A recent edition of New Statesman listed out their recommended “Twenty-five books to read in 2025”. That’s a list of books due to come out in 2025 to be clear, so none of us can possibly have read any of them yet.

Naturally this has done nothing other than make my want to read list continue grow exponentially faster than my to-read list. Worse yet, it’s almost the end of month 1 and my personal goal to read more books this year has so far got me into the grand position of having read - after almost 1/12th of the year has elapsed - a grand total of:

Zero books.

The shame of it.

Ugh. Oh well, here’s what I nontheless can’t resist adding to the “if only” list.

World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics, by Bruno Maçães:

World politics has changed, claims Bruno Maçães. Geopolitics is no longer simply a contest to control territory: in this age of advanced technology, it has become a contest to create the territory. Great powers seek to build a world for other states to inhabit, while keeping the ability to change the rules or the state of the world when necessary.

At a moment when the old concepts no longer work, this book aims to introduce a radically new theory of world politics and technology. Understood as ‘world building’, the most important events of our troubled times suddenly appear connected and their inner logic is revealed: technology wars between China and the United States, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy transition.

To conclude, Maçães considers the more distant future, when the metaverse and artificial intelligence become the world, a world the great powers must struggle to build and control.

Get In - The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power under Keir Starmer.

Minority Rule, by Ash Sarkar.

‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans-activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.

In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it’s facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.

The Age of Diagnosis, by Suzanne O’Sullivan

…a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients

How to Think About AI - A Guide for the Perplexed, by Richard Susskind

Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups - and into everyday life.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian

Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.

To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.

Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.

The Genuis Myth, by Helen Lewis

The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor.

You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate.

Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means.