Tag: Oscars

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

The philosophy of giving away your books / The new war for the seafloor / Smarter ways to wrap presents / Evolution inspires inventors / Vitruvius and De Architectura

This week: The philosophy of giving away your books / The new war for the seafloor / Smarter ways to wrap presents / Evolution inspires inventors / Vitruvius and De Architectura

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. Forecasting
Columbia Journalism Review | December 2025
“Clouds collect over the present. There are a lot of unknowns about the next twenty-five years for journalism. But we can, at least, dress for the weather.”

2. ‘I Didn’t Vote for This’: A Revolt Against DOGE Cuts, Deep in Trump Country
By Cassidy Randall | Politico Magazine | December 2025
“Trump administration policies slashing staffing and funding for public lands are waking a sleeping political giant in Montana. Will either party notice?”

3. When selling Christmas trees beats line cooking
By Sabri Ben-Achour, Ashley Rodriguez and Alex Schroeder | Marketplace | December 2025
“Most seasonal workers go to the mall. But if you’re willing to brave cold nights on the street, the gig of tree seller could be more lucrative.”

4. Oscars Bolts from ABC to YouTube Starting in 2029
By Scott Feinberg and Alex Weprin | The Hollywood Reporter | December 2025
“The Disney-owned Alphabet Network will continue to air the Oscars — long the world’s most watched awards telecast — through the 100th edition of the awards show in 2028. After that, the ceremony will be available live and for free to over two billion people around the world on YouTube, and to YouTube TV subscribers in the United States.”

5. Shaping the conversation means offering context to extreme ideas, not just a platform
By Graham Bodie | The Conversation | December 2025
“A conversation that presents all viewpoints as morally equivalent risks signaling that even extreme positions belong within normal political discourse.”

6. How Dr. Seuss Gave Us One of the Most Complex, Socially Important Heist Stories Ever
By Olivia Rutigliano | Crime Reads | December 2019
“[I]t tells the story of an outsider with no formal power who deliberately connives to swipe Christmas from those who celebrate it, precisely because it bothers him that they do. “

7. The Scramble for the Seafloor
By Rebecca Egan McCarthy | The New York Review of Books | December 2025
“With the Trump administration’s backing, an emerging industry could start mining minerals from the bottom of the sea—and risk turning the ocean into a free-for-all.”

8. How maths can help you wrap your presents better
By Sarah Griffiths | BBC News | December 2025
“Wrapping awkwardly shaped Christmas presents is always a headache, but here’s the formula for perfect gift wrap.”

9. The divide between culture reporter and critic closes
By JP Mangalindan | Nieman Lab | December 2025
“Audiences no longer want writers to simply recount what happened; they want help understanding why it mattered.”

10. The Case for Whole Books
By Johanna Winant and Dan Sinykin | Slate | October 2025
“You can’t get better at reading until you care about a text.”

11. Why I Give My Books Away For Free
By Shane Hinton | LitHub | October 2025
“People that connect with us in the right place at the right time change the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Art is one mechanism of this connection. Sales numbers can’t represent the connective potential of a given piece.”

12. America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year. There’s a commemorative ornament for it
By Darlene Superville | Associated Press | November 2025
“The limited-edition, hand-crafted ornament features the Declaration of Independence, the document the Second Continental Congress used to announce it was breaking away from Britain on July 4, 1776. President Donald Trump has a copy hanging in the Oval Office.”

13. Why do we find our pets so cute? Bold, bin-raiding raccoons may have a surprising answer
By Helen Pilcher | The Guardian | November 2025
“Known for their urban scavenging antics, raccoons are becoming more domesticated – so how they look will gradually change.”

14. (Some) MAGA Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
By Elaine Godfrey | The Atlantic | November 2025
“What does it mean to be female and conservative in 2025?”

15. The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai
By Ed Caesar | The New Yorker | October 2025
“Daniel Kinahan, an Irish drug dealer, commands a billion-dollar empire from the U.A.E. Why isn’t he in prison?”

