October 2025 – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Follow these tips to ensure a long, happy life for your dog / The 58 essential books to read / Democracy needs a mass movement now / Happy 200th to the Erie Canal / Rings are forming around Chiron, a celestial centaur / The mysteries of Hadrian’s Wall and Al-Kindi

This week: Follow these tips to ensure a long, happy life for your dog / The 58 essential books to read / Democracy needs a mass movement now / Happy 200th to the Erie Canal / Rings are forming around Chiron, a celestial centaur / The mysteries of Hadrian’s Wall and Al-Kindi

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. 58 Books You Need to Read (Recommended by People Who Know)
By Emily Temple | LitHub | October 2025
“We will be sharing their opinions on various subjects with you over the next weeks, but to start, we’ve collated some of the best answers on one of our favorite questions: what’s the best book you’ve read recently?”

2. What Are We Living Through?
By Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen | The Boston Review | October 2025
“Three competing narratives of the second Trump administration.”

3. Are these local newsletters local news? (And does it matter?)
By Sophie Culpepper | Nieman Lab | October 2025
“Meet a few of the entrepreneurs and hobbyists building community — and sometimes, making real ad money — from newsletters aggregating local events.”

4. Late bloomers
By Gail Dugelby | Garden Style San Antonio | October 2025
“There’s a large bouquet of wildflowers that signal the arrival of fall — and welcome the butterflies and birds that pass through our area this season.”

5. The 2025 Esquire Gadget Awards
By Krista Jones, Luke Guillory, Bryn Gelbart and The Esquire Editors | Esquire | October 2025
“These 63 products prove that keeping up with the times matters. Ranging from robots to red-light technology, this is what you’re missing.”

6. America Needs a Mass Movement — Now
By David Brooks | The Atlantic | October 2025
“Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades.”

7. Astronomers observe rings forming around icy celestial body Chiron
By Will Dunham | Reuters | October 2025
“The rings of Saturn are among the wonders of our solar system, with a diameter of roughly 175,000 miles as they encircle the giant planet. But smaller celestial bodies in the solar system also boast ring systems that are impressive in their own right, even if their scale is not as grand.”

8. The Case for Unbordered Reporting
By Jean Guerrero | Columbia Journalism Review | October 2025
“A guide for taking immigration stories beyond walls both physical and mental.”

9. Erie Canal’s 200th anniversary: How a technological marvel for trade changed the environment forever
By Christine Keiner | The Conversation | October 2025
“When the Erie Canal opened 200 years ago, on Oct. 26, 1825, the route was dotted with decaying trees left by construction that had cut through more than 360 miles of forests and fields, and life quickly sped up.”

10. These 16-ton self-driving cargo trucks are joining the US Army
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal | New Atlas | October 2025
“The next iteration of these 10-wheel trucks, designed to carry 16.5-ton payloads across practically any terrain, will get ‘by-wire functionality to enable autonomous operation and active safety systems that increase protection and efficiency for soldiers operating in complex environments.’ “

11. The Best Books of the Year So Far
The New Yorker | October 2025
“Each week, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.”

12. Want your dog to live a longer life? Here are 6 science-backed tips
By Julia Ries Wexler | National Geographic | October 2025
“We asked scientists from the Dog Aging Project for practical tips to improve your dog’s lifespan—from what to feed them to exactly how often they need a walk.”

13. ‘Hot mic’ hot mess: gaffes made by global leaders when they think no one is listening
By Prabowo Subianto | Explainer :: The Guardian | October 2025
“Indonesia’s Prabowo is the latest world leader to fall foul of the ‘hot mic’ – diplomatic snafus that have caused embarrassment to leaders around the globe”

14. How Healthy Are Lentils?
By Alexandra Pattillo | The New York Times | October 2025
“Some experts call them a superfood. Here’s why they deserve a spot in your pantry.”

15. No amount of alcohol is safe, at least for dementia risk, study finds
By Richard Sima | The Washington Post | October 2025
“Even a drink or two a day isn’t risk-free, a new study suggests.”

16. The Polio Crusade
American Experience :: PBS | December 2022
“In the summer of 1950 fear gripped the residents of Wytheville, Virginia. Movie theaters shut down, baseball games were cancelled and panicky parents kept their children indoors — anything to keep them safe from an invisible invader. … Polio had struck in Wytheville. The town was in the midst of a full-blown epidemic. That year alone, more than 33,000 Americans fell victim — half of them under the age of ten.”

17. The turbulent history of the union jack
By Neil Armstrong | BBC News | October 2025
“For centuries the ultimate emblem of Britishness has meant different things to different people, and now it is back in the news. What does its history tell us?”

18. Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet
By Samanth Subramanian | The Guardian | September 2025
“A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life.”

