POLITICS – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: The resilience of U.S. democracy / Preparing for death out of a love for life / The magic of kokedama / Amanda Shires builds her post-divorce life / ‘Platoon’ was Charlie Sheen’s Vietnam

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. Six Ways to Start Early and Lift Your Mood
By Arthur C. Brooks | The Atlantic | September 2025
“Try my protocol for a happy start to the day and see what works for your own well-being.”

2. Transform your houseplants into art with this Japanese gardening technique
By Jessica Damiano | Associated Press | September 2025
“The Japanese method of growing plants in a living planter made of a moss-covered ball of soil, is a simple, DIY project that elevates common houseplants into works of art. They make great gifts, too.”

3. Amanda Shires Tells Her Side of the Story After Divorce From Jason Isbell: ‘I’m Not Scared’
By Natalie Weiner | Texas Monthly | September 2025
“The Lubbock-raised singer-songwriter-fiddler’s new album, Nobody’s Girl, is a raw and revealing look at falling out of love and finding resilience.”

4. I Tested How Well AI Tools Work for Journalism
By Hilke Schellmann | Columbia Journalism Review | August 2025
“Some tools were sufficient for summarizing meetings. For research, the results were a disaster.”

5. American Democracy Might Be Stronger Than Donald Trump
By Jonathan Schlefer | Politico Magazine | September 2025
“Yes, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. But the country has a few attributes that make it more resilient than you might think.”

6. We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself
By Stephen Greenblatt | The New York Times | September 2025
“We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.”

7. ‘I love life:’ The man who has scheduled his death so he can enjoy living
By Amandas Ong | Al Jazeera | September 2025
“Despite Alzheimer’s, Alex Pandolfo leads a full life. But when his health declines, he plans to have an assisted death.”

8. Historian Jill Lepore explores the Constitution and its interpretations in ‘We the People’
By Geoff Bennett | PBS News Hour | September 2025
“Originalism is often countered by the idea that the Constitution is a living, breathing document meant to be interpreted and changed along with the times.”

9. What If the Next Democratic President Governs Like Trump?
By Matt Ford | The New Republic | September 2025
“Between a permissive Supreme Court and his own governing innovations, the president has greatly expanded executive power. Liberals, take note.”

10. Cats and Dogs in History
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: Indian Ocean Trade and European Dominance | Indian Ocean Trade from its Origins to the Eve of Imperialism | Ukraine and Russia | Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States

11. Charlie Sheen’s Lifestyle Couldn’t Kill Him. ‘Platoon’ Nearly Did.
By Charlie Sheen | The Hollywood Reporter | September 2025
“In 1986, well before the sex scandals, the crack and the tiger blood, the 20-year-old actor embarked on the most intense shoot of his career. In an excerpt from his explosive new memoir, Sheen reveals how Oliver Stone’s epic Vietnam War film changed him forever.”

12. Theaters bet big on massive screens, booming sound and recliners to lure movie fans
By Harshita Mary Varghese and Dawn Chmielewski | Reuters | September 2025
“Auditoriums with enhanced visual and video formats, such as IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and ScreenX, account for a record 14.9% of all tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada this year, up from 9.8% in 2019, according to data from research firm Comscore exclusively compiled for Reuters.”

13. Orchid Fever
By Susan Orlean | The New Yorker | January 1995
“How seductive are orchids? Connoisseurs spare nothing for a rare bloom — the issue in a battle between Florida, the Seminoles, and a man with a passion.”

14. The South’s Inner Civil War
By Eric Foner | American Heritage | Summer 2025
“The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes which the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn’t want secession.”

15. 6 More Things E.R. Doctors Wish You’d Avoid
By Jancee Dunn | Well :: The New York Times | September 2025
“Stay out of the emergency room with these tips.”

16. Strawberries in Winter
By Adrienne LaFrance | The Atlantic | September 2025
“Most Americans do not want civil war. Anyone who is declaring it should stop.”

