Reading – CGW's Blog

Vigil by George Saunders

What might the chief architect of the oil and gas industry think about on his deathbed, as the effects of climate change only worsen and his lobbying prove even more effective?

That’s the setup of Vigil, the new satirical novel by George Saunders, the celebrated American writer. It’s a magical device to explore regret, comfort and legacy.

A few friends and I have admired and followed George for close to 20 years. We’ve discussed his short stories, attended his talks bought his collections and more recently his longer works. He helped me understand what writing can be.

Those friends and I were divided on Vigil. Two friends feel he’s narrowed too much into one voice that came from his short stories, into Lincoln in the Bardo and returned for this one. In contrast, I view this as a defining style — the incomplete sentences, particular pacing and sparing coarse language and themes — and I love it. I found it comforting, and thought-provoking, visual and world-making.

I always remember George talking about how every writer “climbs the mountain” of another writer’s voice, before finding their own. He’s done it, and I’m on a lifelong journey to do the same.

Below, I have a few notes I wrote down memorably from the book for my future reference.

Why the joint stock company was one of the world’s best inventions

A company pools capital for entrepreneurs, and distributes risk for investors.

The oldest forms were extensions of the state, typically time-bound efforts to reach some goal of an empire. Victorian England introduced “limited liability,” in which investors were not liable for anything beyond their investment, and tradable shares.

This invention of invention helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. That’s from the 2003 book The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

More than 20 years old, the short snappy book was written in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals. Before even the Great Recession, these business journalists were already asking: “Is the company essentially a private association, subject to the laws of the state but with no greater obligation than making money, or a public one which is supposed to act in the public interest?”

That questions remains important today. Even as it’s become far easier to start a company, as the authors write: “The modern company still needs a franchise from society”

Below I share my notes for future reference

What is human consciousness?

Consciousness is “under siege.”

Suddenly lightning-fast computing seems to recreate tasks we commonly associate with intelligence. Yet we’re unprepared as a society to define, let alone create and control, something as pervasive as being. Across close to two-dozen scientific theories of why consciousness appears at all, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” none has widespread agreement.

We’re behind in part because at the dawn of the Enlightenment, early scientists focused on measurable phenomenon, in part because they believed that leaving the soul to the church would avoid a political backlash. That allowed hundreds of years of scientific flourishing, but left an underdeveloped sense of self.

That’s from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, a 2026 book by author-science journalist Michael Pollan. Across dozens of interviews and an approachable survey of the research landscape, he ably walks the reader through what we know now. Two stages are easier to test than the two later ones, since it requires consciousness to describe consciousness, but to put it simply:

Cognition is processing information, perhaps by instinct
Intelligence is, as William James defined it, “a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it”
Sentience is a precursor to consciousness, or, as Evan Thompson described it, “the feeling of being alive”
Consciousness is a sense of self, of knowing you know

It’s a fun book, I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The risk-taking that connects Wall Street, Las Vegas and Silicon Valley

A certain approach to risk and decision-making spans Wall Street, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley and, yes, even cryptocurrency libertarianism. Not all of it’s good, but some is.

It’s important to understand this community and worldview. That’s from On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a 2025 book by popular statistician Nate Silver.

The book is at least 150 pages too long, and needed a more disciplined edit. The author says he had three book proposals: gambling, AI and game theory. As far as I can tell, he combined them all. The bloated book has detailed poker gossip, historical passages about Las Vegas and biography of Steve Wynn. Lengthy passages detail how LLMs work and the personalities behind game theory. It’s all moderately interesting but bizarrely off focus of his book, in my read.

I happen to like the stuff, but I kept finding myself circling passages that could have been edited away. Regardless, I took away plenty of charming little details.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How a poem’s 1417 rediscovery shaped the Enlightenment

The concept hooked me: Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, a materialist Roman poem, gets rediscovered in 1417 by book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini, and its ideas — atoms, a universe without divine design, pleasure as a worthy pursuit — help crack open the modern world.

That’s the setup of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a 2011 book by historian Stephen Greenblatt that won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. I just read it.

What I actually wanted was the origins story: how could anyone in the centuries BCE arrive at “atomism” at all, with no microscopes and no evidence? The book gave me less of that than I hoped, so I went digging on my own — and that turned out to be the more rewarding part. The answer: ancient atomism wasn’t a discovery. It was a logical deduction. Parmenides had argued that nothing can come from nothing and therefore change is impossible; Democritus’s answer was tiny, eternal, uncuttable bits (atomos) rearranging in a void. It only looks like modern science because the word survived. The concept was independently rebuilt on real evidence 2,000 years later.

Which reframed the whole book for me. The Swerve isn’t really a book of ideas — it’s a beautifully written, story-forward narrative built on a single irresistible image: a lone bibliophile pulling a lost masterpiece off a monastery shelf at exactly the right moment to change everything. That’s why it won: gorgeous prose, a great yarn, and a secular-humanist thesis that landed perfectly in the science-vs-religion mood of 2011.

The insight I want to keep: Greenblatt’s book is itself an example of its own thesis. It’s a work that met its moment — the right idea, well-told, arriving when the culture was primed to reward it. Drop it into today and I’m not sure it wins anything. Books, like the texts they’re about, get lucky in their timing.

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

Immigration creates a “lake society,” rather than a stagnant swamp

Immigrants are neither villains, nor victims.

The through put in any economy is where dynamism comes from to get a “lake society”, rather than a stagnant swamp.

More to the point, foreign workers tend to not be the same as native workers, and when that’s the case everyone benefits. So that should be the focus, less displacement and more a core component of how an economy thrives.

That’s from The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, a 2024 book written by Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez.

In truth this pro-immigration stance is something of a straw man. Overall, even amid partisan American culture war, as I frequently report, high-skilled immigration is bipartisan— regardless of campaign rhetoric. It’s among the few things we agree on.

Instead, in many societies the question is what is the right level of immigration.

Below are my notes for future reference.

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”

The alchemist who takes on the king’s trial to attempt to turn lead into gold. If he does so he gets fabulous wealth for all around him. If he doesn’t, everyone dies.

Believing it impractical to stop everyone else’s from trying, he decides that he is the best shot because he has the most discipline. His sister begs him not to, but he goes anyway.

That fable opens the 11th chapter of the comfortingly named “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” the fall 2025 book by Eliezer Yudkowsky (“the prophet of AI doom”) and Nate Soares.

To their credit, the book is more reasoned than the title might suggest (I actually think it’s a great book title). They say again and again that they do not know the timeline: AI research, then, they say is a ladder on which each rung is billions of dollars but if anyone reaches the top everything explodes — and no one knows how long the ladder is.

Their argument is competition between China and the United States is silly Nobody “has” ASI (or AGI ), only it has itself, is their argument

Their argument, and this book in particular, helped refine my own framework for interpreting the moment, and my own AI philosophy, distilled in the chart below as a two-by-two axis depending on what your best guess is on the technology.

Below I have my notes for future reference.

Let Them

Commercially successful self-help authors have a story that a book-buying audience wants to hear. That message lands simply and clearly for those who need it, and may not seem like much to anyone else.

So it is with The Let Them Theory, the 2024 book by Mel Robbins, a former CNN legal analyst and self-help star, that has sold 10 million copies. I got the book to better understand this category, which frequently spawns coursework and speaking careers from tidy packages and simple ideas.

The corporation was invented to serve the people

Apple and Amazon are valued by public markets far in excess of their tangible assets, because of their “intangibles” in R&D and brand recognition. By historic standards, they own very little.

In contrast, AerCap and Prologis are among the world’s largest owners of the “means of production.” One leases aircraft to most large airlines. The other is the world’s largest industrial real estate company, leasing warehouses and data centers. They own the stuff.

Both “are nevertheless rather unimportant intermediaries in the modern economy” that now reflect “a long chain of intermediation” that means the system is more distributed. Yet our view and language about how companies fit into our world hasn’t changed.

That’s from The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong, a 2024 book by knighted economist John Kay.

The old industrial meaning of “capital” meant the owned means of production — mills, railways, steel plants, assembly lines. In many modern firms, Kay argues, those assets are fungible, often rented, and less important than the firm’s collective capabilities.

Among his criticisms is how today’s shareholder priority has distracted from the corporation’s origins as a device of the state. Executives can extract value in the short term, but this narrow-mindedness is provably harmful to corporations in the medium term. Business and economics thought has become far too self interested. Its champions treat “collective action” and “collective knowledge” as accidental overflow rather than our truly natural state. The book is thoughtful and important, given that its from among its closest insiders.

Below I have my notes for future reference.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Long the most compelling evidence of the net good of the project called “Western civilization” has been the demand for so many to join it. No doubt it’s always included misdirection and dastardly ethical lapses but surely all told the demand showed it was worth it. What happens when that changes?

The author who overlooked the petty indignities because of the remarkable and widespread freedom — of movies and walking into a library unencumbered by fear was thrilling. But the paper thin reliance on Israel over the killing of Palestinian children has broken a growing number of adherents.

That’s what I kept thinking of while reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the February 2025 National Book Award winning lyrical takedown of Western enablement of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians by novelist Omar El Akkad. It is harrowing, and beautiful and imporant.

“This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all,” he writes, and then later to the western liberal, of which I would likely be considered one: “It’s no use in the end to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you just this once to be the thing you pretend to be”

Elsewhere: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”

Below I have my notes for future reference.