19. Reign of Destruction
By Steve Ryfle | The Criterion Collection | October 2019
“While Godzilla has evolved with the times, the Showa series as a whole is undeniably the foundation of this ever-growing pop-culture phenomenon.”

20. The Rapture
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2011-2020
Also see: Hadrian’s Wall | Al-Kindi | The Ming Voyages | The Etruscan Civilisation

Interested in more like this? Since June 2011, Stillness of Heart‘s “Recommended” series has accumulated a magnificent collection of articles, essays, music, podcasts, historical analyses, cultural reflections, and documentaries. Scroll through the offerings here.

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Herculaneum’s lost library / Gen Z-ers and conservative Christianity / These dinosaurs are your friends / Discover the usefulness of coffee naps / Being organized may suggest longer life / 1816: the ‘Year Without a Summer’

This week: Herculaneum’s lost library / Gen Z-ers and conservative Christianity / These dinosaurs are your friends / Discover the usefulness of coffee naps / Being organized may suggest longer life / 1816: the ‘Year Without a Summer’

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark
By Anne Applebaum | The Atlantic | October 2025
“For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad, even when it failed to live up to those ideals itself. Not anymore.”

2. ‘Deeply alarmed’: House Democrats send a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
By Mariel Padilla | The 19th | October 2025
“Women veterans in Congress and nearly 100 House Democrats are decrying the secretary’s comments about women in the military.”

3. Get Ready to See Yourself in Ads
By John Herrman | Intelligencer :: New York Magazine | October 2025
“Thanks to generative AI, the future may look like Minority Report.”

4. We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library
By Hayley Bennett | New Scientist | October 2025
“A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures.”

5. Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?
By Syris Valentine | Scientific American | October 2025
“Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year — and some companies are already trying it.”

6. Why So Many Gen Z-ers Are Drawn to Conservative Christianity
By Daniel K. Williams | The New York Times | October 2025
“In the aftermath of Covid — and amid the longing for purpose, community and transcendence that many Gen Z-ers feel — a sizable minority of them have found their answer in conservative Christianity, fueling both a religious and a political revival among these young Americans. They bring a new attitude to the combination of faith and politics, and many see politics as a matter of spiritual warfare.”

7. Plato and the Poets
By Elaine Scarry | The Boston Review | Summer 2025
“The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one.”

8. ‘Broadcasting’ has its roots in agriculture. Here’s how it made its way into media
By Rachel Treisman | NPR | October 2025
“Various dictionaries have traced the verb’s first written use — to sow seed over a broad area — to 1733 and 1744.”

9. Leapin’ lizards! These guys are good for the garden
By Malachi Leo | Garden Style San Antonio | October 2025
“Tiny dinosaurs have set up shop in your yard. Don’t worry, they’re harmless — unless you’re an insect.”

10. Coffee naps might be the weirdest — and smartest — way to recharge
By Leah Worthington | National Geographic | September 2025
“It sounds backward, but research suggests a cup of coffee followed by a short nap could sharpen focus and fight fatigue.”

11. Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Reassessing the Haitian revolutionary leader’s legacy
By Julia Gaffield | The Conversation | October 2025
“One of the founding fathers in the struggle for Haitian independence, alongside Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines has a mixed legacy: celebrated at home for his role in ending slavery and overthrowing French colonial rule, but often condemned internationally for his violent tactics and the 1804 killing of white French people in independent Haiti.”

12. Deep-diving manta rays are retrieving directions from nature’s Google Maps
By Bronwyn Thompson | New Atlas | October 2025
“The researchers believe the mantas are using nature’s cues such as changes in magnetic field strength, oxygen concentration, temperature and light to navigate themselves onto the right path for the next days’ travel.”

13. The new Dr. Google is in. Here’s how to use it.
By Leana S. Wen | The Washington Post | October 2025
“Yes, artificial intelligence can help patients with their health, when used with caution.”

14. Victory in the Pacific
American Experience | May 2005
“The two-hour program examines the final year of World War II in the Pacific, including the rationale for using the atomic bomb, and features the first-hand recollections of both American and Japanese civilians and soldiers — even a kamikaze pilot who survived his failed mission.”

15. The Real Problem Is How Trump Can Legally Use the Military
By Jeannie Suk Gersen | The New Yorker | October 2025
“Congress wrote statutes with the apparent assumption that whoever held the office of the Presidency would use the powers they granted in good faith.”

16. Chile’s Route 7: A tough, lonely drive to the end of the world
By Egle Gerulaityte | BBC News | October 2025
“Chile’s Carretera Austral remains one of the world’s most remote and spectacular road trips, where every kilometre tests your resolve and rewards your persistence.”

17. How to use tech in the garden and still keep your serenity
By Jessica Diamond | Associated Press | September 2025
“Gardening tools are evolving to incorporate technology — including artificial intelligence — to help us keep plants healthier, avoid unpleasant tasks and even grow crops indoors over winter. And we can use them without losing the stress-relieving, analog benefits that nature provides.”