17. Why your nose could be the perfect window into your mental state
By Gillian Forrester | New Scientist | September 2025
“Diagnosing mental health conditions like anxiety and depression can be difficult, but it turns out that your nose could help doctors understand when you are feeling the strain.”

18. ‘We wanted to make it real:’ How ‘Goodfellas’ reinvented the gangster film
By Myles Burke | BBC Culture | September 2025
“Martin Scorsese’s crime epic was released 35 years ago. In 1990, the director and his stars, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, revealed its secrets to the BBC.”

19. Laughing in Hell: How We Tell the Stories of Other Peoples’ Suicides
By Sarah Adler | LitHub | September 2025
“I was drawn to memoirs about suicide even before Rebecca’s death, probably because when someone you love travels often against the thin curtain between life and death, these stories can feel like windows.”

20. Echolocation
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2016-2018
Also see: Animal Farm | Agrippina the Younger | The Sikh Empire | The Gettysburg Address

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

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

Continue reading

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Loving books about books / NATO bolsters its eastern flank / The battles Kamala Harris fought / Heartbreak in Woodrow Wilson’s letters / The ancient Peruvian city that could change history

This week: Loving books about books / NATO bolsters its eastern flank / The battles Kamala Harris fought / Heartbreak in Woodrow Wilson’s letters / The ancient Peruvian city that could change history

Most of these great 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. What does ‘luxury’ mean today?
By Rachel Tashjian | The Washington Post | September 2025
“Luxury for some is a subdued secret language of wealth, the knowledge of the right restaurants, sweater brands, natural deodorants or matcha orders; for others, it’s an Oval Office freshly festooned in gold. Whether that gold is 24 karat or plastic from Home Depot may destroy the illusion completely, or may not matter at all.”

2. 28 new movies worth checking out this fall
By Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, Glen Weldon, and Bob Mondello | What to Watch :: NPR | September 2025
“The weather’s turning cooler, back-to-school shopping’s all done and, sure, you could rake the leaves, but wouldn’t it be more fun to escape to your local cinema?”

3. Pandemic love story: The whims of Kevin, our neighbors’ cat
By Solvej Schou | Associated Press | September 2021
“His routine was always the same: He would suddenly show up, stare at us with a silent urgent meow, and then walk back and forth rubbing his face on our wooden porch bench. He would allow us to bend down and pet him with long strokes. It always seemed like a privilege to pet him: this deeply affectionate neighbors cat who was as shiny and new to us as we were to him.”

4. The human cost of witnessing violence online
By: Ren LaForme | Poynter | September 2025
“I was 14 when I found the murder video of a journalist on a file-sharing site. Today, violence finds us before we can look away.”

5. The Art of Pondering Earth’s Distant Future
By Vincent Ialenti | Scientific American | August 2021
“Stretching the mind across time can help us become more responsible planetary stewards and foster empathy across generations.”

6. ‘Publish or perish’ evolutionary pressures shape scientific publishing, for better and worse
By Thomas Morgan | The Conversation | September 2025
“Culture shapes everything people do, not least scientific practice – how scientists decide what questions to ask and how to answer them. Good scientific practices lead to public benefits, while poor scientific practices waste time and money.”

7. The Constant Battle
By Kamala Harris | The Atlantic | September 2025
“The first excerpt from 107 Days.”

8. The newly discovered desert city that’s rewriting the history of the Americas
By Heather Jasper | BBC Travel | September 2025
“On Peru’s desert hillsides, archaeologists have uncovered a 3,800-year-old city that may reshape our understanding of the cradle of civilisation in the Americas.”

9. The Greatest Danger in the Taiwan Strait
By Joel Wuthnow | Foreign Affairs | September 2025
“Even If China Avoids a War of Choice, a Miscalculation Could Spark a War of Chance”

10. The Joy of Reading Books About Books
By Susan Coll | LitHub | September 2025
“Books about books, or bookstores, or people who work in bookstores, or in publishing, or in libraries, or anything book-adjacent, are not in short supply, perhaps for the obvious reason that writers are by definition people who are drawn to, and often write about, books.”

