Staff Picks 2025: Read

The staff at the Center for a New American Security dove into researching some of the most pressing and hard-hitting national security issues of the day. But we also take time to read, watch, and listen to some of the best media to come out of 2025 (and before!). Discover new, or just new to you, content to start your year out in 2026.

What we read . . .

Katherine L. Kuzminski, Director of Studies

Top reads: The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States, by Kori Schake. America’s Founding Fathers feared that a standing army would be a permanent political danger, yet the U.S. military has in the 250 years since become a bulwark of democracy. Kori Schake explains why in this compelling history of civil-military relations from independence to the challenges of the present.

Carved from Granite: West Point Since 1902, by Lance Betros. The United States Military Academy at West Point is one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions. Founded in 1802, its first and only mission is to prepare young men—and, since 1976, young women—to be leaders of character for service as commissioned officers in the United States Army. Carved from Granite is the story of how West Point goes about producing military leaders of character. As scholar and academy graduate Lance Betros shows, West Point’s early history is interesting and colorful, but its history since then is far more relevant to the issues—and problems—that face the Academy today.

Anna Pederson, Associate Director of Communications

Top read: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. Not a new book, but as I round the corner of five years living in Virginia, I’ve fallen in love with the history and people of the Appalachia region. The loose retelling of David Copperfield through the life of a young man navigating poverty, drugs, and rural life, Kingsolver tells much deeper stories of systemic issues and getting through hard times. Triumph and struggle are intertwined throughout, and worth every painful moment to keep rooting for Demon.

Daniel Remler, Senior Fellow, Technology and National Security Program

Top read: Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, by Patrick McGee. After struggling to build products on three continents, Apple turned to China’s seemingly endless supply of cheap labor. It soon deployed thousands of engineers, trained millions of workers, and invested hundreds of billions of dollars to create the most advanced global supply chain. These efforts fueled the iPhone’s dominance—but also laid the foundation for a powerful, state-supported Chinese electronics industry. What began as a business decision evolved into a cautionary tale of global trade, tech rivalry, and national security.

Gibbs McKinley, Research Associate to the CEO

Top Read: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë. Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behavior becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. It is only when Helen allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she has left behind emerge. Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman’s fight for domestic independence and creative freedom.

Sam Howell, Associate Fellow, Technology and National Security Program

Top reads: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters, and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see.

Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson, by Mitch Albom. Mitch Albom rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man’s life. Knowing he was dying, Mitch visited with Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final “class”: lessons in how to live. “The truth is, Mitch,” Morrie said, “once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma.

Ryan Claffey, Research Assistant, Indo-Pacific Security Program

Top read: “A Battle with My Blood,” by Tatiana Schlossberg, published in The New Yorker. The daughter of Caroline Kennedy writes about receiving a terminal diagnosis following the birth of her daughter and watching Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., cut funding for the health care system she relies on.

Samantha Baxter, Operations and IT Assistant

Top read: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins. This is a prequel to The Hunger Games that follows the rise of Coriolanus Snow, who eventually becomes the President of Panem. The depth that was created for Snow is both beautifully written and tragic. In Snow’s pursuit of survival, the lines of morality and immorality get blurred. This book illustrates how one’s pursuit of power and control can often lead to losing oneself in the process. It makes the reader question whether people are inherently good or evil, and it shows how our choices shape our lives.

Molly Campbell, Research Assistant, Defense Program

Top read: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan. Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a fantasy novel series by American author Rick Riordan. The novels are set in a world with the Greek gods in the 21st century. The series follows the protagonist, Percy Jackson, a young demigod who must prevent the Titans, led by Kronos, from destroying the world.

Emma Swislow, Senior Editor

Top reads: “The Thin Purple Line: The Dubious Rise of the Private-Security Industry,” by Jasper Craven, published in The New Yorker. While private security guards lack the training and public oversight of cops, they are increasingly coming to resemble them. A few years ago, the private-security industry went so far as to coopt the “thin blue line” of the police, choosing the color purple to represent security guards.

Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. At the turn of the 21st century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his 30s―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude―a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Charles Horn, Communications Officer

Top reads: The Pacific War Trilogy, by Ian W. Toll. This prize-winning and best-selling trilogy stands as the first complete history of the Pacific War in more than 25 years, and the first multivolume history of the Pacific naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison’s series was published in the 1950s.

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family to a strongarm for white supremacists and the politicized Christian right, serving eight presidents. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history—not at the fringes, but at the center—and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

Playground, by Richard Powers. Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity.

