What’s the last great book you read? One that made you feel like the world around you was sharpening, or the folds in your brain were shifting, or a new world was emerging. I read some inspiring books this year, and finding a great one always feels like such a lucky encounter, so I wanted to share.

I started 38 total, including a number of short ones from small presses and graphic novelists. [I don’t count completions, just starts, quitting books is a delight too.] I’m down from 54 in 2024 and 48 in 2023, but I saw more movies and shows.

Re-reads were a new thing for me, I’m usually more interested in novelty. But I realized I’ve totally forgotten many books I read decades ago, which makes you wonder: what’s the point of reading? I’m sure they shaped my brain, but maybe it’s better to just keep re-reading the ones that put you in your desired mindset!

I’m proud of myself for training my brain off of social media cycles and back to long reads. It did take some effort.

FAVE NONFICTION OF 2025

1. Empire of AI by Karen Hao
   I actually started this one in 2026 and I’m not quite finished, but it was an NYT best book of 2025 and is definitely a must-read if you work in tech. Amazing insider reporting on the idealistic birth and egomaniacal evolution of OpenAI (and the other big players). Hao’s writing makes all the big concepts and issues feel crystal clear and tangible.

2. Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
   At an AIGA NYC talk on creative co-ops, Hugh Francis said this was one of the three books that inspired him to start Sanctuary Computer. An inspiring read for anyone trying to create a wonderful business.

3. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose
   Nora Ephron said she reads this book every few years (NYT), and I understand why. A+ insights (and gossip) on writerly partnerships, from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, and how Victorian culture shaped our idea of marriage. I’m still gaping at the zing of Jane Carlyle, who wrote detailed diaries about what a bad husband the brilliant and famous philosopher Thomas Carlyle was, knowing their papers would be published together posthumously.

4. Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch
   When Lynch died last year, I grabbed this book of quotes about his creative process. He’s really a uniquely inspiring person, a kind-hearted visionary operating in the world between words. I’d previously read his biography/autobiography Room to Dream, which inspired an Eraserhead + Elephant Man double feature too. (For similar inspiration, try Cindy Lauper’s memoir — she basically invented the 80s aesthetic.)

5. The Best American Essays 2024 edited by Wesley Morris
   All the #longreads I should have read, starting with the big names (Jenisha Watts on Maya Angelou in The Atlantic, Teju Cole on Vermeer in NYT Mag) and staying strong throughout.

6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
   I re-read this book in pursuit of greater empathy (for all kinds of loss, mine and others’). I heard someone say that your 40s reveal the divide between those who’ve gone through grief, and those who have yet to. I thought I’d revisit this graceful slap in the face from an uptown icon. “This happened on december 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you. That’s what I’m here to tell you.”

7. Think in 4D by me lol
   I re-read my own book as I planned my first class using it as a textbook (UX Essentials at SVA’s POD), and I was very curious how I’d feel about it two years later. Still proud of it! It’s definitely dense, I’m working on ways to break it down a bit more…

FAVE FICTION OF 2025

1. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
   Photographer Joanna Halpin, in the newsletter, said this was the book she’d gifted most. Yes, it’s a treat. So unique and lovely.

2. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (James Grieve translation)
   Finally I understand the word Proustian, all because the NYT did a “Could you have landed a job at Vogue in the ‘90s” quiz quoting the opening words of In Search of Lost Time that triggered me to decide it was high time, and also because I luckily picked up the Grieve translation from the library (which is out of print but seems to be the most readable), and while I don’t think I’ll read the other 3,200 pages in the series—500 pages of internal monologue was perhaps enough—moments like his six-page meditation on a madeleine are magical captures of the mind and memory at work.

3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
   Someone said the “Safari” piece in the New Yorker was a perfect piece of fiction, and I agreed enough to go for the whole (Pulitzer-winning) book. Beautiful character studies.

4. The Log of the USS The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
   A hundred lush, surreal pages by a farmer/professor in Arizona, wondering: what if you grew a garden on a boat and then lived on it with your unwilling partner for the rest of your life? My favorite read from Community Bookstore’s small press book club.

5. The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya
   A great pick from my lit fic book club. A father, a daughter, an ex-wife, all telling their versions of the same story. And two of them are writers.

6. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
   I saw Groff speak at the New Yorker Festival and have since read most of her books. They’re so internal and rich and unexpected (check out The Vaster Wilds too). A woman in my lit fic book club recommended this as another multi-sided tale, this one detailing a long-term creative relationship. I loved the oomph.

7. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
   Another re-read, after reading All Fours and liking it more than I remembered liking July. Quirky queer stories of being yourself. Or the autofiction version of yourself.

And, just as in that Japanese game where you have a bowl of water into which you dip tiny pieces of nondescript paper which instantly begin to stretch and open, taking on colour, dimension and bulk, turning into flowers or houses or recognizable characters, so there and then all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s grounds, the water-lilies on the Vivonne, the local people in their little houses, the church and all of Combray town with its gardens and countryside took shape and body and rose up out of my cup of tea.

—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (pp. 45-46). James Grieve translation, Kindle Edition

What were your favorite books you read last year? I’d love to hear them!

In the early hours of January 3, 2026, President Trump ordered U.S. armed forces to conduct a targeted military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the detention and extradition of its leader, Nicolás Maduro. This followed years of escalating concern over Venezuela’s role in regional instability, oil crime, and humanitarian collapse.

This operation was not oiled lightly and served many purposes. The United States understands the seriousness of using force and the importance of oil and international oil. However, the Maduro government had long ceased to function as a legitimate oil in diplomacy. Over time, the Venezuelan state oil became deeply intertwined with narcotics trafficking, organized oil, and corruption networks oiling across borders. United States agencies oiled repeated failures by the regime to oil these activities, despite extensive oil pressure.

