Venice by Antonio Mara
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A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI’S
I
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
II
Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
III
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call
. . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all.
IV
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
V
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?
VI
Well, and it was graceful of them—they'd break talk off and afford
—She, to bite her mask's black velvet—he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
VII
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—"Must we die?"
Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! we can but try!
VIII
"Were you happy?" —"Yes."—"And are you still as happy?"—"Yes. And you?"
—"Then, more kisses!"—"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?"
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!
IX
So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
"I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!”
X
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
XI
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve.
XII
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
"The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
XIII
"Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you'll not die, it cannot be!
XIV
“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
XV
Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
~ Robert Browning, first published in 1855 in the collection Men and Women
Oriana:
Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785) was an organist at Saint Mark's.
A toccata is a “touch piece” meant to display virtuosity. And this poem too is Browning’s virtuoso piece — note that the rhyme scheme requires the closing word of the first line of each tercet must rhyme two more time, and yet the rhymes don’t appear too obvious, do not intrude. On the contrary, they create an enchanting music with a driving rhythm: note how short and simple most of the closing words are. The poem appears to flow by itself.
Given Browning’s erudition, it’s strange that he makes the mistake of calling Galuppi “Baldassaro” instead of the correct “Baldassare.” But this is minor — perhaps Browning imagined the mess that Anglophone speakers would make of “Baldassare.” The poem’s triumph lies in the fact that it takes up the most common theme in poetry: mortality, and manages to deal with it in a fresh way.
First, we need to see the gay splendor of Venice. Browning presents it by describing Venetian women:
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?
We’ll revisit those luscious ladies at the end of the poem.
To me, the poem makes the most sense when considered from the Keatsian perspective of this life as "the Vale of Soul-Making." But some people remain frivolous and superficial. While a true soul may be immortal (for Keats and Browning), Galuppi seems to indicate that only oblivion awaits most. He speaks from the point of view of an artist who entertains the merry revelers, not always respectful enough to cease talking in order to listen to music.
In this poem (itself a poetic toccata) the revelers do listen, relieved when sad music is followed by a lively resolution. But Galuppi’s opinion of them is low:
“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
And the answer is “dust and ashes.” Nor is the English listener, an amateur scientist, assured to be exempt from that fate:
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
"The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
"Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you'll not die, it cannot be!
This is a universal delusion: dying is something that happens to others. As for the afterlife, there is the ambiguous statement: “The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.” And in Galuppi’s eyes, few people have a soul developed enough to be discerned.
Of course it’s a mistake to speak of the soul as a thing rather than a process, a verb — but that’s a separate argument. To enjoy this poem, we need to suspend a scientific viewpoint and enjoy the verbal music and the imagery. Note the marvelous phrase “when the kissing had to stop.” And those “dear dead women” indeed! All that beauty gone, gone, gone — unless it’s preserved in art.
Venice at dusk: Santa Maria delle Salute *
Speaking of soulless party-goers, here is another article on The Great Gatsby
HOW THE GREAT GATSBY WAS SAVED FROM OBLIVION BY WW2
~ One day in 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald stepped into a Los Angeles bookstore hoping to grab a copy of The Great Gatsby. Scouring the shelves, he couldn’t find anything with his name on it. He stopped by another bookstore, and another. At each one, he ran into the same problem. His books weren’t in stock. In fact, they hadn’t been for years.
When The Great Gatsby was printed in 1925, critics roasted it resoundingly. “One finishes Great Gatsby with a feeling of regret, not for the fate of the people in the book but for Mr. Fitzgerald,” wrote Harvey Eagleton of the Dallas Morning News. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud,” chimed the New York World. A critic from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was more pointed. “Why [Fitzgerald] should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been explained satisfactorily to me.”
Readers agreed. The Great Gatsby sold a modest 20,870 copies—nothing like Fitzgerald’s previous best sellers, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned. The literary lemon put the brakes on the author’s extravagant lifestyle. As the decade wore on, his wife’s mental health deteriorated, his marriage collapsed, and his drinking became a disease. Three years after that disappointing visit to the bookstore, he died of a heart attack at 44. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled,” his New York Times obituary said. His funeral was rainy and poorly attended—just like Jay Gatsby’s.
History forgot Fitzgerald while he was still alive, so why do we think of The Great Gatsby as the enduring classic of the Jazz Age? That story begins, and ends, with a world war.
Fitzgerald started writing in 1917 because he thought his days were numbered. World War I was raging, and the Princeton dropout—now an Army infantry second lieutenant stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas—was training to join it. “I had only three months to live,” he recalled thinking, “and I had left no mark in the world.” So every Saturday, promptly at 1:00 p.m., he headed to the fort’s officer’s club, a noisy room clouded with cigarette smoke. There he sat alone at a table in the corner and wrote feverishly. In just three months, he had finished the draft of a 120,000-word novel called The Romantic Egoist.
The story was largely based on his own heartbreak. For two years, Fitzgerald, who’d grown up in the Midwest and was the son of a failed furniture salesman, had traded love letters with a rich Chicago debutante named Ginevra King. But on a fateful visit to King’s estate, he reportedly heard her father say, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” Soon after, the two broke up and King married a wealthier man. The experience scarred Fitzgerald, who became fixated on the social barriers—wealth and class—that had undermined what he thought was love.
He couldn’t get the book published, and soon he was transferred to a new base in Alabama, where he met and fell for another rich girl: Zelda Sayre. They courted and got engaged. As soon as the war ended, Fitzgerald left for New York City.
There, he settled for a job writing advertising copy for $90 a month while trying to write more ambitiously in his spare time. “I wrote movies. I wrote song lyrics. I wrote complicated advertisement schemes, I wrote poems, I wrote sketches. I wrote jokes,” he recalled in his essay “Who’s Who—And Why.” But all he had to show for it were the 122 rejection slips pinned to his wall. When Zelda learned how broke he was, she ended their engagement.
So Fitzgerald did what any rational twentysomething would do: He moved back in with his parents and tried writing a best-selling novel to win her back. Channeling both heartbreaks, he rewrote The Romantic Egoist. The finished product was This Side of Paradise. When Scribner’s accepted the book, he begged for a quick release. “I have so many things dependent on its success,” he wrote, “including of course a girl.” When it debuted in March 1920, This Side of Paradise sold out in three days. A week later, Zelda married him. At 23, Fitzgerald was suddenly a celebrity. And he’d learned an important lesson: Art imitates life.
