This holiday time signals the looming end of the year. It gives all of us a reason to pause, slowdown, reflect, and often allow us to spend time with people we appreciate. In our increasingly fast, networked world, it’s hard to overstate the need to lower life’s tempo.
And on almost all calendars they are a red-letter day, a day describing a memorable day, usually because something happy or significant happens. The expression comes from the very first printed calendars, where major festivals, holidays, and other special days were marked in red ink, while the rest were in black. So any day worth noting became a red-letter day.
1 January 2026 – We should bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a fleeting enthusiasm and what a lifelong gift. It is good to have an annual hindsight ritual in one’s life and one’s work, the more so the more the two converge.
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination – success, superhuman strength, the love of another.
Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration.
An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary.
An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery – of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.
And, yes, there was so much to read this past year. I have included a few work links below, a composite measure of subject matters you most loved reading about and that I most loved writing about. Ok, they never perfectly coincided. I preferred to write more about war and dystopia. Most of you favored my technology articles. Bless the otherness of minds.
As someone whose inner energy is defined by my creative process, I am constantly switching between creation, consumption, and
I will still write and so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the “need to publish” and to constantly “put out content” have contributed to the overall devaluation of the media ecosystem, turning attention
And all of those are on the dystopia side (surprise!), forming around 4 overriding thoughts after contemplating 2025:
• Over this holiday period I had an opportunity to catch up with many friends across Europe, across many groups, and those conversations convinced me even more that the continent is sliding into geopolitical irrelevance – and we’ll all lose. It is time EU elites stop talking about “Europe” and the EU as interchangeable concepts. There can be no such thing as a “federalized Europe,” as there is no European nation. The political chatter, the political theatre is mindless.
• In “Game of Thrones”, the “Mad King” King Aerys II TargaryenI is uniquely famous for a plot that was a total betrayal of his own people to an “enemy” he created in his mind. It was “fiction”. Today the mad king is all too real, serving an enemy whose plan is to destroy the kingdom. As I have detailed in several posts over the past 5+ years, it all started in the early 1950s, when Stalin instructed his security services to devise ways to destroy the United States from within. It grew from there. Far, far too much to detail here, but as I will try to synthesize in an upcoming post we are watching in real time a mad president and his mad enablers destroy the most powerful country in the world.
The hallmark of the first year of Trump’s second term has been for he and his cronies to dismantle the constitutional system set up by the framers of that document when they established the United States of America. It’s not simply that they have broken the laws. They have acted as if the laws, and the Constitution that underpins them, don’t exist.
And, crucially, it put operatives in virtually all government departments and agencies, where they gained access to privileged information about Americans, including citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants.
• Putin cannot stop the Ukraine War. This war is no longer about Ukraine. It is about regime survival. Authoritarian wars don’t end when they become immoral or irrational. They end when continuing them becomes more dangerous than stopping them. For Putin, that moment hasn’t arrived. Stopping the war wouldn’t erase its costs – it would make them payable. Blood, money, propaganda, repression: none of it can be undone, only justified as “unfinished”.
• This is why I’ve written we are fairly well into the foothills of WWIII already. It actually began over a decade ago and nobody noticed. We’ve seen countries achieve military objectives without firing a single bullet. We’ve seen public opinion manipulated to destabilize nations and degrade long-held alliances. We’ve seen the export of disinformation to prop up authoritarian politicians in otherwise healthy democracies. We’ve seen entire governments captured by manipulating voters and leveraging flaws in electoral systems that empower ideological minorities.
Cyber warfare IS warfare. Information warfare IS warfare. A lie, told often enough, can kill more people than any conventional bomb. It’s well past time we recognized this, that we see the weaponization of ignorance and media illiteracy.
Those who know Russia and Putin at the molecular level see what’s coming clear as day.
The upshot? The free world is thinking small. Our adversaries are not. We deny what is right before our eyes. Looking only at Russia, the steady drumbeat of ignored warnings — the Bronze Night events in Estonia in 2007, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Georgian election in 2012, the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the influence campaigns during Brexit and the US elections in 2016, the expansion of hybrid means across much of the globe, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — doesn’t speak well of our ability to assess and respond to security threats.
For anyone in the proliferating group chats of security and foreign policy professionals on any connected topics, hardly a week goes by when serious people don’t seem to deny the facts of what has happened even while accepting the general nature of the adversary. This bizarre discordance has many points of origin — but it points toward our failures to grapple with this timeline, and toward our deep failures of imagination about how we got here and what to do.
Now, on the technology side … well, too many subjects, really.
But this New Years holiday break I want to mention just a few pieces I think you should read:
• My team has already mentioned this piece several times, so here is my reminder (again). Read AI researcher Andrej Karpathy’s “2025: The Year in LLM” which will give you a tangible, very easy to understand, overview of what transpired – and how much – in 2025 in this relatively young field of large language models.
• Plus ”Is AI a bubble? Will it burst?” by Fred Vogelstein which tackles the big question from his perspective,
• And ”You don’t even need a product. AI will sell fake stuff”. Somewhere in here is a lesson for sellers, but don’t think I am happy about this. We are already at peak consumerism and don’t need more radicalized version of it. That said, the story is totally worth reading.
• And lastly “The Politics of Superintelligence”. Listening to AI nonsense from men who don’t understand tech, and from those selling them a future vision,
That’s it. I’m not going to push any more AI stuff on you.
Wishing you all a healthy, satisfying New Year.