11. What I See As a Midwife for Pregnant Women in ICE Detention
By Andrea González-Ramírez | The Cut :: New York Magazine | September 2025
“One pregnant woman in detention recently said that she’d lost 25 pounds in just a month.”

12. 21 Nonfiction Books Coming This Fall
By Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson | The New York Times | September 2025
“This year’s lineup includes celebrity memoirs, secret Nazi histories, Renaissance biographies, a prismatic group of true crime offerings and immersive reporting on social movements past and present.”

13. NATO to beef up defence of Europe’s eastern flank after Poland shot down drones
By Andrew Gray, Barbara Erling and Michelle Nichols | Reuters | September 2025
“At the United Nations, the United States called the airspace violations ‘alarming’ and vowed to ‘defend every inch of NATO territory,’ remarks that appeared aimed at assuaging Washington’s NATO allies after President Donald Trump said Russia’s drone incursion could have been a mistake.”

14. How Fear Killed Liberalism
By Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy | September 2025
“Political anxieties have piled up and put an end to an era of public optimism.”

15. ICE’s colonial disgrace shakes Puerto Rico
By Belinés Ramos Negrón | Ojala | July 2025
“People who migrate to Puerto Rico — by choice or by force — in the face of colonial, necropatriarchal, capitalist, and racist states arrive to encounter even more state discrimination and abandonment. This is especially true for our siblings from the Dominican Republic.”

16. How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart
By Varsha Bansal | The Guardian | September 2025
“Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent.”

17. Presidential Papers — Love and Heartbreak, War and Politics
By Wendi Maloney | The Library of Congress | June 2021
“Researchers using [Woodrow] Wilson s papers at the Library may be surprised to encounter the private — and passionate — Wilson behind the formal and somewhat aloof public figure they recall from history books or World War I-era film footage.”

18. James Webb Space Telescope images enormous star shooting out twin jets 8 light-years long
By Keith Cooper | Space.com | September 2025
“The beams hint at the true scale of the massive star that spawned them.”

19. La dolce vita: Tuxedos at Dawn
By Gary Giddins | The Criterion Collection | October 2014
“Today the film s revolutionary purview may appear tame, especially themes that rankled the church and bluenoses: moral decay, moneyed monotony, religious irreverence, loveless coupling. Detractors complain that the film isn’t shocking anymore — that time has reduced it to little more than a fascinating souvenir of another day.”

20. Is Shakespeare History? The Romans
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2016
Also see: Al-Ghazali | Eleanor of Aquitaine | Rumi’s Poetry | Mary Magdalene

Reflecting in 2025 …

The brilliant, deadly light: A remembrance of 9/11/01

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Charting the road to today’s divided America / Billie Eilish and James Bond / Remembering Flight 93 on 9/11 / Men and beach body tyranny / Women’s experiences in the military

This week: Charting the road to today’s divided America / Billie Eilish and James Bond / Remembering Flight 93 on 9/11 / Men and beach body tyranny / Women’s experiences in the military

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

1. Women don’t need new year resolutions: we’re pressured to improve ourselves every day
By Yomi Adegoke | The Guardian | January 2020
“Don’t worry if you haven’t kept your promises this month: there’s always the rest of the year to feel the expectation to make yourself better”

2.America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump
Frontline :: PBS | January 2020
“Part One traces how Barack Obama’s promise of unity collapsed as increasing racial, cultural and political divisions laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.
Part Two examines how Trump’s campaign exploited the country’s divisions, how his presidency has unleashed anger on both sides of the divide, and what America’s polarization could mean for the country’s future.”

3. How AP will call Iowa winner
By Lauren Easton | The Definitive Source :: Associated Press | January 2020
“The Associated Press will declare the winner of the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses based on the number of state delegate equivalents awarded to the candidates.”

