Coffee – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Lady Gaga, the gothic groundbreaker / Time to rethink obituaries / Coffee has a long term effect on health / The ‘new’ Middle East may not exist / Some in MAGA want Trump to go harder / Napping smarter

This week: Lady Gaga, the gothic groundbreaker / Time to rethink obituaries / Coffee has a long term effect on health / The ‘new’ Middle East may not exist / Some in MAGA want Trump to go harder / Napping smarter

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. What you put in your coffee can have an outsize impact on your health
By Trisha Pasricha | The Washington Post | October 2025
“Add no more than 1 teaspoon of sugar and 2 tablespoons of whole milk to each cup. But go ahead and grab another mug; 3½ cups of filtered coffee per day can be good for your health.”

2. A ‘New Middle East’ Is Easier to Declare Than to Achieve
By David Remnick | The New Yorker | October 2025
“As a long-overdue ceasefire takes hold amid the ruins of Gaza, the President’s visit to Jerusalem is more about transactional politics than transformative peace.”

3. A seed bank in England marks 25 years of preserving the world’s plant diversity
By Mustakim Hasnath | Associated Press | October 2025
“The Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew holds more than 2.5 billion wild plant seeds from around 40,000 species. The seeds are stored in sealed glass jars and foil packets, and are preserved in temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius ( minus 4 Fahrenheit) to guard against extinction.”

4. In D.C., the Arc de Trump Goes Up as the Local Workforce Shuts Down
By Michael Schaffer | Politico | October 2025
“Trump really wants a shining capital. Can you do that while battering the city economy?”

5. Obituaries are important, worth rethinking and reviving
By Kristen Hare | Poynter | November 2021
“Here’s what we discovered from 2.5 years of work, a fellowship and a newsletter.”

6. Putins All the Way Down
By Joshua Yaffa | Foreign Affairs | October 2025
“The Kremlin no longer holds to any democratic pretensions. Putin appears destined to rule indefinitely, and even far down the ballot, independent candidates are kept from running.”

7. The Rise of RFK Jr.
Frontline :: PBS | October 2025
“Tracing the dramatic and controversial rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ‘Frontline’ examines how the scion of a storied dynasty endured tragedy and scandal, broke with the Democratic Party and his family, stoked conspiracy theories, and is reshaping government and public health.”

8. Latinx Shakespeares of the 20th century
By Carla Della Gatta | Shakespeare & Beyond :: Folger Shakespeare Library | October 2025
“Latinx peoples and cultures have been a rich part of American Shakespearean performance for more than 85 years.”

9. The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough
By David Austin Walsh | Boston Review | October 2025
“MAGA’s base is more fractured than it looks.”

10. Lady Gaga Was Always Gothic. Now the World Has Caught Up to Her.
By Wesley Morris | Cannonball :: The New York Times | October 2025
“At a moment when other pop stars are flirting with dark spectacle, Gaga’s ‘Mayhem’ tour shows that she has perfected it.”

11. ‘Shall We Have a King?’
By William E. Leuchtenburg | American Heritage | Fall 2025
“Some delegates at the Constitutional Convention wanted a strong executive, while others feared the American president might become a king.”

12. How a ‘dark fleet’ of tankers helped a Mexican cartel build a fuel-smuggling empire
By Stefanie Eschenbacher, Shariq Khan and Stephen Eisenhammer | Reuters | October 2025
“The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has mastered the use of tankers to smuggle fuel to Mexico. U.S. oil players are helping them. Reuters traces one ship’s brazen journey.”

13. Revenge is never simple — neither is the legacy of ‘Kill Bill’
By Caroline Siede | Paste | October 2025
“Like The Bride herself, Kill Bill remains a messy, contradictory, thoroughly kickass duology.”

14. The secret to waking up from a nap feeling refreshed (and not groggy)
By Andee Tagle | NPR | October 2025
“Ever woken up from a nap and felt more tired? Or so discombobulated you forgot which planet you were on?”

15. Francis Ford Coppola Forced to Sell His Custom $1 Million Watch After ‘Megalopolis’ Debacle
By Laurie Brookins | The Hollywood Reporter | October 2025
“The one-of-a-kind F.P. Journe watch will be on display in New York before its sale in December. The director spent $120 million of his own money on the film, which grossed just $14.4 million.”

