Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds God

Charles Murray [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)], the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve, has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_Religion_Seriously]. But what if God doesn’t take him seriously—or worse, finds his work on cognitive elites sufficiently annoying to sentence him to give powerpoint presentations on IQ for eternity? Murray doesn’t seem too stressed by these Dantesque scenarios. Instead, he’s eager to keep up with his Quaker wife, Catherine Bly Cox, who has taken religion far more seriously than Murray himself. Even Murray’s discovery of God feels slightly detached and skeptical—as if the social scientist is laughing at himself for doing such an unverifiable and perhaps even low IQ thing. So if Murray can’t take his own faith seriously, why should God—or fellow skeptics of today’s mob fashion for religion—take him any more seriously?

1. The Intellectual Zeitgeist Has Shifted on Religion Twenty years ago, the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens) dominated intellectual discourse. Today, figures from Peter Thiel to Jordan Peterson to Ross Douthat are taking religion seriously again. Murray sees this as the West emerging from “intellectual adolescence”—no longer assuming our Enlightenment parents were wrong about everything.

2. Science Has Flipped from Religion’s Enemy to Its Unexpected Ally For centuries, scientific discoveries (evolution, psychology, astronomy) delivered body blows to religious belief. But Murray argues that 20th-century science—from the Big Bang to near-death experiences to the hard problem of consciousness—has created new mysteries that materialism can’t explain but religion can. We’ve moved from a “god of the gaps” to genuine scientific anomalies that challenge pure materialism.

3. Spiritual Sensitivity Is a Trait, Not an Achievement Murray believes sensitivity to spiritual matters is like musical ability or artistic appreciation—a genetically grounded continuum from low to high. His wife has access to spiritual insights he doesn’t. This isn’t about intelligence (both Christopher Hitchens and Francis Collins are brilliant) but about a distinct cognitive capacity. Smart people at Harvard don’t believe because they lack this trait, not because they’re smarter.

4. Murray Is Chasing His Wife’s Faith (and Losing) Catherine Bly Cox began her religious journey after feeling she loved their baby “more than evolution required”—sensing she was a conduit for mysterious, superfluous love. Her faith has slowly evolved “like a light on a rheostat.” Murray, the empiricist, can’t access what she experiences. He’s stuck investigating historicity and near-death experiences while she explores meaning and the human condition. He’s envious but can’t catch up.

5. Murray Won’t Apologize for The Bell Curve—Even to God When pressed about whether guilt over his controversial work might motivate his religious turn, Murray was emphatic: “Not the slightest. I am not only proud of the bell curve, I think that the bell curve contains the germ of a lot of the arguments I’ve been making to you today.” He insists God cannot be anthropomorphized or placed on an IQ scale. But his refusal to reckon with how his life’s work might look from a divine perspective—or from the perspective of Christian love and universal human dignity—suggests his religious journey remains fundamentally intellectual rather than transformative.



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The Bell Curve Author Takes God Seriously: But What if God Doesn't Take Him Seriously? 

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and resurgent tribalism.

Back in January 2022, Lea Ypi came on [https://lithub.com/lea-ypi-on-coming-of-age-amid-political-upheaval/] the show to discuss Free [https://bookshop.org/p/books/free-a-child-and-a-country-at-the-end-of-history-lea-ypi/94728d70e9dee89a?ean=9780393867732&next=t&next=t&affiliate=132], her brilliant account of growing up in communist Albania. Now Ypi [https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/lea-ypi], who teaches political philosophy at LSE, is back with her follow-up, Indignity [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458930/indignity-by-ypi-lea/9780241661925], an equally compelling biography of Leman Ypi, her maternal grandmother. “A Life Reimagined” is its subtitle, but it’s not just her grandmother whose life Ypi is reimagining. The book is a retelling of the modern stories of Greece, Turkey and Albania as well as a sly backwards glance on the court politics of the late Ottomans. Indignity is a Balkan story, in the grand tradition of Rebecca West. And like West, Ypi shows us that Balkan history is never quite dead - instead, it’s prophecy for our own age of resurgent nationalism and manufactured identities. Things don’t die in South Eastern Europe, Ypi suggests, they just fester, creating more and more indignity. No wonder the Dracula myth is a Balkan creation.

