NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award One of The New Yorker 's Best Books of the Year • One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2025 • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year • An August 2025 Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book • One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025 A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America. For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth ―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset. In Breakneck , Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid. In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.

Recommended on 1 episode:

The Three Forces Deranging the Economy in 2025

This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — things look pretty normal. But they clearly aren’t normal. The Trump administration spent the year upending the global trade system while tech companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I., a technology that could potentially displace many of our jobs. And people don’t feel normal, either. Survey data shows that the vibecession rages on. Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal are the co-hosts of the excellent economics podcast “Odd Lots” and have closely followed all the chaos this year. So I wanted to have them on the show to explain what the hell is going on.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Orality and Literacy (New Accents) by Walter J. Ong
• 📘  North Woods: A Novel by Daniel Mason
• 📗  Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
• 📙  A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst
• 📕  The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of media evolution by Andrey Mir
• 📘  No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior by Joshua Meyrowitz

Tracy Alloway , Joe Weisenthal Dec. 23, 2025 6 books recommended

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