Delaney Soliday, Research Assistant, Middle East Security Program

Top reads: There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak. An enchanting new tale about three characters living along two rivers, all under the shadow of one of the greatest epic poems of all time, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history and fate.

Playground, by Richard Powers.

Ruby Scanlon, Research Associate, Technology and National Security Program

Top reads: God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, by Meghan O’Gieblyn. For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes’s division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking.

Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. In this anthology of nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.

Caroline Steel, Associate Editor

Top reads: Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last 30,000 years. To preserve knowledge and save humankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz. Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

Gwendolyn Nowaczyk, Events and Communications Assistant

Top reads: Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition, by Buddy Levy. In July 1881, Lieutenant A.W. Greely and his crew of 24 scientists and explorers were bound for the last region unmarked on global maps. Their goal: Farthest North. What would follow was one of the most extraordinary and terrible voyages ever made. Labyrinth of Ice tells the true story of the heroic lives and deaths of these voyagers hell-bent on fame and fortune―at any cost―and how their journey changed the world.

Kyle Rutter, Program Administrator, Energy, Economics, and Security Program

Top reads: Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds. A vital account of the state of the Arctic today—emphasizing the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition. Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins.

James Sanders, Research Associate, Technology and National Security Program

Top reads: Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI, by Joe Carlsmith. This essay series examines a set of interconnected questions about how agents with different values should relate to one another, and about the ethics of seeking and sharing power. These old questions are ones we will have to grapple with in new ways as increasingly powerful AI systems come online—and are core to some parts of the discourse om existential risk from misaligned AI.

“Will Compute Bottlenecks Prevent an Intelligence Explosion?” by Parker Whitfill and Cheryl Wu. The possibility of a rapid, “software-only” intelligence explosion brought on by AI’s recursive self-improvement is a subject of intense debate within the AI community. This paper presents an economic model and an empirical estimation of the elasticity of substitution between research compute and cognitive labor at frontier AI firms to shed light on the possibility.

Dylan Selewonik, Administrative Assistant in Finance and Operations

Top reads: Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, by William Neuman. The book is a fluid combination of journalism, memoir, and history that chronicles Venezuela’s tragic journey from petro-riches to poverty. Author William Neuman witnessed it all firsthand while living in Caracas and serving as The New York Times Andes region bureau chief. His book paints a clear-eyed, riveting, and highly personal portrait of the crisis unfolding in real time, with all of its tropical surrealism, extremes of wealth and suffering, and gripping drama. It is also a heartfelt reflection of the country’s great beauty and vibrancy—and the energy, passion, and humor of its people, even under the most challenging circumstances.

The Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression, by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. This is a book that sheds light on the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland during World War II. It provides a comprehensive account of the events that led to the invasion, the strategies employed by the Soviet Union, and the atrocities committed against the Polish people. Mikolajczyk, who was the prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile during the war, offers a firsthand account of the invasion and its aftermath.

Requiem for a Dream, by Hubert Selby Jr. In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sarah Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares.

Kalena Blake, Intern, Defense Program

Top reads: “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?” by Dexter Filkins, published in The New Yorker. A growing consensus of defense experts holds that the United States is dangerously unprepared for the conflicts it might face.

“The Unfinished Revolution,” published in the November 2025 issue of The Atlantic. The authors examine the founding of the United States and brings the nation’s history to bear on its present—and its future.

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, by Eva Dou. In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire—one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build—and that has also ensnared it.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Sevi Silvia, Intern, Communications

Top read: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. The book follows Edmond Dantès, a young sailor who is unjustly imprisoned, as he reenters society as a wealthy, mysterious count bent on avenging his lost years. Originally published in serialized format over the course of two years, Dumas masterfully weaves a tale filled with the soaring highs and disastrous lows of wealth, revenge, and most importantly, love. The Count of Monte Cristo offers a reflection on humanity through the lens of the Napoleonic era and Bourbon Restoration. Don’t let the page count deter you!

Cameron Olbert, Intern, Transatlantic Security Program

Top read: Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War, by Ben Connable. Ground Combat reveals the gritty details of land warfare at the tactical level and challenges today’s overly subjective and often inaccurate approaches to characterizing war. Ben Connable’s motivation for writing the book is to offer an evidence-based approach to examining the future of warfare.

Ryan Beane, Intern, Technology and National Security Program.

Top reads: The Wide Wide Sea, by Hampton Sides. Hampton Sides’s bravura account of Captain James Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. Using portraits of America’s flawed policymakers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with one of the most important abiding questions of our country’s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose?