Recommendations you can check.
by Dan Wang, 2025
Who uses, recommends or left Breakneck, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
3 people
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
From “My Favorite Books of 2025”, his annual top-ten list.
2025-12-29·tomtunguz.com ↗
Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China's engineering state, juxtaposing it against America's lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I've been a keen reader of Dan's personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience.
His annual round-up collecting the books he recommended month by month during 2025.
2025-12-28·eliotpeper.substack.com ↗
Breakneck by Dan Wang Wong does an excellent job at objectively looking at the pros and cons of the Chinese and American societies. The engineering state versus lawyerly society as a way to explain each nation is brilliant.
His annual round-up of the best books he read that year; every book title on the page links to Amazon through his own affiliate tag (amzn.to -> tag=aweaofcomsen-20).
2025-12-21·awealthofcommonsense.com ↗
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.