TELEVISION – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: A new history of Robert McNamara / 40 TV shows to watch / The wisdom of a human stain remover / Protest music survives Iran’s theocracy / More women choose to go makeup free / The Booker Prize shortlist unveiled

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 War Hawk Who Wasn’t
By Philip Taubman and William Taubman | The Atlantic | September 2025
“Newly discovered documents reveal Robert McNamara’s private doubts about Vietnam.”

2. So You Want a Civil War? Let’s Pause to Remember What One Looks Like.
By David Blight | The New Republic | September 2025
“[Sept. 17] marks the 163rd anniversary of Antietam. Those who say they’re ready for civil war should stop and think about what happened there.”

3. 40 Shows to Watch This Fall
By Mike Hale | The New York Times | September 2025
“A Ken Burns documentary on the birth of the American Republic, the end of ‘Stranger Things,’ a new series from Sterlin Harjo and much more.”

4. After Martha
By Paul Laity | The London Review of Books | September 2025
“It was immediately clear when Martha, my 13-year-old daughter, died of septic shock that serious errors had been made.”

5. The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job
By Tom Lamont | The Guardian | September 2025
“From murder scenes to whale blubber, Ben Giles has seen it – and cleaned it – all. In their stickiest hours, people rely on him to restore order”

6. The Trump Administration Is Quietly Curbing the Flow of Disaster Dollars
By Jennifer DeCesaro and Sarah Labowitz | Emissary :: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | September 2025
“The current administration is deploying three different strategies to slow-walk the flow of disaster dollars to state and local governments: stalling disbursements, delaying FEMA’s emergency response function, and suspending mitigation funding.”

7. Birding by ear: How to learn the songs of nature’s symphony with some simple techniques
By Chris Lituma | The Conversation | September 2025
“A simple way to start bird-watching is to buy a feeder, a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and begin watching birds from your window. However, one of the most rewarding ways to identify birds is to listen to them and learn to recognize their songs.”

8. The world needs peasants
By Maryam Aslany | Aeon | September 2025
“Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalized.”

9. Dr. Strangelove: The Darkest Room
By David Bromwich | The Criterion Collection | June 2016
“Human beings for Kubrick possess something of the quality of mobile dolls or mannequins. … Human actions, in his view, are governed by determinations beyond our grasp.”

10. Protest music thrives in Iran, three years after young woman’s death sparked grassroots uprising
By Joy Hackel | The World :: PRI | September 2025
“The death of Mahsa Amini — a young Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested and beaten in police custody — sparked widespread protests across Iran in September 2022. Protest songs became a powerful unifying force for the movement.”

11. New evidence proves North Sea asteroid impact
BBC News | September 2025
“Scientists have found proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43 million years ago causing a huge tsunami and leaving a 1.9 mile (3km) wide crater under the seabed.”

12. RFK Jr’s war on vaccines is about shaming women, not helping kids
By Amanda Marcotte | Salon | September 2025
“The MAHA movement regards all childhood ailments as a sign that moms are failing.”

13. Pamela Anderson leads the way for women who choose to go makeup free
By Leanne Italie | Associated Press | September 2025
“It’s a look, especially for older women, that serves to plague and perplex. Do we chase youth (and relevancy) with a full face, or do we foster radiant skin and march on makeup free?”

14. From looms to laptops, Afghan women lose lifeline in Taliban internet ban
By Mohammad Yunus Yawar | Reuters | September 2025
“Local government officials confirmed a ban on fibre-optic services in five northern provinces — Balkh, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Takhar and Baghlan. Officials said the ban is to prevent ‘immoral activities.’ Residents in other provinces, including Kandahar, Herat and Parwan have reported disruptions, though these have not been formally acknowledged by authorities.”

15. Introducing the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist!
The Booker Prizes | September 2025
“Find out which six books are in the running for the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction.”

16. A look inside the AI strategies at ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’
By Joshua Benton | Nieman Lab | September 2025
“Digiday held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week, and it’s been rolling out highlights from many of the sessions.”