16. Are millennials frozen out of the housing market? The reality may be more interesting.
By Julie Zauzmer Weil | The Washington Post | November 2025
“An eye-catching report said the average first-time homebuyer is now 40, but the story is more complex.”

17. How Inventors Find Inspiration in Evolution
By Carl Zimmer | The New York Times | November 2025
“Soft batteries and water-walking robots are among the many creations made possible by studying animals and plants.”

18. Rachel Carson
American Experience :: PBS | July 2023
“Drawn from Carson’s own writings, letters and recent scholarship, this film illuminates both the public and private life of the woman who launched the modern environmental movement and revolutionized how we understand our relationship with the natural world.”

19. Eyes Wide Shut: A Sword in the Bed
By Megan Abbott | Criterion Collection | November 2025
“Watching, we feel our own marriages exposed, our own wayward desires unmasked. The movie thus cuts deeply, making us want to avert our eyes, preferring them to remain wide shut.”

20. The Time Machine
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2020
Also see: James Joyce’s Ulysses | The Measurement of Time | Vitruvius and De Architectura | The Siege of Tenochtitlan

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: Monica Lewinsky and #MeToo / The last days of John Kelly? / Remembering the 2017 Oscar disaster / Hitler’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s death tolls / Inside the U.S. embassy in Havana

This week: Monica Lewinsky and #MeToo / The last days of John Kelly? / Remembering the 2017 Oscar disaster / Hitler’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s death tolls / Inside the U.S. embassy in Havana

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. Emerging from ‘the House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #MeToo
By Monica Lewinsky | Hive :: Vanity Fair | February 2018
“On the 20th anniversary of the Starr investigation, which introduced her to the world, the author reflects on the changing nature of trauma, the de-evolution of the media, and the extraordinary hope now provided by the #MeToo movement.”

2. ‘The Newsroom Feels Embarrassed’: Backfires and Explosions at The New York Times as a Possible Future Chief Re-Invents the Paper’s Opinion Pages
By Joe Pompeo | Hive :: Vanity Fair | February 2018
“A yoga-pants refusenik, a climate-science skeptic, and a tech writer with a neo-Nazi pal, among other offenders, have put James Bennet in the crosshairs.”
Also, from the Washington Post: ‘Criticize our work privately’: NYT editorial page chief sends a 1,500-word treatise to colleagues

3. How Long Can John Kelly Hang On?
By Matt Flegenheimer | The New York Times | February 2018
“Last year, Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that if anyone could bring order to the Trump administration, it was the retired four-star Marine general. Were they wrong?”

4. “They Got the Wrong Envelope!”: The Oral History of Oscar’s Epic Best Picture Fiasco
By Scott Feinberg | Hollywood Reporter | February 2018
“One year after the craziest, most improbable and downright embarrassing moment in Academy Awards history, 29 key players open up (many for the first time) about the onstage chaos, backstage bickering and who’s really to blame for Envelopegate and the two minutes and 23 seconds that ‘La La Land’ beat ‘Moonlight.'”
Also, from the Hollywood Reporter: They’re Back: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway to Present Oscars Best Picture

5. Personal Connections with the Civil War West
By Maria Angela Diaz | Muster :: Journal of the Civil War Era | February 2018
“While listening to the papers of my own panel, walking around the book exhibit, and attending several of the other panels, it got me thinking about being a Mexican-American woman, a historian of the Civil War era, and how I’ve related to, or at times not been able to relate to, the field that I’ve chosen to study.”

6. How showing vulnerability helps build a stronger team
By Daniel Coyle | Ideas :: TED.com | February 2018
“If you’d like trust to develop in your office, group or team — and who wouldn’t? — the key is sharing your weaknesses”

7. When Government Drew the Color Line
By Jason DeParle | The New York Review of Books | February 2018
“Government agencies used public housing to clear mixed neighborhoods and create segregated ones. Governments built highways as buffers to keep the races apart. They used federal mortgage insurance to usher in an era of suburbanization on the condition that developers keep blacks out. From New Dealers to county sheriffs, government agencies at every level helped impose segregation — not de facto but de jure.”

