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.

Other Writing:

Interview

The Most Important Foreign Policy Speech in Years

February 6, 2026 pin Weaponized Interdependence
A Conversation with Ezra Klein. “Beneath Carney’s analysis of what is happening is an idea I’ve been following for some time: weaponized interdependence. This idea comes from the international-relations theorists and professors Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.” The basic concept is that over time, ...
Read Article
Essay

The Abundance Debate We’re Not Having

May 1, 2025
The best way to read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is to take the authors at their word. Abundance is what is usually called a “policy book,” but Klein and Thompson don’t quite offer a traditional policy agenda. Instead, the authors begin and end with a question that is also a concentrating lens. “Can we ...
Read Article
Browse the Archives