Recent-ish Reads, April 12, 2025

Comparative metaphysics is hidden everywhere! So, I'm going to aim to provide short lists of recent articles every so often, maybe about bi-weekly. They'll feature readable writings that that illustrate aspects of the map/territory or substance/process-relational ways of understanding reality, even though few reference that distinction directly. Here's a few fairly recent gooders, over a wide array of subjects.

• Society/Humanities: Good Neighbors: Relearning How to Live Together. By Willow Defebaugh, April 11, 2025, in Atmos via her always wonderful The Overview weekly newsletter. ("Isolation is illusory—and more than that, it’s a deliberate tactic that is being used to divide us.... The answer to tactics of division cannot be more division; it has to be banding together, and learning once again, what it means to be good neighbors. And that is something we can all practice at every scale; when macro change is difficult, focus on the micro.")
• Politics: The Joy in Being A Cause: What's power and how do we get it? (part one). By Greg Frey, March 27, 2025, on his Substack notes from the belly of the whale. (A nice introduction to concepts of "power over" versus "power with.") (I should mention, though, that the Substack platform sucks and actively defends and promotes literal masks-off Nazis, in case you want to avoid that. I go back and forth, because there are some damn good writers still at the Nazi bar.)
• Economics: Capitalism's FAFO Moment: This week a major insurer warned that climate change was endangering capitalism as we know it. But what if it's already dead? By Dave Vetter, April 6, 2025, on his blog The Climate Laundry. ("[B]y emphasising only competition and efficiency, and completely ignoring things like ethics, human irrationality and, er, the entire planet on which we live, capitalism has nurtured the seeds of its own destruction.")
  • See also This Is Abundance also by Dave Vetter, March 23, 2025. (Vetter finds Ezra Klein's book on "Abundance" entirely fails to mention aspects of reality like biodiversity, feedback loops, or planetary boundaries. Others have found it cites few women or people of color. Process-relationality is pro-abundance, but defines it less extractively and more inclusively.)
• Health: Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient: From growth charts to anemia thresholds, clinical standards assume a single human prototype. Why are we still using one-size-fits-all health metrics? By Prof. Manvir Singh, March 24, 2025, in The New Yorker. ("Instead of clinging to dubious classifications that obscure variation [i.e. simplified maps], we would be better served by developing methods that account for people’s distinctive ancestry and lived environment [i.e. complex process-relational terrain].")
• Tech: ‘No species has ever created another species’: Baratunde Thurston on the future of being human with AI. Interview with Jenna Abdou for Fast Company, published April 4, 2025. ("[I[t’s a big task to create an entirely new story. Instead, we need to 'be sensitive to and aware of where that new story is already present, nurture that, and give our attention and thus our power to that. By doing so, we make that story more real.'")
  • Also fun to read the ever-brilliant Tressie McMillan Cottom on how AI is just mid.
  • And a more anti-AI piece, The New Artificial Intelligentsia: How AI evangelists wrap their self-interest in a cloak of humanistic concern. By Prof. Ruha Benjamin, October 18, 2024, in the LA Review of Books (part of its Legacies of Eugenics essay series; not super recent, but new to me via Bluesky). ("It is not enough to refute the legacies of eugenics animating the faux futures of the artificial intelligentsia; we must also take it upon ourselves to inaugurate legacies of solidarity that reflect our intrinsic interdependence as a people and a planet.")
• "Hard" sciences: Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex: A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. By Philip Ball, April 2, 2025, in Quanta Magazine (one of the best science publications, their newsletter is great). ("[M]any researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot.")
  • Less recent but also fun: ‘Next-Level’ Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability: In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle. By Charlie Wood, March 7, 2025, in Quanta Magazine and Wired. ("Undecidability means that certain questions simply cannot be answered. It’s an unfamiliar message for physicists, but it’s one that mathematicians and computer scientists know well. More than a century ago, they rigorously established that there are mathematical questions that can never be answered, true statements that can never be proved. Now physicists are connecting those unknowable mathematical systems with an increasing number of physical ones and thereby beginning to map out the hard boundary of knowability in their field as well.")