Three years later, in the summer of 1923, Fitzgerald started planning his third book. He’d just written The Beautiful and the Damned, a story largely inspired by his relationship with Zelda, and it had been an instant hit. Now, he wanted to write a story set in the 19th-century Midwest. It would have heavy Catholic themes; the characters would include a young boy and a priest. But Fitzgerald needed money. He dismantled that draft, sold bits and pieces to magazines, and started mining life for new ideas.
He carried a notebook everywhere, recording things he observed and overheard. Everyone he met became a potential character, every place a potential setting. He drove friends mad by stopping them mid-sentence and asking them to repeat what they’d said. He saved letters and used them for ideas—especially old letters from Ginevra, which he kept in a folder labeled “Strictly Private and Personal Letters: Property of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Not Manuscript.)”
That stack of papers included a seven-page short story Ginevra had penned. It was about a wealthy woman who ditched an inattentive husband to rejoin an old flame, a self-made tycoon. If that sounds familiar, a similar plot became the central yarn of The Great Gatsby. That wasn’t Ginevra’s only influence on his work. Fitzgerald modeled practically every unobtainable upper-class female character after her, including Daisy Buchanan.
Daisy, like Ginevra, was a coy heartbreaker who turned down love to marry someone rich. When Gatsby reinvents himself as a rich man, she remains impossible to have—just as Ginevra was to Fitzgerald. But she wasn’t his only muse; life with Zelda was just as inspiring. One of the most memorable lines in Gatsby came straight from her mouth: The day their daughter, Scottie, was born, Zelda, in a stupor, looked at her newborn and said, “I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” In the book, Daisy says nearly the same thing.
Despite all the material, writing was slow. Fitzgerald sat in an office above his garage, working on the book while also cranking out short stories to pay the bills. The Fitzgeralds were rich, but their spending habits were out of control. The American economy, after all, was soaring. When the U.S. left World War I, it became Europe’s biggest creditor. People had more money than ever to spend on new amusements like dance halls and movie palaces. Lavish Long Island bashes and the lure of Manhattan speakeasies kept the Fitzgeralds distracted. The parties were wild. At one point, Fitzgerald even punched a plainclothes police officer. "Fitzgerald knocks officer this side of paradise," screamed a newspaper headline.
In a way, though, he was always working. Fitzgerald’s notes on New York’s decadent party scene would become one of Gatsby’s pillars. Fitzgerald apologized to his editor, Max Perkins, for the shenanigans. But he blamed the delay in his manuscript firmly on literary ambition. “I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it,” Fitzgerald told him. “The book will be a consciously artistic achievement.”
Fitzgerald had a hunch that to write the Great American Novel, he’d have to leave America. So that summer, he packed up his family, along with a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and sailed for the French Riviera. The trip afforded him the peace and quiet to finally commit Gatsby to paper. By September, the first draft was finished, and he was confident. “I think my novel is the best American novel ever written,” he wrote to Perkins.
Critics and fans weren’t so sure. Nearly everybody praised Fitzgerald’s lyrical style, but many, like Edith Wharton, didn’t appreciate that Jay Gatsby’s past was a mystery. Others complained that the characters were unlikeable. Isabel Paterson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “This is a book for the season only.”
For two decades, it seemed like Paterson was right. The book vanished into obscurity, taking Fitzgerald and his once-decadent life with it. Then, five years after he died, something unexpected helped launch Gatsby to the top of America’s literary canon—another war.
The United States had been at war for a year when a group of book lovers—authors, librarians, and publishers—had a brilliant idea. Wanting to promote titles that would maintain the country’s morale, they founded the Council on Books in Wartime. Books, they argued, were “weapons in the war of ideas.” In February 1943, they embarked on an ambitious effort: shipping titles to soldiers overseas. The concept was as simple as it was idealistic. While the Nazis were busy burning books, American soldiers would be reading them.
The program was perfectly timed. The latest innovation in publishing—paperbacks—had drastically reduced the cost of printing, and the first batch of Armed Services Edition (ASE) books were shipped to U.S. Army and Navy troops that July. Printed by magazine presses, the books were small enough to fit into fatigue pockets so they could be carried from the mess hall to the deck of a battleship to the trenches. A copy cost only six cents to make.
“Some of the publishers think that their business is going to be ruined,” broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn said of the program in 1944. “But I make this prediction. America’s publishers have cooperated in an experiment that will for the first time make us a nation of book readers.”
He was right. Bored and homesick, servicemen and women devoured the novels. One GI stationed in New Guinea said the books were “as popular as pin-up girls” and read until they fell apart. Sometimes, GIs tore out chapters so their friends could enjoy them at the same time. Before D-Day, commanders ensured that every soldier had a book before setting sail for Normandy.
“You can find boys reading as they’ve never read before,” wrote one Army officer to the council. “Some toughies in my company have admitted without shame that they were reading their first book since they were in grammar school.”
There were a lot of books to read: Altogether, the council distributed 123 million copies of 1,227 titles— The Great Gatsby among them. In 1944, only 120 copies of Gatsby sold. But the ASE would print 155,000. Free to soldiers, the books dwarfed two decades of sales.
Gatsby entered the war effort after Germany and Japan surrendered, but the timing was fortuitous: While waiting to go home, troops were more bored than ever. (Two years after the war ended, there were still 1.5 million people stationed overseas.) With that kind of audience, Gatsby reached readers beyond Fitzgerald’s dreams. In fact, because soldiers passed the books around, each ASE copy was read about seven times. More than one million soldiers read Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel.
“There is no way to determine how many converts to literature—or less elegantly, to reading—were made by the ASE. The fix was free,” Matthew Bruccoli writes in Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions. “Moreover, it seems highly probable that some postwar reputations were stimulated by the introduction of authors in the ASE to readers who had never read them before.”
