Reading List September 2026

What I've read in September 2026

What I read this September, along with my comments and notes. I fell sick and, during my days stuck in bed or on the sofa, I managed to read a lot.

Books#

John Tinnell, Il filosofo di Palo Alto. Mark Weiser, lo Xerox Parc e l’internet delle cose originario, QBit, Castelvecchi Editore#

Published in English as “The Philosopher of Palo Alto. Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things” by the University of Chicago Press.

The courses my younger self took in the history and philosophy of science taught me to see things from a historical perspective alongside their logical and formal structure. Of course, working in IT, I have a keen interest in the history of computer science: nothing was born in a vacuum. While primarily a biography of Mark Weiser and how he invented the concepts of the Internet of Things, Tinnell’s book has the merit of revealing how the current state of corporations, technology, and social media surveillance came to be.

Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC, inspired by Martin Heidegger and Michael Polanyi, imagined a world where computers would blend into the environment instead of forcing the user’s attention onto a single point. Computers and sensors were meant to disappear from our field of vision below the threshold of conscious awareness, enhancing our access to information to better connect us to the world in a Zuhandenheit way — a Heideggerian concept meaning “ready to hand without conscious thinking”.

Unfortunately, a series of financial circumstances led the MIT Media Lab’s vision of the future to win out: attention-grabbing mobile pocket devices and buildings collecting data day and night to optimize feedback loops. Mark Weiser warned us about the risks of MIT’s design, but major corporations consciously chose the MIT Media Lab’s approach over Xerox PARC’s.

It’s tragic to read about Weiser’s optimistic, human-centered view of technology—informed by the best phenomenological philosophy—which has either been forgotten by most computer scientists or corrupted by corporate greed. The tech industry chose a future where the Internet of Things is not “calm technology,” but a machine for harvesting data and profiling users.

Erich Maria Remarque, Nulla di nuovo sul fronte occidentale, Neri Pozza#

Published in English as “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Penguin Classics. I read the beginning years ago in middle school and it failed to hook me. Now in my thirties, I flew through this book.

It is an absolute masterpiece that moved me deeply—and I am not someone who gets emotional easily.

The book begins with a disclaimer:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Remarque kept his promise: the book is intensely analytical in depicting the harsh realities of German soldiers in WWI, and how the conflict wiped out any vision of a future for these young men. The prose does not explicitly condemn the futility of war; simply showing its psychological toll and leaving the reader with raw consequences is enough. It is a stark, unvarnished novel written in essential prose that strips away all epic or celebratory tropes. Its power lies in how understatedly it shows the protagonists slowly becoming desensitized to the horrors of the trenches.

Yet All Quiet on the Western Front is not purely horror: there is genuine warmth, friendship, and camaraderie between Paul and the soldiers in his regiment. They find quiet joy in spending an evening with French girls or when stationed to guard a supply depot behind the lines, savoring rare delicacies. Trench warfare is hell, but the novel reminds us that perhaps we can always rely on solidarity from other human beings. (For instance, when Paul teaches incoming rookies how to survive, or when Paul returns from a dangerous patrol after meeting the Frenchman, only to find Albert and Kat frantically looking for him.)

Without a doubt, the single best anti-war book I have ever read.

Michael Steinberger, Il filosofo nella Valley. Alex Karp, Palantir e l’ascesa dello Stato di sorveglianza, Il Foglio edizioni#

Published in English as “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” by Simon & Schuster.

Excellent book that explains how a half-Jewish, half-African American philosophy PhD student has become one of the most controversial CEOs out there. And Steinberger does so by entwining Alexander Karp’s biography with the rise of Palantir: the software enterprise supplying data analysis and AI products to the US Army and other private companies, like Coca-Cola.

Often, newspapers portray Palantir as the most evil tech company, but it’s much more complicated. Karp became its CEO pursuing a particular mission: helping the West to fight terrorism and guarantee public security by endowing the CIA and the US Army with top-notch data analysis software. He wasn’t concerned with just making tons of money like other businesses in Silicon Valley at the dawn of the big data era. That’s why Karp and his fellows built Palantir as an ideological mission rather than a business aiming to make a profit. Despite the criticism, this led to impressive results like lowering the soldiers’ death count in Afghanistan and supporting Ukraine’s war against fascist Russia. At the same time, Palantir sold its products to police departments to identify criminals (often belonging to marginalized groups), ICE to track down illegal immigrants and violate their human rights, and Israel to fight Hamas. It’s more shades of grey than black and white, and I enjoyed the book because it provides a balanced and fair perspective of Karp and Palantir without glossing over the debatable stuff.

