Reading – Stillness of Heart

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

How TikTok keeps scrollers scrolling / Russia learns from its mistakes in Ukraine / Expats build new lives in Asia / The women who made Theodore Roosevelt / The beauty of Zeno’s Paradoxes

This week: How TikTok keeps scrollers scrolling / Russia learns from its mistakes in Ukraine / Expats build new lives in Asia / The women who made Theodore Roosevelt / The beauty of Zeno’s Paradoxes

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. The Civil-Military Crisis Is Here
By Tom Nichols | The Atlantic | October 2025
“The leaders of the U.S. military may soon face a terrible decision.”

2. The Cat Who Woke Me Up
By Sy Safransky | The Sun | October 2025
“Even though my brain is confused and I’m struggling, always struggling, to see if my writing is good, I still want to write. And the writing that matters the most to me isn’t about Alzheimer’s. It’s about a cat. A cat who woke me up. A cat who changed my life.”

3. Karen Attiah on getting fired by ‘The Washington Post’
By Tom Jones | The Poynter Report Podcast | October 2025
“Attiah reflects on her 11-year career at the Post, including her early work setting social media policy, championing global press freedom and editing the late Jamal Khashoggi. She shares her perspective on the Post’s ideological shift, its new editorial mission and what she believes was a betrayal of the journalistic values she once upheld.”

4. Cumbia Across Latin America
NPR | October 2025
“Following a musical genre that continues to evolve and inspire celebration.”

5. How Russia recovered
By Dara Massicot | Foreign Affairs | October 2025
“What the Kremlin is learning from the war in Ukraine.”

6. Britain’s once-mighty Conservative Party is battling to avoid extinction
By Jill Lawless | Associated Press | October 2025
“The center-right party that governed the U.K. for more than 60 of the last 100 years before being ousted in 2024 is embracing Donald Trump -style policies, including mass deportations and government budget-slashing, as it battles to remain a contender for power.”

7. ‘Impact editor’ is a relatively new job, and it’s already changing
By Hanaa’ Tameez | Nieman Lab | October 2025
“Newsrooms can try to define impact even at the beginning of the reporting process, impact editors say.”

8. Trump or no Trump, Europe’s relationship with the US will never recover
By Nathalie Tocci | The Guardian | September 2025
“Optimists cling to a faith in the old alliance, but the best we can achieve is an amicable divorce.”

9. A complete digitization of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Codex Atlanticus,’ the largest collection of his drawings & writings
Open Culture | October 2025
“He approached everything he did as a technician. The uncanny effects he achieved in painting were the result, as in so much Renaissance art, of mathematical precision, careful study, and firsthand observation.”

10. How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day
By Caitlin Gilbert, Richard Sima, Leslie Shapiro, Aaron Steckelberg and Clara Ence Morse | The Washington Post | October 2025
“More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling.”

11. Inside Asia’s best countries for expats
By Lindsey Galloway | BBC News | October 2025
“Affordable living, vibrant cultures and career opportunities are drawing expats to Asia – and many say they’ve never been happier.”

12. 18 Well-Read People on How They Find the Time For Books
By Jasmine Vojdani | The Cut :: New York Magazine | October 2025
“One thing that came up over and over: the relentless, almost inescapable attention-zapping evil of the phone. If technology is waging a war on our attention spans, these soldiers are well-prepared for the fight.”

13. Our Most Macho President Owed Everything to Women
By Edward F. O’Keefe | Politico Magazine | May 2024
“You can’t know the real TR without knowing the women who shaped him.”

14. With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks?
By Windsor Johnston | NPR | September 2025
“AI chatbots, marketed as ‘mental health companions,’ are drawing in people priced out of therapy, burned by bad experiences, or just curious to see if a machine might be a helpful guide through problems.”

15. Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’
By Stephen Castle | The New York Times | September 2025
“The highly intelligent cephalopods filled fishing nets and gobbled up crabs and lobsters in Devon and Cornwall this summer.”

16. A good shower is a simple shower, no matter what influencers recommends
By Kenya Hunter | Associated Press | September 2025
“The multistep processes that have inspired people to spend endless amounts of time sudsing up can harm your skin — and the environment. Dermatologists say it’s all mostly unnecessary.”

17. When Jon Stewart took over ‘The Daily Show,’ satire became a trusted news source
By Ciara O’Rourke | The Poynter 50 | June 2025
“Fed up with ‘partisan hackery,’ Stewart trumped traditional media for some fans — even with a show that followed ‘puppets making crank phone calls.’”

18. Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So?
By Christina Caron | The New York Times | September 2025
“A campus movement aims to find out.”

19. Y Tu Mamá También: Dirty Happy Things
By Charles Taylor | The Criterion Collection | August 2014
“Hovering on the verge of obnoxiousness, they are basically grubby innocents. Like dirty-minded virgins, they’re excited by each joint, every beer, every chance for sex, as if it were their first time. On middle-aged men, the funk of cigarettes and beer and sweat and sex smells of failure; on Tenoch and Julio, it’s the perfume of youth.”

20. Fungi
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2017-2020
Also see: Garibaldi and the Risorgimento | Johannes Kepler | Parasitism | Zeno’s Paradoxes

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Reading faster / Biden’s foreign policy challenges / Remembering a slave’s death in a pandemic / The rise of freebirthing / The fall of Rome and the fall of America

This week: Reading faster / Biden’s foreign policy challenges / Remembering a slave’s death in a pandemic / The rise of freebirthing / The fall of Rome and the fall of America

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’s next for America’s favorite news podcast
By Kerry Flynn | CNN Business | December 2020
“[W]ith an incoming president who ran on restoring normalcy to a chaotic White House, what remains to be decided is whether listeners will still flock to ‘The Daily’ for deep dives and explanations of the news.”

