Welcome to the first one. The idea is simple: once a month, a short note on what I read, what I finished, and the ideas that rearranged how I think — the margin notes, not the whole book. If a month is thin, this'll be short. No filler.
Here's June.
Reading
I'm partway through Curfewed Night (Basharat Peer) — a memoir of growing up in Kashmir under counterinsurgency. What stays with me isn't the violence so much as the ordinariness around it: how a place absorbs occupation until the abnormal becomes the texture of an ordinary Tuesday.
It pairs uncomfortably well with No Good Men Among the Living (Anand Gopal), which I finished this month — a reported account of the Afghan war told through three lives. The most clarifying thing I've read on why the U.S. kept losing: it kept misreading local feuds as ideology. People settled old scores by feeding the Americans the wrong names, and the machine couldn't tell the difference.
The thread between them: when you can't see the system, you optimize the wrong variable. Both wars were full of competent people measuring the wrong things.
Alongside those, I finally sat down with Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows) — the book that gives that thread its grammar. It's slim, almost gentle, but it rewired how I read everything else: stocks and flows, feedback loops, the delays that make well-meant fixes backfire (you push on a system and it pushes back). The line that stuck: you can't control a complex system, you can only learn its rhythms and dance with it. For someone moving into risk, that's most of the job in one sentence.
Finished
Wrapped the last of the Coursera risk track — the spine of the pivot I'm making into risk consulting. The lesson underneath all of it: risk isn't a way to remove uncertainty, it's a language for making it legible. You don't model risk to feel safe — you model it to argue clearly about what could go wrong, and what you'd do about it.
One idea
The one that stuck: the linchpin — the small, load-bearing piece that holds a larger system together. Small in size, disproportionate in impact. Pull it and the whole thing unwinds; find it and you've got leverage. I keep seeing it everywhere now — in the books above, in supply chains, in arguments. Most systems have one. The work is finding it before it finds you.
Meadows has a name for this: leverage points — the places where a small shift changes everything. What got me is that she ranks them, and the highest-leverage one isn't a lever at all: it's the power to change the paradigm the whole system runs on. The linchpin, one floor up.
Off the clock
The World Cup came to North America this summer, which means for once the tournament runs on my clock instead of at 3am — and I've turned that into a standing excuse to feed people. Any match that kicks off after 6pm becomes an open house; I even wired up a little booking page so a friend can claim a game and a seat.
There's something particular about watching a World Cup as someone far from where he started: the whole world shows up to play in your adopted backyard, and for a month the map I carry around in my head is just… on TV, in group form. The USA opened against Paraguay with my door open, ran the group, and now the knockouts are here — where it stops being a league table and starts being heartbreak by penalty. The football's honestly been secondary. The real discovery is that a fixture list turns out to be wonderful social infrastructure: a reason, printed weeks in advance, to get people in one room. That's the whole trick to seeing anyone as an adult, it turns out — you just have to schedule it.
That's June. See you next month — and if something here made you want to argue, that's the point. Just reply.