18. Being organised and active may be predictor of longer life, study finds
By Amelia Hill | The Guardian | September 2025
“Researchers find specific self-descriptions predict mortality risks better than broader categories such as extraversion”

19. The Big Chill: Surviving
By Harlan Jacobson | The Criterion Collection | August 2014
“Though it represents Kasdan s tackling larger, more personal themes, The Big Chill may be about nothing more or less than how to survive a weekend with friends who knew one another for a short period long ago on someone else s money and who have since abandoned one another s lives and younger values faster than the U.S. military evacuated Saigon.”
Also see: These Are Your Parents

20. Frederick Douglass
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2016-2020
Also see: The Bronze Age Collapse | Sovereignty | 1816, the Year Without a Summer | The 12th Century Renaissance

Interested in more like this? Since June 2011, Stillness of Heart‘s “Recommended” series has accumulated a magnificent collection of articles, essays, music, podcasts, historical analyses, cultural reflections, and documentaries. Scroll through the offerings here.

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

The joy of walking alone / NPR loses Susan Stamberg / The Pentagon press corps revolts / New levels of ICE-y aggression / Refreshing the iPhone / The Amazon’s ‘flying rivers’ / The beauty of Euclid’s ‘Elements’

This week: The joy of walking alone / NPR loses Susan Stamberg / The Pentagon press corps revolts / New levels of ICE-y aggression / Refreshing the iPhone / The Amazon’s ‘flying rivers’ / The beauty of Euclid’s ‘Elements’

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. Iran is out in the cold as the Mideast unites in support of the Gaza ceasefire
By Jon Gambrell | Associated Press | October 2025
“How Tehran’s theocracy responds in the weeks and months ahead, whether that means lashing out or trying to rebuild its hobbled economy at home, will be crucial.”
Also see: This is why the story of Abraham is coming up in the push for Middle East peace

2. NPR ‘founding mother’ Susan Stamberg has died
By David Folkenflik | NPR | October 2025
“Susan Stamberg, an original National Public Radio staffer who went on to become the first U.S. woman to anchor a nightly national news program, died Thursday at the age of 87.”

3. Who will lose out when ACA health insurance subsidies expire?
By Alyssa Fowers | The Washington Post | October 2025
“About 80 percent of the people who benefit from them live in states that Donald Trump won in the 2024 presidential election. Many have no idea that their health insurance costs are on track to go up.”

4. Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
By David Bauder | Associated Press | October 2025
“News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.”

5. D’Angelo Saw His Future in the Past
By Craig Jenkins | Vulture :: New York Magazine | October 2025
“To understand the late musician’s originality, look to his covers of the greats.”

6. The feds are cutting off public money for all Planned Parenthoods, following a playbook that began in Texas
By Lindsey Byman | The Texas Tribune | October 2025
“Texas’ Planned Parenthood has lost half its clinics, but they continue to see thousands of patients a year.”

7. Warning: Our Stock Market Is Looking Like a Bubble
By Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings | The New York Times | October 2025
“You may remember the recession that followed the collapse of dot-com stocks in 2001. Or, worse, the housing crisis of 2008. Both times, a new idea — the internet, mortgage-backed securities and the arcane derivatives they unleashed — convinced investors to plunge so much money into the stock market that it inflated two speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting created much economic pain. We believe it’s time to call the third bubble of our century: the A.I. bubble.”

8. Recession warning signs to watch: Goodbye lipstick, hello Hamburger Helper
By Rachel Lerman and Elena Lacey | The Washington Post | October 2025
“Everything is a ‘recession indicator’ online. Here’s what you really need to pay attention to.”

9. Why Is ICE So Aggressive Now? A Former ICE Chief Explains.
By Riya Misra | Politico Magazine | October 2025
“ICE used to arrest the ‘worst first.’ Under the new Trump administration, ‘those rules are gone,’ says a former ICE chief.”

10. ‘That Is Not What It Used to Look Like’
By Melissa Dahl | The Cut :: New York Magazine | October 2025
“Women are taking testosterone to treat menopause symptoms. An enlarged clitoris is one potential side effect.”

11. The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
By Manvir Singh | The New Yorker | October 2025
“From thunder gods to serpent slayers, scholars are reconstructing myths that vanished millennia ago. How much further can we go — and what might we find?”

12. The Riot Report
American Experience :: PBS | May 2024
“When Black neighborhoods in scores of cities erupted in violence during the summer of 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders––informally known as the Kerner Commission––to answer three questions: What happened? Why did it happen? And what could be done to prevent it from happening again?”

