Benjamin Recht, The Irrational Decision. Princeton University Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0-691-27244-3.

In The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us from Princeton University Press, Benjamin Recht of UC Berkeley examines the history of computer-driven risk analysis from its foundations in World War II to the present day. Many of Dr. Recht’s themes are familiar, but he provides ample new (to me, at least) perspectives and examples to advance the discussion.

I particularly like his treatment of creating linear models, which have well-defined solutions, as a means of controlling physical systems. Another recent book from Princeton, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (which I reviewed here) examines automation as applied to theme park ride control and optimization. Recht acknowledges the power of these systems but references a 1989 conference plenary address entitled “Respect the Unstable” by Gunter Stein, a Honeywell engineer, regarding the dangers of forcing linear control over nonlinear systems. Recht notes that Stein provided several examples of small perturbations that caused a nonlinear system controlled using a linear model to get dangerously out of control.

Other examples include gameplay for checkers, chess, go, and poker. These three games are perfect information games with enormous game trees, while poker has a huge game space that includes hidden information. As a risk analysis and optimization problem, it’s theoretically possible to describe the entire game tree of a perfect information game. That has been done for checkers, which was solved in 2007, but seems comfortably out of reach for chess and go.

It’s different for business problems. You can’t build a decision tree or evaluate simulation results without knowing the specific outcome of each play of the game. Defining player payoffs in all but the simplest cases is impossible, especially if you include non-monetary measures. To that end, Recht quotes RAND historian Robert Leonard:

Repeatedly, one encounters the opinion that, as far as systems analysis was concerned, the value of game theory at RAND was not in providing numerical solutions to particular strategic problems, but in providing qualitative insight, in stressing the important of reciprocation, opposing intentions, the credibility of threats, and the like. Game theory played a role in systems analysis, therefore, but not as a generator of numerical solutions to well-specified problems.

How, then, do humans make decisions? The Irrational Decision compares the competing theories of Daniel Kahneman of Thinking Fast and Slow fame, and Gary Klein, who wrote Sources of Power and Streetlights and Shadows. Kahneman focuses on heuristics and rules, while Klein created his Recognition-Primed Decision Making (RDM) model. Recht’s comparison of the two approaches and how the creators achieved a form of reconciliation was interesting to read and more information I hadn’t encountered previously.

The Irrational Game is an excellent book. Even if you’re familiar with the popular literature on decision-making you’ll likely find new information and fresh perspectives. Highly recommended.

Caitlin Rozakis, Startup Hell. Titan Books. 2026. ISBN13: 978-1-835-41586-3. $19.99.

Leave it to a professional marketer to tell us about the special kind of hell it is to work at a startup. Everyone does the job of at least three people, leadership pivots to different products on a whim, and some of your coworkers would sell their soul to cash out.

In Caitlin Rozakis’s new book Startup Hell, all of those things are literally true. The startup Zabloom (I mean, really?) pivots more often than a small-college basketball center and marketer Morgan Blackwater-McKey is caught in the middle. Then her supervisor dies while summoning a demon and things get worse. And worse. And worse.

Selling one’s soul to a demon for earthly benefit isn’t that uncommon in Morgan’s world. Her mother is a professional mystical ass-kicker with the scars to prove it, vampires run venture capital firms, and angels dispense justice while barely knowing why. Morgan has a magical disability similar to dyslexia that prevents her from using magic effectively, but she is familiar with the craft and knows how to manage herself when the sparks fly.

Rozakis deftly blends all-to-real details of startup life with a fun speculative world of demonic contracts. It turns out the price for earthly riches is somewhat less than eternal damnation but no less satisfying when the truly deserving pay the cost. Throw in a fun and funny romance with a handsome junior salesdemon trying to make his own quarterly targets and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Startup Hell tells a great story. More to the point for me, it asks what the infernal realm would do differently, if anything, from our terrestrial companies to demand top performance from their sales reps. There are a few uneven moments but they don’t detract from the overall experience. You’ll probably spot a dozen startup products that flamed out gloriously along with the personalities that tried to convince us we needed a marginal product built by people with no other goal than to cash out.

