Just... wow. You know that feeling when you finish a book and your mind is simultaneously racing and numb? That's where I'm at after devouring Yuval Noah Harari's latest mind-bender, Nexus. Like, I need to sit down and process this—oh wait, I've been sitting for the last 8 hours straight reading this thing. Maybe I need to stand up and process it?
Anyway. If you've read Harari's previous hits like Sapiens or Homo Deus or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, you know the drill - he takes impossibly vast swaths of human history, distills them into pithy observations that make you go "huh, never thought of it that way before," and then uses those insights to paint a picture of where we're headed that's equal parts fascinating and terrifying. But Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari feels different. More urgent. More personal. Instead of covering all of human history, Harari zooms in on the history of information networks - from ancient oral traditions to holy books to. newspapers to the internet and beyond. And in doing so, he reveals how the ways we share and process information have always shaped (and misshaped) human society. But now, with the rise of AI, we're on the precipice of the biggest transformation yet—one that could fundamentally alter what it means to be human.Must read.