13. Skip Apple’s new iPhone – five tips to make your old phone feel new again
By Prakhar Khanna | The Guardian | September 2025
“A few inexpensive upgrades can totally reinvigorate your old iPhone, and you can get even get the iPhone 17’s best feature completely free”

14. The Happiness of Choosing to Walk Alone
By Arthur C. Brooks | The Atlantic | October 2025
“Going along with an untruth for fear of disagreeing with others is a form of self-betrayal that will make you miserable.”

15. ‘Lee Miller was the bravest person I ever knew’: The pioneering photographer who captured the horror of World War Two
By Arwa Haider | BBC News | October 2025
“The unflinching, surreal gaze of the US artist and war photographer Lee Miller bore witness to both beauty and brutality. Now she is the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Britain.”

16. How Kevin Costner Lost Hollywood
By Peter Kieffer | The Hollywood Reporter | October 2025
“On-set brawls. Courtroom battles. Epic bombs. Why the world’s most bankable cowboy is suddenly shooting blanks”

17. As Amazon’s ‘flying rivers’ weaken with tree loss, scientists warn of worsening droughts
By Steven Grattan | Associated Press | September 2025
“Droughts have withered crops in Peru, fires have scorched the Amazon and hydroelectric dams in Ecuador have struggled to keep the lights on as rivers dry up. Scientists say the cause may lie high above the rainforest, where invisible “flying rivers” carry rain from the Atlantic Ocean across South America.”

18. Walter Cronkite signed off — and trust in the press steadily eroded
By Amaris Castillo | The Poynter 50 | August 2025
“Cronkite’s departure is seen in hindsight as one of the last moments when Americans collectively turned to a single, authoritative news source. Whether that’s true or just a convenient fable, there’s no doubt that trust is much lower now.”

19. Tootsie: One Great Dame
By Michael Sragow | The Criterion Collection | December 2014
“Tootsie isn’t merely about men and women grappling with volatile gender identities. It s about the unpredictable power that acting — taking on new roles — can have in people s lives.”

20. Sun Tzu and The Art of War
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2016-2018
Also see: Euclid’s Elements | The Muses | Plasma | Math in the Early Islamic World

Interested in more like this? Since June 2011, Stillness of Heart‘s “Recommended” series has accumulated a magnificent collection of articles, essays, music, podcasts, historical analyses, cultural reflections, and documentaries. Scroll through the offerings here.

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

How TikTok keeps scrollers scrolling / Russia learns from its mistakes in Ukraine / Expats build new lives in Asia / The women who made Theodore Roosevelt / The beauty of Zeno’s Paradoxes

This week: How TikTok keeps scrollers scrolling / Russia learns from its mistakes in Ukraine / Expats build new lives in Asia / The women who made Theodore Roosevelt / The beauty of Zeno’s Paradoxes

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here
By Tom Nichols | The Atlantic | October 2025
“The leaders of the U.S. military may soon face a terrible decision.”

2. The Cat Who Woke Me Up
By Sy Safransky | The Sun | October 2025
“Even though my brain is confused and I’m struggling, always struggling, to see if my writing is good, I still want to write. And the writing that matters the most to me isn’t about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a cat. A cat who woke me up. A cat who changed my life.”

3. Karen Attiah on getting fired by ‘The Washington Post’
By Tom Jones | The Poynter Report Podcast | October 2025
“Attiah reflects on her 11-year career at the Post, including her early work setting social media policy, championing global press freedom and editing the late Jamal Khashoggi. She shares her perspective on the Post’s ideological shift, its new editorial mission and what she believes was a betrayal of the journalistic values she once upheld.”

4. Cumbia Across Latin America
NPR | October 2025
“Following a musical genre that continues to evolve and inspire celebration.”

5. How Russia recovered
By Dara Massicot | Foreign Affairs | October 2025
“What the Kremlin is learning from the war in Ukraine.”

6. Britain’s once-mighty Conservative Party is battling to avoid extinction
By Jill Lawless | Associated Press | October 2025
“The center-right party that governed the U.K. for more than 60 of the last 100 years before being ousted in 2024 is embracing Donald Trump -style policies, including mass deportations and government budget-slashing, as it battles to remain a contender for power.”

7. ‘Impact editor’ is a relatively new job, and it’s already changing
By Hanaa’ Tameez | Nieman Lab | October 2025
“Newsrooms can try to define impact even at the beginning of the reporting process, impact editors say.”

8. Trump or no Trump, Europe’s relationship with the US will never recover
By Nathalie Tocci | The Guardian | September 2025
“Optimists cling to a faith in the old alliance, but the best we can achieve is an amicable divorce.”

9. A complete digitization of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Codex Atlanticus,’ the largest collection of his drawings & writings
Open Culture | October 2025
“He approached everything he did as a technician. The uncanny effects he achieved in painting were the result, as in so much Renaissance art, of mathematical precision, careful study, and firsthand observation.”