17. New Black Hole Measurements Show More Ways Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein Were Right
By Clara Moskowitz | Scientific American | September 2025
“Spacetime ripples from a black hole collision across the cosmos have confirmed weird aspects of black hole physics”

18. Scott Glenn on Gene Hackman, Saving Coppola’s Life and Still Having ‘Gas Left in the Tank’
By Scott Roxborough | The Hollywood Reporter | September 2025
“The character actor’s character actor plays a rare leading role in ‘Eugene the Machine,’ which is opening the 2025 Oldenburg Film Festival.”

19. Lincoln As Commander in Chief
By James M. McPherson | American Heritage | Summer 2025
“Even though he had no military training, Lincoln quickly rose to become one of America’s most talented commanders.”

20. Roman Slavery
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2018
Also see: Saturn | Josephus | Frederick the Great | Frida Kahlo

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: 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

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Gayle King’s R Kelly interview / Mental illness as an evolutionary trait / The world built for men / Are you feeling love or lust? / The reign of komodo dragons

This week: Gayle King’s R Kelly interview / Mental illness as an evolutionary trait / The world built for men / Are you feeling love or lust? / The reign of komodo dragons

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.

1. The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here
By Ian Bogost | The Atlantic | March 2019
“An artificial-intelligence “artist” got a solo show at a Chelsea gallery. Will it reinvent art, or destroy it?”

2. Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt over the Millennia
By Dana G. Smith | Scientific American | March 2019
“Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, one of the founders of evolutionary medicine, explains why natural selection did not rid our species of onerous psychiatric disorders”

3. Kelly interview becomes a spotlight moment for Gayle King
By David Bauder | Associated Press | March 2019
“King proved unflappable as a crying Kelly leaped up in anger. … [S]he didn’t flinch from challenging the singer as he denied multiple allegations that he sexually abused underage girls and was controlling in his relationships. She drew praise for her performance.”

4. The deadly truth about a world built for men — from stab vests to car crashes
By Caroline Criado-Perez | The Guardian | February 2019
“Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women — and puts lives at risk”

5. A Message in a Bottle Washed Up on Padre Island — 57 Years Later
By Dan Solomon | Texas Monthly | February 2019
“The missive was part of a 1962 study that attempted to track the flow of ocean currents.”

6. How Does Spotify Know You So Well
By Sophia Ciocca | Medium | October 2017
“A software engineer explains the science behind personalized music recommendations”

7. Is it lust or is it love How to tell — and how you can have both at once
By Terri Orbuch | Ideas: TED Talks | February 2018
“I’ve studied the romances and relationship patterns of thousands of people for three decades, and I’ve heard many of them talk about that wild, out-of-control feeling at the beginning of a new relationship. …”

8. Why do zebras have stripes Perhaps to dazzle away flies
By Danica Kirka | Associated Press | February 2019
“The researchers found that fewer horseflies landed on the cloaked horses than on the ones without striped coats, suggesting that zebra stripes may offer protection from blood-sucking insects that can spread disease.”

9. Former deputy chief inspector for NYPD dies at 104 years old
By Larry Celona and Ben Feuerherd | The New York Post | February 2019
“Former NYPD Deputy Chief Inspector John Downer, who joined the force in 1941 and served more than 30 years, died …”

10. Why Komodo Dragons Haven’t Conquered the World
By Veronique Greenwood | The New York Times | November 2018
“The razor-toothed predators are fierce, but scientists found that they’re real homebodies. “

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Dealing when a friend has a baby / America beyond Trump / Powerless Puerto Rico / Dancing with Madonna / Loving your library

This week: Dealing when a friend has a baby / America beyond Trump / Powerless Puerto Rico / Dancing with Madonna / Loving your library

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.

1. A Friend’s Pregnancy
By Julia Wertz | The New Yorker | October 2016
“I was happy for her, but I was afraid it would have a negative impact on our relationship. It was certainly not what I wanted, but I knew such an epic life event would change our relationship irrevocably, and I was scared.”

2. War Without End
By C.J. Chivers | The New York Times Magazine | August 2018
“The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.”

3. Planning for the Post-Trump Wreckage
By Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy | August 2018
“When the president eventually exits the White House, the rest of us will quickly have to make sense of the world he’s left behind.”

