Colleague, News, and Opinion Links for the Week of June 22, 2025
Newsletter #364 - June 26 2025
Note: This newsletter was put together before we left on a two-week vacation, so it is not up to date with the many current events. But most of the readings, we think, are still useful, and we’ll be working on catching up in our next few links newsletters.
Reader Suggested Links
Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.
US Politics
A Pivot Point for the American People — A hopeful argument that democracy's self-correcting mechanisms are starting to respond effectively to the many challenges being posed by the Trump administration.Bridge Building
Action over Dialogue: The Case for Prioritizing Local Civic Engagement — A report from the Trust for Civic Life showing how processes that focus on one issue or problem and move toward action are more impactful than processes that just focus on dialogue.Media Reform
My School Banned Phones for the Year. Here's What Happened. — An informative update on efforts to reduce the damage that smartphones can do young people.US Politics
The most disturbing aspect of Trump’s first 100 days — A lament about the unwillingness of so many people to challenge President Trump's assertions of near dictatorial power.Communication Complexity
How the Digital Age Changed Us — A thought-provoking essay that asked us to step back and look at the way in which the rapidly evolving digital age has transformed our society.Climate / Environment / Health
A Better Approach to Climate Policy — The report on an earlier and still quite promising effort to craft a climate strategy that is more likely to survive its encounter with the global political system.Civic Education
Everyone wants colleges to produce good citizens. No one knows how. — Thoughts on how, exactly, to build a civic educational system that successfully trains and motivates citizens to produce the society in which most everyone would like to live.
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
Saving Democracy
Principles for Trusted Elections — The Principles for Trusted Elections is a cross-partisan national program helping to restore voters’ confidence along six dimensions: honest process, nonviolent campaigning, secure voting, responsible oversight, and trusted outcomes.Social / Economic Complexity
Tracking the Policy Landscape for the Charitable Sector — Independent Sector and its partners provide three trackers to monitor Trump policy actions that could impact the charitable sector, including a tax and federal legislation tracker, a litigation tracker, and an executive action tracker.Media Reform
Don’t let the news overwhelm you — use this tool to stay engaged — When it feels like progress isn't happening, a force field analysis can reveal where the status quo is shifting and point to other strategic leverage points.Superpower Conflict
Amerika: MAGA, China, Imperial Decline, Democracy — This report examines the current rivalries between the USA and China—two entangled but differently structured empires—which are triggering mental confusions, public anxieties and political misunderstandings and fears.Constructive Communication
The Pöster Project: Infographics for Democracy. — The Pöster Project points out that statistics don't change minds, but stories do. They provide infographics to help people to visually tell the stories about what is happening to US democracy.Theories of Change
The Beautiful Movement @ The Horizons Project — A new substack from our colleagues at the Horizons Project telling stories of ordinary people standing up to authoritarianism around the world. Together, we are more powerful than we know!Artificial Intelligence
Normsy.ai: Strengthening Online Civic Norms At Scale — A white paper explaining how Normy.ai works to transform online conversation threads with the greatest potential for civic harm toward more constructive dialogue.Peacebuilding
Why It Worked: Redefining “Success” in Conflict Resolution and Peace Negotiations — A special issue of the Negotiation Journal based on a 2-year research project examining why and how peacebuilding can succeed even in the most intractable conflicts.Developing a Unifying Vision
Core values guide us, especially during times of uncertainty — Chuck Salter of the News Literacy Project explains what the project is and why he believes that news literacy is so important in uncertain times.Bridge Building
The Heat of Resistance Meets the Cool of Dialogue — Eileen Boris and Julia Roig talk about the continuum from raising the heat (resistance) to cooling things down with dialogue. They go on to explain why both approaches are valid and needed.Social / Economic Complexity
Grappling With Systems Collapse: How Social Sector Leaders Can Respond — The social sector needs new models for understanding what it might be able to do when the systems that we all rely upon fall apart.Saving Democracy
Epistemic Secession: Can Democracy Survive Without a Shared Reality? — When Americans no longer agree on who to trust or what counts as truth, democracy itself is at risk. Rebuilding a shared foundation of facts may be our only path forward.Saving Democracy
Can democracy take us into the future? — A podcast with Suzette Brooks, a political strategist and Senior Fellow at the Democracy Funders Network, exploring her research on ways to invigorate democratic practice, including citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting.Peacebuilding
With the Peacebuilding Field Under Attack, Risks Abound – But Also Opportunities — Decreasing budgets for peacebuilding across the Global North are forcing a rethinking of the field. Experts say that the dramatic cuts present significant risks, but also offer a window of opportunity for the field to become more efficient and sustainable.Civil Society
Five Steps toward a Resilient Nonprofit Sector — From the Kettering Foundation, five things nonprofits can do to weather the coming storm: don't panic, communicate proactively, don't go it alone, do a risk assessment, and "learn the lessons of resiliance."
