Nowhere dense graph classes, introduced by Nesetril and Ossona de Mendez, are a broad family of sparse graph classes for which many algorithmic problems which are hard in general become tractable. In particular, model checking first-order logic is fixed-parameter tractable over such classes, as shown recently by Grohe, Kreutzer, and Siebertz. With the aim of finding generalizations of this result to dense graph classes, I will talk about some recent developments in the study of the connections between nowheredenseness and stability (developed by Shelah).