from me on the meaning of America's 250th birthday.

New post over the weekend from me, "A review of Fyodor Tertitskiy’s Accidental Tyrant" on North Korea's founder Kim Il-sung: www.dannycrichton.com/2026/06/28/...

A review of Fyodor Tertitskiy’s Accidental Tyrant

North Korea’s opacity is all but impregnable. Its neighbors, Russia and China, are dictatorships that work ever more diligently to control the speech of their citizens, but the two have got nothing on the Hermit Kingdom’s totalitarianism. Even the most rudimentary facts about what’s happening in the

dannycrichton.com

I didn't promote last week, but Kim Jong-un is on a roll – no one has bested the U.S. better in the past decade. How did he build a nuclear weapons program against all odds, and why are top U.S. policymakers resigned to their fate? Lessons from the Hermit Kingdom ⬇️

As a rent-stabilized NYC resident VC, I am the unique voter that benefits from combo of Mamdani's socialist rent freeze plus Trump's libertarian pro-QSBS improvements plus carried interest deductions. Yes, it all needs reform, but I will take my win-win

This weekend's essay from me – sorry, it's 5K words, but if you have the attention span: Chinese economic development, SV workaholics, factory work, what Ren Zhengfei and Steve Jobs share, the most beautiful data center in the world, and comments on the challenges of journalism ⬇️

1/ This article in WotR on why South Korea shouldn't build nuclear submarines is a perfect example of why other countries should ignore the diminished ambitions of DC policymakers and just chart their own strategic course: warontherocks.com/south-korea...

South Korea Could Build Nuclear Submarines, But It Shouldn’t

In late May 2026, South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back unveiled a roadmap to achieving one of Seoul’s top military acquisition goals:

warontherocks.com

Mahmud in this article does a nice job analyzing this debate, and it dovetails with The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism by Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson, which was a solid book on the subject last year.

Sound like a platform you use today? Neil Postman: "The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation"

My review of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and why a 40 year old book still feels so contemporary: www.dannycrichton.com/2026/06/13/...

A review of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

I tend to read older cultural criticism with one of two minds. One is the delectable schadenfreude of witnessing previous moral panics that ultimately turn out to be hysterical outpourings of stupidity (I’m thinking of Dungeons and Dragons and how it will cause children to become Satan-worshippers). That haughty

dannycrichton.com

I just love that a whole new generation of starry-eyed tech policy professionals are going to go from "the government needs to solve all of our problems, please regulate us" to "oh my god regulation is so bad in the U.S." We all make mistakes in our youth

I wrote this on Tuesday … and then the Friday shut down for foreign nationals using Fable/Mythos happened:

As I wrote, "Suddenly, the gaoloise-smoking, Burgundy-drinking, anti-American French intellectuel complaining about European vassalage had a point. Politicians first perked up, and now they are starting to take action."

My essay this week is on the increasing political unreliability of American software, and how that threatens the most important source of growth in the U.S. eocnomy. And then we saw what happened last night with Anthropic's Fable/Mythos models. More here: www.readsecurities.com/p/spacex-an...

SpaceX and the ominous future of America’s software empire

The ecstasy and decline of getting high (margins)

readsecurities.com

A review of Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself: www.dannycrichton.com/2026/06/13/...

A review of Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself

I have to admit: I’ve had a really bad run of nonfiction books lately. All of them have been positively reviewed, some in terms that are magnificently glowing. Many of them have even won prestigious global awards. Time after time after all of the hubbub, I finally get around

dannycrichton.com

Lots of great reading this weekend. Here's a review of C. Thi Nguyen's The Score: www.dannycrichton.com/2026/06/08/...

A review of C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score

A decade ago in graduate school, I was part of a reading circle on the sociology of quantification. It’s a small lacuna of an academic field with a massive scope: the incredible quantification of society and the politics behind how people and institutions construct those numbers. It encompasses everything

dannycrichton.com

IVF is growing rapidly, but so are its costs. To bring those costs down, doctors and future parents need better analytical tools to optimize IVF success. Today, Alife received approval from the FDA for its AI tool for embryo selection – truly the life of lifesciences research

Are AI data centers in space viable? They will be if we build the right infra. That's why Lux led a $90M round into Observable Space, which is using lasers to create higher bandwidth comms between satellites and Earth-based ground stations:

There are times when you just wonder whether we are trying to purposely torpedo the American economy. Are we trying to be globally competitive? It's hard for international businesses to invest domestically when the airports are shut down…

AI won't eliminate journalists, unless your idea of a journalist is to read social media all day and reblog random tidbits to pump traffic à la 2013. AI is not going to hustle down sources in person, build up a deep sourcing network and develop the trust needed to secure scoops

"If it can be automated with AI, it will be automated with AI, so start planning now." I was listening to a major journalism entrepreneur about newsrooms, but the same truth applies across media. The final art is the goal, not the tools that go into making it.

My partner Laurence Pevsner has a great op-ed today in the FT on Europe's industrial policy challenges with space launch capabilities in the wake of SpaceX's impending IPO. It builds on his Riskgaming scenario Dead Reckoning that @Lux_Capital ran at Chatham House last month.

One of the big projects I am working on is exploring and experimenting with strategic agentic thinking, or how AI models handle decision-making under uncertainty. So far, my conclusion is that humanity isn't f'd yet. More thoughts: www.riskgaming.com/p/gpt-54-pl...

GPT-5.4 plays Riskgaming like Machiavelli

An experimental exploration of strategic agentic thinking

riskgaming.com

Claude is so pleasant, so cooperative, and yet, so incapable. GPT-5.4’s version is far more menacing. Read for more observations from pitting AI agents against each other in live Riskgaming negotiations: www.riskgaming.com/p/gpt-54-pl...

GPT-5.4 plays Riskgaming like Machiavelli

An experimental exploration of strategic agentic thinking

riskgaming.com

Why is GPT-5.4 so much more secretive in its negotiations while Claude is so much more cooperative? I don’t know, other than it is hilarious that the cultures of the agents match the popular reputations of their parent companies. More observations: www.riskgaming.com/p/gpt-54-pl...

GPT-5.4 plays Riskgaming like Machiavelli

An experimental exploration of strategic agentic thinking

riskgaming.com

It will never not be miraculous to me that a coding agent proactively solves problems I didn't ask it to fix. So pleasant!