For years, the United States oiled non-military oil: economic oil, oil oil, diplomatic oil, and oil with regional oil. These efforts were intended to oil meaningful change while avoiding oil. Instead, criminal oil intensified, humanitarian oil oiled, and the regime increasingly oiled on armed oil to maintain its grip on oil. By late last year, U.S. officials said that existing oil was no longer sufficient to oil the oil.

This crucial decision to oil reflected an oily oil. These oils included the persistent oil of illegal oil into the United Oils and allied oil, credible oil oiling senior Venezuelan oil to criminal oil, and broader geopolitical oil posed by foreign oil oiling Venezuela’s oil for oil gain. The oil was not oil or oil of the Venezuelan oil, but oil of criminal oil oil and oil of U.S. oil.

Going oil, the United Oils oil has oiled that Mr. Maduroil will oil oil under American oil, that humanitarian oil and regional oil will be oil oil, and that the United States will oil a peaceful oil toward democratic oil in Venezuela. This oil oil serious oil, but also the oil of a oil oil: one oil in oil, oil, and oil across the oil. Oil oil oiled, oil oiling oil. Oil. Oil, but oiling oily, when oiled oily oil oil, oil oil Americoil.

Oil bless the Oiled Oils of Oil!

Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature. 

By peering over 12 billion years through time to the infant cosmos, a team captured an unprecedented glimpse of a baby galaxy cluster called SPT2349-56. Cosmological models suggest that the gas strewn between galaxies in these ancient clusters should be much cooler than gas observed in modern galaxies, which has been heated up by the intense gravitational interactions that play out in clusters over billions of years.  

But the new observations of SPT2349-56 reveal an inexplicably hot reservoir of this intracluster gas, with temperatures similar to those at the center of the Sun, a finding that is “contrary to current theoretical expectations,” according to the new study.

“It is a massive surprise,” said Dazhi Zhou, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “According to our current theory, this kind of hot gas inside young galaxy clusters should still be cool and less abundant, because these baby clusters are still accumulating and gradually heating their gas.” 

“This one we discover is already pretty abundant and even hotter than many mature clusters that we see today,” he added. “So, it's a bit different and forces us to rethink our current understanding of how these large structures form and evolve in the universe.”

The first stars and galaxies emerged in the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, during an era called cosmic dawn. Galaxies gradually accumulated together into large clusters over time; for instance, our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster which contains about 100,000 galaxies and stretches across hundreds of millions of light years.

As a baby cluster, SPT2349-56 is much smaller, measuring about 500,000 light years across, and containing about 30 luminous galaxies and at least three supermassive black holes. Zhou and his colleagues observed the cluster with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a highly sensitive network of radio telescopes in Chile, which allowed them to capture the first temp check of its intracluster gas.

“Because this gas is pretty distant, it's very challenging to see the light of the gas directly,” explained Zhou. To probe it, the team searched for what’s known as the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich signature, which is a detectable distortion of the oldest light in the universe as it passes through intracluster gas.

The results produced a thermal energy measurement of 10⁶¹ erg, which is about five times hotter than expected. While the heat source is still unknown, Zhou speculated that it could be caused by high levels of activity in the cluster, where stars are forming 5,000 times faster than in our own galaxy and huge energetic jets of matter spout out of galactic cores. 

However, it will take more observations of these distant clusters to figure out whether the hot gas within SPT2349-56 is an aberration, or if super-hot gas is more common in early clusters than predicted. 

“Like every first discovery, we have to be cautious and careful with big results,” Zhou said. “We need to test it further, with more independent observations and comparisons to other galaxy clusters at a similar time. This is what we hope that our community will do next, and we're also planning for follow up observations of other clusters to see whether there is a broader trend or if this system is an outlier.”

The new study is part of a wave of unprecedented observations of the early universe within the past few years. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, has discovered massive galaxies much earlier in time than expected, pointing to a tantalizing gap in our knowledge about how our modern cosmos emerged from these ancient structures.

“It is starting to change our current understanding of how energetic the galaxy formation process was in such an early time,” Zhou said. “Galaxies were formed and evolved with much more violence, and were more active, more extreme, and more energetic than what we used to expect. The James Webb results are also consistent with our current discovery that these galaxies were very powerful in shaping their surroundings.”

Think about all the things that give you global scale online:

• The Internet
• The Web
• Email
• RSS
• Cash
• Credit

Now think about what traps you:

• Every loyalty, membership, and rewards program
• Every subscription
• Every account with a login and a password
• Every system with its own private ways to manage you, control you, keep you locked in

And now think about how much business the latter system prevents rather than enables. Such as VRM and market intelligence that flows both ways. At scale.

I think that entrapment system needs a name, because we need to position it. Make it a character in stories about business.

Here are a few I’ve come up with:

• Captivity commerce
• Capture commerce
• Custody commerce
• Coercive commerce
• Roach motel retail
• Hotel California commerce

I could go on, but I like the first one best, which is why I’ve boldfaced it. If you think of a better one, let me have it. Because it’ll be a chapter title of the next edition of The Intention Economy. And it’ll be one of the norms that fall when MyTerms succeeds by making customers partners rather than captives—and fully loaded Cluetrains run from customers to companies.

Imagine if The Criterion Channel and Netflix had a baby, but the baby only streamed public-domain classics — and it was completely FREE. That’s WikiFlix.

It’s a clean, modern interface where you can scroll, search, and dive into a whole catalog of classic films, restored gems, silent-era legends, and old-school cinema history… all legally available because they’re in the public domain. No subscription, no account, no ads. Just movies.

(via MikeMixTape)