4. What Happened in the Dark: Puerto Rico’s Year of Fighting for Power
By Daniel Alarcon | Wired | August 2018
“More Americans rely on Puerto Rico’s grid than on any other public electric utility. How one renegade plant worker led them through the shadows.”

5. Nuance: A Love Story
By Meghan Daum | Medium | August 2018
“My affair with the intellectual dark web”

6. 2001 Is Still Teaching Us How to Pay Attention to Movies
By Colin Fleming | Slate | August 2018
“Your mind need not be going.”

7. Step one for befriending a goat: Smile
By Karin Brulliard | Animalia :: The Washington Post | August 2018
“Goat subjects … had already shown themselves to be adept at reading subtle human body language. Now, the researchers have found, goats are also able to distinguish happy people faces from sad ones — and they prefer happy.”

8. Dancing with Madonna Kept Me Alive
By Salim Gauwloos | Outlook :: BBC World Service | July 2018
“Salim Gauwloos became famous dancing with Madonna on her iconic Blond Ambition tour. Madonna used the tour to promote freedom of sexuality and sexual health. All of this made a young Salim feel extremely uncomfortable. The reason he was so anxious was that he was harbouring a secret.”

9. The Dos and Don’ts of Supporting Your Local Library
By Kristin Arnett | LitHub | August 2018
“For God’s sake, do not recatalog a book with Sharpie”

10. My son, Osama: the al-Qaida leader’s mother speaks for the first time
By Martin Chulov | The Guardian | August 2018
“Nearly 17 years since 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s family remains an influential part of Saudi society – as well as a reminder of the darkest moment in the kingdom’s history. Can they escape his legacy”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: How to survive an earthquake / New life in a coral reef cemetery / Resisting Obama / The best Texas bourbon / David Simon’s secrets

This week: How to survive an earthquake / New life in a coral reef cemetery / Resisting Obama / The best Texas bourbon / David Simon’s secrets

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.

1. Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father
By David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner | The New York Times | October 2018
“The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”
Also see from the Columbia Journalism Review: The Times Trump investigation and the power of the long game

2. Traveling to Find Out
By Hanif Kureishi | London Review of Books | August 2018
“Legitimate anger turned bad; the desire for obedience and strong men; a terror of others; the promise of power, independence and sovereignty; the persecution of minorities and women; the return to an imagined purity. Who would have thought this idea would have spread so far, and continue to spread.”

3. The Marines Didn’t Think Women Belonged in the Infantry. She’s Proving Them Wrong.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff | The New York Times | August 2018
“As Lieutenant Hierl issued orders against the din of rifle fire, she dropped her usually reserved, soft-spoken demeanor for a firm tone that left no doubt about who was in command.”

4. Forget Doorframes: Expert Advice on Earthquake Survival Strategies
By Robin George Andrews | Scientific American | August 2018
“Indonesia’s Lombok quake revives the question of taking cover versus running outside.”

5. A coral reef cemetery is home to life in the afterlife
By Kelli Kennedy | Associated Press | August 2018
“[T]he Neptune Memorial Reef is home to the cremated remains of 1,500 people, and any snorkeler or scuba diver can visit.”

6. Blood and Oil
By Seth Harp | Rolling Stone | September 2018
“Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry — infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military. Can the country’s new populist president find a way to contain the chaos.”

7. He Was the Resistance Inside the Obama Administration
By David Dayen | The New Republic | September 2018
“Timothy Geithner’s refusal to obey his boss has had long-term political and economic consequences.”

8. Six Texas Bourbons to Drink Right Now
By Jessica Dupuy | Texas Monthly | September 2018
“Enjoy them straight, on the rocks, or in an inventive cocktail, such as the Tejas Ponche from Treaty Oak in Dripping Springs.”

9. The Guy Who Wouldn’t Write a Hit: An Interview with David Simon
By Claudia Dreifus | NYR Daily :: The New York Review of Books | August 2018
“In the world of cookie-cutter television program-making, writer and producer David Simon is a creative maverick. For a quarter of a century, Simon, now turning fifty-eight, has been making unconventional dramas about the political and social problems of modern America.”