8. The Instagram matchmaking queer women via old school personal ads
By Biju Belinky | Dazed Digital | February 2018
“Spoiler alert: it’s led to cross-country love affairs”

9. The Sound and the Fury: Inside the Mystery of the Havana Embassy
By Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella | ProPubilica | February 2018
“More than a year after American diplomats began to suffer strange, concussion-like symptoms in Cuba, a U.S. investigation is no closer to determining how they were hurt or by whom, and the FBI and CIA are at odds over the case.”

10. Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?
By Ian Johnson | The New York Review of Books | February 2018
“[T]he Hitler and Stalin numbers invite questions that Mao’s higher ones do not. Should we let Hitler, especially, off the hook for combatant deaths in World War II? It’s probably fair to say that without Hitler, there wouldn’t have been a European war.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Trump and Putin / Da Vinci’s genius / Sexism and Clinton’s culpability / Tracing your Texas ancestry / A trans woman’s journey as Beyonce

This week: Trump and Putin / Da Vinci’s genius / Sexism and Clinton’s culpability / Tracing your Texas ancestry / A trans woman’s journey as Beyonce

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. Why Putin Keeps Outsmarting Trump
By John McLaughlin | Politico Magazine | Nov. 17
“The Kremlin leader is trained to lie. Trust me, I ran the CIA: Believing anything he says is folly.”
Also, from The Economist: America’s foreign policy: embrace thugs, dictators and strongmen

2. Puerto Rico’s DIY Disaster Relief
By Molly Crabapple | NYT Daily :: The New York Review of Books | Nov. 17
“Two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit, aid remained a bureaucratic quagmire, mismanaged by FEMA, the FBI, the US military, the laughably corrupt local government. The island looked like it was stuck somewhere between the nineteenth century and the apocalypse. But leftists, nationalists, socialists … were stepping up to rebuild their communities.”

3. Trump era sparks new debate about nuclear war authority
By Robert Burns | Associated Press | Nov. 19
“[W]hat would happen if an American president ordered a nuclear strike, for whatever reason, and the four-star general at Strategic Command balked or refused, believing it to be illegal?”

4. Latino vote
By Bill Lambrecht | San Antonio Express-News | Nov. 19
“Latino success in Virginia and across the country in recent elections continued a run of historic victories in 2017 and left leaders confident of their strategy heading into mid-term elections next year.”

5. What Made Leonardo da Vinci a Genius?
By Simon Worrall | National Geographic | Nov. 4
“Hint: The great Italian artist was interested in everything.”

6. Sexism on America’s Front Lines
By Susan B. Glasser | Politico Magazine | Nov. 6
“Six top national security pros sound off about an adversary closer to home: piggish men.”
Also, from The Atlantic: What Hillary Knew: Hillary Clinton once tweeted that ‘every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.’ What about Juanita Broaddrick?
Also, from the Guardian: I saw how we failed Bill Clinton’s accusers. We can’t do that again
Also, from the New York Post: Let’s just cancel the Oscars

7. ‘Everybody’s Cousins’: Tracing San Antonio Ancestry To 1718 And Beyond
By Norma Martinez | Texas Public Radio | Nov. 17
“A lot of South Texans can trace their ancestry back to 1718 and beyond. For those who can’t, a nonprofit is making it easier to follow their family tree.”

8. Becoming Beyoncé On Stage Helped One Trans Woman Come Into Her Own
By Danny Nett | Fandoms :: NPR | Nov. 19
“At first, she didn’t even have a strong, personal connection to Beyoncé the way people might expect, she says. That came later.”

9. Get lost in this visualization of interconnected global issues
By Robbie Gonzalez | Wired | Nov. 13
“[T]here’s more to Knowledge Maps than pretty diagrams. In fact, the tool’s utility becomes clear when you explore its less-mesmerizing features: a series of summaries and content feeds curated partly by humans and partly by machines.”

10. The Making of an American Nazi
By Luke O’Brien | The Atlantic | December 2017
“How did Andrew Anglin go from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist—and how might he be stopped?”

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