Recent-ish Reads, November 6, 2025

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.

— Rachel Carson

Once again, there has been a lot of writing and chatter about the need to update the dominant understanding of the world to one of interdependence, beautiful diversity, context relevance, and open futures that we co-create together with every action and reaction. Zohran Mamdani is one who gets it: "Hope is a decision" and "politics ... is something that we do." "In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another." Huzzah!

Here are some more top highlights.

Let's start with quantum physics! Carlo Rovelli, the leading theorist of relational quantum mechanics, recently did a great interview with Quanta magazine. While the piece overstates how "radical" process-relational worldviews are in the context of other cultures and understates what an outlier Euro-Western culture is in expecting every thing to be separate, self-contained, and determinate, it's a good and accessible intro to one of our most brilliant thinkers. I wrote about him earlier, here.

Carlo Rovelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality | Quanta Magazine

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

Quanta MagazineZack Savitsky

Sticking with science, a short Guardian article provides a compelling review of the interdependence between our inner biodiversity and health, and the outer world's biodiversity. Our societal failure to see and value these relations leads us to severely under-protect both. And it's very literally killing us. At the same time, our collective relational understanding increases every day, giving us more tools to overcome these failures.

The nature extinction crisis is mirrored by one in our own bodies. Both have huge implications for health

Modern life is waging a war against ecosystems around us and inside us. Keeping our own microbes healthy is another reason to demand action to preserve the natural world

The GuardianPhoebe Weston

Shifting gears somewhat to law (though of course, there's no real divide!), a new Annual Reviews article summarizes how Anglo-American law's distinctively adversarial, binary and map-metaphysics-aligned procedural structure negatively shapes processes, participants, and outcomes. The "persistence of the combat model is a testament to adversarialism's iron grip on the American legal imagination."

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-121324-110748

Through the month of October, University of California - Berkeley's fabulous Othering and Belonging Institute published a trio of essays, with accompanying videos, by institute director and civil rights icon john a. powell "on the ongoing assaults on our democracy and communities, and how we may respond to and confront them." It offers a compelling affirmative vision that learns from history while clarifying what we're up against. "The idea of belonging on offer from Trump is not rooted in dignity and democracy, but in disdain and hierarchy" with "a very narrow 'we'". Even more importantly, the series provides concrete, process-relational reality-based action recommendations.

Fighting Forward Essay Series

Othering & Belonging Institute home page

I can't recommend Scot Nakagawa's free Anti-Authoritarian Playbook strongly enough (despite its unfortunately being on Substack). Linked below is a speech aimed at activists but informative for everyone. "The goal isn’t to preserve democracy as it is. The goal is to preserve democracy as a space where it can become what it should be. ... Future generations will ask: Did the progressives of 2025 choose strategic thinking over ideological purity? Did they defend democracy while transforming it? Did they understand that democracy as infrastructure was not a compromise of their values but the application of their values to this historical moment?"

Democracy as Infrastructure

A Call to Action for Progressive Leaders

The Anti-Authoritarian PlaybookScot Nakagawa

Also on politics, I linked this one in my last post but wanted to surface it again because it rigorously demonstrates how right-wingers' hierarchical, zero-sum worldview is behind their enthusiasm for lies. (Also, Substack, unfortunately.)

Disinformation belief is more about defying societal norms than having incorrect views

New study finds that believers in false statements are trying to project strength

FluxFlux

It's also well worth reading Thomas Zimmer on the escalating fever-dream map-metaphysics extremism of U.S. fascism, its systemic and structural context, and the still-open future we still face.

Escalation, Authoritarian “Normalization,” or a Democratic Turnaround?

One year after the election: What we can say with certainty about the state of the Trumpist assault, where uncertainty lies, and where America might go from here

Steady

And, if you can stomach it, this writeup of the hardcore misogyny increasingly driving conservatism and the Republican party, rooted in a worldview of rigid binaries, ranked mattering and "realness," all-encompassing zero-sum competition, and the insecurities those build into boys' psyches.

Women Should Make Babies, Not Vote: Why Some on the Far Right Want to Repeal the 19th Amendment

The far right takes losses at the ballot box as evidence that women do not deserve their rights.

Liberal CurrentsAlan Elrod

Finally, I want to share a fascinating article that doesn't quite confront static substance map-world thinking versus process-relational territory, but where everything makes vastly more sense when read through that lens. MAGAts' destructive stupidity—their disconnected, future-ignoring, conformist and hierarchical non-thinking—comes not from mental defect (usually) but from their cultural and fear-based commitment to a simplified false reality. If the rest of us are really less stupid, we should be able to out-maneuver them with the wise and creative system interventions, pluralistic solidarity, and positive future imaginaries that process-relational thinking enables.

Stupidology | William Davies

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

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