16. Social Ties Help You Live Longer. What Does That Mean for Introverts?
By Dana G. Smith | The New York Times | October 2025
“You don’t have to be the life of every party to reap the health benefits.”

17. A new island erupted from the sea – can it show us how nature works without human interference?
By Patrick Greenfield | The Guardian | October 2025
“The volcanic island of Surtsey emerged in the 1960s, and scientists say studying its development offers hope for damaged ecosystems worldwide.”

18. Stonewall Uprising
American Experience :: PBS | June 2023
“When police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City on June 28, 1969, the street erupted into violent protests that lasted for the next six days. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world.”

19. Inside Llewyn Davis: The Sound of Music
By Kent Jones | The Criterion Collection | January 2016
“The world of the Coens is the world of everyday heroes and scoundrels, of you and me and the stranger sitting across from us, the ordinary citizens trying to make sense of life as we live it, who have neither the time nor the wherewithal to develop into the Transformative Figures of Our Age.”

20. The Inca
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2011-2019
Also see: The Taiping Rebellion | Maimonides | Aristotle’s Poetics | The Mexican Revolution

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

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: The modern treehouse / Rethinking their post-9/11 decisions / Alabama’s first black poet laureate / The emotional beauty of Omar Little / Literature’s most memorable trees

This week: The modern treehouse / Rethinking their post-9/11 decisions / Alabama’s first black poet laureate / The emotional beauty of Omar Little / Literature’s most memorable trees

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. Nature meets nostalgia: Treehouses return in style
By Tracee M. Herbaugh | Associated Press | September 2021
“Treehouses have proliferated during the pandemic. There are stylish backyard ones built by professionals, and makeshift ones thrown up just to escape the four walls of home. There are listings on sites like Airbnb for treehouses to camp in. Unlike the rickety treehouses of yore, many of these new ones have been upgraded. Most are still accessed with a ladder, however, requiring you to climb.”

2. They Created Our Post-9/11 World. Here’s What They Think They Got Wrong.
By Bryan Bender and Daniel Lippman | Politico Magazine | September 2021
“Seventeen prominent players reflect on the decades of war they helped wage and the domestic defenses they helped erect.”

3. Alabama’s First Black Poet Laureate Takes A Personal Approach To ‘Reparations’
By Jeevika Verma | NPR | September 2021
“The state of Alabama has a new poet laureate: Ashley M. Jones is the first Black poet to claim the title, and at 31, also the youngest.”

4. ‘You’re Food and Drink to Me.’ A Letter From Henry Miller to Anais Nin
By Shaun Usher | LitHub | September 2021
“Such explosive conditions resulted in countless passionate love letters from both parties. This particular missive was written prior to a heated few days at Nin’s home in France.”

5. The fictional complexity of Omar
By Robin Givhan | The Washington Post | September 2021
“Omar exuded the sort of stone-faced masculinity that for so long defined what it means to be a man, along with the threatening aura that has become associated specifically with Black men. Yet Omar also had a gentle touch for his boyfriend about whom he unabashedly expressed his affection. Omar sneered. Omar cried.”

6. Why Does Coffee Sometimes Make Me Tired?
By Wudan Yan | The New York Times | September 2021
“Lethargy, blood sugar and dehydration explain in part the paradoxical effects of coffee on our energy levels.”

7. Extreme Animal Weapons
NOVA :: PBS | November 2017
“Discover how a secret biological code has shaped nature’s battleground.”

8. The 18 Most Memorable Trees in Literature
By Christopher Cox | LitHub | August 2021
“At first we wanted to rank the trees, or pit them head-to-head, March Madness–style, to see which one came out on top. Would Whitman’s hickory defeat Yeats’s chestnut? In the battle of the oaks, who would reign supreme: Calvino or Kunitz? But the trees invoked here, and the works of literature in which they are found, resist such a reductive treatment.”

9. Black politics and history
By Eric Foner | Start Making Sense | August 2021
“Eric Foner talks bout how our understanding of Black politics and history, starting with Reconstruction, has changed — and about the historian-activists who challenged the prevailing racist historians back in the 1930s, starting with W.E.B. DuBois and James S. Allen”

10. This pictogram is one of the oldest known accounts of earthquakes in the Americas
By Carolyn Gramling | Science News | September 2021
“The written chronology in a 16th century codex was created by a pre-Hispanic civilization.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Thoughts from the Second Gentleman / The history of land borders / Caligula’s gardens / Cleavage and modern culture / Demonic possession

This week: Thoughts from the Second Gentleman / The history of land borders / Caligula’s gardens / Cleavage and modern culture / Demonic possession

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 Has the Pandemic Done to Our Eyes?
By Eve Peyser | Intelligencer :: New York Magazine | January 2021
“Take a minute every hour to look away and close your eyes. Somehow in the darkness, with your eyeballs moist and safe, everything feels just a little bit better.”

2. I Might Be the First Second Gentleman, But I Don’t Want to Be the Last
By Douglas Emhoff | GQ | January 2021
“Douglas Emhoff reflects on his unique place in history at the side of his wife Kamala Harris.”

3. The Oldest, The Longest, The Weirdest: A Brief History of Land Borders
By Simon Winchester | Harper :: LitHub | January 2021
“The great majority of the world’s land borders were fashioned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: a fierce acceleration of nation building got under way in 1850, became territorial mayhem between 1875 and 1899 … and reached its climacteric in the first two decades of the 20th century. …”

4. Trump revived Andrew Jackson’s spoils system, which would undo America’s 138-year-old professional civil service
By Barry M. Mitnick | The Conversation | January 2021
“Less than two weeks before Election Day, Donald Trump signed an executive order that threatens to return the U.S. to a spoils system in which a large share of the federal government’s workforce could be fired for little or no reason. … While President Joe Biden appears likely to reverse the order, its effects may not be so easily undone. And he may have his own reasons for keeping it temporarily in place.”

5. Busted! What The Great and Bridgerton reveal about cleavage
By Morwenna Ferrier | The Guardian | January 2021
“Corset sales are up, even in lockdown, as the nation binge-watches glossy costume dramas. But even in the 18th century, the cantilevered look could be fraught”

6. Caligula’s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored
By Franz Lidz | The New York Times | January 2021
“Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome’s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists.”

7. Which winter sports are safest to play during COVID-19?
Associated Press | December 2020
“The best physical activities for limiting the risk of coronavirus infections are the ones you do alone or with members of your household”

8. ‘Demonic Possession’ in Early Modern Europe
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: History of the Ottoman Empire, Part 1 | History of the Ottoman Empire, Part 2 | European Imperialism in the Middle East, Part 1 | European Imperialism in the Middle East, Part 2

9. How to Scatter Cremated Remains
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | October 2020
“Note the location with GPS coordinates. At sea, human remains, including ashes, must be thrown at least three nautical miles from land.”

10. Coffee
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2013-2020
Also see: The Valladolid Debate | The Amazons | Japan’s Sakoku Period | Ice Ages

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

John Updike fading? / The other marriage myth / The priceless database of Afghan war wounds / Salman Rushdie on censorship / Hillary Clinton’s legacy at State

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. Read past recommendations from this series here.

1. Q&A: Seeking Better-Sounding Skype Calls
By J.D. Biersdorfer | Gadgetwise :: The New York Times | May 17
“Are there any ways to improve the audio quality of computer-to-computer Skype calls?”

2. First & Last: Opening/Closing Lines from Our Best Books of the Month
By Neal Thompson | Omnivoracious :: Amazon.com | May 10
“Every book begins with nothing. A blank screen or, if you’re Robert Caro, a blank page.”

3. Have we fallen out of love with John Updike?
By Sarah Crown | Books Blog :: The Guardian | May 15
“Three years after John Updike’s death, his reputation appears to be on the wane. But who else can match his deftness and grace?”

4. The Myth About Marriage
By Garry Wills | NYR Blog :: The New York Review of Books | May 9
“Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.”

5. Lessons in a Catalog of Afghan War Wounds May Be Lost
By C.J. Chivers | The New York Times | May 17
“[The] database is one part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. But there are concerns that the potential lessons from such data could be lost, because no one has yet brought the information together and made it fully cohere. ”

6. On Censorship
By Salman Rushdie | Page-Tirner :: The New Yorker | May 15
“Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.”

