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’
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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
20. Frederick Douglass
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2016-2020
Also see: The Bronze Age Collapse | Sovereignty | 1816, the Year Without a Summer | The 12th Century Renaissance
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