10. How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day
By Caitlin Gilbert, Richard Sima, Leslie Shapiro, Aaron Steckelberg and Clara Ence Morse | The Washington Post | October 2025
“More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling.”

11. Inside Asia’s best countries for expats
By Lindsey Galloway | BBC News | October 2025
“Affordable living, vibrant cultures and career opportunities are drawing expats to Asia – and many say they’ve never been happier.”

12. 18 Well-Read People on How They Find the Time For Books
By Jasmine Vojdani | The Cut :: New York Magazine | October 2025
“One thing that came up over and over: the relentless, almost inescapable attention-zapping evil of the phone. If technology is waging a war on our attention spans, these soldiers are well-prepared for the fight.”

13. Our Most Macho President Owed Everything to Women
By Edward F. O’Keefe | Politico Magazine | May 2024
“You can’t know the real TR without knowing the women who shaped him.”

14. With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks?
By Windsor Johnston | NPR | September 2025
“AI chatbots, marketed as ‘mental health companions,’ are drawing in people priced out of therapy, burned by bad experiences, or just curious to see if a machine might be a helpful guide through problems.”

15. Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’
By Stephen Castle | The New York Times | September 2025
“The highly intelligent cephalopods filled fishing nets and gobbled up crabs and lobsters in Devon and Cornwall this summer.”

16. A good shower is a simple shower, no matter what influencers recommends
By Kenya Hunter | Associated Press | September 2025
“The multistep processes that have inspired people to spend endless amounts of time sudsing up can harm your skin — and the environment. Dermatologists say it’s all mostly unnecessary.”

17. When Jon Stewart took over ‘The Daily Show,’ satire became a trusted news source
By Ciara O’Rourke | The Poynter 50 | June 2025
“Fed up with ‘partisan hackery,’ Stewart trumped traditional media for some fans — even with a show that followed ‘puppets making crank phone calls.’”

18. Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So?
By Christina Caron | The New York Times | September 2025
“A campus movement aims to find out.”

19. Y Tu Mamá También: Dirty Happy Things
By Charles Taylor | The Criterion Collection | August 2014
“Hovering on the verge of obnoxiousness, they are basically grubby innocents. Like dirty-minded virgins, they’re excited by each joint, every beer, every chance for sex, as if it were their first time. On middle-aged men, the funk of cigarettes and beer and sweat and sex smells of failure; on Tenoch and Julio, it’s the perfume of youth.”

20. Fungi
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2017-2020
Also see: Garibaldi and the Risorgimento | Johannes Kepler | Parasitism | Zeno’s Paradoxes

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

The Gaza war transformed the Middle East / The Special Forces culture / The vivid animated version of Beethoven’s ‘9th Symphony’ / Robot rabbits used to capture pythons in the Everglades / The risks and rewards of cold-water immersion

This week: The Gaza war transformed the Middle East / The Special Forces culture / The vivid animated version of Beethoven’s ‘9th Symphony’ / Robot rabbits used to capture pythons in the Everglades / The risks and rewards of cold-water immersion

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. Gold futures rise above $4,000 per ounce for the first time
By Wyatte Grantham-Philips | Associated Press | October 2025
“Gold sales can rise sharply when anxious investors seek secure investments for their money. Even before the shutdown, the asset — and other metals, like silver — had seen wide gains over the last year, as President Donald Trump ’s barrage of tariffs cause uncertainty around the outlook for the global economy. More recently, the prospect of lower interest rates has also made gold a more attractive investment than interest-bearing investments.”

2. After two years, Israel’s Gaza war has reshaped the Middle East
By Ishaan Tharoor | The Washington Post | October 2025
“Israel’s hard power preeminence in the Middle East seems paramount. But the country’s leaders — and the entire region — still face an array of political challenges.”

3. The American Experiment
By Jeffrey Goldberg | The Atlantic | October 2025
“At 250, the Revolution’s goals remain noble and indispensable.”

4. What is Insurrection Act, could it help Trump deploy troops to US cities?
By Sarah Shamim | Al Jazeera | October 2025
“The threat to invoke the Insurrection Act comes amid protests in Portland and legal challenges against his anti-immigration crackdown.”

5. Cold-water immersion may offer health benefits — and also presents risks
By Stephen Wade | Associated Press | October 2025
“Claims about the benefits of cold-water immersion date back centuries. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president, wrote toward the end of his life about using a cold foot bath daily for 60 years. He also owned a book published in 1706 on the history of cold-water bathing.”

