While reading Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (2015), I can almost feel the light of this great American novel pierce my soul, refracted through the spores and dust floating in the forest air, disturbed by my feet as I tread across the novel’s loamy pages.

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.