Highly recommended. 

J. Rey Lee, Unsettling Catan. University of Michigan Press. 2025. ISBN: 978-0-472-03998-2. $24.95.

Settlers of Catan, the classic boardgame by Klaus Teuber, has sold more than 40 million copies over various editions and expansions. Combining easy-to-learn rules, variable setup, and meaningful choices throughout the game, Catan was a breakthrough hit that put eurogames on the map outside of Europe.

As Professor J. Rey Lee notes in Unsettling Catan: Detached Design in Eurogames, Catan abstracts away elements of the game’s scenario relating to the territory and economic engines the players develop. Lee refers to this construction in both subtitle and text as detached design, which he sets in contrast to the overt conflict of wargames and many other boardgames.

Eurogame design philosophy centers on player choice in place of random success or failure of a selected action. In Catan and similar games the players are presented with options generated by card or tile draws, from which they chose an option. This input randomness happens near the start of the player’s turn, as opposed to output randomness where a player chooses an action and faces a die roll to determine success or failure near the end of their turn. Any gamer can tell you there’s nothing more nerve-wracking than rolling a twenty-sided die when you know you need an eighteen or higher to succeed. Moving the luck to the start of the turn and demanding a choice from options with known outcomes results in significant emotional detachment—the suspense is gone even though future turns and choices will ultimately decide the effect of your move.

The author argues that this detachment extends to the ideological framework of the game. Lee points out that Catan embodies colonialism, a claim readily supported by the word “settlers” in the game’s title and the lack of indigenous peoples explicitly benefitting from the players’ economic development. The game omits discussion of that framework, which isn’t surprising for a work created to entertain, but the themes are clear when exposed and have different meanings for western and non-western audiences.

Unsettling Catan is an excellent study that builds a substantive cultural critique from a touchstone in the boardgame world that extends to other eurogames and beyond. I benefitted from reading Professor Lee’s work and recommend Unsettling Catan without reservation.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Green City Wars. Tor Publishing Group. 2026. ISBN: 978-1-250-29033-5. $28.99.

I follow Adrian Tchaikovsky on Bluesky so I’d preordered Green City Wars months in advance. I’m certain I would have picked it up if I’d spotted it on the New Fiction table at Powell’s, though. The outstanding cover designed by Shreya Gupta and executed by Chris Koehler catches the eye immediately. Raccoon in a fedora moving in silhouette across a nighttime cityscape? Count me in.

Skotch, the raccoon in question, has augmented intelligence and physical skills. He received that treatment to make him one of the Little Helpers, the army of animals that do the grunt work of bussing tables, collecting trash, and maintaining the infrastructure of a near-future city Neuwien, the reconstituted Vienna, Austria. The Little Helpers are managed by Uzco and, as long as they remain in good standing they receive regular doses of Plangent. Going without means their intelligence swiftly disappears.

Not a good fit for the corporate life, Skotch has gone freelance as a private investigator. And with freelancing being what it is, he faces regular shortages of both buttons (currency) and Plangent. Those shortages give his former employer Uzco the leverage to convince our raccoon PI to find an augmented mouse.

In Neuwien, mice are at the bottom of the Little Helper social hierarchy and used as the baseline for Mausgelt, the number of buttons one must pay to wipe the slate clean after a death. A mouse is worth one Mausgelt, meaning that if you kill a mouse you can pay one button to have the offended party, whether family, clan, or corporation, set the matter aside. The mouse in question is special, of course, and multiple parties want to lay their paws on him. Skotch’s job is to manage those opposing forces while saving the mouse and his own pelt.

Tchaikovsky builds an intriguing world with sly references to Flowers for Algernon, dramas such as Downton Abbey and Upstairs/Downstairs, and science fiction classics from the 1970s that I don’t want to spoil for you. His commentary on the plight of the serving class through the lens of animals as Little Helpers cuts neatly into contemporary society and critiques the assumptions and goals of technology leaders.

