Cats – Stillness of Heart

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

This week: The history of the new African American Museum / Dirty debate secrets / Lil Wayne in Rikers / Pluto’s deep ocean / Ease off on self-discipline

This week: The history of the new African American Museum / Dirty debate secrets / Lil Wayne in Rikers / Pluto’s deep ocean / Ease off on self-discipline

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

1. How to Win a Debate with Mind Games and Dirty Tricks
By Zack Stanton | Politico Magazine | Sept. 24
“Presidential debates have a long and often comical history of psych-outs, with candidates trying to intimidate each other and even threatening insulting props.”

2. John Lewis spent 15 years fighting for the museum — now the dream is realized
By John Lewis | Washington Post Magazine | Sept. 15
“I have loved history ever since I was a boy. It started when I was so young. To celebrate Carter G. Woodson’s innovation — then called Negro History Week and now called Black History Month — my teachers would ask us to cut out pictures in magazines and newspapers of famous African Americans, such as Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver.”

3. The artifacts and stories that brought the African American museum to life
By Marcia Davis | Washington Post Magazine | Sept. 15
“Inside the museum are markers of a nation’s racial history and bloodied path to democracy: from the remnants of a slave ship to a slave cabin to a segregation-era train car and shards of glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Ala., where four little girls were killed on a September Sunday morning not so long ago.”

4. Larry Sanders, Bernie’s Brother, Is Running for David Cameron’s Seat in Parliament
By Sewell Chan | The New York Times | Sept. 23
“Sanders grew up in New York City. … In 1969, after graduating from Harvard Law School, he moved to Oxford, England, where he has devoted his career to social work and the law and been an advocate in areas like mental health and education.”

5. Lil Wayne describes what life is really like inside Rikers Island
By Tashara Jones | Page Six :: The New York Post | Sept. 23
“Wayne got visits from P. Diddy and Kanye West, all of whom underwent the body searches, but he admitted a low point was when Drake admitted to sleeping with his girlfriend. …”

6. 10 Things Every Man Should Know About Wearing a Suit
By Teo van Den Broeke | Esquire | Sept. 23
“Always ensure that the skirt of your jacket fully covers your backside. Short jackets are not flattering on anyone, even skinny guys. A full length jacket with a nip at the waist will look flattering on pretty much all frames.”

7. Are cats better than dogs?
The New Yorker Festival | November 2014
“A panel of authors, scientists, and New Yorker writers debate which are better: cats or dogs.”

8. Pluto’s Liquid Water Ocean Might be Insanely Deep
By Maddie Stone | Gizmodo | Sept. 23
“[I]t’s thought that the enormous asteroid responsible for creating Sputnik Planum struck somewhere near the north pole, but that over time, Pluto’s heart became heavy and caused the entire planet to tip over.”

9. Self-discipline is overrated, so go easy on yourself
By Oliver Burkeman | The Guardian | Sept. 23
“Too little self-control makes you impulsive and prone to taking dangerous risks, but too much isn’t great either”

10. A Swimmer and Surfer Who Straddled Two Cultures
By Michael Beschloss | HistorySource :: The New York Times | August 2014
“Duke Kahanamoku, who won a total of five swimming medals in Olympics from 1912 to 1924, probably did more than anyone else to bring the sport of surfing from his native Hawaiian islands to the United States mainland. Almost in reverse, he also played a substantial part in the Americanization of old Hawaii.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Churchill’s brutal decision / How cats fall / Grieving for pets / Flying the Dawn spacecraft / A classic interview with Fidel Castro

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. An Interview with Fidel Castro
By Barbara Walters | Foreign Policy | Sept. 15, 1977
“Fidel Castro on communism, his own death, and the U.S. embargo.”

2. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Discovers Apollo 11 Rocket Engines at the Bottom of the Sea
By Rebecca J. Rosen | The Atlantic | March 28
“For four decades, the engines that powered Apollo 11 to the moon have lain at the bottom of the Atlantic. But they’ll soon rise again.”

3. How to Fly the Slowest Spacecraft in the Cosmos
By Jeffrey Kluger | Time Science | March 28
“You may never have heard of Dawn, and if you haven’t, you’re not alone.”

4. Grieving for Pets and Humans: Is There a Difference?
By Tara Parker-Pope | Well :: The New York Times | March 27
“Can the death of a pet hurt as much as the loss of a relative?”

5. The dirty little secret about second-term presidents
By Daniel W. Drezner | Foreign Policy | March 26
“Consider the last three two-term presidents: Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43. I’ll grant this is a very small sample, but bear with me. Did their second-term policies look different from their first-term? You bectha.”

6. Who, What, Why: How do cats survive falls from great heights?
BBC News Magazine | March 24
“A cat in the US city of Boston survived a fall from a 19-storey window and only bruised her chest. How do cats survive falls from such great heights?”

7. Gingrich Stuck to Caustic Path in Ethics Battles
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg | The Long Run :: The New York Times | Jan. 28
“Newt Gingrich had an urgent warning for conservatives: Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House, was out to destroy America.”

8. Rereading: RK Narayan
By Charles Nicholl | The Guardian | May 14
“A visit to the city that inspired RK Narayan’s fictional south Indian town, Malgudi, on the 10th anniversary of his death”

9. Churchill’s Deadly Decision
Secrets of the Dead :: PBS | May 13, 2010
“Churchill had to make a choice. He could either trust the promises of the new French government that they would never hand over their ships to Hitler. Or he could make sure that the ships never joined the German navy by destroying them himself.”

10. Assassination of Malcolm X
Witness :: BBC News | February 28
“In February 1965, the controversial black leader, Malcolm X, was assassinated in Harlem, New York.”

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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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