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
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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
Stillness of Heart 
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