In early February of 2025, I sat ensconced on my sofa sipping tea, the soft winter light filtering through falling snow and the bay window behind me to illuminate the pages of Merlin Sheldrake’s brilliant book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures (2020). Page after page, Sheldrake revealed to me the vast, hidden filaments of

Author of Honeybee Democracy (2010), Thomas D. Seeley is a professor of biology at Cornell University and has been researching honeybees for decades. This deep knowledge is soaked into every page of the book, of course, but so too is his love of his subject. For Seeley, the honeybee is both object of study and fascinating subject, whose behaviors and traits can teach us things about the concepts of community and democratic decision-making.

Barbara Kingsolver comes to novel writing with a degree in biology, background that supports her ability to communicate scientific concepts such as climate change and butterfly migration patterns language at once simple and elegant. Kingsolver describes her novel as being about how people feel about climate change, and more broadly about how people can receive the same set of facts but come to different beliefs. Both subjects remain as relevant in 2024 as they were when Flight Behavior was published in 2012, …