It is the bane of the modern writer that, despite working in humanity’s oldest medium (ignoring cave artists), everything is always in flux. The freedom of blogging transformed into the pivot to social, then the pivot to video, then the pivot away from video, then the pivot to subscriptions and then newsletters (plus affiliated podcasts!) and now on to the AI slop-o-verse. By the way, that history covers about the half-life of a professional writer.
Into that maelstrom eleven years ago, Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman launched Lux Recommends on TinyLetter with a subscriber base of quite literally one. It was — and has been — a weekly roundup of the eccentricities of the world at the intersection of science, technology and the future, and it eventually drew thousands of fans. The sediments of Sam’s findings would ultimately accumulate into his book The Magic of Code, which was published last year.
When I took over Lux Recommends back in 2021, I added a nice dollop of cynical optimism (George Carlin’s “inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist”), mostly by discussing security issues that paralleled Lux’s own prodigious investments in the category. Russia invaded Ukraine a few weeks later, and of course, we’ve all seen the global chaos since then.
Lux Recommends has now hit its 500th edition, and it’s a time to both rejoice at the tenure of this little internet publication and hold a requiem — as all digital media does these days — for its immediate foreclosure. This is the final issue.
Part of the inspiration is that Casey Newton killed his own link roundup for Platformer. His experience mirrors my own: the honest truth is that our open rates for Lux Recommends were always hovering around the 40% mark compared to dispatches, which are opened by about 50% and can top 60% at times when I put a modicum of effort into the subject line. I am not surprised that original, on-the-ground reporting outranks the “what the hell did I like this week” roll call. But it’s also time to accept the will of you, my dear readers, and your finite attention spans.
We’ll be announcing other changes next week more broadly to Riskgaming. For now though, I want to leave you with some news from Lux, as well as my favorite 15 recommendations from the last five years, personally and eye-searingly culled from 366 links.
And yes, the subhed is a joke. There’s plenty of amazing new writing and artistry in the world. I’m just not going to tell you about it anymore. Or at least, not here.
From Lux Capital
ZIRP-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, ZIRP-a-Dee-Ay
My oh my what a fundable day
Okay, the ZIRP era is over, but that doesn’t mean startups aren’t growing like crazy.
Modal, which helps companies manage their AI infrastructure for inference and training, announced $355 million in Series C funding from investors including Lux, at a $4.65 billion valuation.
Cognition, the company behind the hit developer copilot Devin, raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. That’s math even Scott Wu can calculate.
Lux led a $90 million Series A round into Observable Space, which is pioneering laser-based communications between satellites and Earth ground stations to power the future space data center and connectivity economy.
My top recommends of all time
These are fifteen pieces I’ve continued to save and forward — each one shifted something about how I understand the world. They span money, power, history and the question of what it means to produce something that lasts. I hope you find a few that stick.
Economics & Industry
1. The Bank That Didn’t Die
Lucca De Paoli & Jeremy Hill — Businessweek, July 2022
Lehman Brothers had been dead for fourteen years. Except it wasn’t. A skeleton crew of employees is still unwinding the books, and the process may outlast them. This strange, melancholic portrait of an institution that collapsed but never really ended is as striking today as it was then.
2. China’s Shadow Fleet
Ian Urbina — The New Yorker, November 2023
Ian Urbina’s investigation into China’s distant-water fishing fleet still reads like a geopolitical thriller set at sea. Five billion pounds of seafood a year, a thirty-five-billion-dollar industry, and a quiet expansion of Chinese influence across ports and oceans most people never think about.
3. The Miracle of Running Water
The New Atlantis, May 2025
A deep dive into ancient and modern water infrastructure — and a reminder that the whole thing is far more precarious than it looks. Fresh water is far scarcer than our blue-globe intuitions suggest, and the systems that deliver it were never as robust as we assumed.
Geopolitics & National Security
4. The Sabotage Campaign
Zach Dorfman — Politico Magazine, August 2024
When Soviet agents kept stealing American technology during the Cold War, the FBI didn’t just watch — they started slipping them sabotaged hardware. Zach Dorfman (who is currently writing a book on non-official cover spies) tells the story with the pacing of a spy novel and the sourcing of a journalist who’s spent years on this beat.
5. What Russians Do Not Wish to Know
Sergei Lebedev — Liberties, September 2025
A Russian writer traces how willful ignorance of his country’s colonial history made the invasion of Ukraine not just possible but, for many, unremarkable. One of the most quietly devastating pieces of political writing I’ve read in years.
Society, History & the Human Condidition
6. The Dark Empath
Nadja Heym & Alexander Sumich — The Conversation, March 2022
Psychology researchers Nadja Heym and Alexander Sumich challenge the assumption that psychopathy and empathy are opposites. “Dark empaths” — people with dark triad traits who are also highly empathetic — may be more common than we think, and more unsettling than the straightforwardly callous.
7. The Tyranny of Narrative
Parul Sehgal — The New Yorker, July 2023
Sehgal examines the rise of “narrative” as the lens through which we explain everything — politics, identity, medicine, business — and asks whether this framing clarifies or merely flatters. A sharp critique of one of the most overused concepts in contemporary thought.
8. India’s Uprising
Christopher Caldwell — Claremont Review of Books, August 2023
A contrarian read on Narendra Modi’s India — not a defense of illiberalism, but a serious attempt to understand what it looks like when democracy answers to a society as it actually exists rather than to the preferences of its educated class. Frustrating in parts; genuinely clarifying in others.
9. There Is No Such Thing as Grand Strategy
History Does You (Substack), February 2026
“Grand strategy” is one of the most prestigious concepts in IR — and, this author argues, largely a retrospective fiction. The closer you get to actual institutions, budgets, and political incentives, the harder it is to believe coherence was ever the plan.
Culture, Ideas & Intellectual Life
10. Nature Does Not Care
Richard Smyth — Aeon, May 2022
Smyth makes a bracing case that nature writing has become too sentimental — too much Romanticism, not enough rigor. The natural world deserves writers who see it clearly, not writers who project onto it.
11. All History Is Revisionist History
James M. Banner Jr. — National Endowment for the Humanities, September 2022
A short, careful essay that threads one of the profession’s major debates: what does it mean to “revise” history, and why is it both inevitable and contested? Useful for anyone who’s found themselves arguing about whether the past has been rewritten.
12. What ‘Long Covid’ Means
Peter Robinson — The American Conservative, February 2023
One of the most empathetic accounts I’ve read of treating a disease that resists classification. Robinson writes about what it actually means for a doctor to help a patient when the diagnosis itself is uncertain — and what that uncertainty reveals about medicine more broadly.
13. The Age of Average
Alex Murrell, April 2023
Everything looks the same now. Apartment interiors, car designs, brand identities, films, novels. Alex Murrell’s diagnosis of convergence culture is sweeping and, once you read it, impossible to unsee.
14. Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?
Celine Nguyen — Asterisk, November 2025
The problem isn’t that today’s artists lack talent — it’s that criticism has collapsed. Celine Nguyen argues that vibrant creative cultures need a critical mass of engaged audiences, not just professional critics, and that the internet has hollowed out exactly that infrastructure.
15. Boxing, Celebrity, and the Death of Mastery
Tam Hussein — New Lines Magazine, January 2026
Jake Paul vs. genuine world champions: a lesson in what we now value. Tam Hussein’s lament about boxing is really a lament about a culture that has decided fame matters more than hard work. The poetry reading at the end lands harder than any punch.