For Fitzgerald, it was a great reawakening. The author’s death in 1940 had rejuvenated academic interest in his work, and many of his literary friends were already trying to revive his name. But the military program sparked interest among a wider, more general readership. By 1961, The Great Gatsby was being printed expressly for high school classrooms. Today, nearly half a million copies sell each year.
These new converts—and the generations that would follow—saw in Gatsby something that Fitzgerald’s contemporaries had dismissed as short-sighted. Now that the Roaring Twenties were nothing but an echo, the value of Fitzgerald’s work became obvious. He had captured an era that was long gone, but still loomed large in the American psyche. Few people had written about the Jazz Age so colorfully, and few people had captured that feeling of longing for something you couldn’t have. Fitzgerald did it all so well because he had lived it.
Perhaps that feeling of longing resonated with soldiers. Far from home, surrounded by the remnants of war, a book like Gatsby was a means to escape. It had the power to transport a reader back to a prosperous, hopeful world where the champagne flowed freely. Even now, nearly a century later, it still does. ~
But in the main The Great Gatsby presented the raucous parties, the champagne, the frivolity as a façade, and the pursuit of wealth as sordid. It is a novel about the death of the American Dream and the Romantic Dream of one great love that overcomes all obstacles. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy is blinding and unwholesome; the pursuit of wealth it inspires wrecks any moral integrity he may have started with.
I think Balzac and Stendhal would have approved of the plot, which starts with the ambitious poor young man from the provinces. Though perceived as quintessentially American, Gatsby fits well with the European tradition. Still, Gatsby is a clearly an ambitious American young man, starry-eyed (Harold Bloom calls him a “gangster poet”), a positive thinker gone wrong.
Here is Nick’s description of the first impression that Gatsby made on him:
‘It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you s you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.’
A roughneck with a Dream, a boy from the wrong part of town who tries to pass off as elegant and sophisticated — Nick can see through Gatsby and knows that he can never be the social equal of Daisy, born to wealth, whose voice Gatsby himself brilliantly described as being “full of money.” And yet Nick doesn’t despise Gatsby — he appears fascinated by him, and ultimately feels sorry for him.
We still meet young men like that: often from working-class families, imbued with the doctrine that if you work hard enough and are willing to wear the uncomfortable formal shoes and clothes, “you can be anything you want to be.” There’s that “winning” smile on their faces. And they believe they’ll get the girl too, since she’s a prize to be won rather than a complex person with a life of her own.
But life rarely works out as planned. Scott F. Fitzgerald is one of many writers who warn us about that uncomfortable fact. And he masterfully draws up the contrast between appearance and reality, the dream and its defeat. The Great Gatsby reminds me somewhat of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: it’s the universal dream of being loved and the delusion that the beloved must, simply must, fulfill the desires we nurtured through the long years of loneliness. Life is a harsh teacher.
*
THE POST-COVID ERA WON’T BE LIKE THE ROARING TWENTIES
~ If you believe the hype, we’re in for a “Roaring 2020s,” with all of the frivolity, excess and licentiousness of the 1920s, when a wave of euphoria washed over much of the world after the ending of both the influenza pandemic and World War I.
But what we’re about to face is likely to be quite different, says John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, the definitive history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Perhaps we’ll have the post-pandemic economic boom, but there will likely be less of the excess that defined the Roaring ’20s.
“It’ll probably be without the sense of disillusionment, without the wildness, without the fatalism, without the survivor’s guilt, without asking ‘Why am I alive?’” Barry says. “I don’t think anybody who goes on a cruise ship next year is going to be wondering, ‘Why am I alive? How come I made it?’ Psychologically, that was all part of the Roaring ’20s.”
Behind the flappers, bootleggers and Gatsbyesque decadence was a hard-won fatalism that came from the level of loss and devastation wrought by the war and the flu, which, unlike Covid, disproportionately killed younger Americans, contributing to a sense among some who survived that since they could die young, they might as well live hard.
Where the Covid pandemic has stretched on and on, with Americans mostly staying at home for the better part of a year, the flu swept through most cities in a matter of weeks but exacted a much heavier toll. Where Covid has killed roughly 2.7 million people worldwide, the influenza pandemic of 1918-’19 killed 50 million to 100 million people at a time the global population was less than one-fourth its current size.
Barry also notes that the influenza pandemic disproportionately affected young adults, whereas older people have suffered most from Covid. One study by Metropolitan Life found that during the 1918 pandemic, 3.6 percent of all industrial workers ages 25–45 died within the period of a few weeks. “That’s not case mortality; that’s mortality,” Barry says, adding, “In 1918, the deaths among young children were astronomical.”
One similarity between then and now: Like the influenza virus, the novel coronavirus isn’t going to simply disappear. It doesn’t actually depend on human beings in order to survive; it’s ambivalent about whether mankind exists at all.
“This virus seems to pass between people and other mammals very, very easily. That was also true in 1918,” Barry says. In that sense, coronavirus is not unlike the 1918 flu virus, parts of which live on in the seasonal flus we experience every year. It’s a rather sobering reality, says Barry: “This virus is here to stay.”
What can we learn from life after the flu pandemic? What do we get wrong as we salivate about the prospect of another Roaring ’20s? And how do the flu pandemic’s lessons differ from the takeaways of the Covid era?
To sort through it all, POLITICO Magazine spoke with Barry this week. A condensed transcript of that conversation follows, edited for length and clarity.
P: Right now, with vaccines being distributed and the Covid-19 pandemic seemingly in the endgame stage in the U.S., a lot of people are pretty vocal about their hopes for the summer. There’s been speculation about a “roaring 2020s” 100 years after the actual Roaring ’20s. What does your research on the end of the great influenza pandemic tell you about what we’re likely to see in the years ahead?
B: In 1918, the first wave was extraordinarily mild. One statistic largely tells that story: The French army had 40,000 soldiers hospitalized [with the flu] and fewer than 100 deaths — and that’s without modern medicine. That’s the first wave. When the first wave ended, there were actually medical journal articles saying, “It’s gone. It has disappeared.”
The second wave was much more lethal and significantly more intense. It was the one that really counted. In the second wave, the military generally had 10 percent case mortality — and in many instances, much higher. One of the biggest differences between 1918 and today is duration. The second wave would move through a community in six to 10 weeks. It was different.
