Recent Reads

2025

• Technology
• AI 2027
• Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race
• Economics
• Towards a Syrian ‘Political Economy of Productive Powers’
• Once an Economy Switches from Rules to Deals, It’s Hard to Go Back
• 16 Years of Bitcoin: Why it Matters
• On the TikTok Ban
• Ideas
• The Lost Art of Research as Leisure
• Whose Weil?​ | Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone

2024

• Economics
• A lifeline in code: Evacuating Lebanon through Bitcoin
• Ideas
• The Human Right to a Life Project of Forcibly Displaced People Following The Swimmers
• School is Not Enough
• Writes and Write-Nots
• Politics
• America Votes: The cost of accountability is our future
• On Normalization
• The Delusion, Once Again, of a ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria
• Syrian returnees subjected to “gross human rights violations and abuses”, UN report details

2023

• Politics
• Pakistan’s expulsion order deepens the Afghan crisis
• The international human rights framework desperately needs an upgrade
• Life & Arts
• Anna Wintour: ‘I just have to make sure things are being done right’
• Progress
• Clusters rule everything around me
• Economics
• China and Japan pass by on the stairs of inflation
• Britain’s Martin Lewis Problem
• Do pay transparency laws raise wages?
• Utah’s Economic Exceptionalism
• Tech
• Transformers: the Google scientists who pioneered an AI revolution
• Ideas
• The Acceleration of Addictiveness
• Reading Well
• How to Do Great Work
• Are You Serious?

2022

• Psychology
• How I Wish Trauma Had Been Explained to Me
• Erikson’s Stages of Development
• Ideas
• The Anti-Promethean Backlash
• Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought
• Sketches of Beauty, Shades of Remoteness
• On Practical Religion, Self-Improvement and Why Sermons Don’t Work
• Open Borders: A Review of Bryan Caplan’s Book
• The Fog of Change
• Micromort: A Standard Unit of Measure For Risk
• Predictions for 2050
• Progress & Science
• Value Created vs. Value Extracted
• Hispaniola’s Great Divergence: Why are Haiti and the DR so different?
• Science as a source of social alpha
• Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth?
• Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital
• When Extreme Necessity is the Mother of Invention
• Progress, humanism, agency
• Funding Models and Innovation
• Sustainability & Climate
• The finite pool of worry
• Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View
• Methane hunters: what explains the surge in the potent greenhouse gas?
• The last design you’ll ever make
• Business
• Tokyu Hands Reborn as ‘Hands.’ A Closer Look at Nendo’s Rebranding
• Governance & Politics
• Britain’s ‘emerging market’ crisis
• Nestlé, Godiva and Nutella
• The fall of Sri Lanka
• An Interview with Pankaj Mishra
• The Human Cost of Normalizing Assad
• Rivalry between America and China will shape the post-covid world
• Crypto
• Axie Infinity’s vision of a “play-to-earn” video game
• Education & Learning
• Christopher Alexander’s architecture for learning
• Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

2021

• Governance & Politics:
• The Trouble with the View from Above
• Bashar al-Assad’s Unlikely Comeback
• Climate:
• Stripe Is Kick Starting Market for Carbon Removal
• Development:
• Th economic growth necessary to reduce global poverty
• National Development Delivers
• Innovation:
• What We Learned Doing Fast Grants
• Remote Work and the Future of Innovation
• Can a new approach to funding scientific research unlock innovation?
• Progress:
• How does progress happen?
• What are the returns to R&D?
• Education & Learning
• The New American University
• Cognitive Load, Emotion and Buoyancy
• Memories are made of this
• Organisational Culture:
• Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come From?
• Building Products at Stripe
• Business:
• 1,000 True Fans
• Invisible asymptotes
• Idea Generation
• Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?
• Technology:
• Moderation in Infrastructure
• Anthropology:
• Rules of Thumb and Adaptive Rationality
• Ideas:
• Upside decay
• Truth, Status, and Tribes
• The importance trap
• Familiarity and Belonging
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
• Literature:
• Inside the Whale

Poetry

• Borges: For a Version of I Ching
• Gibran: On Work
• Eavan Boland: The Emigrant Irish
• Rainer Maria Rilke: Go to the Limits of Your Longing
• Charles Baudelaire: The Albatross
• David Wagoner: Lost

Tutoring

In my free time I run Nativeluent offering personalized Arabic language lessons for students of all levels, focusing on speaking, reading, writing, and cultural understanding. This includes classical and Levantine Arabic for beginners and advanced students.

Writing

I write at taqaddum.net on Syria and personal and professional refelctions at arwaalmustafa.substack.com.