10. 7 strategies to keep your phone from taking over your life
By Chris Bailey | Ideas :: TED.com | August 2018
“We’re distracted like never before — and our phones are probably the biggest culprit. But there is a way you can live with one and still get things done.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: FEMA and Hurricane Maria / Dear Abby and #MeToo / Learn to be happy at Yale / Understanding Sarah Huckabee Sanders / Summer books, movies, and TV

This week: FEMA and Hurricane Maria / Dear Abby and #MeToo / Learn to be happy at Yale / Understanding Sarah Huckabee Sanders / Summer books, movies, and TV

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.

1. FEMA Was Sorely Unprepared for Puerto Rico Hurricane, Report Says
By Francis Robles | The New York Times | July 2018
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s plans for a crisis in Puerto Rico were based on a focused disaster like a tsunami, not a major hurricane devastating the whole island. The agency vastly underestimated how much food and fresh water it would need, and how hard it would be to get additional supplies to the island.”

2. Plane Bae Teaches Us That Other People’s Lives Are Not a Movie for Us to Watch
By Dan Solomon | Texas Monthly | July 2018
“How a chance encounter on a flight to Dallas turned into an internet sensation, and why it shouldn’t happen again.”

3. Dear Abby, #MeToo
By Jessica Weisberg | The New York Times | April 2018
“[#MeToo] created room for the sort of discussions that once were restricted to, essentially, just one type of public space: advice columns. For decades, the columns were where women with creepy bosses or abusive husbands went to air their grievances.”

4. At Yale, you can take a course on being happy
By Billy Baker | The Boston Globe | April 2018
“The success of the class has been unprecedented. So many students signed up that the meeting space had to be moved to Woolsey Hall, a cavernous, cathedral-like auditorium typically used for things like symphony concerts. The sheer volume of students requires two dozen teaching fellows.”

5. Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale
By Margaret Atwood | The Folio Society :: LitHub | April 2018
“The origin story of an iconic novel”

6. The Puzzle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders
By Jason Schwartz | Politico Magazine | May/June 2018
“How a bright, competent and likable young operative became the face of the most duplicitous press operation in White House history.”

7. Hear Stanley Kubrick Explain the 2001: A Space Odyssey Ending In a Rare, Unearthed Video
By Matt Miller | Esquire | July 2018
“The director famously refused to give his interpretation of the sci-fi masterpiece.”

8. Summer Reading: Movies & TV
By Ben Dickinson | The New York Times Book Review | June 2018
New books about Bruce Lee, David Lynch, The Wire and 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with recommendations on new thrillers, true crime, travel, sports and more.

9. How Syria Came to This
By Andrew Tabler | The Atlantic | April 2018
“A story of ethnic and sectarian conflict, international connivance, and above all civilian suffering”

10. The Woman Who Brought Down Bill Cosby
By Neeti Upadhye | The New York Times | April 2018
“Andrea Constand is the only woman among more than 50 accusers whose complaint against Mr. Cosby has resulted in a conviction. A jury found him guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Monica Lewinsky and #MeToo / The last days of John Kelly? / Remembering the 2017 Oscar disaster / Hitler’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s death tolls / Inside the U.S. embassy in Havana

This week: Monica Lewinsky and #MeToo / The last days of John Kelly? / Remembering the 2017 Oscar disaster / Hitler’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s death tolls / Inside the U.S. embassy in Havana

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.

1. Emerging from ‘the House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #MeToo
By Monica Lewinsky | Hive :: Vanity Fair | February 2018
“On the 20th anniversary of the Starr investigation, which introduced her to the world, the author reflects on the changing nature of trauma, the de-evolution of the media, and the extraordinary hope now provided by the #MeToo movement.”

2. ‘The Newsroom Feels Embarrassed’: Backfires and Explosions at The New York Times as a Possible Future Chief Re-Invents the Paper’s Opinion Pages
By Joe Pompeo | Hive :: Vanity Fair | February 2018
“A yoga-pants refusenik, a climate-science skeptic, and a tech writer with a neo-Nazi pal, among other offenders, have put James Bennet in the crosshairs.”
Also, from the Washington Post: ‘Criticize our work privately’: NYT editorial page chief sends a 1,500-word treatise to colleagues

3. How Long Can John Kelly Hang On?
By Matt Flegenheimer | The New York Times | February 2018
“Last year, Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that if anyone could bring order to the Trump administration, it was the retired four-star Marine general. Were they wrong?”

