Power is the most talked-about thing in the world and the least understood. Everyone has a take. Most takes fit on a fridge magnet.
This is my attempt to do better than a fridge magnet. Over 10 to 12 months I am reading 27 books and building a compendium of about a hundred concept cards on how power actually gets taken, kept, and lost, read end to end instead of in fragments. Not the airport-bookstore version with five laws and a gold foil cover. The real machinery, traced back to where each idea came from.
And I am doing it in public, right here, so you can follow along, steal the whole system, or tell me where I am wrong. Ideally all three.
The one bet
Power is not a thing you hold. It is what happens when three forces line up.
Human nature: who people follow, and why they agree to be led at all. Networks: who sits where in the wiring, and who controls what moves through it. Narrative: who gets to decide what the story means.
The structures that last run all three at once. Miss one and you get a coup that cannot govern, a monopoly nobody trusts, or a beautiful idea with no way to travel. That is the bet of the whole project, and the 27 books are just different instruments for testing it.
What this actually is
Not a course. Not a hot-take newsletter. It is a commonplace project, which is an old and slightly obsessive tradition: you read, you distill the ideas into your own words by hand, you connect them, and over months you build a private map of a subject that lives in your head instead of on a shelf.
Mine has four moving parts.
A framework. Seven domains of knowledge, seven cross-cutting threads. The hooks on the wall that tell me where every idea goes. It is also designed to fall apart, more on that below.
A reading plan. 27 books, 20 non-fiction and 7 fiction, in a deliberate order so no book ever leans on an idea I have not met yet. Thucydides first. Octavia Butler last. Caro's 1,300 pages somewhere in the painful middle.
A method. Three-pass reading, handwritten concept cards, a weekly synthesis session. Handwritten first, then connected, because the pen files a thing in memory the keyboard never will.
A tracker. A spreadsheet with every concept, every thread, and a status column I have promised, in public now, to actually keep updated.
Full disclosure
I built the framework, the plan, and the four-sheet tracker before reading a single page. I drew a detailed map of a country I had never visited. I know exactly how that sounds.
Here is the part I like. The plan predicts its own collapse. Somewhere around book eight to twelve the seven neat domains will stop fitting, concepts will spill across the lines, and the grid will start to feel like a cage. That is not the plan breaking. That is the plan working. The redesign I write at that moment, in categories I earned instead of guessed, is the actual point of the whole exercise. The tidy first version is only the ladder you climb up and then kick away.
Start anywhere
The framework for the scaffolding: the seven domains, the seven threads, the five arguments I have to settle.
The reading plan for all 27 books and the order, with an opinion attached to each one.
The method if you want to run your own version of this on your own subject, not mine.
Follow along for how I am publishing this and how to read the same books at the same time.
One thing to know before you commit: I have not read most of these yet either. We are starting at the same line. That is the fun part.