1. Dignity is what we chase, indignity is what we photograph. Bob Dylan wrote that “dignity never been photographed,” and Ypi iterates an entire philosophical framework around this insight. A 1941 photo of her glamorous grandmother in the Italian Alps sparked the book—but also online accusations that she was a spy. For Ypi, following Kant, dignity is an immaterial ideal we pursue; indignity is the empirical reality we live in. The book oscillates between the two, asking: how do we think about the dignity of the dead when all we have left are degraded facts and hostile interpretations?

2. Salonique the Magnificent died in 1912—and took cosmopolitan possibility with it. Leman Ypi was born in 1917 in Salonica, an Ottoman melting pot that was, for a time, considered a potential homeland for European Jews. When it became Greek in 1912, the Hellenization project began dismantling centuries of multicultural coexistence. By the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI, rising nationalism had replaced cosmopolitan possibility. Leman, an “Albanian” who’d never been to Albania, was told her identity must align with the new nation-state project. The book is a lament for this lost time—not a lost place, but a lost way of being.

3. Nationalism is a zero-sum game for dignity. In the world of nation-states that emerged from Ottoman collapse, individual dignity became inseparable from collective identity. To be Albanian meant dignity only as part of the Albanian nation-state project. This homogenizing, exclusionary logic forced people into boxes they’d never inhabited before. Ypi shows how this nationalist manipulation of dignity—promising it while destroying it—ran from the 1920s through fascism and communism. And it’s back now, in our age of deportations, border walls, and politicians demanding: “What are you? Where do you really belong?”

4. The stoic suicide versus the Kantian fighter—two philosophies of dignity. Leman’s aunt Selma, forced into marriage with a German businessman, killed herself on her wedding day—the ultimate stoic assertion of control. “If you see a room full of smoke, do you wait for help or just leave?” Throughout her life, especi

Dignity Has Never Been Photographed: More Balkan Ghosts for our Indignant Times

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracy

As American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFau [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McFaul]l had a front row seat on Russia’s slide into autocracy. But in his new book, Autocrats vs Democrats [https://michaelmcfaul.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-autocrats-vs-democrats], McFaul warns that it’s not just Putin, but also Xi and Trump who are fueling the “new global disorder”. And the intended audience for his jeremiad against autocracy is, of course, in the United States, rather than China or Russia. McFaul, who now teaches at Stanford, is warning about democracy’s dangerous flirtation with autocracy, especially in the United States. The parallels are chilling. Putin used the law to target enemies, reorganized property rights to silence independent media, and cultivated a patrimonial relationship with supporters who saw him as their protector. Trump, McFaul argues, is following a similar playbook—though America’s deeper democratic traditions and more autonomous institutions provide stronger resistance. Yet McFaul sees cause for alarm in Trump’s rapid moves to “bulldoze” democratic norms, from weaponizing the Justice Department to attacking press freedom. The question, for Michael McFaul, isn’t if America could slide into autocracy, but whether its citizens will recognize the threat before the current flirtation is consummated.

1. Democratic Expansion, Not NATO, Turned Putin Against the West McFaul demolishes the Mearsheimer thesis that NATO expansion provoked Putin. As ambassador, he was in every meeting with Putin and Medvedev for five years—NATO simply wasn’t a major issue. What terrified Putin were democratic revolutions: Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution 2004, and especially the 2011 protests when a quarter million Russians demanded reform in Moscow. Putin blamed the CIA and saw American-style democracy as an existential threat to his autocratic rule.

2. Trump Is Following Putin’s Autocratic Playbook—With One Crucial Difference Like Putin, Trump weaponizes the Justice Department against enemies, attacks independent media through property rights reorganization, and moves fast to “bulldoze” democratic norms (making reconstruction nearly impossible). But America has what Russia lacked: deeper democratic traditions going back centuries, autonomous state governments, genuinely independent media, and even a functioning opposition party. McFaul notes Trump’s failures—unable to silence critics like Kimmel—suggest democratic antibodies still work, though the threat remains real.

3. Xi’s Slow Game Is More Dangerous Than Putin’s Imperial Aggression Putin exports illiberal nationalism, seeking ideological allies in Europe and America who share his contempt for liberal “decadence.” Xi plays differently: he’s not trying to destroy the liberal international order but to increase Chinese power within it while building parallel structures (BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization) where China serves as anchor for an autocratic world. McFaul warns this evolutionary approach may prove more dangerous precisely because it’s less visible than Putin’s tanks rolling into Ukraine.