4. Globally, roads are deadlier than HIV or murder
The Economist | January 2020
“The tragedy is that this is so easy to change”

5. Is Billie Eilish too cool for the James Bond franchise?
By Stuart Heritage | The Guardian | January 2020
“The 18-year-old will be the youngest singer to do a 007 theme but she might prove too contemporary for one of the dustiest film franchises around”
Also see: Midas touch: how to create the perfect James Bond song

6. ‘We May Have to Shoot Down This Aircraft’
By Garrett M. Graff | Politico Magazine | September 2019
“What the chaos aboard Flight 93 on 9/11 looked like to the White House, to the fighter pilots prepared to ram the cockpit and to the passengers.”

7. Beach Body Tyranny Hurts Men Too
By Katharine A. Phillips | The New York Times | August 2019
“Women feel tremendous pressure to look good, especially during vacation season. But what about the men and boys who are suffering quietly?”

8. Albert Einstein – Separating Man from Myth
By Augusta Dell’Omo | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | February 2019
“We go deep into the personal life of Einstein, discussing his damaged relationships, intellectually incoherent views on pacifism and religion, and his own eccentric worldview.”

9. 40 Stories From Women About Life in the Military
By Lauren Katzenberg | At War :: The New York Times | March 2019
“For International Women’s Day, The Times asked servicewomen and veterans to send us the stories that defined their experiences in the military. We left it to them whether to share their accomplishments, the challenges they faced or something unforgettable from their time in the military. Below is a selection of the more than 650 submissions we received.”

10. Ending in 2020, NASA’s Infrared Spitzer Mission Leaves a Gap in Astronomy
By Jonathan O’Callaghan | Scientific American | June 2019
“Delays to the James Webb Space Telescope will result in at least a yearlong hiatus in space-based infrared observations”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Havana’s neon past / 48 hours that almost destroyed Trump / The myth of nice-guy Gen. Lee / The voice of a Ken Burns documentary film / Women on the edge of the ‘glass cliff’

This week: Havana’s neon past / 48 hours that almost destroyed Trump / The myth of nice-guy Gen. Lee / The voice of a Ken Burns documentary film / Women on the edge of the ‘glass cliff’

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

1. In Search of the Brain’s Social Road Maps
By Matthew Schafer and Daniela Schiller | Scientific American | January 2020
“Neural circuits that track our whereabouts in space and time may also play vital roles in determining how we relate to other people”

2. Inside the restoration of Havana’s 20th-century neon signs
The Economist | January 2020
“After the Cuban revolution, much of the signage was destroyed or fell into disrepair. One artist has made it luminous again.”

3. Do women feel guilt after having an abortion? No, mainly relief
By Suzanne Moore | The Guardian | January 2020
“Most women don’t regret their decision to have a termination — and that outlook could help us protect reproductive rights”

4. Is this the most powerful word in the English language?
Helene Schumacher | BBC Culture | January 2020
“The most commonly-used word in English might only have three letters — but it packs a punch.”

5. ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump
By Tim Alberta | Politico Magazine | July 2019
“The exclusive story of how Trump survived the Access Hollywood tape.”

6. The Myth of the Kindly General Lee
By Adam Serwer | The Atlantic | June 2017
“The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.”

7. The Golden Voice Behind All Those Ken Burns Documentaries
By Tim Greiving | Vulture | September 2019
” His calm, cowboy-around-a-campfire timbre is basically the voice of America, at least within the orbit of PBS.”

8. The ‘glass cliff’ puts women in power during crisis — often without support
By Traci Tong | PRI :: The World | March 2019
“It’s the phenomenon of women in leadership roles — CEOs or political figures — who are far more likely to ascend to leadership roles during a crisis, when the risk of failure is highest.”

9. What Survival Looks Like After the Oceans Rise
By Andrea Frazzetta | The New York Times Magazine | April 2019
“At the site of a Bangladeshi town lost to devastating storms, locals make do by scavenging what remains.”

