Recent-ish Reads, May 8, 2025

A few more curated gooders for you.

Art and Relational Reality: I really enjoyed these conversational snippets from Ursula K. Le Guin. "One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say." (From 2018, but timeless, and recirculated in a recent Marginalian "Midweek Sanity Oasis" newsletter which I also recommend.)

Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”

The MarginalianMaria Popova

Politics:

1. Bearing in mind that process-relationality points beyond Euro-Western liberal and/or socialist models, this article's forceful argument for an affirmative political vision aligns well with process-relational "individuality without individualism" right from the opening epigraphs.

Inheritance of Equals: A Case for Liberal Socialism

Things literally cannot go on as they have before the present democratic crisis—things have been broken and will have to be put back together somehow. Ideas that were unthinkable even a decade ago may see their chance in the sun. It is time for liberal socialism.

Liberal CurrentsPaul Crider

2. Naomi Klein again, on putting profit and power (i.e., map-metaphysics) over people and planet (i.e., process-relational reality). Also shock doctrine, AI worship, and the Pope. The interview is paywalled, but Rolling Stone is $4.79 a month and it's one of the few journalistic publications meeting the moment.

Naomi Klein: ‘What They Want Is Absolutely Everything’

The ‘Shock Doctrine’ author explains the dark logic of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s path of destruction and why billionaire oligarchs are so angry.

Rolling StoneTim Dickinson

Law and Ecology: A lovely, meandering book review that stands on its own and also got me to pre-order the book. And it uses the word ontological. Twice!

How Recognizing the Life of Rivers Could Transform the Law | Atmos

Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is A River Alive?, is a propulsive, white-water ride through the rights of nature movement.

AtmosAtmos

Cognitive Science and Technology: If you want to continue on a cognitive science kick, this one's worth it for the illustrations alone (see above), though the article itself is also a genuinely fascinating read about the entangled mutual advancement of biological cognitive science and artificial "neural networks."

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

Quanta MagazineYasemin Saplakoglu

Technology and Culture: I read this one by the always-engaging Jia Tolentino as an indication of how desperately we need methodological and metaphysical moorings to ground us in reality's terrain, and how much current techno-capitalist trends tend to bury that reality under left-brained algorithmic bullshit, undermining "the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase—with which we handle the task of being alive." (See also "ChatGPT Is Bullshit," an academic article from last year.)

My Brain Finally Broke

Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.

The New YorkerJia Tolentino

Technology, Culture, Ecology, and Antitrust: This wide-ranging, much more optimistic take on technology's liberatory possibilities is grounded in a thoroughly regenerative and process-relational understanding of how things work when they work well. "Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it’s tough to imagine alternatives. ... Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision."

We Need To Rewild The Internet | NOEMA

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

NOEMAMaria Farrell