4. America’s Fatal Post-Cold War Mistake: We Stopped Selling Democracy to Americans The West assumed democracy was inevitable after 1991 and stopped doing the hard work. Political elites in both parties said “we got this” and stopped explaining to middle America why global engagement, free trade, and democracy promotion serve national interests. This created a vacuum Trump filled with isolationism. McFaul argues the book is written not for Cambridge and Palo Alto, but for the entire country—an attempt to restart that abandoned conver

Democracy's Dangerous Flirtation with Autocracy: Michael McFaul on America's Abdication of Global Leadership

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the future

Peter Agre [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2003/agre/biographical/] won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nobel Prize winners start predicting what the stock market would do, or who’s going to win the World Series, they may be beyond their specialty,” he says. Yet in his new book, Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail?, Agre claims that scientists have succeeded in defusing international crises where politicians have failed. He uses the 2015 Iran nuclear accord as an example, arguing that it only happened because two MIT-trained physicists spoke the same scientific language and brought presents for each other’s grandchildren. Then Trump canceled it. Now, with RFK Jr. running American health policy and the CDC “decimated,” he fears for catastrophe. Peter Agre may not quite be God. But he’s about as close as we will get in our polarized and paranoid world.

* Science diplomacy works when politicians deadlock. The 2015 Iran nuclear accord succeeded because two MIT-trained physicists—Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi—could speak the same technical language and find common ground where politicians like John Kerry and Javad Zarif had reached a standstill. They started by bringing presents for each other’s grandchildren.

* Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal exemplifies political failure. After scientists brokered a successful nuclear agreement involving the P5+1 nations, Trump withdrew from it, believing the deal wasn’t “tough enough.” The result: “we’re back to round zero,” undermining years of scientific diplomacy.

* The bipartisan consensus on science has collapsed. During the Sputnik era, Republicans and Democrats united to fund NASA and transform American science education. Today, that unity is gone—COVID politicized science, Fauci became a lightning rod, and the traditional respect for scientific expertise has eroded across the political spectrum.

* RFK Jr.’s health policies reflect “a lack of fundamental understanding.” Agre warns that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance and the decimation of the CDC under his leadership are “dangerous” and “counterintuitive.” Measles, virtually absent from the Western Hemisphere, is now returning without leadership response. Catastrophe, Agre suggests, is not a question of if but when.

* Scientists must inform policy without becoming know-it-alls. Agre argues that scientists shouldn’t make all decisions but must make information accessible to those in power. The challenge: maintaining credibility and trust in an era when Americans are increasingly skeptical of expertise, and when standing up for science risks becoming unavoidably political.

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Nobel Laureate Peter Agre: Why Scientists Must succeed Where Politicians Fail

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe.

Who isn’t afraid of AI? But according to the San Francisco-based technology historian Vanessa Chang [https://www.vanessa-chang.com/home-1], that’s nothing new. So, she says, our ChatGPT age should give us hope rather than the reactionary hysteria marking much of today’s conversation about AI. In her new book, The Body Digital [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797013/the-body-digital-by-vanessa-chang/], Chang argues that our bodies have always been living interfaces between our minds and our world. Designing that interface has always been a choice, and so are the worlds that we are always building. From cuckoo clocks to player pianos to gramophones, every generation has panicked about machines colonizing human experience. And every generation has eventually found ways to shape those machines to human ends. So don’t be scared of ChatGPT, Chang says. Get creative. Get agency.

* Tech anxiety is a historical constant, not a contemporary crisis. From Sousa’s panic about player pianos replacing human musicianship to today’s fears about ChatGPT, every generation has worried that machines will colonize human experience. The pattern itself should be instructive—and perhaps reassuring.

* Our bodies have always been technological. Eyeglasses, writing, clocks—these aren’t separate from our embodied existence but extensions of it. The digital age hasn’t created the “body digital”; it’s simply the latest chapter in a much longer story of humans using tools to reshape how we sense, think, and interact with the world.