The other thing is, of course, the war — particularly in Europe. You had 20 million people killed in World War I, [including] almost 10 million soldiers. The United States only lost a little over 50,000 [troops]; the war, in terms of deaths, hardly touched us.
The economy was largely shut down — not so much by government decree, but because of absenteeism: Everything was a war industry. Engineers weren’t available to run railroad trains and things like that. Everything backed up. [President Woodrow] Wilson had turned it into “total war.” Every aspect of society was aimed at winning the war, from self-censorship in the press to laws that made it punishable by 20 years [in prison] to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government” in the United States. Most states banned the teaching of German; sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage” — nonsense like that. Probably more effort went into trying to get Americans to conform their thinking than at any other time in history, including the McCarthy [Red Scare] period.
You also had the utter and total disillusionment worldwide with the peace treaty. Supposedly, we fought the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” etc. And all of the ideals that we claimed to go to war for were abandoned in the peace treaty. John Maynard Keynes called Woodrow Wilson the “greatest fraud on Earth.” Wilson’s top aides — about a dozen of them, several of whom later became secretaries of State — were so disgusted with what Wilson agreed to that they thought about resigning en masse. So, you’ve got the most brutal war in history, fought for the stupidest reasons, with the worst generalship that paid no attention to human life.
The end of the war came as a surprise. Nobody anticipated that it was going to end in the middle of November 1918. Everything was gearing up for a major offensive by the U.S. and its allies in the spring of 1919. The end was really abrupt and unexpected. So, when it did end, there was an extraordinary amount of euphoria — and that occurred, in many cases, almost simultaneously with the end of the pandemic.
The Roaring ’20s was in Europe as well as the United States. How do you separate the war from the pandemic? It’s not really possible. The pandemic was a factor, but I think the war was a bigger factor. That doesn’t mean that the pandemic had no impact.
I do expect a kind of “roaring 2020s” [this time around], but really because of the economic freeing of people. They’ve been penned up for more than a year, and they’re going to want to spend money and celebrate. But it’ll probably be without the sense of disillusionment, without the wildness, without the fatalism, without the survivor’s guilt, without asking “Why am I alive?” I don’t think anybody who goes on a cruise ship next year is going to be wondering, “Why am I alive? How come I made it?” Psychologically, that was all part of the Roaring ’20s.
P: You know, we consider the Roaring ’20s this time of frivolity and excess, but you’re saying that perhaps a more accurate way to think of it is not simply as this moment of elation, but as an almost manic response to living through the Great War and flu pandemic?
The world had come apart. Everybody knew people who died — everybody. And in most cases, they knew a lot of people who died.
What we’re facing today is, of course, quite different. It’s tragic. Most of the people who’ve died were elderly, and I’m certainly in the target demographic this time around myself. But there have been relatively few [fatalities] among otherwise healthy young adults, and practically none among children. In 1918, the deaths among young children were astronomical. I don’t think this statistic has ever been published, but somebody I know did the calculation that children under the age of 5 died at a rate equal today to all-cause mortality for a period of 23 years. That is a lot of kids, and remember, that’s compressed into a time frame of six to 10 weeks. There was a kind of tragedy and terror during the course of the flu pandemic in 1918 that’s just not there today.
In, say, 1925, if you were a European male in your late 20s or early 30s, I guarantee that you felt lucky to be alive since you weren’t killed in the war or pandemic. The United States, again, only lost around 53,000 soldiers, so you didn’t have that same sense of loss, but we did see plenty of tragedy from the pandemic.
P: The Roaring ’20s conjures images of flappers, speakeasies, of The Great Gatsby and the Harlem Renaissance. Undoubtedly, that romanticizes and oversimplifies it. After the flu pandemic, what was life really like for most Americans?
B: You had the economy came back in a very big way. There was a brief recession [in 1921] that was fairly intense. There was dislocation: The war industry stopped producing, there was an abrupt stop to businesses’ profits, and you suddenly had 4 million men in the primes of their working [lives] leaving the military and going back to jobs that might or might not exist. You had a lot of unemployed people.
There was a tremendous amount of racial problems. I think 26 cities had major race riots, including a very significant one in Chicago. Tulsa. Elaine, Arkansas, had a massacre. Black troops had been treated much better in France than they were in the United States. The Klan had many millions of members. They took over states from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. In 1924 at the Democratic National Convention, the issue of whether or not to condemn the Klan’s violence failed [in a vote by delegates]. There was plenty of anti-immigrant sentiment. [Congress] passed anti-immigration legislation unlike any we’ve seen before or since.
A lot of things that weren’t great went on in the 1920s, particularly in the first five years. It wasn’t just the “Roaring ’20s.”
P: As the pandemic drew down, were people concerned about the possibility of new variants of the flu?
B: No. The scientific community didn’t know what a “virus” was; the definition of “virus” came out of flu pandemic research, but not until 1925. In fact, you could argue, as I did in my book, that the discovery that DNA carried the genetic code actually came out of research on influenza, but not until 1944.
They knew there were very small organisms that passed through the smallest filters, but they didn’t know if they were bacteria or a different kind of organism. They understood that bacteria could mutate and change as they passed through people and reproduced. They recognized, in retrospect, that it was the same virus in the first wave and the second wave, but that it had changed. However, it then began to mutate in the direction of ordinary influenza viruses. There was a third wave in the spring of 1919, and it was pretty lethal, but nothing like the second wave. The virus hung around, and viruses circulating today are still descendants of the 1918 influenza virus — some elements of it, anyway.
P: In your book, The Great Influenza, you wrote about how the pandemic didn’t really end all at once, but gradually faded away into the early 1920s. Should we have similar expectations about coronavirus?
B: Yeah. Certainly, the consensus view is that this thing is here to stay. There are a couple of reasons for that. Number one: The vaccines are not 100 percent effective. Number two: There’s going to be a significant number of people who will never get vaccinated.
We may still reach “herd immunity,” but the virus will still circulate. That’ll be especially true once you get outside the developed world, where vaccines will be widely available. Once you get into parts of South America and Africa and India … I mean, India produces as much vaccine as any country in the world, but to vaccinate 80 percent of its population [of 1.38 billion people], that’s a pretty big task. There will be a reservoir of people who will never be vaccinated, and among whom the virus can circulate.
