• 07 Nov, 2025 *

This week, we have a diverse and exciting mix of material as always, albeit with its own impression on the space of ideas. From space to animal cognition, from the ecology of trees and humans to the geopolitical games that nations play - the bag of ideas is brimming this week, and the call of the hour is to let the grey matter do its thing.

Book

This week, we are (re)reading Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Winning novel The Overstory - a one-of-a-kind novel that takes Suzzane Simard’s ideas and crafts a world around the ecology of plants and humans. And the world Richard builds, is rich, layered and deeply intimate, reflecting fragments of our own world through a checkered canopy. The characters are relatable in their moments of vulnerability and persistent struggle against the schisms growing through the natural world, raw and real in their helplessness against the onslaught of time and the human machine. The textures of a mossy forest come alive in the smoke and noise of a belligerent humanity ripping through the ecologies of its origin. Screams and clarion calls leap through the pages, as the spiral of time reaches through the wildwood in eerie silence, a whispered warning of the impending doom. While a lot has been written and spoken about the sixth extinction, what is often lost in the noise is the slow, deliberate nature of this great vanishing act. And standing amidst the aspen groves and the mute sequoia, the scale of this violence hits the nerves without mercy, as it should. I would recommend every curriculum to include this mandatorily in its reading list, but I am overstepping my bounds so instead I’ll urge you to read it and share. Remember, this land is your land, this land is my land.

Podcast

Dwarkesh is back with another lecture from the inimitable Sarah Paine, this time about the strange relationship between Russia and China. The age-old fight for dominance in the high Pamirs is well known, and the Great Game is now a regular appearance on any remotely informed geopolitical chat. This one however goes deeper and uncovers the “difficult” history behind China’s rise and Russia’s game in the backdrop of the Cold War and the tense peace that followed. An interesting listen.

Essay

This week we have a longform article on the Martian landscape from the magazine Aeon, and it’s a tour-de-force. From the earliest pulp stories of Martian aliens and underground cities, to the modern cartographic revelations, Mars has always been a favorite subject for sci-fi and futurism. As private rockets lift off in greater numbers from space ports across the world on our long road to the red planet and beyond, how do we reckon our changing perspectives of our extraterrestrial terra firma ? I can recommend a warm cup of coffee and the fantastic book “Planetary Landscapes” by Ronald Greeley to pair with this perfectly.

Documentary

This week’s recommended watch is My Octopus Teacher by Craig Forster. A highly celebrated doc feature that won multiple accolades all over and more importantly was loved by people, this one cannot be recommended enough. As moving as it is, this film should spark more conversations around the nature of intelligence in the animal world and how constricted our anthropocentric view of the same has left us. Sentience is not an exclusively human phenomenon, watch this to know what exists beyond the same.

And as always, these are solely meant to spark your curiosity and prompt you to engage with the world more deeply than ever.

Dive in, soak these worlds and let them take you places you’ve never walked into before. May all illumination be yours.

• Nemo