4. “They Got the Wrong Envelope!”: The Oral History of Oscar’s Epic Best Picture Fiasco
By Scott Feinberg | Hollywood Reporter | February 2018
“One year after the craziest, most improbable and downright embarrassing moment in Academy Awards history, 29 key players open up (many for the first time) about the onstage chaos, backstage bickering and who’s really to blame for Envelopegate and the two minutes and 23 seconds that ‘La La Land’ beat ‘Moonlight.'”
Also, from the Hollywood Reporter: They’re Back: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway to Present Oscars Best Picture

5. Personal Connections with the Civil War West
By Maria Angela Diaz | Muster :: Journal of the Civil War Era | February 2018
“While listening to the papers of my own panel, walking around the book exhibit, and attending several of the other panels, it got me thinking about being a Mexican-American woman, a historian of the Civil War era, and how I’ve related to, or at times not been able to relate to, the field that I’ve chosen to study.”

6. How showing vulnerability helps build a stronger team
By Daniel Coyle | Ideas :: TED.com | February 2018
“If you’d like trust to develop in your office, group or team — and who wouldn’t? — the key is sharing your weaknesses”

7. When Government Drew the Color Line
By Jason DeParle | The New York Review of Books | February 2018
“Government agencies used public housing to clear mixed neighborhoods and create segregated ones. Governments built highways as buffers to keep the races apart. They used federal mortgage insurance to usher in an era of suburbanization on the condition that developers keep blacks out. From New Dealers to county sheriffs, government agencies at every level helped impose segregation — not de facto but de jure.”

8. The Instagram matchmaking queer women via old school personal ads
By Biju Belinky | Dazed Digital | February 2018
“Spoiler alert: it’s led to cross-country love affairs”

9. The Sound and the Fury: Inside the Mystery of the Havana Embassy
By Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella | ProPubilica | February 2018
“More than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba, a U.S. investigation is no closer to determining how they were hurt or by whom, and the FBI and CIA are at odds over the case.”

10. Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?
By Ian Johnson | The New York Review of Books | February 2018
“[T]he Hitler and Stalin numbers invite questions that Mao’s higher ones do not. Should we let Hitler, especially, off the hook for combatant deaths in World War II? It’s probably fair to say that without Hitler, there wouldn’t have been a European war.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Teaching your daughters / ‘Project Runway’ and depression / Donald Glover / Women rewriting the story / Black fatherhood and ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’

This week: Teaching your daughters / ‘Project Runway’ and depression / Donald Glover / Women rewriting the story / Black fatherhood and ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’

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.

1. Why I’m Teaching My Daughters to Be Rude
By Danielle Lazzarin | The Cut :: New York Magazine | February 2018
“I would no longer teach them that they owe anyone smiles or gratitude for being noticed. I would no longer train them to weaken their boundaries for the sake of being polite.”

2. How ‘Project Runway’ Helped Me ‘Make It Work’ When I Was Depressed
By Juliet Escoria | Vice | February 2018
“Although I hate to admit it because it makes me feel sappy and basic, the show is inspiring — and Tim Gunn is a literal angel.”

3. Donald Glover Has Always Been Ten Steps Ahead
By Bijan Stephen | Esquire | February 2018
“He’s become one of the most powerful and influential individuals in town. So what’s next? We sat down with the legend in the making.”

4. Pushing back: why it’s time for women to rewrite the story
By Sarah Churchwell | The Guardian | February 2018
“Poe, Updike, Roth, Mailer: many male authors have contributed to a culture in which the credibility of women is undermined. It’s time to put a stop to the gaslighting.”

5. A Kingdom of Dust
By Mark Arax, Trent Davis Bailey and Denise Nestor | The California Sunday Magazine | January 2018
“I grew up in the suburbs where our playgrounds were named after the pioneers of fruit and canals of irrigation shot through our neighborhoods to the farms we did not know. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?”