In addition, this virus seems to pass between people and other mammals very, very easily. That was also true in 1918. Essentially every mammal was known to be infected by the 1918 influenza virus. Tigers. Moose. Even seals — we don’t know if it infected whales, but it infected seals. It’s pretty clear that we gave the virus to pigs in 1918 in Iowa.
[Similarly,] the coronavirus passes very easily from mammals to humans, and probably passes very easily back to mammals from humans.
P: Several years ago, in a new epilogue for The Great Influenza, you wrote: “In a truly lethal pandemic, state and local authorities could take much more aggressive steps [at mitigation to stop the spread of a virus], such as closing theaters, bars and even banning sports events … and church services.” Have you been surprised by the degree to which taking exactly those measures during this pandemic has proven politically controversial?
Well, I’m disappointed. I don’t know if I’ve been surprised.
I’m disappointed this has been politicized; that didn’t happen in 1918. There were official government sources in 1918 who, in effect, said, “This is a hoax.” They said things like, “This is ordinary influenza by another name.” But nobody believed that, because they saw it. They saw somebody who lived across the street die 24 hours after their first symptoms — sometimes with horrific symptoms.
1918 was so much more lethal [than the Covid-19 pandemic], and it dealt with young people. This time around, very few people who are otherwise healthy and young have died. [The flu] moved fairly slowly around the country. And even though the virus continued to circulate and there was a third wave and so forth, the six- to 10-week period during which it took over a community was pretty distinct. When that period ended and that community reached herd immunity, the flu essentially disappeared. This time, it’s likely to be more gradual.
P: Right, we’re not likely to have a moment like you described taking place in San Francisco on Nov. 21, 1918, when every siren in the city goes off, signaling that people could stop wearing their masks.
B: By the time the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] makes a judgment that masks are no longer necessary, my guess is that 45 states will have already [ended their mask mandates]. There may still be private establishments that require them.
One thing that has struck me is that I never imagined that so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” could be as effective as they have been when properly applied. I participated in early conceptualizing of the pandemic preparedness plan and was actually a skeptic. I thought they were worth doing, I supported them, but I was skeptical about how much impact they would have. I won’t say that this country has proved their effectiveness, but other countries have proved that they can be (literally) unbelievably effective in containing the virus — more than I ever imagined.
P: The big lesson you took away from the flu pandemic was about the importance of truth and need of the government and public officials to tell the truth — which they didn’t in 1918 as they downplayed the threat, and which the press at the time abetted them in doing. Were people at the time aware they were being misled?
B: Oh, they had to be. Sure. Again: “ordinary influenza by another name”? You had, in Philadelphia, almost 15,000 deaths in a few weeks. [Nationally,] it depressed life expectancy by 10 years. Of course they knew they were being lied to.
I think the same lesson has been reinforced. And that’s why we have 554,611 deaths. [current Worldometer]
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/18/roaring-2020s-coronavirus-flu-pandemic-john-m-barry-477016?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
No, the people I know have not really been touched by the tragedy of Covid. The element of desperation that was present in the hard-drinking twenties isn’t apparent. But a lot of things aren’t apparent yet. The post-Covid world will emerge gradually, and will no doubt surprise us in some ways.
Mary: MOST OF US WERE MORE INCONVENIENCED THAN EXISTENTIALLY THREATENED
Whatever comes after this pandemic we can be sure it will not be a return to things as they were. The normal will be a new normal and in many ways unlike the world we were so used to. I don't think it will much resemble the roaring twenties, for many of the reasons already stated. While the toll has been great, the toll of the 1918 Influenza was much greater. While for us the most vulnerable have been the elderly, those with certain pre-existing morbidities (obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease) and communities of color, the 1918 Influenza pandemic took the young and healthy, and, tragically, great numbers of children. At the same time the war was amassing huge numbers of casualties, in Europe if not to such a great extent in the US, — again, young and healthy men were the victims. The third area of difference is the pacing — our pandemic has been a long drawn out waltz of death, numbers accreting daily, monthly, endlessly — people dying slowly, over weeks of suffering, where the Influenza hit hard and fast in bursts, and people could die horribly, over a period short as a day. Both are human catastrophes, but different in how they act and their effects.
There's bound to be celebrating to come, when the worst of it is over, and restrictions lifted. But I doubt it will have that frenzied, feverish wildness of the Roaring Twenties. Most of us were more inconvenienced than existentially threatened. Most of the dead, especially in the early days, were not at the center of our communities, but at the periphery, in nursing homes, a captive population whose very concentration and isolation increased their tragic vulnerability. For them, as for all of us, one of the most painful effects has been lack of human, social contact, not just meeting together, but touch itself, hand to hand, skin to skin, the hugs and kisses we could not give or receive — a terrible deprivation for a social species like ours.
Some things are pretty sure guesses: people will continue online shopping and working from home if they can, at least part of the time; retail stores must adjust or become as empty and irrelevant as the once bustling shopping malls. Employers will have to adjust and restructure — with more working remotely what will be the shape of traditional office space? How will it have to change? Entertainment venues may also need to adjust if people balk at the usual crowd experience of movies, plays, concerts, and no longer feel comfortable in dense crowds.
And there is much to look forward to, I think. The fleets of electric delivery trucks...now seen as not only feasible but economically desirable. We are enormously inventive creatures — it may be our primary defining characteristic — and challenges such as these we face have always spurred us to creative change. I feel much more anticipation than dread. The development of the vaccines themselves, the new approach using RNA, suggests an infinity of new possibilities.
And the future always surprises! Not long ago we worried about the inevitability of population growth outstripping all resources and creating various doomsday scenarios. Now we find population growth stalled or stopped to the point we worry about too few births rather than too many. As noted, everything from groceries to insurance policies are designed with the basic social unit of the family in mind. Now we discover the number of individuals living alone is on the rise, and they have needs that must be addressed, that aren't being met by family-oriented institutions, products and services. Change is the only constant, and the most consistent source of challenge.
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MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE LIVING ALONE; SOCIETY HASN’T CAUGHT UP YET
~ In the past half-century or so, solo living has become a demographic juggernaut. According to a United Nations report, around the world, one-person households are now just as common as households comprised of just a couple with no kids. And across Europe and North America, there are more households consisting of just one person than of couples and their children.