2. How to Read Faster
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | March 2020
“You tend to read faster by reading more.”

3. Biden faces a changed world and no end of foreign policy challenges from China to Iran
By Karen DeYoung | The Washington Post | December 2020
“Biden faces competing priorities, congressional hurdles and wary, if welcoming, allies. In some cases, such as with North Korea and Venezuela, the most daunting obstacle to foreign policy success is the one that has bedeviled several presidents before him. There are no good options.”

4. How to Talk to Yourself
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | April 2020
“Research suggests that people with low self-esteem who try to force positive self-talk can end up feeling worse.”

5. A Brief Appreciation of the Incest Gnocchi Scene in The Godfather: Part III
By Roxana Hadadi | Vulture :: New York Magazine | December 2020
“In the kitchen of Vincent’s club, though, Mary stops being his ‘little cousin’ and asserts herself as the executor of her own desires. She is a young woman discovering her sexuality, and I’m sorry, who wouldn’t fall for a man who makes his own pasta?”
Also see, from Vulture: In Conversation: Francis Ford Coppola

6. Cicely was young, Black and enslaved – her death during an epidemic in 1714 has lessons that resonate in today’s pandemic
By Nicole S. Maskiell | The Conversation | December 2020
“Throughout the United States, as COVID-19 affects frontline workers and communities of color far more than other demographic groups … I believe it’s important to look back at how a few marginalized and oppressed people who served on the front lines of prior epidemics have been treated and remembered. ”

7. ‘Women feel they have no option but to give birth alone’: the rise of freebirthing
By Hannah Summers | The Guardian | December 2020
“As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is laboring without midwives or doctors the answer?”

8. The Social Life of Forests
By Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | December 2020
“Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?”

9. America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late?
By Tim Elliott | Politico Magazine | November 2020
“Two thousand years ago, the famous Republic had a chance to reject a dangerous populist. It failed, and the rest is history.”

10. The Amazon has seen our future
The New York Times | October 2020
“We’ve been talking about ‘saving the rainforest’ for decades, but trees are still burning, oil is still spilling, and dams are still being built. Today, the people of the Amazon are living through the most extreme versions of our planet’s most urgent problems.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

A new Canary island … Scorsese’s best … al-Qaida in Africa … Bachmann’s journey … Girl gangs

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. Canary Island volcano: A new island in the making?
By Rob Hugh-Jones | The World and BBC News | Dec. 3
“An undersea volcano erupting just south of Spain’s Canary Islands may be the beginnings of a new island, or an extension to an existing one. For some, it’s a colourful spectacle — for others a major blow to their livelihood.”

2. Martin Scorsese’s greatest movies
By Matt Zoller Seitz | Salon | Dec. 3
“‘Raging Bull’s’ a contender, and ‘Taxi Driver.’ Which other films round out the iconic director’s best?”

3. Dreaming May Help Relieve a Bad Day
My HealthNewsDaily | Nov. 23
“The results show that during nighttime dreaming, also known as REM sleep, the brain processes emotional experiences in a ‘safe’ environment, or one in which stress chemicals are low. This processing may take the emotional edge off of difficult memories, the researchers said.”

4. Candy, cash — al-Qaida implants itself in Africa
By Rukmini Callimachi and Martin Vogl | Associated Press | Dec. 4
“The terrorist group has create a refuge in this remote land through a strategy of winning hearts and minds, described in rare detail by seven locals in regular contact with the cell.”

5. Bachmann, from Waterloo to White House contender
By Adam Geller | Associated Press | Dec. 3
“The choreographed repetition of modern presidential campaigns can turn the most personable candidate into an endless loop of talking points. But any close observer of Bachmann’s political career would be hard-pressed to dismiss her as two-dimensional.”

6. Plastic Bag Bans Spreading Across The United States
By Jordan Howard | The Huffington Post | Dec. 1
“Four cities in Oregon — Eugene, Corvallis, Newport and Ashland — are considering banning plastic bags at retail stores. The towns would join at least 10 other U.S. cities and counties that have prohibited plastic bags since 2008.”

7. Interesting readers, as well as writers
By Sarah Sweeney | Harvard Gazette | Dec. 1
“Book focuses on leading authors and the books they love”

8. Chelsea Clinton, Living Up to the Family Name
By Amy Chozick | The New York Times | Dec. 3
“Her move to television was a career shift she initiated, having her close advisers arrange interviews with top network executives and at one point working with the powerful Creative Artists Agency.”

9. Which Faulkner Novels Should HBO Adapt?
By David Haglund | Browbeat :: Slate | Dec. 2
“Clearly this is a question for true Faulkner aficionados, so I posed it to a handful of writers who know his work intimately—starting with a novelist who’s no slouch himself when it comes to literary adaptations.”

10. Rise of the girl gangs
By Brad Hamilton | The New York Post | Dec. 3
“As ‘crews’ proliferate in New York’s housing projects, officials worry about the increasing brutality of all-female wolfpacks”

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TUNES

My soundtrack for today included:
1. LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY Donna Summer
2. POSSESSION Sarah McLachlan
3. ELSEWHERE (The Freedom Sessions) Sarah McLachlan
4. EROTICA Madonna
5. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS Foreigner
6. WAIT (The Whisper Song) Ying Yang Twins
7. KILOMETER Sebastien Tellier
8. THE ORBITING SUNS Jens Gad
9. PUNCH DRUNK Sade
10. LINGER The Cranberries

Rebecca Aguilar

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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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