Yuval has done it again, and I can’t help but label this book as awe inspiring and brilliant. This has solidly put him on the list of “I’m eager to read anything he puts out” after the home runs of his Sapien series. 

We are in unprecedented times, but as a studied historian he shows us the ways in which we aren’t flying completely blind and lessons of the past persevere. Just as with Sapiens, it’s astounding how seamlessly he weaves together complex and varied topics with a common thread, and the lessons I took away that astutely apply to anything you read in the headlines today — AI, geopolitics, dismantling of democracy, social media ills, advancing science and medicine, and so much more— make it so important to read now, in this moment of history. 

I cannot adequately summarize all those key lessons that have seeped into how I’m processing other media I read, but I sense I’ll return often to this paragraph from the epilogue when I need a reminder: 

“The good news is if we eschew complacency and despair, we are capable of creating balanced information networks that will keep their own power in check. Doing so is not a matter of inventing another miracle technology or landing upon some brilliant idea that has somehow escaped all previous generations. Rather, to create wiser networks, we must abandon both the naive and the populist views of information, put aside our fantasies of infallibility, and commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms.”