Statecraft Gift Guide 2025
Featuring recommendations from the IFP team
Happy Thanksgiving to you Statecraft subscribers (all 28,000 of you, at last count)! I’m very grateful for the chance to write this newsletter, and for the excellent audience you all are. Thanks for sticking with 6,000+ word transcripts about obscure federal agencies.
As we enter the holiday season, I thought it’d be fun to pull together a gift guide for the state capacity enthusiast in your life.
Below, we have:
Books featured on Statecraft
Non-book recommendations from me
Recs from the IFP editorial team
Recs from everyone else on the IFP team
Enjoy! And let me know if you shop off the list.
Books featured on Statecraft
The ones whose authors we interviewed
Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare, John Lechner, 2024, $15.
John went everywhere for this one: Mali, Ukraine, Syria. The best book on the Wagner Group you’ll find.
Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, Peter Moskos, 2024, $25.
I really loved reading this. Peter’s a gem. His other stuff’s good too.
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, Jennifer Pahlka, 2023, $15.
The OG. Required reading.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang, 2025, $32.
Breakneck received an appropriate amount of buzz on its way to topping the charts this fall. Run, don’t walk.
Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study, Rob Johnston, 2005, $7.
Why our spooks act the way they do.
Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution, Joel Burke, 2024. $26.
We just scratched the surface in our conversation — fascinating history.
Other books recommended on Statecraft
I did a lot of reading about Russia this year, including:
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, Vladislav M. Zubok, 2021, $25. Here’s my review of Zubok’s book.
Imperium, Ryszard Kapuściński, 1993, $12.
Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, Sean McMeekin, 2021, $26.
The Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton, 1938, $15.
Next year I’m hoping to read The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes, 1990, $6.
Other books we talked about include:
Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century, Angelo M. Codevilla, 1992, $28.
Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, Richard Beeman, 2009, $17. I published a review for July 4th. Great history.
The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter, 2025, $37. Brian is a colleague, of course, and he writes Construction Physics. I think I can honestly say I’ve read Brian more closely than anyone else in the world (I’ve been his newsletter editor for several years). He’s really good at what he does.
Non-book recommendations
I have it on good authority that a certain senior White House advisor burns this candle in his office.
Offer the penitent DOGEr in your life some rare DOGE collectible cards.
Get ahold of this DVD of Heat (1995) (very good condition) for insight into the minds of the weirdest think tankers in Washington.
Recommendations from the IFP editorial team
I have two editorial colleagues at IFP, Beez and Rita, both of them with far better taste than mine. They both swear by this bag. Beez baked IFP’s contest-winning pie this year in this all-American bad boy. She also got me this notebook, which I now swear by.
Rita and I both love A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, a close reading of great Russian short stories. At the most recent IFP team retreat, Rita presented on Nabokov’s English translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which is a mammoth text but purportedly rewarding; I led a short seminar drawing from Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated — more of a stocking-stuffer.
Bonus: Emma Steinhobel does a lot of our design work (including every title card you see in this newsletter. She designed this groovy font (pay-what-you-want).
Recommendations from the IFP team
Macroscience head honcho Andrew Gerard recommends “some classic, actual men’s dress shoes,” like these: “Shoes that click when you walk around.” He says eBay is an underrated supplier.
For care of these shoes, Beez recommends
Tim Fist runs our emerging tech team, and provides the IFP coffee loadout:
A special word from Claire, our chief of staff
In general, one area that is often overlooked in policy work is looking the look — unfortunately, it typically does not matter how good your ideas are if you show up in a crumpled t-shirt or otherwise are presenting as disheveled or overly casual. If an aspiring policy entrepreneur in your life doesn’t yet have a suit, buy them one! The best dressed young man in our office previously recommended professional menswear from Suitsupply, Spier & Mackay, and Proper Cloth. Meanwhile, the women of IFP are partial to Theory and Argent. Of course, you might want to also gift a good lint roller or steamer along with the new attire.
In addition to clothing, it might behoove your network to pay closer attention to their hair and face as well. Sunscreen is never overrated — most of the people in our office have been bullied into buying this one. The return of the Trump admin has meant a lot more time spent on hair styling for the women of DC. Bleaching your hair blonde? Treat it periodically with a bond repair, like this one from Epres. You might also benefit from a deep conditioning mask like this one. For styling and volume, the Dyson Airwrap is a classic (but please use heat protectant like this one beforehand!), and the person with the finest, flattest hair on the team swears by this mousse.
And a few words from Tim Fist, again
A gift for the forward-deployed think tanker in your life: an NVIDIA DGX Spark desktop computer — 1 petaflop/s of FP4 AI performance to help you outwork your CCP counterpart.
A complete rare earths metal set to start creating your own local strategic stockpile.
For the white collar worker in your life: a GoPro with a head strap. Do your duty: start collecting the task-level data that American frontier labs need to win the AI race.
A 15kW portable natural gas generator from Home Depot: enough power output to sustain an NVIDIA DGX B300 server at maximum power. Beat NEPA by deploying your own BTM generation facility, all in the comfort of your own backyard.
Embrace differential technological development with this framed photo of John von Neumann. Show your dinner guests that the appropriate safeguard for dual-use technologies is a long sequence of small, correct decisions.
Seconding the Spier & Mackay recommendation. I've never been disappointed by them.
I'll get back to you on the books.
I tried to find reviews of Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution to see if it was worth getting and the book seems to have sunk without a trace, barely any Goodreads or Amazon reviews