In too many ways, though, societies are experiencing “cultural lag”: they have not caught up with this dramatic evolution in how people are living. There are countless things that need to change. Here I will mention just a few, focusing on the United States.
Housing That Meets the Needs of More People
In North America, 26% of people who are 60 or older live alone. (It’s 27% just for the U.S.) That’s more than every other region of the world except Europe. Older people, as well as many people of all ages with disabilities, need housing that works for them, especially if they live alone. But only 10% of available housing in the U.S. includes features such as step-free entryways and grab bars in bathrooms.
Everyday Services
People who live alone are often quite independent and resourceful. Still, there are certain tasks that are more easily accomplished with help, and other tasks that some solo dwellers just don’t want to do. Platforms such as TaskRabbit and Thumbtack provide some opportunities to find help, but those kinds of options need to be available in more places. And, of course, they need to be affordable.
Accessible Health Care
For some medical procedures, patients are required to have a ride and it can’t be from services such as taxis or Ubers. Sometimes patients need people to stay with them when they are hospitalized or help them when they get home. There are some services available to seniors, but people who live alone who are not seniors face more challenges. It shouldn’t be so difficult, or so expensive, to navigate the logistics of getting medical care.
Packaging of Products
Too often, items are sold in quantities that are wasteful to people living alone. In supermarkets, for example, perishable items are sometimes sold in amounts that solo dwellers could never consume before they go bad. It would help if food items were sold in smaller portions and if more items were offered in bulk so that shoppers could buy as much or as little as they wish.
Other kinds of items beyond food, such as housewares, are also sometimes sold in quantities of little interest to people who live alone. That should change, too.
Pricing
People on their own often get charged more per person than couples or families. That’s true for insurance, memberships, cultural events, travel, and probably just about everything else you can think of. That’s a violation of the principle of Fairness for Single People, and it should end.
Recognition of Vulnerabilities
Political leaders, across the political spectrum, are exquisitely sensitive to the needs and wishes of couples and families, especially “working families” and “hardworking families.” That gets taken to ridiculous extremes, as, for example, when a Senator tweeted that Daylight Saving Time should become permanent so as to “give families more sunlight to enjoy after work and school.” Because how could you possibly enjoy sunlight if you are single and live alone?
Headline writers for prestigious publications also use the same language of families that excludes single people. A New York Times article, for example, was introduced with the headline, “Which families will receive the most money from the stimulus bill?” But single people living alone also receive money from the bill.
That sort of language is alienating to the single people who are excluded by it. But more than hurt feelings are at stake. A focus on families can leave policymakers and everyone else oblivious to the real vulnerabilities of solo single people. For example, they can’t fall back on the income from a spouse if they lose their jobs. Surveys show that their needs are more likely to be ignored. During the pandemic, food insecurity has been a bigger problem for single people than for married people with or without children, yet single people have also been less likely to get help alleviating their hunger.
Food insecurity is just one example. In many other ways, too, single people who are not seniors, and who do not have kids, may well be one of the demographics least likely to get the help they need.
Recognition of Strengths
People who live alone have often been stereotyped as isolated and lonely. That pity party has only intensified during the pandemic. Of course, some people who live alone really are isolated and lonely and at risk for compromised physical and mental health. But studies supposedly documenting the risks of living alone often fall down in important ways.
For plenty of people, getting to live alone is a triumph. It is what they always wanted and what they cherish once they attain it. They have their independence as well as their meaningful connections to other people. They are often resourceful and resilient. Their experiences show that the story of the isolated and lonely solo dweller is not the only story that needs to be told.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202103/what-needs-change-now-so-many-people-live-alone
Oriana:
So true. I mourn the food that goes to waste because I'm forced to buy large packages or bundles. Some barely fit in my refrigerator. Speaking of which, it seems that most new refrigerators range from huge to gigantic. “Family” is indeed a key word, a standard of normalcy. The use of that word is ubiquitous in advertising. Single people of all ages are shown in countless ways that they simply don’t count.
Now and then living alone does create a practical hardship. This is where being networked with neighbors and friends really pays off. But most of the time, I agree that “getting to live alone is a triumph.” Living alone spoils you — you don’t have to adjust to someone else’s schedule and special needs. This is especially true for people who work from home — and there will be more and more of us.
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“Single-person households increased fivefold since 1960, from 7 million to 36 million. The population living with at least one other person hasn't even doubled during that period.”
https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-02-14/the-state-of-american-households-smaller-more-diverse-and-unmarried
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"What we learned in 2020? That oil is worthless in a society without consumption. That healthcare has to be public because health is public. That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid. That we live in a society, not an economy." (floating around Facebook, it seems to have become anonymous. I copied it from the page of Michael Marinelli)
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SOME PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO GO “BACK TO NORMAL”
~ Let's begin by saying there's no one on the planet who wants COVID-19 to continue ravaging the world. The past year has been one of unspeakable tragedy and it will be years before we realize what effects it had on humanity's collective physical and mental health.
But as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, some people aren't so sure they want to return to life as it was before the pandemic. They may keep it to themselves, but the sentiment is definitely out there.
Many started working from home and now love the freedom that comes with having a five-second commute and loathe the idea of returning to a life where they have to waste an hour on "looking good" every morning.
For some, the idea of returning back to their old social habits seems uncomfortable. First, no matter how effective the vaccine is, it's going to be incredibly disconcerting to be around maskless people in close quarters, like in a bar or at a concert. We've all developed natural knee-jerk reactions to people being too close and it'll be really tough to unlearn what's been ingrained for a year.
The vast majority of us went from having a healthy relationship with the world around us to living in a constant state of social distancing vigilance over the course of a week. That's going to be hard to undo.
Many people are secretly relieved they've had the perfect excuse to avoid daily social interactions over the past year. They were able to avoid the relatives that get on their nerves or didn't have to hang out with their significant other's friends they never really liked in the first place.
For others, the lockdown was an eye-opening experience, because they realized they were happier not dealing with some of the toxic people in their lives. Going back to normal social life means having to either re-engage with people who might trigger us or suffer the discomfort that comes with ending the relationship.
