HAITI – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Cranberries as a Thanksgiving classic / Watch the history of presidents / 2025 hurricane season enters history books / Texas men planned to invade Haitian island and enslave women / MAGA singles look for love / Potential 2028 presidential candidates aren’t shy about ambitions

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1. 2025 Atlantic hurricane season marked by striking contrasts
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | November 2025
“The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends on November 30, was notable for its striking contrast — wavering between periods of relative calm and bursts of intense activity, generating very powerful storms. Overall, the season fell within the predicted ranges for named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes issued in NOAA’s seasonal outlooks.”

2. How are Americans using AI? Evidence from a nationwide survey
By Malihe Alikhani, Ben Harris, and Sanjay Patnaik | Brookings | November 2025
“The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has heightened the need to better understand its adoption across various aspects of social and economic applications. In this essay, we present new evidence on the extent of AI adoption across a host of dimensions, including use in households, by employees in the workplace, and by owners and workers in small businesses.”

3. The botany behind why cranberries became a Thanksgiving staple
By Serina DeSalvio | The Conversation :: PBS Newshour | November 2023
“Cranberry cultivation began in 1816 in Massachusetts, where Revolutionary War veteran Henry Hall found that covering cranberry bogs with sand fertilized the vines and retained water around their roots. From there, the fruit spread throughout the U.S. Northeast and Upper Midwest.”
Also see, from the Associated Press: Remember to give thanks to yourself during the holidays and beyond

4. How food assistance programs can feed families and nourish their dignity
By Joslyn Brenton, Alyssa Tindall, and Senbagam Virudachalam | The Conversation | November 2025
“Food is not just a matter of survival. What and how you eat is also a symbol of your social status. Being unable to reliably feed your family healthy and nutritious foods in a way that aligns with your values can feel undignified. It can make people feel unseen and less important than others.”

5. Texas adds new ID restrictions on vehicle registrations and renewals
By Ayden Runnels and Alex Nguyen | The Texas Tribune | November 2025
“The restrictions, which went into effect on Nov. 18, could upend the ability of many undocumented residents to legally own vehicles.”

6. ‘The blight seeped into your soul’: How ‘Seven’ reflected fears in the US in the 1980s
By Tom Joudrey | BBC News | November 2025
“David Fincher’s gritty thriller commented on the urban blight and religious conservatism of the Reagan era. But it also predicted our obsession with true crime today.”

7. The Vanquishing of Military.com
By Liam Scott | Columbia Journalism Review | November 2025
“Former staffers say a new owner dealt the respected publication a death blow when service members and veterans needed it most.”

8. How Gabbard’s ‘hunters’ pounced on secret CIA warehouse for Kennedy files
By Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay | Reuters | November 2025
“The case casts new light on the tension between two forces in Washington, the CIA and Gabbard’s ODNI, as Trump appointees sought to act on the president’s orders to swiftly release the full accounting of Kennedy’s murder in 1963, as well as the high-profile 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.”

9. Texas men indicted in plot to take over Haitian island and enslave women and children
By Kristin Wright | NPR | November 2025
“Gavin Weisenburg, 21 years old of Allen, and Tanner Thomas, 20 years old of Argyle, along with other co-conspirators planned to murder all men on the Haitian territory before taking over the island, and enslaving the women and children as ‘sex slaves.’ “

10. McCarthyism Is Back. You Can Thank This Woman.
By Joshua Kendall | Politico Magazine | November 2025
“History has overlooked the real architect of Joe McCarthy’s purges: his wife.”

11. US leaders are erasing Black history. That threatens our future
By Stacey Abrams and Esosa Osa | The Guardian | October 2025
“DEI is being used as a smokescreen to roll back progress and consolidate power. The goal is to rewrite our nation’s story”

12. Potential presidential candidates are less coy about 2028 plans: ‘Of course I’m thinking about it’
By Jill Colvin | Associated Press | November 2025
“With no clear party leader and Democratic voters raring for a fight, some could-be candidates are being far more transparent about their intentions, doing away with pretensions as they try to gain maximum visibility at a time when authenticity is in high demand.”

13. Texas’s Water Wars
By Rachel Monroe | The New Yorker | November 2025
“As industrial operations move to the state, residents find that their drinking water has been promised to companies.”

14. A ‘win-win’ partnership brings a surge of reporting firepower to hyperlocal news outlets around Boston
By Sarah Scire | Nieman Lab | November 2025
“The Boston University Newsroom has published nearly 400 news articles in hyperlocal outlets in and around the city.”

15. The Encyclopedic Genius of Melville’s Masterpiece
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari | LitHub | August 2019
“Time is not the principle of order in this book; it is a manifestation of chaos. Instead, the principle of order in Moby Dick is that of the encyclopedia, foreshadowed in the book’s first pages and then bursting forth exuberantly in the classification and the anatomy of the whale.”

16. MAGA singles are looking for love in Washington. It’s a challenge.
By Jesús Rodríguez | The Washington Post | October 2025
“The politics of trying to find a partner in an overwhelmingly liberal city can be tricky: ‘My partner can’t think I’m a fascist. That’s crazy.’ “

17. Mariners Wanted: Six-Figure Salaries and Months at Sea
By Peter Eavis | The New York Times | November 2025
“There are few American mariners today because only a small proportion of international commercial shipping is done with vessels flying under the American flag, meaning they are registered in the United States, follow the Coast Guard’s regulations and employ American citizens. The jobs pay well but often require people to be away from home for months at a time.”

19. Midnight Cowboy: On the Fringe
By Mark Harris | The Criterion Collection | May 2018
“As a New York movie, as a barrier breaker in terms of adult content, as a representation of a new, more daring Hollywood, as a buddy film, and most complexly as, if not a gay movie, a movie that at least helped to make the notion of a gay movie possible, the film represents a true dividing line, albeit not one that everybody immediately recognized.”

20. An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery
By Ariel Sabar | The Atlantic | August 2024
“The Voynich Manuscript has long baffled scholars—and attracted cranks and conspiracy theorists. Now a prominent medievalist is taking a new approach to unlocking its secrets.”

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

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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