10. Slavery and Abolition
By Brooks Winfree | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | April 2018
“Who were abolitionists How did they organize What were their methods And, considering that it took a Civil War to put an end to slavery, did they have any real effect”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Touring fire-ravaged Australia / A cuttlefish wears 3-D glasses / Check your email etiquette / Remembering sexual oppression / World War I in the Balkans

This week: Touring fire-ravaged Australia / A cuttlefish wears 3-D glasses / Check your email etiquette / Remembering sexual oppression / World War I in the Balkans

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

1. Going camping in apocalyptic Australia
Marketplace :: PRI | January 2020
“Brent Dunn is an architect whose home and studio are located in the bush south of Sydney. There’s no fire there for now. Dunn just returned from an annual camping trip that, this year, seemed apocalyptic: Wind as hot as a hairdryer’s blast, a thunderstorm raining down wet ash, and a smokey rainbow that stretched across the sky.”

2. As a Young Metropolitan Person, I Am Ready to Die on an Electric Scooter
By Maria Sherman | Jezebel | January 2020
“If you live in a metropolis and have felt irrationally annoyed by the increased number of electric scooter brands littering your beautiful city streets, well, turns out there’s an even bigger and better reason to hate them: they’re dangerous!”

3. Yes, This Cuttlefish Is Wearing 3-D Glasses
By Veronique Greenwood | The New York Times | January 2020
“Scientists knew octopuses and squid don’t have any depth perception, but they had a hunch their cuttlefish cousins might.”

4. This browser extension shows you which Amazon books are available free at your local library
By Rich Brolda | Cheapskate :: CNET | April 2019
“Available for Chrome and Firefox, the insanely great Library Extension saves you time and money.”

5. Is your email etiquette up to snuff?
By Kai Ryssdal and Maria Hollenhorst | Marketplace | January 2020
“Maybe you spent your holiday break on a social media detox or cleaning out your email inbox for the new year. Now that you’re back, you might want to brush up on your online etiquette.”

6. Feminist Icons in Love
By Vivian Gornick | Boston Review | October 2002
“The romantic obsessions of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras”

7. Remembering a Woman Who Was a Leader of the French Resistance
By Kati Marton | The New York Times Book Review | March 2019
“Just how did Hitler nearly fulfill his murderous vision, and why did so few resist his monstrous plans? Marie-Madeleine Fourcade certainly did, and with this gripping tale Lynne Olson pays her what history has so far denied her. France, slow to confront the stain of Vichy, would do well to finally honor a fighter most of us would want in our foxhole.”

8. Memories of Sexual Oppression
Evergreen Review | March 2019
“We all understand that because society needs to protect us from rape and assault, we are going to be restricted to a very narrow range of experience, which will stunt our imaginations.”

9. Notorious: The Same Hunger
By Angelica Jade Bastien | Current :: The Criterion Collection | January 2019
“The performances by Grant and Rains are dynamic high-water marks in their towering careers. But even amid these wonders, it is Bergman who is the crowning jewel. She brings an untold warmth, a sincerity, and a vulpine physicality that make her character a beguiling outlier not only in Hitchcock’s canon but also within forties cinema and Bergman’s own career.”

10. The Legacy of WWI in the Balkans and Middle East
By Christopher Rose | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | October 2018
“World War I dramatically changed the face of Europe and the Middle East. The war had caused millions of deaths and millions more were displaced. Two great multinational empires–the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire–were dissolved into new nation states, while Russia descended into a chaotic revolution.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: The fate of Trump’s followers / How we speak to our dogs / The women taking down Harvey Weinstein / Slavery in Native America / Are you doing enough?

This week: The fate of Trump’s followers / How we speak to our dogs / The women taking down Harvey Weinstein / Slavery in Native America / Are you doing enough?

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

1. What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?
By Frank Rich | Intelligencer :: New York Magazine | January 2020
“Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.”

2. Which Star Trek Captain Has the Best Managerial Technique?
By Keith Phipps | Vulture | March 2019
“We considered the captains featured in various film and TV branches of the Star Trek universe and tried to rank them based on who would provide the best work experience — and who would be most likely to bring you back home in one piece.”

3. Why Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent her final days in an office instead of a yacht
By Eric Spitznagel | The New York Post | April 2019
“What makes her editing career so remarkable — besides that it lasted longer than her two famous marriages combined — was how it shed new light on a woman whose name is synonymous with 20th-century glamour.”

