What I'm reading: Sept 2025
Some gems of print and digital media
Never a Patient Woman
CLEIN, Emmeline. (2025). Never a patient woman. Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, 45, 20–33. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/never-a-patient-woman/. ISBN 978-1-942904-04-5
On reading and rereading Shulamith Firestone through the tensions between second-wave and radical feminism.
Weaving simultaneous joy, admiration, horror, sarcasm, and irony throughout her essay, Clein engages with a firebrand scholar and activist who as a woman had to both survive in the system that man imposed on her and to architect her and all women’s freedom.
Touches on the shortcomings of Freudian psychoanalysis and its ability to liberate us from the “exaggerated sexual oppression and repression” of the Victorian Era due to its pathologising of any and all dissatisfaction with the heteronormative nuclear family. Of note as well the discussion, following the work of Philippe Ariès, of creation of the childhood as a structure,1 an “adjunct to the modern family [… ‘d]esigned to keep the child economically dependent for longer and longer periods of time,’ to entrench the nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalism” (p. 25).
“Where Freudianism promised ordinary unhappiness, feminism flirted with the radically unknown”.
Related reading: PRECIADO, Paul B. (2020). Yo soy el monstruo que os habla: Informe para una academia de psicoanalistas. Barcelona: Anagrama. ISBN 978-84-339-1643-3
In English: PRECIADO, Paul B. (2020). Can the monster speak?: A report to an academy of psychoanalysts (F. Wynne, Trans.). London: Fitzcarraldo. ISBN 978-1913097-58-5
Epistemological Homogenization in AI
FAZELPOUR, Sina, & FLEISHER, Will. (2025). The Value of Disagreement in AI Design, Evaluation, and Alignment. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’25), 1–9. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07772
On the flattening of epistemologies and diverse standpoints into a uniform epistemological body due to the nature and architecture of today’s LLMs. Do generative language models homogenize human knowledge into an average based on the next-token prediction model and transformer architecture? Does the relative uniformity of training data across all the major models have any significant implications? Are we constricting ourselves to rely on a paradigm that necessary simplifies that which we know to be true? And most importantly, have we reached a point where we are no longer just outsourcing cognitive processes, but epistemologies themselves? Are we no longer the knowers of our own knowledge? This paper delves critically into this intersection of the latest AI technologies and paramount questions of philosophy of the mind and cognitive systems.
Of interest: Bommasani, R., Creel, K. A., Kumar, A., Jurafsky, D., & Liang, P. (2022, November 25). Picking on the Same Person: Does Algorithmic Monoculture lead to Outcome Homogenization? 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022). http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13972
Incendiary
BURLOCK, Charley. (2025). Incendiary. Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, 45, 66–75. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/incendiary/. ISBN 978-1-942904-04-5
On the fiery history of the Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) and haphazard initiative-taking that constitutes the Californian quick-fix enterprising mentality that brought it in the first place and seeks to deal with it today. What we can learn from the ubiquitous, invasive tree—simultaneously flammable and fire-surviving, nonnative but here to stay—we stand to learn about ourselves.
Related reading: DIDION, Joan. (2023). Where I was from. New York: Vintage. (Original work published 2003). ISBN 978-0-679752-86-8
A World of Standards but Not a Standard World
TIMMERMANS, Stefan, & EPSTEIN, Steven. (2010). A world of standards but not a standard world: Toward a sociology of standards and standardization. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102629
On what makes a standard a standard, what it embeds, and within what infrastructure it operates. On standardisation as a both democratising and exclusionary process. Questions of homogenisation and subsequent differentiation.
“Following Latour (1988)2, in order for lab results to work outside the lab, the world has to be turned into a laboratory”.
Degrowth, Control of Production, and the Global North
BASTANI, Aaron, & HICKEL, Jason. (2025.08.31). Capitalism’s addiction to growth means civilisational collapse. Novara Media.
On why growth should not be the priority and on what degrowth is not.
Highlights:
Why is China not a capitalist country, in spite of having a market economy? TL;DR because the production is controlled by the state and production decisions are made towards the end of human wellbeing, not towards the profit of capital.
Does degrowth mean that poor countries are condemned to being underdeveloped forever? No, degrowth is a framework relevant to industrialised countries that overshoot their fair share of planetary capacity. Degrowth must take place in the Global North, not universally.
What is the fundamental flaw of capitalism in light of our current crises? Capitalism depends on the incessant increase of profitability and growth. It is unable to downscale unnecessary production in one industry and upscale it in another towards social or ecological objectives, as illustrated by energy companies not automatically switching to the “green economy”, even a decade after renewable energy prices are lower than fossil-fuel prices (because capital is concerned with profit, not prices).
Further reading: HICKEL, Jason, KALB, Don, DYVEKE SYVE, Maria, & TOMASONE, Federico. (2025.08.22). Reorganizing production to serve life, not profit. Progressive International. https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-22-reorganizing-production-to-serve-life-not-profit/en
Header image: MOLLERUS, Sharon. (2022.11.27). Pigeon point light station. Flickr, CC BY 2.0, flickr.com. Accessed 2025.09.08.
ARIÈS, Philippe. (1960). L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime. Paris: Seuil.
LATOUR, Bruno. (1988). The pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.