This week: The secrets retreating glaciers reveal / A 19th century woman predicted global warming / A new forest in the heart of Baghdad / A Texas scream club lets out all the feels / The 2025 National Book Awards longlist unveiled
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1. ‘Like walking through time:’ As glaciers retreat, new worlds are being created in their wake
By Katherine Hill | The Guardian | September 2025
“As Swiss glaciers melt at an ever-faster rate, new species move in and flourish, but entire ecosystems and an alpine culture can be lost.”
2. We Take Clouds for Granted
By Gavin Pretor-Pinney | The New York Times | September 2025
“How exactly cloud cover will shift in a warming world is anyone’s guess; it’s one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate science. But it should also be everyone’s concern. What happens to our clouds as the planet warms is so important that we need a renaissance in the study of clouds.”
3. I was a political columnist. Here’s why I’m now searching for hidden beauty.
By Dana Milbank | The Washington Post | September 2025
“I begin today a new column dedicated to reclaiming the humanity we are losing to the savagery of politics, the toxicity of social media and the amorality of artificial intelligence. One of the keys to that recovery is nurturing our innate sense of awe, the feeling we get when we contemplate something so vast and mysterious that it quiets our anxieties and ambitions and puts our differences and disagreements into perspective.”
4. The Birth Certificate for ‘America’
By Neely Tucker and Mike Klein | The Library of Congress | June 2021
“The name ‘America’ originated with the famous 1507 map by Martin Waldseem ller, who named the newly-discovered lands for the sea-faring voyages of Amerigo Vespuccui a few years earlier.”
5. How Nostalgia Keeps Friendships Alive
By Kuan-Ju Huang | Scientific American | September 2025
“The social and psychological consequences of yearning for the past are starting to come into focus.”
6. Insect populations drop even without direct human interference, a new study finds
By Alana Wise | NPR | September 2025
“The study, published in the journal Ecology, calculated the density of flying insects during 15 summers, between 2004–2024, in a remote meadow in the Colorado mountains.”
7. Inside ‘Megadoc:’ How Francis Ford Coppola Made Mike Figgis an Offer He Couldn’t Refuse
By Patrick Brzeski | The Hollywood Reporter | August 2025
“Ahead of the documentary’s Venice world premiere, the Leaving Las Vegas director reflects on the folly and glories of the 83-year-old cinema legend’s $140 million experimental epic: ‘Name another filmmaker of that stature still taking risks like this.’
8. If Only 19th-Century America Had Listened to a Woman Scientist
By Sidney Perkowitz | Nautilus | November 2019
“Where might the U.S. be if it heeded her discovery of global warming’s source?”
9. The Return of ISIS
By Caroline Rose and Colin P. Clarke | Foreign Affairs | September 2025
“The Group Is Rebuilding in Syria—Just as U.S. Forces Prepare to Leave”
10. Gensler designs forested district as ‘a beacon for the rebirth’ of Baghdad
By Starr Charles | Dezeen | September 2025
“Named Baghdad Sustainable Forests, the masterplan is conceptualised by the studio as an ‘ecological and urban district’ for Iraq’s capital city, encompassing a 10-million-square-metre forested site.”
11. The Trans-Pacific Slave Trade
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: The U.S. and Decolonization after World War II | The Paris Commune | The Birmingham Quran | The Changsha Rice Riots of 1910
12. The Best Part of Any Piece of Mail Is the Stamp
By Liza St. James | The New York Times Magazine | September 2025
“These tiny rectangles hold memory and mystery, and they will travel where you will not.”
13. The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel
By Adelle Waldman | The New York Review of Books | August 2025
“Why isn’t there a twenty-first-century Cheever?”
14. Two Intimate Enemies
By Joseph J. Ellis | American Heritage | Summer 2025
“When John Adams was elected president, and Thomas Jefferson as vice president, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.”
15. How cosmic events may have influenced hominin evolution
By Michael Marshall | New Scientist | September 2025
“Some cosmic events could have profoundly altered the lives of our ancient human relatives. Did Neanderthals go extinct, at least in part, due to changes in Earth’s magnetic field? Did Australopithecus witness huge meteorite impacts?”
16. I Met a Bunch of Strangers on a Bridge to Scream
By Amanda O’Donnell | Texas Monthly | September 2025
“At the inaugural meeting of Texas’s first ‘scream club,’ shouting into the void isn’t futile — it’s something.”
17. ‘Girls need to carry things too!’: How women’s pockets became so controversial
By Clare Thorp | BBC Culture | September 2025
“Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets, and women’s so few? For centuries, the humble pocket has been a flashpoint in the gender divide of fashion. Now, with a #WeWantPockets hashtag gaining momentum on social media, is that finally set to change?”
18. The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist
The New Yorker | September 2025
“The New Yorker presents the longlists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction.”
19. In Praise of Writing in Cemeteries
By Darcie Dennigan | LitHub | September 2025
“When I write, I long to enter — no — to visit — a particular state. It’s one I have felt inside a few books too — like Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle and Thoreau’s notebook Wild Fruits. But I always feel it in cemeteries. I want to write until I feel mortal and decompose myself and become a flower.”
20. Tocqueville: Democracy in America
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2018
Also see: Alexander the Great | Simone de Beauvoir | The Invention of Photography | The Maya Civilization
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Stillness of Heart 