James Webb – Stillness of Heart

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.”

This week: The Democrats’ future / James Webb Telescope / The Internet Archive / Lincoln’s legacy in Mexico / 10 Arab philosophers we need

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. Liberal activists, new DNC chief face a Trump-era reckoning
By Bill Barrow | Associated Press | Feb. 26
“Perez has embraced the idea of a more aggressive, populist identity for the party, even if he hasn’t convinced activists he can deliver on it. He said throughout the three-day DNC meeting ahead of the vote that he would work to align party resources with the energy of groups from Black Lives Matter and Swing Left to Indivisible, Resist Trump Tuesdays, Knock Every Door, Rise Stronger and Sister District.”

2. How the baby boomers destroyed everything
By Bruce Cannon Gibney | The Boston Globe | Feb. 26
“In 1971, Alan Shepard was playing golf on the moon. Today, America can’t put a man into orbit (or, allegedly, the Oval Office) without Russian assistance. Something changed, and that something was the boomers and the sociopathic agenda they emplaced.”

3. What will the James Webb Space Telescope reveal about the newly discovered exoplanets?
By Nick Lavars | New Atlas | Feb. 23
“Poised to take the reins from Hubble as NASA’s premier orbiting telescope in 2018, it will boast seven times the light-collecting capacity of its predecessor and will be sensitive enough to spot a single firefly one million kilometers away.”

4. Where to find what’s disappeared online, and a whole lot more: the Internet Archive
By Mary Kay Magistad | Who’s Century Is It? :: PRI | Feb. 23
” Since the Internet Archive started in 1996, its staff — now, about 140 people — have digitized almost 3 million books, and are aiming for 10 million.”

5. When A Woman Deletes A Man’s Comment Online
By Ijeoma Oluo | The Establishment | Feb. 22
“I’m not debating those who show up wedded to bigotry”

6. Could Pluto Regain Its Planethood?
By Mike Wall | Space.com :: Scientific American | Feb. 23
“A proposed new definition for what constitutes a ‘planet’ could reinstate the demoted icy world”

7. Why Abraham Lincoln Was Revered in Mexico
By Jamie Katz | Smithsonian Magazine | Feb. 23
“As a young Congressman and later as the nation’s leader, the first Republican president proved to be a true friend to America’s neighbor to the south”

8. 10 Arabic Philosophers, and Why You Should Know Them
By Scotty Hendricks | Big Think | November 2016
“Of the stars that have proper names in common usage, most of them have the names given to them by Arabic astronomers. We use the numeral system they devised, including the zero. They set the standard for the scientific method for hundreds of years. It is impossible to fully understand western thought without understanding the ideas of these thinkers.”

9. What a Kansas professor learned after interviewing a ‘lost generation’ of journalists
By Deron Lee | Columbia Journalism Review | September 2016
“When Scott Reinardy began studying the state of morale in newspaper newsrooms more than 10 years ago … [he] didn’t know the industry was about to enter a traumatic period of upheaval that would deplete the ranks of journalists around the country and force newspapers to reassess their mission.”

10. The Gang That Always Liked Ike
By Michael Beschloss | HistorySource :: The New York Times | November 2014
“The Gang played bridge, golfed and shot skeet together, ate steaks barbecued by the president, offered advice on politics and the economy and chuckled at his private aphorisms. (He maintained, for example, that the ‘two professions in which amateurs excel’ are ‘prostitution and the military.’)”

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