The Four Winds transported me back to the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, a brutal chapter of American history told through one family’s struggle to survive it.
Kristin Hannah is an extraordinary storyteller. This was the third of her novels I have read in the past year, and I continue to be struck by her ability to make history feel deeply engaging and human. I also loved Winter Garden and The Nightingale (historical novels about the siege of Leningrad and Nazi occupied France during World War II)
I also loved the moral complexity and quiet courage of The Frozen River, the sweeping portrait of place and history in James Michener’s Hawaii, and the remarkable story of the women codebreakers of Bletchley Park in The Rose Code.
Let us all rewind on Leopold Aschenbrenner
He will go down as the man who gave the world its intellectual framework for AGI, ran his hedge fund from $1.5B to $45B, and built a name for himself all at the age of 25
• Columbia valedictorian. Graduated at 19
• Joined a philanthropy fund backed by Sam Bankman-Fried before SBF became SBF
• Landed at OpenAI's Superalignment team under Ilya Sutskever
• Wrote a memo warning that OpenAI's security was "egregiously insufficient" against Chinese espionage
• HR called it racist. An OpenAI lawyer questioned whether his team was "loyal to the company"
• Fired at 23. April 2024
• Published a manifesto called Situational Awareness. Every serious person in AI read it
• Raised from the Collison brothers, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman
• Grew to $45 billion by early July 2026
Then July happened and everything unfolded
• Long SK Hynix. It dropped
• Nebius, Sandisk, Micron, CoreWeave: top 4 holdings. All down 35%+ this month
• Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan all working the unwind
• Ken Griffin's Citadel bought the public book
He is getting married this weekend to Avital Balwit, Dario Amodei's chief of staff at Anthropic
He is 25 years old, he will be fine