4. Things People Say to Their Dogs
By Alexanda Horowitz | The New York Times | August 2019
“Our running commentary tells us a lot about who we are — and who we think animals are.”

5. Can CBD Really Do All That?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | The New York Times Magazine | May 2019
“How one molecule from the cannabis plant came to be seen as a therapeutic cure-all.”

6. We Have Always Loved Ranking Things, Particularly American Presidents
By Douglas Brinkley | LitHub | May 2019
“In the 18th century, when the Republic began, ranking the American presidents was not much of a discussion. Washington was a demigod, and Adams acted like one, making him a bitterly controversial second choice. From 1800 onward, however, as more presidencies piled up, the debate expanded, but only in a cracker-barrel way.”

7. 100 Women vs. Harvey Weinstein
By Irin Carmon and Amanda Demme | The Cut :: New York Magazine | January 2020
“The disgraced movie mogul finally faces his day in court. But as his accusers know best, there might not be a Hollywood ending. ”
Also see: The Complete List of Allegations Against Harvey Weinstein

8. The Voice of Orson Welles
By Farran Smith Nehme | Current :: The Criterion Collection | November 2018
“In Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the summit of his work as a vocal actor, he is chronicling the decline of an entire wealthy midwestern civilization—both how the Ambersons pulled their own world down and what was lost with it. He does so with breathtaking grace.”

9. Slavery in Indian Territory
By Brooks Winfree | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | December 2018
“Many American Indian cultures, like the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, practiced a form of non-hereditary slavery for centuries before contact with Europeans. But after Europeans arrived on Native shores, and they forcibly brought African people into labor in the beginning of the 17th century, the dynamics of native slavery practices changed.”

10. Do you ever feel like you’re not enough?
By Mary Halton | Ideas :: TED.com | March 2019
“If your self-worth seems to rise and fall according to what other people think, you’re not alone. But you can challenge this mindset and find a new way of valuing yourself, says psychologist Meag-gan O’Reilly.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: How to avoid loneliness / Joe Biden in the Trump Era / 60,000 Mexicans ‘disappeared’ / The nuns who sold slaves / Racist tipping

This week: How to avoid loneliness / Joe Biden in the Trump Era / 60,000 Mexicans ‘disappeared’ / The nuns who sold slaves / Racist tipping

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

1. García Márquez’s Five Favorite Cocktail Stories
By Santiago Mutis Duran, and translated by David Unger | The Paris Review | August 2019
“Santiago Mutis Durán, the son of Márquez’s close friend Álvaro Mutis, gathered together small author-less stories that Márquez had written down or told over the course of his lifetime.”

2. How to avoid the traps that produce loneliness and isolation
By Arthur C. Brooks | The Washington Post | January 2020
“But the real question is why so many people feel isolated, when contact with others should be easier than ever. If we can answer that, we can craft a solution — if not societally, at least personally, to make our lives happier and better.”

3. A Man In Full
By Walter Shapiro | The New Republic | January 2020
“Joe Biden wants to be a normal president in a highly abnormal age.”

4. More than 60,000 Mexicans have been ‘disappeared’ amid drug war, officials say
By Mary Beth Sheridan | The Washington Post | January 2020
“Karla Quintana, head of Mexico’s National Search Commission, which coordinates the effort to find the missing, said at least 61,637 people had been reported disappeared and not been found — what she called ‘data of horror.’ The actual number is thought to be even higher, since many cases are never reported. The numbers confirm that Mexico is suffering one of the worst crises of ‘the disappeared’ in Latin American history.”

5. The Racist History of Tipping
By William J. Barber II | Politico Magazine | July 2019
“Tipping originated in feudal Europe and was imported back to the United States by American travelers eager to seem sophisticated. The practice spread throughout the country after the Civil War as U.S. employers, largely in the hospitality sector, looked for ways to avoid paying formerly enslaved workers.”

