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THIS WEEK'S EDITION
Three Books To Read This Summer To Actually Understand AI
Every September, someone on your team comes back from vacation with a tan and a strong opinion about something they read over the summer. This year, we'd like that person to be you. There's no shortage of AI content out there—most of it is either too technical to use or too breathless to believe. In today's short read, we give you three books that, taken together, will teach you more than a year of headlines.
Start With The History: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
Harari's 2024 book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, is the wide shot. He walks through every major information technology humans have built—clay tablets, holy books, the printing press, newspapers, radio, social media—and asks the same question each time: did more information make us wiser, or just more powerful?
The answer is uncomfortable, and it's why this book matters for our line of work. Harari's core argument is that AI is not another tool inside the information network. It's the first technology to become a member of the network—something that generates ideas, makes decisions, and produces content with no human in the loop.
If your job is moving information to decision-makers, that distinction is your entire operating environment for the next decade.
Then The Hardware: The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt
Witt's book won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year for 2025, and it's the closest thing we have to a readable explanation of why AI happened when it did.
It's framed as a biography of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The real story is a company that spent thirty years making graphics chips for video games and then discovered those chips were accidentally perfect for building artificial intelligence.
Here's why you should care. Every AI policy fight of the next ten years—export controls, data center siting, energy demand, state preemption—leads back to the hardware that runs AI. You can't credibly work these issues with chips as a black box. Witt opens the box.
Now a strange recommendation: read a fifteen-year-old biography of a man who died the day after Apple introduced Siri.
Isaacson's Steve Jobs isn't merely a book about Steve Jobs. It's the modern history of Silicon Valley wearing a biography costume. The garage mythology, the reality distortion field, the contempt for market research, the willingness to ship something unfinished and fix it in public, the conviction that a demo is a form of argument—it's all in there, and it's all still running the companies building AI today.
The first two books tell you what AI does. This one explains why the people building it behave the way they do. In public affairs, when you understand motive, you have an enormous edge.
Finally, here's one more reason to see AI through Jobs's eyes—he predicted it over forty years ago.
What This Means For Public Affairs
Nobody pays us to know how a transformer works. They pay us to bend outcomes. Bending outcomes requires judgment, and judgment comes from context. Let your competition skim the headlines. Be the one who reads the primary sources.
Three Ways To Operationalize This Email
🔱 Pick one and start this week. If you read only one, make it Nexus. It's the one most likely to change how you think about your own job.
🔱 Buy the audio versions. All three are available. That's your commute, your workout, and your flight to Hawaii.
🔱 Make it a team read. Assign one book per person, then give each of them ten minutes at a staff meeting to report back. You'll cover all three inside a month.
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