News and Opinion
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)
Theories of Change
Why Liberals Must Not Give Up Hope — From Francis Fukuyama, an argument for recognizing the many ways in which the political and social landscape has changed (and an argument for recommitting oneself to building a better world).Psychological Complexity
‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’ — Reflections on the many implications of the intense competition that now exist between those who aspire to leadership roles with in our society.Social / Economic Complexity
So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years? — A useful exploration of the factors that have, in recent decades, been limiting economic opportunity and exacerbating social tensions.Saving Democracy
The Slow Death of Effective Government — A report on the complex ways in which Trump administration actions are dramatically altering the civil service (and undermining the ability of government employees to serve the public).Race / Anti-Racism
How the BLM riots broke America: The oligarchs learned to weaponise mistrust — An informative examination of the way in which the BLM riots transformed the United States and the ways in which the resulting tensions were exploited by political opportunists.Psychological Complexity
Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat — From Nicholas Kristof, a man who has spent a career covering the horrors of authoritarianism, reflections on the most effective strategies for combating these tyrants.Culture and Religion
What the Fastest-Growing Christian Group Reveals About America — An examination of the surprising way that Christianity is evolving in the United States.Social / Economic Complexity
You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You — Pessimistic musings about what an honest graduation speech might say to a generation of students whose lives are likely to be diverted by any one of a number of unfolding crises.Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
4 ways women are physically stronger than men — Yet another area in which stereotypes about the relative strengths and weaknesses of men and women turn out to be wrong in surprising ways.Social / Economic Complexity
Law ≠ Power — A critical, but informative, examination of the complex ways in which the critical legal studies movement has helped produce our current constitutional crises.Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness — Food for thought as societies worldwide contemplate a future in which the coming generation won't be large enough to sustain the society.Social / Economic Complexity
Understanding America Across 15 Types of Communities (Part One) — A report outlining a major new effort to document the socio-cultural (not just racial) diversity of the United States.Communication Complexity
Rethinking the Social Media Hysteria — One of those contrarian arguments that forces us to think critically about the conventional wisdom. This one looks at the impact of social media.Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
How to Spot ‘Toxic Femininity’ — It's always useful to, from time to time, turn the tables and look at your side in the same way that you look at the other.US Politics
Analyzing the 2024 Presidential Vote: PRRI’s Post-Election Survey — Amid continuing debate over the lessons that we should learn from the recent US election, a report on a major new post-election analysis.US Politics
Who Started the Lawfare Era? — From a right-leaning perspective, a thoughtful counterargument about the origins of our rapidly escalating epidemic of political lawfare. (It's not just Trump.)Developing a Unifying Vision
An Anti-Monopoly and Abundance Movement for Urban Politics — One-party municipal rule leads to poor services, corruption, and dejected electorates. A major debate is brewing over how to respond.Interstate War
A Russia-NATO War Would Look Nothing Like Ukraine — As Tolstoy famously said, "you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you." If we want to prevent war, we had better pay attention to the ways in which it might happen.Social / Economic Complexity
Four Books Sound the Alarm About the Power of Private Equity — Almost 20 years after unrestrained financial innovations caused the great upheavals of the 2008 recession, new worries about similarly increasing economic vulnerabilities.US Politics
The Coming Democratic Civil War — More thoughts about the intense conflict that is emerging around proposals for scaling back the regulatory state and promoting economic growth.Trust / Trust Earning
Can We Trust Social Science Yet? — For a time in which the public no longer trusts science (and especially the social sciences), thoughts about whether science is or is not worthy of the public's trust.
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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