Henry Farrell

Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto.

Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.”

Read the full article in Bloomberg Weekend.

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Chapter in an Edited Volume

Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19, COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation – with Hahrie Han – eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin

September 8, 2020 eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin Johns Hopkins University 2020 with Hahrie Han
The COVID-19 crisis is a major shock to the existing complex of global rules sometimes described as the “liberal international order.” This order heavily emphasized global openness in trade and information flows, and it favored the presumptive liberalization of non-democratic societies that would naturally emerge from it. Yet the liberal order fell short of its ...
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EssayPublic Writing

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October 15, 2025 pin The New York Times
“The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up ...
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