6. America’s Vigilantes
By Matthieu Aikins | The New York Times Magazine | October 2025
“A four-part investigation of the culture of impunity in the U.S. Special Forces.”
Part 1: A Green Beret’s Confession | Part 2: Nine Bodies on a U.S. Base
Part 3: A Culture of Secrecy | Part 4: Lawlessness Comes Home

7. Doing almost anything is better with friends, research finds
By Richard Sima | The Washington Post | October 2025
“You might be leaving some happiness on the table by doing your everyday activities all by yourself.”

8. Octopuses prefer to use different arms for different tasks, scientists find
By Nicola Davis | The Guardian | September 2025
“Creatures favour front arms for most tasks, study suggests, despite fact all eight arms are capable of all actions.”

9. How Not to Get a Progressive Party off the Ground
By Arash Azizi | The Atlantic | October 2025
“The British left needs a strategy that can win elections instead of throwing them to the right.”

10. Stupidology
By William Davies | n+1 | Fall 2025
“The outsourcing of judgment.”

11. Going Beyond War’s Cliches
By Alisa Sopova | Nieman Lab | September 2025
“A collaborative project records Ukrainians’ day-to-day lives since the Russian invasion.”

12. See Beethoven’s entire ‘9th Symphony’ visualized in colorful animations
Open Culture | October 2025
“In a sense, ‘Ode to Joy’ is a natural choice for a musical representation of Europe, not just for its explicit themes, but also for the obvious ambition of the symphony that includes it to capture an entire civilization in musical form.”

13. JFK Wanted You to Watch This Movie Before He Was Assassinated
By Gordon F. Sander | Politico Magazine | February 2025
“The president had a hand in the making of a Cold War blockbuster.”

14. With ‘drug boat’ strikes, Trump leans into war on terror tactic against cartels
By Ryan Lucas | NPR | September 2025
“The administration has provided few details on the scope of its anti-cartel campaign, but it has adopted — at least in part — the blueprint of military strikes from the global war on terrorism that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

15. Robot rabbits the latest tool in Florida battle to control invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades
By Curt Anderson and Cody Jackson | Associated Press | August 2025
“They look, move and even smell like the kind of furry Everglades marsh rabbit a Burmese python would love to eat. But these bunnies are robots meant to lure the giant invasive snakes out of their hiding spots.”

16. The Art of the Impersonal Essay
By Zadie Smith | The New Yorker | September 2025
“In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine.”

17. When Mexico’s richest man threw ‘The New York Times’ a lifeline
By Rick Edmonds | The Poynter 50 | April 2025
“Before the bundles, the podcasts and the 10 million digital subscribers, there was a $250 million loan with a sky-high interest rate.”

18. The Book That Taught Nonna to Cook Is Coming to America
By Kim Severson | The New York Times | September 2025
“An English translation of Ada Boni’s The Talisman of Happiness, an indispensable guide for Italian home cooks since the 1920s, is finally on its way.”

19. The Fisher King: In the Kingdom of the Imperfect
By Bilge Ebiri | The Criterion Collection | June 2015
“Trauma and kindness. These are the two elements that govern The Fisher King, and they re represented by the two mythical figures that haunt the film.”

20. Augustine’s Confessions
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2016-2018
Also see: Justinian’s Legal Code | Four Quartets | Purgatory | The Battle of Salamis

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

The culture war over Texas history / A controversial vision for the U.S. military / The history of ‘woke’ / Is this the golden age of biography? / The landline is back / The Gibson Girl lives on

This week: The culture war over Texas history / A controversial vision for the U.S. military / The history of ‘woke’ / Is this the golden age of biography? / The landline is back / The Gibson Girl lives on

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. Through their eyes: Donald Trump and his actions, as seen by leaders from around the world
By Jennifer Peltz | Associated Press | September 2025
“Here’s a sampling of quotes by leaders and luminaries from around the world this past week at the United Nations talking about Trump and his administration — positive, negative and in between.”

2. Trump and Hegseth spark alarm about domestic use of military
By Blaise Malley | Salon | September 2025
“At an unprecedented gathering of the nation’s top military brass, Trump and Hegseth spoke of using force in America”
Also see, from NPR: Trump defends use of the U.S. military against the ‘enemy within’
Also see, from The Atlantic: Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face
Also see, from The Washington Post: Hegseth wants to return the military to 1990 — a dark time in its history

3. The federal government has shut down. Here’s what will be affected across the country
By Caitlyn Kim | NPR | October 2025
Air travel, mail delivery, safety net programs, paychecks, and FEMA funding may be impacted.

4. An Annual Blast of Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur, Alarming Scientists
By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey | The New York Times | September 2025
“The cold water upwell, which is vital to marine life, did not materialize for the first time on record. Researchers are trying to figure out why.”

5. How ‘woke’ went from an expression in Black culture to a conservative criticism
By Terry Tang | Associated Press | September 2025
“‘Wokeness’ originated decades ago as African American cultural slang for having awareness and enlightenment around racism, injustice, privilege or threats of white supremacist violence.”