* The real question isn’t whether technology will change us—it’s who gets to design that change. Chang insists we’ve always had agency in our relationship with machines. The danger isn’t AI itself but allowing corporate interests and proprietary systems to dictate the terms of our technological embodiment without democratic input or creative resistance.

* AI isn’t “all-knowing”—it’s deeply circumscribed. Large language models are shaped by training data, developer biases, invisible labor in developing countries, and corporate imperatives. The mythology of omniscient AI obscures the very human choices and limitations embedded in these systems.

* Writing and AI belong to the same evolutionary story. Both are technologies for extending human cognition beyond the body. Before writing, your thoughts died with you. After writing, they could travel across time and space. AI is simply the next iteration of humanity’s ancient project of externalizing and augmenting our minds—with all the promise and peril that entails.

*

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Why Our Fear of Technology Is Nothing New—And Why That Should Give Us Hope: From Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth.

Happy Halloween, everyone. To celebrate, we’re turning our attention to one of white America’s most mythic—and most feared—figures: the hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. In Only God Can Judge Me [https://jeffpearlman.com/only-god-can-judge-me/], his new Tupac biography, the Los Angeles-based sportswriter Jeff Pearlman [https://jeffpearlman.com/] reveals both the humanity and the heartbreak behind the myth. Yes, Pearlman concedes, Tupac Shakur was far from perfect. Yet in his music, his movies, and above all his short, turbulent life, Tupac embodied the quintessential American hero—a man who, despite all the injustice and chaos around him, stood up for what was right. Here was someone whom perhaps not even God could judge.

1. Tupac’s story is fundamentally about trauma, not violencePearlman’s biggest revelation wasn’t about gang culture or rap feuds—it was about the crushing weight of intergenerational trauma. Watching his hero mother, former Black Panther Afeni Shakur, descend into crack addiction left Tupac with wounds that shaped everything. “The trauma of having your hero become this thing that’s unrecognizable and zombie-like,” Pearlman explains, is what people miss when they romanticize Afeni as simply a “goddess” or reduce Tupac to a “son of a Black Panther.”

2. Tupac was a theater kid before he was a gangster rapperBefore Marin City’s crack epidemic and Death Row Records, Tupac Shakur was studying at the Baltimore School of the Arts—writing poetry, dancing, and dreaming of acting. He was “this free spirit who lived this beautiful, beautiful life,” Pearlman says. That artistic foundation—not the tough-guy persona—was his authentic self. Actor Jim Belushi told Pearlman that Tupac was on the verge of becoming an Academy Award–winning actor. The gangster image that Death Row demanded wasn’t who he wanted to be.

3. The book is sad—and that surprised everyone, including Pearlman“I didn’t expect this to be a sad book,” Pearlman admits. But every proofreader who read it said the same thing: “God, this book is so sad.” Tupac died young, nearly broke, used by powerful people, and alone in many ways—desperate to be understood and accepted. “Life kind of gobbled him up,” Pearlman says. The mythology of Tupac as an invincible icon obscures the heartbreaking reality of a 25-year-old carrying impossible weight.

4. Writing about Tupac as a white suburban sportswriter required radical humilityPearlman acknowledges the cultural distance he had to cross: “It’s a weird situation being a white guy who grew up in middle-class rural America writing about Tupac... I never experienced that level of trauma.” His approach wasn’t to claim expertise but to listen deeply and interview exhaustively. Along the way, he gained an unexpected education in Southern California gang culture—discovering that many former gang members and drug dealers “are wonderful guys” who “just had different journeys.”

5. Tupac would be “absolutely furious” about Trump’s America—and probably arrestedWhen asked what Tupac would think of today’s political climate, Pearlman doesn’t hesitate: “I think 25-year-old Tupac would be horrified, but not surprised.” More specifically, “I can’t imagine Tupac Shakur of any age just sitting back” while ICE agents grab people in unmarked vehicles. “I think he’d be 100% getting arrested at ICE roundups,” Pearlman says. As for Biden or Harris? Tupac would probably see them as “corporate shills who don’t stand up enough for the people.”

Keen On America is a reader-

Not Even God Can Judge Tupac Shakur: How a White Suburban Sportswriter Found the Humanity and Tragedy Behind Hip-Hop’s Most Misunderstood Star

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle.

