Summer Reading 2026 – The Future Without Apology

This summer, I want to do something that feels genuinely new to me – both in subject and in format.

I want to spend time thinking about the future. And I want to do it in public, while I am still figuring things out.

Not forecasts, not trend reports, not techno-fantasy. I am interested in futures that feel serious, generous, beautiful and believable — futures rooted in things people can recognize, understand and trust.

A few books pushed me into this.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind and Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World both seem to circle around a strange problem: these days even evidence-based optimism feels like something that needs to be defended.

Fred Polak’s The Image of the Future asks why societies need images of the future strong enough to move towards. And the Eameses’ India Report keeps pulling me in because it seems to carry a positive, forward-looking confidence I find strangely moving – and because I want to understand where, when and why we seem to have lost parts of that.

Summer Reading 2026

So I made myself a small summer reading project: Summer Reading 2026 – Futures Worth Wanting

For each book or text, I will write a personal reading note — not a review, not a summary pretending to be objective, but a public notebook of what I found interesting, irritating, useful or worth keeping.

Along the way, I might also write broader posts about patterns that emerge across the readings: optimism, trust, design, useful objects, inherited material, humane tools, and futures rooted in things people already understand.

This is also a preparation of sorts. I am circling around a larger project about credible positive futures, cultural trust, and the reuse of inherited material — but let's not rush that.

For now, I'm simply reading and thinking in public.

The collected reading notes and the current list of books live here. Join me if you want. 😃