6. This Diplomat Saw the Fall of the Shah Coming. Jimmy Carter Ignored Him.
By Scott Anderson | Politico Magazine | August 2025
“The Carter administration overlooked a dissenting voice on Iran. It almost cost him his life.”

7. With ‘One Battle After Another,’ Paul Thomas Anderson Captures the Shortcomings of His Generation
By Richard Newby | The Hollywood Reporter | September 2025
“Though Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob, Anderson explores limits and frustrations of a revolutionary in an America where the disenfranchisement of Black and Latino populations has grown beyond his generation’s ability to combat.”

8. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: The Succession to Muhammad | Darwinism and the Scopes Monkey Trial | Monumental Sculpture of Preclassic Mesoamerica | Ezra and the Compilation of the Pentateuch

9. The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates: Capturing the Kennedys
By Thom Powers | The Criterion Collection | April 2016
“Around the world, other nonfiction filmmakers were also experimenting with handheld styles, from those in England s Free Cinema movement to the members of the National Film Board of Canada. In New York City, the motivation to get out on the streets was felt strongly among the nascent community of independent filmmakers, a loose group whose interests spanned fiction, documentary, and experimental work.”

10. How Scholars Lost the Culture War over Texas History
By Ty Cashion | Texas Observer | September 2025
“And how they could still start winning it.”

11. Citizen historians document Smithsonian exhibits under White House scrutiny
By Jeffrey Brown | PBS News Hour | September 2025
“The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It’s a public-private trust that has long operated at arm’s length from the White House, but now finds itself under unprecedented scrutiny from the Trump administration. “

12. Are We Entering a New Golden Age of Biography?
By Megan Marshall | LitHub | September 2025
“As I enter my fifth decade in the genre, I’m happy to number the brilliant younger biographers whose careers I’m following in the dozens. Nicholas Boggs, Francesca Wade, and Lance Richardson are just three who happen to be stepping out in the same season with sumptuous new biographies of 20th-century literary giants: James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Peter Matthiessen.”

13. What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?
By Miranda Carter | The New Yorker | June 2018
“Some of Trump’s critics suppose that these escalating crises might cause him to loosen, or even lose, his grip on the Presidency. The real lesson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, may be that Trump’s leaving office might not be the end of the problems he may bring on or exacerbate—it may be only the beginning.”

14. How to future-proof your knees
By David Cox | BBC News | September 2025
“Our knees are arguably one of our most important joints, but also one of the most poorly looked after. Science tells us putting in some work now pays dividends later.”

15. Parents are bringing back the landline
By Caitlin Gibson | The Washington Post | September 2025
“Looking to steer kids away from screens and social media, more families are going analog.”

16. A friend’s advice to cut my tortured prose unlocked my career as a novelist
By Andrew Martin | The Guardian | September 2025
“What he said was simple, but it achieved a kind of sorcery. For the first time, my dream of becoming a writer seemed possible”

17. Queering the museum
By M. Quechol | Ojala | September 2025
“In early 2003, Peruvian philosopher, drag performer, and activist Giuseppe Campuzano created the Travesti Museum of Peru. For the next ten years, Campuzano carried this deliberately mobile project in suitcases and public spaces, leaving a legacy of a defiantly impermanent museum. A living counter-archive.”

18. How Originalism Killed the Constitution
By Jill Lepore | The Atlantic | September 2025
“A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution.”

19. The Undimmed Appeal Of The Gibson Girl
By Agnes Rogers | American Heritage | Summer 2025
“She was forever a girl — forever young and beautiful, feminine without being (in today’s terms) sexy.”

20. The Almoravid Empire
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2018
Also see: Circadian Rhythms | The Empire of Mali | The Battle of Lepanto | The Salem Witch Trials

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Take a reading vacation / Why is Buc-ees thriving? / How to heal from burnout / Tony Blair returns to the Middle East’s political battlefields / Trump’s war on the Library of Congress is not new

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. Business is booming for the Beaver – but why?
By David Brown and Kaye Knoll | Texas Standard | October 2025
“A YouTuber investigates Buc-ee’s, the travel stop staple, and what makes it so successful.”

2. My First Murder
By Skip Hollandsworth | Texas Monthly | October 2025
“A legendary true crime writer revisits the case that launched his lifelong obsession.”

3. What the O.J. Verdict & Its Aftermath Revealed About Race in America
By Patrice Taddonio | Frontline :: PBS | October 2025
“Millions of households across the U.S. had tuned in to wall-to-wall coverage of onetime American icon O.J. Simpson’s trial for the brutal double murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Then, on Oct. 3, 1995, came a televised verdict, watched by more than 150 million people, that shook the country along racial lines — sparking both consternation and celebration, and raising profound questions about the criminal justice system, fairness and America’s racial divide.”