Seventeen years after PBS rejected his Iraq War documentary The Last 600 Meters [https://www.pbs.org/show/the-last-600-meters/] as “too pro-military,” conservative filmmaker Michael Pack [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pack] is finally seeing it air — fittingly, on Veterans Day weekend. Pack reflects on why he believes documentaries are the “second draft of history,” why every war film is, at its core, an anti-war film, and how America’s shifting attitudes toward the military say as much about our politics as our wars.

1. History’s second draft.Pack sees documentaries as the “second draft of history,” a way to capture the ground truth before time erases memory — not to debate the causes or meanings of war, but to record what it actually felt like to fight.

2. Too pro-military for 2008, perfect for 2025.PBS first rejected The Last 600 Meters as “too pro-military.” Seventeen years later, the network is airing it before Veterans Day — proof, Pack says, that America’s cultural attitudes toward the military have shifted.

3. A non-woke filmmaker’s battle.Pack, long identified with the right, argues that the documentary world is dominated by the left. His new company, Palladium Pictures, trains “non-woke” filmmakers to tell stories that aren’t polemical but still reflect a wider range of perspectives.

4. Every war film is an anti-war film.For Pack, heroism and horror are inseparable. His Marines cross kill zones under fire, rescue the wounded, and witness the smell and trauma of war — “heroic and tragic,” he says, in the Kubrickian sense.

5. America’s unfinished war with itself.Pack’s Iraq film and his upcoming documentary on the Afghan withdrawal reflect what he calls “the failure of American elites.” From Vietnam to Afghanistan, he argues, the question remains: can America still fight and win wars?

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Fighting to Tell the Truth: Why every Film about War is an Anti-War Film

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it.

Four years [https://lithub.com/daniel-sokatch-on-the-chronicle-of-israel-and-palestine/] ago, Daniel Sokatch [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sokatch] came on the show to discuss Can We Talk About Israel? [https://www.amazon.com/Can-Talk-About-Israel-Conflicted/dp/1635573874], a guide for what he called “the curious, the confused, and the conflicted.” Now Sokatch is back with a new edition of his book. As head of the New Israel Fund [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Israel_Fund], the liberal Zionist has spent his career defending the controversial idea that Israel can be both a Jewish and democratic state. Today, even as the Zionist dream continues to unravel, Sokatch insists that we need to continue talking about Israel. Without talk, Daniel Sokatch warns, there’s silence - and that silence might guarantee the end of the dream of both a Jewish and democratic state between what he calls “the river and the sea.”

* Israel’s crisis is moral, not just political.For Sokatch, the war in Gaza has exposed the collapse of Israel’s founding promise — that it could be both Jewish and democratic. What’s at stake now, he argues, is not security but the moral soul of the state.

* The American Jewish consensus is fracturing.Polls show that younger American Jews are turning away from Israel. Sokatch sees this as less about antisemitism and more about disillusionment — the feeling that Israel no longer reflects liberal Jewish values.

* Zionism is no longer a single idea.“Ask me if I’m a Zionist,” Sokatch says, “and I have to ask what you mean.” The word has splintered — between nationalism, religion, and democracy — leaving even its defenders unsure of what dream they’re defending.

* Talking is an act of resistance.Sokatch’s call to “keep talking about Israel” isn’t rhetorical. In an age when criticism of Israel is often branded antisemitic, he argues that open conversation is the only alternative to despair — or silence.

* Hope lies in imagination, not ideology.Despite everything, Sokatch refuses fatalism. Like South Africa or Northern Ireland, he believes history can still surprise us — if civil society can keep the moral imagination alive long enough for change to take root.

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Between the River and the Sea: American Jews and the Soiling of the Zionist Dream

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci [https://us.macmillan.com/author/anthonyvinci]. In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250370907/thefourthintelligencerevolution/],, Vinci argues that we must all become spies in order to save America. That’s the future of espionage in an age when, at least according to Vinci, the Chinese might be hacking our data to subvert the United States. This “Vinci Code” borrows heavily from the Cold War playbook — paranoia layered upon paranoia layered upon more paranoia. I’m not buying it. But then again, I’m too busy with KEEN ON to be Bond.

1. A Fourth Intelligence Revolution Is UnderwayAnthony Vinci argues that global espionage is undergoing a fundamental transformation driven by artificial intelligence and the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. Intelligence, he says, is no longer confined to spies and soldiers — it now extends into economics, technology, and even ordinary life.