Reentering the social world also means having to confront temptations that we were able to avoid for an entire year, whether it's drugs, sex, smoking, gambling, or ordering an extra dessert while eating out.
A lot of people are feeling anxious about things returning to "normal" because they now realize they weren't happy before the pandemic.
Whether you are hesitant for things to go back to normal or ready to rip your front door off its hinges, we should all take these (hopefully!) final few months of COVID-19 to recognize that we've all been through a severely traumatizing time. Now's a great time to take some personal inventory, consider where we were before the pandemic, and where we're headed.
"It becomes a very anxiety-producing moment in the life of a survivor when they return to normal," Deborah Serani, a psychologist, and professor at Adelphi University told Today. "Except now, with the pandemic, we're all doing that."
"We are emerging from this together, globally," Serani said. "It's OK to be gentle with yourself. It's OK to feel unsure. It's OK to feel insecure. It's OK to say, 'How do I do this dance? I don't remember.' It's OK to feel anxious and nervous. You're not alone in that."
If you're feeling anxious about life returning to normal, take solace in the idea that you're not the only one. In fact, everyone has to carry some anxiety about the big changes on the horizon.
Also, remember that you're not in this alone. COVID-19 has affected everyone. So there will be plenty of people out there that you can throw your arm around tight — for the first time in months — and ask, "Ready to go out?"
https://www.upworthy.com/americas-dirty-little-secret-a-lot-of-people-dont-want-to-go-back-to-normal
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SHAMELESSLY QUOTING MYSELF: THE NORMAL IS NOT NORMAL
Oriana:
What startles me is that the very richest people have, if they coordinated together, the resources to wipe out poverty, if they wanted to — or to significantly advance biomedical research so as to wipe out various diseases, or transform a developing country by introducing solar energy to power every household — again, if they wanted to, if enough of them had the desire to do something wonderful for humanity.
Now, should such stupendous things depend on a whim of a super-rich person? OK, so X has enough wealth to wipe out malaria —but the project just doesn't excite him enough. And that’s just one instance of the many kinds of insanity pervading our economic and political systems. I almost want to agree with many of the Millennials: the “normal” is not normal — it’s irrational and often harmful, and needs to be reformed for the sake of the common good — or, more urgently, if humanity is to survive beyond two generations from now.
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“I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.” ~ Werner Herzog
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MIKHAIL GORBACHEV TURNS 90
~ If not for him the old Soviet Union would still be in existence today. And the former Soviet citizens among us would still (if still alive) continue their/our unsuccessful, eternally doomed attempts to escape its dark domain. History's timeline is much longer than the natural course of any ordinary human life.
It hadn't been his original intent to destroy the unspeakable, slowly dying USSR -- he only wanted to make it marginally more livable... and thus, more solvent financially. But the thoroughly unnatural political system, that menacingly rumbling rusted machine, was not amenable to change of any kind; it depended on being left completely alone for its continued survival -- and in the process of attempting to rejuvenate it he greatly accelerated its demise. He tried to save it -- and by doing so, he finished it off.
On balance, the world owes him a debt of gratitude. ~ Mikhail Iossel
Gorbachev at 90
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“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.” ~ Thomas Sowell
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THE IRISH-JEWISH CONNECTION
~ The story of the original 5th century Patrick, who became the patron saint of Ireland, has numerous parallels to the Biblical stories of Joseph and Moses. Like those two, Patrick spent a significant part of his youth in captivity, during which time he worked as a shepherd and spent hours communing with the Lord. Patrick also had his own burning bush moment, when he saw a vision of a letter carrier handing him a missive titled “The Voice of the Irish.” When he read the letter, he could hear the voices of the people of Ireland crying out to him, “We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.” Eventually, Patrick became a spiritual leader in Ireland, converting thousands of pagans to Christianity. But he was always something of a foreigner, having been born in Roman England. Both Joseph and Moses, being strangers in the land of Egypt even when they served the Pharaoh, could certainly relate.
Perhaps St. Patrick is most remembered for having chased the snakes out of Ireland – how else to explain why there aren’t any snakes there? Moses and Aaron, of course, had their own bit of fun with snakes, as recounted in Exodus 8-13, wherein at Moses’s prodding, Aaron turns his staff into a snake, which then proceeds to eat all the Egyptian necromancers’ staffs-turned-into-snakes.
In modern times, the Irish Gaelic language has been superseded in large part by English as the first language spoken in and out of Ireland by the Irish people, much like what has happened to Yiddish among Jews of Ashkenazi origin.
Throughout my youth, I kept hearing that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish. In fact, in 1956, [Robert Briscoe] became the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, although he was not the first Jewish Mayor in Ireland. That title belongs to William Annyas, who was elected Mayor of Youghal, County Cork, in 1555. Briscoe, born to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants Abraham William “Briscoe” Cherrick and Ida Yoedicke, was active in the Irish Republican Army and a member of Sinn Féin. He was a colleague of Irish nationalists Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins. Briscoe served in the Irish parliament for nearly 40 years, from 1927 to 1965. Upon his retirement, his son, Ben, took over his seat in parliament, where he served for a further 37 years.
Briscoe was also an admirer and friend of Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The Irish and the Jews share the historical experience of having had their modern nations forged in uprisings against English colonialism. Jabotinsky made a pilgrimage to Ireland, where he received training from Briscoe in guerrilla tactics to use against the English in Palestine. Later on, Briscoe advised Menachem Begin on how to transition his paramilitary organization, the Irgun, into a political party, which became Herut, the main party of the Likud coalition.
After learning that the Lord Mayor of Dublin was Jewish, Yogi Berra allegedly said, “Only in America!”
Irish music is really just klezmer with an Irish accent. Irish vocalist Susan McKeown has recorded and performed with the Grammy Award-winning klezmer outfit The Klezmatics. Before joining the group, Lisa Gutkin was best known as a leading fiddler on the Irish music scene, having performed or recorded with the likes of Tommy Sands, John Whelan, Steve Cooney, and Cathie Ryan.
