The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Society / politics / economy

Dan Wang

danwang.co

A materials culture and the secure transport of light: Essays here tend to be about globalization and technology.

Society / politics / economyTech news / industryEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
39 from 18 Mar 2014 to 1 Jan 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://danwang.co/feed/

2026 1

  1. 2025 letter

2025 1

  1. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

2024 1

  1. 2023 letter

2023 2

  1. China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum
  2. 2022 letter

2022 1

  1. 2021 letter

2021 1

  1. 2020 letter

2020 2

  1. Covid Observations from Beijing, March 11
  2. 2019 letter

2019 1

  1. 2018 letter

2018 3

  1. How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)
  2. Imperial history and classical aesthetics
  3. 2017 letter

2017 6

  1. Definite optimism as human capital
  2. Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror
  3. Why do so few people major in computer science?
  4. Reflections from an unglobalized part of the world
  5. Tyler Cowen’s *The Complacent Class*
  6. Californian Dreams

2016 5

  1. Liu Cixin’s *Three Body* Trilogy
  2. I write for Vox on smartphones and Shenzhen
  3. “Melancholy,” by Laszlo Foldenyi
  4. “The English and Their History,” by Robert Tombs
  5. Things I’ve recently learned, 3.13.16

2015 10

  1. Casual Carpool in Oakland and Berkeley
  2. Sonderweg
  3. Technological predictions: 1903 – 1970
  4. Game of Thrones: A Girardian Reading
  5. The life of Philip Glass
  6. Two months of Soylent
  7. Peter Thiel and thinking for yourself
  8. Data on police officers killed since 1961
  9. The strangeness of Berlin
  10. Space and military experiments in the sixties, and what we’ve lost

2014 5

  1. The Logic of Nuclear Exchange and the Refinement of American Deterrence Strategy
  2. Herman Kahn and the Bomb
  3. Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
  4. Lecture notes by Peter Thiel
  5. Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis