Future possibilities

Weekend reads for May 17, 2025

Happy Saturday, and welcome to the weekend. As we do for our supporting subscribers each weekend, we’ve gathered the most interesting, challenging, entertaining, and thought-provoking writing we’ve come across this week for you below. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:

• What can the systems thinking of the 1970s teach us about winning elections?

• Just how personal is the political?

• Can music survive the age of the algorithm?

• What does the new media demand of journalists and readers?

• Does a taste for the stars keep us from seeing Earth?

• What do we give up when we let technology improve our lives?

You won’t want to miss any of it. Thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible. If you haven’t yet joined our community, why not become part of this and help us build the future of independent media today?

---

ICYMI in The Ink this week:

The reckoning that wasn’t

---

And now…your Weekend Reads

Stuck in the past

A light bulb went off recently while I was reading Dan Davies’ “The Unaccountability Machine” (interview here). It’s about that same tension between present and future orientation, which Davies argues is present in virtually every organization, as described by the Viable Systems Model developed by Stafford Beer. The VSM model describes systems at five levels: The first three dealing with things as they are, the fourth deals with future possibilities and the fifth deals with the tensions between those orientations.

This was my Eureka moment: Democrats completely lack both fourth- and fifth-level systems, while Republicans don’t. [Salon]

Erotic decisions