7. What will Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic legacy be?
By Richard Wolf | USA Today | May 17
“As she prepares to leave the national stage after a 20-year run, Clinton is winning bipartisan respect at home and admiration abroad for her role as the nation’s 67th secretary of State.”

8. Coffee linked to lower risk of death
By Amina Khan | The Los Angeles Times | May 16
“Subjects who averaged four or five cups per day fared best, though it’s not clear why.”

9. Luxury Liner’s Removal to Begin Off Italian Coast
By Gaia Pianigiani | The New York Times | May 18
“One of the most expensive and challenging salvage operations ever planned, the removal of the luxury liner Costa Concordia from granite rocks off the Tuscan coast, where it ran aground in January, will begin next week.”

10. Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map
Open Culture | May 18
“Users of the model can select a point of origin and destination for a trip and then choose from a number of options to determine either the cheapest, fastest or shortest route.”

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TUNES

Tonight I’m spending some time with the blues, specifically with the Texas Blues Café. Check out the line-up and then listen here.

1. Tom Petty — Lovers Touch
2. The Insomniacs — Maybe Sometime Later
3. Preacher Stone — Blood From A Stone
4. Ramblin Dawgs — You Let Me Down
5. Los Lonely Boys — Man To Beat
6. Ray Wylie Hubbard — Snake Farm
7. The Derek Trucks Band — Get What You Deserve
8. MonkeyJunk — Tiger In Your Tank
9. Jimmie Vaughan — Texas Flood
10. Paul Thorn — Long Way From Tupelo
11. Curtis Salgado — Wiggle Outa This
12. Pride & Joy Band — Texas Hoochie Coo
13. Polk Street Blues Band — 100 Pound Hammer
14. Tommy Castro — Ninety-Nine And One Half

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Coffee before workout / Alexander’s greatness / Mex City closes dump / The GOP dogs / Princess Diana’s wedding

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. Read past recommendations from this series here.

1. How Coffee Can Galvanize Your Workout
By Gretchen Reynolds | Well :: The New York Times | Dec. 14
“Caffeine has been proven to increase the number of fatty acids circulating in the bloodstream, which enables people to run or pedal longer (since their muscles can absorb and burn that fat for fuel and save the body’s limited stores of carbohydrates until later in the workout).”

2. Nietzsche was right: adversity makes you stronger
The Daily Telegraph | Dec. 18
“It is the quote used by many to bolster resilience in the face of adversity. But the words ‘what does not kill me, makes me stronger,’ by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, could have scientific merit too, according to research.”

3. Alexander: How Great?
By Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books | Oct. 27
“Alexander showed signs of fatal weaknesses: witness the vanity, the obeisance he demanded from his followers, the vicious cruelty (he had a record of murdering erstwhile friends around his dinner table), and the infamous drinking.”

4. Ancient Texts Tell Tales of War, Bar Tabs
By Owen Jarus | LiveScience | Dec. 19
“The texts date from the dawn of written history, about 5,000 years ago, to a time about 2,400 years ago when the Achaemenid Empire (based in Persia) ruled much of the Middle East.”

5. Mexico City closes Bordo Poniente rubbish dump
BBC News | Dec. 19
“Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard said the closure would significantly help reduce the capital’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

6. Q&A: Making Emergency Calls on a Cellphone
By J.D. Biersdorfer | Gadgetwise :: The New York Times | Sept. 22
“Q: Is it true a cellphone can always call 911, even if you don’t have a monthly plan?”

7. Dogs and Presidential Candidates: Man’s Best Friend Dominates the Race
By Leslie Bennetts | The Daily Beast | Dec. 17
“Santorum stood up for them, Cain tried to get rid of one, and Romney strapped his to the top of a car. Leslie Bennetts on how man’s best friend came to dominate this year’s race for the White House.”

8. My daughter’s fiance wants to marry a different woman
Troubleshooter :: The Yomiuri Shimbun | Dec. 16
“I want your advice on what to do about this man, whose deception cost my daughter precious time during her 20s.”

9. Flight Attendant Interview
The Flying Pinto | September 2011
“Most airlines hire their own flight attendants to recruit, which is great because who understands what it takes to do this job more than someone who already does it?”

10. Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer
Witness :: BBC News | April 22
“1981 and the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.”

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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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