From the interviews with Karp emerges the portrait of a brilliant and unorthodox outsider who declared war on the Silicon Valley culture, feeling a strict Kantian categorical imperative to work in tech for a higher good. Karp believes that Palantir defends democracies and fights fascism and threats to the Western way of life while preserving privacy, but he isn’t immune to hypocrisy: he defines himself as a progressive, but his company provides tools to the same authoritarian law-and-order politicians he despises, like Trump, or helps the IDF to target civilian objects. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, Karp shifted towards the alt-right, although he’s still firmly convinced he’s left-leaning or socialist; in his view, the Democrats betrayed the progressive cause by opening the borders to unregulated immigration and surrendering to the spreading ‘wokism’ and anti-Semitism.

Highly recommended to understand data and surveillance.

Yasunari Kawabata, La Danzatrice di Izu, Mondadori#

Published in English as “The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories”. The italian edition contains an afterword by Yukio Mishima.

It’s a collection of short stories that first appeared in literary magazines; they were later gathered into a single volume published by Shinchōsha in 1954, with the opening story, “The Izu Dancer,” lending the book its title.

Here are my thoughts on the four stories:

• The Izu Dancer: the most compelling story of the bunch, thanks to the sense of place Kawabata conveys without ever putting you there. It follows a high school student on vacation on Japan’s Izu Peninsula, a classic tourist destination in the region. Along the way, he falls in with a troupe of traveling actors and dancers and joins them for part of the journey. As they walk the road together, he finds himself drawn to the troupe’s young dancer, but the two never get the chance to act on that love — and that is exactly what the story is about. Lyrical, poetic, and a window into life in 1920s Japan. Along with the last story in the collection, it’s my favorite.
• The Onsen Inn: this one follows the lives of several women working at a hot-spring inn that draws a steady stream of shady men and a few sex workers. It shows what it meant to be an independent woman in a society that had no place for one. What I appreciated most is how carefully Kawabata renders every last quirk that sets each of these women apart, tying their stories symbolically to the turning of the seasons.
• Lyrics: the only story I didn’t enjoy, and the one I found muddled. It’s an unchecked stream of consciousness from a woman meditating on death, mixing her reflections with small observations about her late ex-husband’s house and other memories. However hard Kawabata may have been trying to channel James Joyce here, I found it needlessly confusing, with no thread tying all these points in the stream together. It bored me.
• Of Birds and Beasts: my favorite alongside “The Izu Dancer.” It’s the story of a driver, utterly indifferent to humanity, who keeps animals at home but can’t manage to keep some of the species alive. I found it a fascinating meditation on life and death from the point of view of a man who raises these creatures out of both misanthropy and a desire to play God.

Francesco Costa, Come se ne esce. Il mondo dopo Donald Trump, Mondadori#

Published in Italian ony, no translations available at the time I’m writing this post.

Francesco Costa is one of my favorite journalists, right up there with Federico Rampini — and like Rampini, he’s the reason I got hooked on American history and culture.

His latest book is about the moral, civic, and infrastructural decay of the United States in the Trump era; but it also makes the case that there are ways out, drawing on the experience of the mayors, administrators, and cities that have managed to crack problems around transit, the cost of living, and immigration where others came up short.

What surprised me is that Costa lands on more or less the same conclusion I’ve been coming around to for years: what matters most isn’t which side you’re on, it’s whether you can actually get things done, party lines and ideology aside. Being on the right or the left only takes you so far. People stop voting for demagogues and populists when mainstream parties start delivering on the bread-and-butter stuff — schools, health care, public safety, immigration. It’s a delicate balance: you have to keep an ear to the ground without giving in to the temptation to feed people’s short-term fears, and instead push for sensible solutions, explaining them and giving the majority time to digest them. Above all, it means getting back in the habit of talking across the aisle — to people who see the world nothing like we do but who have the same stake in the country — instead of only ever talking to people who already agree with us.

I’m no Marxist – I consider myself a classical liberal in Jeremy Bentham’s and J.S Mill’s sense —, but I think Marx was onto something when he figured out that effective political struggle starts from people’s material conditions and needs, not from ideas alone.¹

Articles#

Articles I deem worth reading this month.

• Tech needs humanists more than ever A brilliant post by Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti; I subscribe to every word written here as if it were my own. I have been advocating for these ideas for a long time—not just in tech, but across all modern professions.
• The Quick Case Against Using AI Convincing argument by Jared Henderson about why you shouldn’t use AI if there’s a possibility of erasing the human race. In my opinion, the whole debate points to the question of whether the collective gains outweigh the existential risks of AI.
• “Tassare i ricchi”: dietro la retorica c’è la crisi dell’imposta personale sul reddito ("Tax the rich": behind the rhetoric lies the crisis of the personal income tax) An insightful article from La Voce.info, the independent web journal founded by economist Tito Boeri. Taxing the rich? It gets significantly more complex once you look beyond recycled political slogans.
• On self-determination and the limits of pacifism. Why Taiwan and Ukraine are not the same as Scotland and the Basque Country I agree with most of the points raised by Massimo Pigliucci, K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. The article articulates three key principles supporting Taiwan’s and Ukraine’s self-determination and independence against foreign annexation; it is well worth the read.