4. Trump Is Waging a Culture War on the Library of Congress. It’s Been Done Before.
By Rebecca Brenner Graham | Politico Magazine | May 2025
“Thomas Jefferson wanted to donate his personal collection of books to the Library of Congress. But critics thought those books were un-American.”

5. Fool me once: the magical origin of the word ‘hoax’
By Scott Neuman | NPR | October 2025
“How did hocus pocus transform from the stage name of a magician … to a byword for the entire craft?”

6. Trump’s welcome message to new citizens isn’t very welcoming
By Chauncey DeVega | Salon | September 2025
“His message to naturalized citizens is part of an effort to redefine American identity and patriotism”

7. Tony Blair’s long experience in the Middle East is both his strength and his weakness
By Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka | Associated Press | September 2025
“Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has returned to the forefront of Middle East peace efforts after a U.S. peace plan on ending the Israel-Hamas war cast him in a leading role in overseeing the post-war administration and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. It’s familiar territory for Blair, who spent eight years working to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians as the international community’s envoy to the Middle East.”

8. I’m exhausted but am surviving. How can I heal from burnout without expensive time off?
By Eleanor Gordon-Smith | Leading Questions :: The Guardian | September 2025
“So many burnout books and blogs seem to assume a second income is present to take care of all the stuff that will still need doing if I take a break, but it’s just me. How do I take an actual break?”

9. The Graduate: Intimations of a Revolution
By Frank Rich | The Criterion Collection | February 2016
“[I]t straddles both the old and the new. It survives not just as a peerless Hollywood entertainment but as a one-of-a-kind cinematic portrait of America when it, like Benjamin Braddock at the edge of his parents swimming pool, teetered on the brink.”

10. How artists and musicians are responding to Trump’s 2nd term
By Jeffrey Brown | PBS News Hour | September 2025
“Rock legend Bruce Springsteen publicly blasted President Trump and his policies, saying ‘we’re living through particularly dangerous times.’ As Trump increasingly targets the arts, artists are faced with the question of whether to speak out or keep their heads down.”

11. Something Very Tiny Is Following Earth Around the Sun
By Robin George Andrews | The New York Times | September 2025
“The object, the latest ‘quasi-moon’ detected by astronomers, could be with us for almost another 60 years.”

12. The Borderlands War, 1915-20
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists | Slavery and Abolition in Iran | The Amateur Photography Movement in the Soviet Union | The Russian Empire on the Eve of World War 1

13. Beyond the beach read: The new wave of bookish travel
By Lizzie Enfield | BBC News | September 2025
“Forget the solo beach paperback: travellers are now joining structured reading retreats that mix books, place and community.”

14. How to Build a Dictionary: On the Hard Art of Popular Lexicography
By Ilan Stavans | LitHub | September 2025
“This conversation concentrates on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as a Platonic model not only within the English language but in countless other linguistic ecosystems. It looks at Samuel Johnson as the cathartic ﬁgure whose lexicographic work shaped modern English dictionaries. And it ponders the sprawling OED products and compares the enterprise to its American counterpart, Merriam-Webster.”

15. What Teen Novels Are Capable Of
By Isabel Fattal | The Atlantic | September 2025
“These books can help young people come to terms with the thoughts that feel too scary to say out loud.”

16. ‘Warrior ethos’ mistakes military might for true security – and ignores the wisdom of Eisenhower
By Monica Duffy Toft | The Conversation | September 2025
“In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. leaders wanted to emphasize a defensive rather than aggressive military posture as they entered the Cold War, a decades-long standoff between the United States and Soviet Union defined by a nuclear arms race, ideological rivalry and proxy wars short of direct great-power conflict.”

17. The parlance of pilots
By Mark Vanhoenacker | Aeon | September 2025
“High above London, Tokyo and Cairo, the language of the cockpit is technical, obscure, geeky – and irresistibly romantic”

18. The night the skies over Baghdad were illuminated, the 24-hour news cycle took over
By Tom Jones | The Poynter 50 | March 2025
“CNN’s live coverage of Operation Desert Storm launched a new era in television news”

19. Should College Get Harder?
By Joshua Rothman | The New Yorker | September 2025
“A.I. is coming for knowledge work, and yet college seems to be getting easier. Does something need to change?”

20. Persepolis
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2018
Also see: The California Gold Rush | Sappho | The Earth’s Core | The Science of Glass

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Observations on the Hudson River as it passes through New York City. The section of the Hudson which passes through New York is historically known as the North River, called this by the Dutch to distinguish it from the Delaware River, which they knew as the South River. This stretch of the Hudson is still often referred to as the North River by local mariners today. All photos copyright Daniel Katzive unless otherwise attributed. For more frequent updates, please follow northriverblog on Facebook or Instagram.

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