6. The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings
By Rachel L. Swarns | The New York Times | August 2019
“America’s nuns are beginning to confront their ties to slavery, but it’s still a long road to repentance.”

7. The Great Boundary-Breaking Women of Fiction
By Louisa Treger | CrimeReads :: LitHub | August 2019
“Celebrating 10 strong women who refused to conform and who struggled to find their place in the world.”

8. One Year in Washington
By David Freelander | The Cut :: New York Magazine | January 2020
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reshaped her party’s agenda, resuscitated Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and hardly has a friend in town.”

9. Violent Policing of the Texas Border
By Augusta Dell’Omo | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | January 2019
“Between 1910 and 1920, an era of state-sanctioned racial violence descended upon the U.S.-Mexico border. Texas Rangers, local ranchers, and U.S. soldiers terrorized ethnic Mexican communities, under the guise of community policing.”

10. Is your to-do list making you nuts? Start a to-don’t list instead
By Anna Phelan | Ideas :: TED.com | March 2019
“The TED speaker and podcast host shares 4 items from his to-don’t list — stuff he’s shed from his life to make him a happier and more effective human. Read it and learn.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: The secrets of Afghanistan / The female gaze on film / 2019’s best books / Loving and hating the New York subway / Boris Johnson and the future

This week: The secrets of Afghanistan / The female gaze on film / 2019’s best books / Loving and hating the New York subway / Boris Johnson and the future

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

1. The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war
By Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh | The Washington Post | December 2019
“In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.”

2. ‘Hustler’s’ Greatest Trick Is Its Take on the Female Gaze
By Alison Willmore | Vulture :: New York Magazine | October 2019
“The intention is not to evoke the lust of the money-hurling mass of customers but to show us Ramona the way Destiny sees her, as this powerful, enviable whole.”

3. How photos taken from the sky are helping farmers
By Andie Corban and Kai Ryssdal | Marketplace | October 2019
“Technology is changing the way most of us work these days, and farming is no exception. There are several new ag-tech companies dedicated solely to making agriculture more efficient.”

4. Our 50 Favorite Books of the Year
LitHub | December 2019
“Highlights From a Year in Reading by the Literary Hub Staff”

5. I Still Kind of Love the New York Subway
By Maeve Higgins | The New York Times | December 2019
“Sometimes I wonder if I can stand many more years of unreliable service. Then something happens that gets me all mushy again.”

6. Could Boris Johnson Be the Last Prime Minister of the U.K. As We Know It?
By Jonah Shepp | Intelligencer :: New York Magazine | December 2019
“British — or rather, English — politicians a generation from now could find themselves in a downsized House of Commons, debating whether breaking up with the European Union was worth breaking up their own union as well.”

7. The worst takes of the 2010s
The Outline | December 2019
“The past decade had a lot of pieces that should have been left unpublished.”

8. How Fiction Can Defeat Fake News
By Amitava Kumar | Columbia Journalism Review | Fall 2019
“There is fiction and then there is fiction — falsities that lead to lynchings and riots. Both rely on storytelling, but that’s like saying soil is used both in gardens and in graves. The way language is used in each case is entirely different, if not opposed.”

9. A Tiny Leak Led to a Massive, Unexpected Collapse at Kilauea Volcano
By Stephanie Pappas | Scientific American | December 2019
“Its caldera’s dramatic, surprisingly slow collapse could point to other risks worldwide.”

10. The War That Continues to Shape Russia, 25 Years Later
By Andrew Higgins | The New York Times | December 2019
“Haunting images show how the first Chechen war humiliated post-Soviet Russia, exposed its weakness, strengthened hard-liners and enabled the rise of Vladimir V. Putin.”

Rebecca Aguilar

#CallingAllJournalists Initiative | Reporter | Media Watchdog | Mentor | Latinas in Journalism

Anna Fonte's Paper Planes

Words, images & collages tossed from a window.

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Gayle Brennan Spencer - sending random thoughts to and from South Austin

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Talking about some of the best publications from the Federal Government, past and present.

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North River Notes

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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