2. Economic Espionage Will Define the Next EraVinci believes America must adapt to a new kind of intelligence competition — one focused on markets, infrastructure, and intellectual property. To keep pace with China, the United States will need to develop capabilities in economic espionage, a domain it has long been reluctant to enter.

3. Artificial Intelligence Will Spy on Artificial IntelligenceThe next phase of espionage, Vinci predicts, will be conducted largely by machines. AI will collect, analyze, and even counter other AI systems, creating a world where “our machines will spy on their machines.” The traditional spy-versus-spy rivalry will become algorithm-versus-algorithm.

4. Every Citizen Is a TargetIn the digital era, espionage has expanded to include everyone. State and non-state actors alike can collect data, influence behavior, and manipulate information at scale. Vinci warns that individuals — not just governments — must now learn basic intelligence skills to safeguard their privacy and security.

5. China Is the Central ChallengeWhile Russia and other autocracies remain active, Vinci views China as the United States’ primary intelligence adversary. From TikTok to cyber-hacking, he argues, Beijing seeks to shape global perceptions and exploit American data — a strategy that makes Vinci’s The Fourth Intelligence Revolution as much about information as ideology.

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The Vinci Code: How AI is Turning Everyone into James Bond

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721789/house-of-huawei-by-eva-dou/], just shortlisted [https://www.ft.com/content/8b2a63d9-f1be-493e-b6b4-082cf7f1d5bb] for the FT business book of the year, the Washington Post’s Eva Dou [https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eva-dou/] has written the untold story of this mysterious company that has shaken the world. As much about its reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, as it is about the telco manufacturer, Dou tells the story of one the great economic miracles of new Chinese economy. From its scrappy origins selling telephone switches to becoming a global tech giant capable of challenging American supremacy, Huawei embodies China’s transformation—and the increasingly fraught collision between Chinese ambition and Western power that now defines our geopolitical moment. And in overtaking Sweden’s Ericsson as the world’s dominant telecommunications equipment supplier, Huawei’s rise marks a fundamental shift in global technological leadership from West to East. What was once unthinkable—a Chinese company displacing the century-old Swedish pioneer that had long symbolized European technological excellence (and neutrality)—became inevitable, revealing how quickly the old order can crumble when confronted by innovative and dynamic state-backed industrial ambition. Yeah, Huawei matters. As Dou acknowledges, the Huawei story might even offer some signposts for Western companies - like Intel and even Nvidia and OpenAI - struggling to keep up with the pace of Chinese state capitalism.

1. Huawei’s Rise Embodies China’s State Capitalism Model Huawei’s transformation from scrappy startup to global telecommunications leader reveals how China combines entrepreneurial dynamism with strategic state support—a hybrid model that has proven remarkably effective at challenging Western technological dominance while defying simple categorization as either purely private enterprise or state-controlled entity.

2. Ren Zhengfei Remains One of Modern China’s Most Enigmatic Figures The reclusive founder’s personal story—from military engineer to billionaire industrialist—mirrors China’s own transformation, yet he has deliberately cultivated mystery around both himself and his company, making Huawei simultaneously China’s most successful global brand and its most opaque major corporation.

3. The Huawei Story Reveals Fundamental Tensions in US-China Relations America’s aggressive campaign against Huawei, from the arrest of Ren’s daughter Meng Wanzhou to equipment bans across the West, demonstrates how technological competition has become the central battleground of twenty-first century geopolitics, with telecommunications infrastructure emerging as contested territory in ways that transcend traditional trade disputes.

4. Huawei’s Displacement of Ericsson Marks a Historic Power Shift The fact that a Chinese company could overtake Sweden’s century-old telecommunications pioneer—long synonymous with European technological excellence and neutrality—represents more than market competition; it signals a fundamental reordering of global technological leadership from West to East that seemed unthinkable just decades ago.

5. Understanding Huawei is Essential to Understanding Contemporary China Huawei serves as a lens through which to examine China’s economic miracle, its relationship between private entrepreneurship and state power, its technological ambitions, and the growing friction between Chinese industrial policy and Western concerns about security, sovereignty, and fair c

Huawei vs Ericsson: How Huawei Turned Sweden's "Neutral" Tech Advantage Into a Cold War Liability

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