6. Radiation Will Tear Elon Musk’s Rocket Car to Bits in a Year
By Rafi Letzter | LiveScience | February 2018
“Down on Earth, a powerful magnetic field and the atmosphere largely protect human beings (and Tesla Roadsters) from the harsh radiation of the sun and cosmic rays. But spacefaring objects have no such protections.”

7. New members of the editorial board
By Kristen Epps | Muster :: The Journal of the Civil War Era | February 2018
“The talented historians joining us in 2018 are Tera Hunter, Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura Edwards, Pekka Hämäläinen, and Susannah Ural.”

8. Controlling the Chief
By Charlie Savage | The New York Review of Books | February 2018
“Trump’s generals — some still in uniform, some now civilians — are clearly trying to mitigate turmoil and curb potential dangers. That may be at once reassuring and disturbing.”

9. Port Aransas Isn’t Giving Up
By Rachel Pearson | Texas Monthly | January 2018
“Returning to my devastated hometown, I found my friends and family putting on a brave face in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.”

10. Deep Space Nine Is TV’s Most Revolutionary Depiction of Black Fatherhood
By Angelica Jade Bastien | Vulture | January 2018
“The family they represent is wholly unique on television: a window into the future of black identity that never forgets the trials of our past or the complexity of our humanity.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: 2017’s few, terrible disasters / The life of former president Obama / An Inca code cracked / David Attenborough talks retirement / Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood and the mystery of Mary Trump

This week: 2017’s few, terrible disasters / The life of former president Obama / An Inca code cracked / David Attenborough talks retirement / Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood and the mystery of Mary Trump

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.

1. Disasters pound North America in 2017; overall down globally
By Seth Borenstein | Associated Press | December 2017
“Disasters kill about 30,000 people and affect about 215 million people a year. This year’s estimated toll was lower — about 6,000 people killed and 75 million affected. Was it random chance, statistical quirk or better preparedness? Experts aren’t certain, but say perhaps it’s a little bit of each.”

2. Obama’s post-presidential life: what does his second act have in store?
By Tom McCarthy | The Guardian | December 2017
“‘There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president,’ said John Quincy Adams — but a year on, what to make of our most newly minted ex?”

3. Favorite Visual Stories Of 2017
By Emily Bogle | NPR | December 2017
“In 2017, politics dominated the news cycle along with the solar eclipse and hurricane coverage in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.”

4. Margaret Atwood: the unlikely style soothsayer of 2017
By Hannah Marriott | The Guardian | December 2017
“Thanks to two hit adaptations of her books, the writer has had a big impact on fashion this year.”

5. Harvard student helps crack mystery of Inca code
By Cristela Guerra | The Boston Globe | December 2017
“The discovery could be a first step to unlocking far more Inca history.”

6. Humans can spot small signs of sickness at a glance, research suggests
By Nikola Davis | The Guardian | January 2018
“Humans may use a host of facial cues – visible just hours after an infection starts – to avoid contracting illnesses from others, study indicates.”

7. David Attenborough: I’ll retire if my work becomes substandard
By Graham Ruddick | The Guardian | January 2018
“In rare comments on subject of retirement, Blue Planet II narrator says physical problems could also force him to quit”

8. The ‘Nuclear Button’ Explained: For Starters, There’s No Button
By Russell Goldman | The New York Times | January 2018
“William Safire, the former New York Times columnist and presidential speechwriter, tracked the origin of the phrase ‘finger on the button’ to panic buttons found in World War II-era bombers. A pilot could ring a bell to signal that other crew members should jump from the plane because it had been damaged extensively. But the buttons were often triggered prematurely or unnecessarily by jittery pilots.”

9. Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47
By Linda Kuehl | The Paris Review | Fall 1972
“Once the interview got underway, she grew more at ease. As she herself might say, she was ‘not unforthcoming.’ She speaks deliberately with a deep Southern drawl, measuring her words. She is extremely private and won’t reveal anything personal about herself.”

10. The Mystery of Mary Trump
By Michael Kruse | Politico Magazine | November/December 2017
“Donald Trump reveres his father but almost never talks about his mother. Why not?”
Also: Presidents and Their Moms, A Short History

Rebecca Aguilar

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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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