And did I mention Skotch’s investigations begin as red and gray squirrels are about to renew large-scale hostilities?

I loved Green City Wars and recommend it without reservation.

Roland Betancourt, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. Princeton University Press. 2026. ISBN: 978-0-691-25587-3. $35.00.

Roland Betancourt’s newest book Disneyland and the Rise of Automation, published by Princeton University Press, makes valuable contributions to industrial history and Disney studies. Theme parks in general, and Disney properties in particular, offer fertile ground for analyses at the intersection of automation and entertainment.

Disney studies has taken off in academia, leading to the launch of the International Journal of Disney Studies and numerous books including Why the Magic Matters: Discovering Disney as a Laboratory for Learning, an edited volume from Bloomsbury. Betancourt’s exploration of how Disney incorporated industrial technology into its theme parks positions the theme park as a factory, relating it directly to post-World War II automation and the development of operations research to optimize those processes. As with social media companies, traffic matters—the more efficiently you can move people through your attractions the more money you make and the more data you can collect.

After setting the analytical frame, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation builds a chronological history of technologies and techniques used to build Disney attractions, such as servomechanisms used on the assembly line Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant, through computerized programmable logic controllers used in contemporary systems. This analysis offers significant value to industrial and Disney historians, in no small measure because of Betancourt’s attention to detail and the bountiful historical record from Disney publications, employee recollections, and patent filings the author incorporates into the text.

Walt Disney viewed his parks as a form of edutainment, offering a glimpse into the workings of the parks’ attractions. Automata such as those used in The Hall of Presidents are one example, but putting attraction control systems in full view rather than hiding them behind set pieces is another. This effort to “denude” the technology of its mystery normalizes its place in popular culture and offers at least the appearance of accessibility and comprehensibility.

As someone who’s interested in the intersection of technology and society, I enjoyed Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. It’s not meant for a general audience but the broad interest in Disney studies and ongoing business and societal focus on efficiency through operations research expands its audience well beyond academic specialists. Highly recommended.

Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation. MIT Press. 2024. ISBN: 978-0-262-55101-4. $19.95.

Recently, many technologies have been branded as “inevitable”: 3D television, the Metaverse (the online environment with legless avatars from Facebook’s parent company, not Neal Stephenson’s conception from the novel Snow Crash), and vacuum-based transportation systems. The first two technologies in that list are no longer extant and the third, though allegedly implemented in Las Vegas as the Hyperloop, consists of human drivers piloting cars through underground tunnels instead of pneumatic tubes ferrying passengers in a high-speed subway system.

In his book Invention and Innovation, published by MIT Press, Dr. Vaclav Smil examines the history of technological hype within three categories of products: inventions that turned from welcome to unwelcome, inventions that were supposed to dominate but did not, and inventions we keep waiting for. The first category includes effective but harmful substances such as the insecticide DDT and lead as a fuel additive; the second features aircraft such as the zeppelin (lighter than air) and supersonic transport such as the Concorde, both of which fell out of favor when reasonable alternatives arose; and we’re still waiting for our flying cars, jetpacks, and vacuum-tube conveyances that have been promised for years but never delivered.

I was a bit surprised that Smil spends relatively little time on artificial intelligence (AI), but after a few paragraphs on the nature and expense of AI output and the cost of its training, he sums up his two pages on the subject this way:

“The conclusion is obvious: our quest for AI is an enormously complex, multifaceted process whose progress must be measured across decades and generations and whose impressive achievements on some relatively easy tasks coexist with the much larger realm of intelligence that remains well beyond the capabilities of programmed machines.”

Each of Smil’s cases provides important context for the current economic and technological environment. I read Invention and Innovation in its entirety and believe that’s the best way to take in his arguments and analysis, but I also think the book would be equally useful as a reference work for researchers and policy makers or as part of the readings for a course on the social impacts of technology and how it is marketed. Smil’s congenial writing style and comprehensive framework make it easy to appreciate his sensible approach to evaluating claims for products marketed now and in the future.