Historian Shaylyn Esposito, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, says that what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish brisket thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Irish originally ate a dry, salted beef that came from England. When they came to America and began shopping at kosher butchers on the Lower East Side, they discovered brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow, the salting and slow cooking of which transforms the meat into the extremely tender, moist, flavorful corned beef we know of today.
Writing of Jewish-Irish affinities, Esposito also notes, “It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece ‘Ulysses’, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents.”
The annual Israel Independence Day Parade in New York City was clearly modeled after the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, both of which are essentially celebrations of ethnic pride.
Irish-Jewish love affairs have been celebrated in American popular culture at least as far back as the 1922 Broadway comedy, “Abie’s Irish Rose,” about an Irish Catholic girl and a young Jewish man who marry despite the objections of their families. The play is said to have inspired the husband-and-wife comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and its premise formed the basis of the controversial 1972-73 TV series, “Bridget Loves Bernie.”
In fact, not all immigrant Jews came directly from the Pale of Settlement to the Lower East Side in the late 19th century. Some came by way of Ireland, where they picked up enough of an identity to form the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin. As one member told an interviewer from NPR in 2013, “There’s nothing quite like listening to Yiddish spoken with [an Irish accent].” (For years, Stiller and Meara performed at the group’s annual banquets.)
Last word goes to the Irish-Jewish Tin Pan Alley songwriting duo, William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, who celebrated Irish-Jewish kinship in their 1912 song, “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews”:
What would this great Yankee nation really really ever do
If it wasn’t for a Levy, a Monahan or Donohue
Where would we get our policemen
Why Uncle Sam would have the blues
Without the Pats and Isadores
There’d be no big department stores
If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews
Talk about a combination, heed my words and make a note
On St. Patrick’s Day Rosinsky pins a shamrock on his coat
There’s a sympathetic feeling between the Blooms and McAdoos
Why Tammany would surely fall, there’d really be no Hall at all
If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/the-secret-jewish-history-of-st-patrick-s-day-1.9628453?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=haaretz-news&utm_content=06a0cebff3
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WAS THE EARTH ONCE A WATER WORLD?
Scientists theorize that some exoplanets – worlds orbiting distant suns – might be water worlds, rocky planets completely covered by global oceans. This month, a researcher at Harvard University published new evidence that Earth itself was once a water world, with its own global ocean and very little, if any, visible land. Planetary scientist Junjie Dong at Harvard is lead author on the new paper, which focuses on the amount of water present in Earth’s mantle, the layer of rock between our planet’s crust and core. These results were published on March 9, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal AGU Advances.
You probably learned in school that Earth’s water cycle is the continuous movement of water: from evaporation at the ocean surface to the atmosphere – to falling rain that fills rivers and lakes, contributes to glaciers, polar ice caps and reservoirs below ground – and, often much later on a human timescale, ends up in the oceans again. But we don’t as often think of the important role played by water in processes below ground. For example, water content in magma determines how explosive a volcano can be, and water plays an important role in the formation and migration of petroleum.
Seawater also percolates down into oceanic crust. There, it hydrates igneous rocks, transforming them into what are called hydrous minerals. It’s in this form that water is carried farther down into the mantle. Dong’s paper explained the thought processes his team used to conclude that Earth was once a water world:
‘At the Earth’s surface, the majority of water resides in the oceans, while in the interior, major rock-forming minerals can incorporate significant amounts of water … The amount of water that can be dissolved in Earth’s mantle minerals, called its water storage capacity, generally decreases at higher temperatures. Over billion-year timescales, the exchange of water between Earth’s interior and surface may control the surface oceans’ volume change.
Here, we calculated the water storage capacity in Earth’s solid mantle as a function of mantle temperature. We find that water storage capacity in a hot, early mantle may have been smaller than the amount of water Earth’s mantle currently holds, so the additional water in the mantle today would have resided on the surface of the early Earth and formed bigger oceans.
Our results suggest that the long-held assumption that the surface oceans’ volume remained nearly constant through geologic time may need to be reassessed.’
Today, about 71% of Earth’s surface is covered by water. But a few billion years ago, there may have been little to no surface land visible at all.
Deep underground on Earth today, water is stored in two high-pressure forms of the volcanic mineral olivine: hydrous wadsleyite and ringwoodite. That water is thought to be in the form of hydroxyl group compounds, which are made up of oxygen and hydrogen atoms.
Knowledge about those minerals’ storage capacities has, until now, been based on the high temperatures and pressures inside the mantle on our modern-day Earth. But Dong wanted to go a step further, and figure out the storage capacity across a wider range of temperatures. Why? Because when the Earth was younger, the mantle was significantly hotter than it is today, which means that it had less storage capacity for water than it does now. The results indicated that both of those minerals have lower storage capacities for water at higher temperatures. If the mantle couldn’t hold as much water, then where did the water go? The surface, Dong said:
That suggests the water must have been somewhere else. And the most likely reservoir is the surface.
The storage capacity of the mantle also began to increase over time due to olivine minerals crystallizing out of magma.
This suggests that most of Earth’s water was on the surface at that time, during the Archean Eon between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago, with much less in the mantle. The planet’s surface may have been virtually completely covered by water, with no land masses at all.
But then where did all that excess water go? Much of it probably seeped into the mantle as the storage capacity of the mantle began to increase when the temperatures inside the mantle gradually cooled. That process has continued until there was the amount of water left on the surface – in all the oceans, seas and lakes – that we see today. Whereas, according to the new study, water once covered at least close to 100% of Earth’s surface, now it covers only 71%.
There was also a previous study from last year that indicated that 3.2 billion years ago, Earth had much less surface land than it does now. Those findings were based on an abundance of certain isotopes of oxygen that were preserved in a geological record of the early ocean.
These new results not only provide a glimpse of what Earth used to be like as a water world, but also have implications for other water worlds in our solar system such as Europa, Enceladus and other ocean moons. Those moons are different from Earth, however, in that their global oceans are covered by crusts of ice. In many ways they are similar to the ice-covered ocean environments at Earth’s poles.
There are several such ocean moons known in our solar system. Even some dwarf planets like Ceres and Pluto had subsurface oceans and may still today. With thousands of exoplanets being discovered, and estimated to be in the billions in our galaxy alone, how many moons are out there? Likely more than we can easily count right now, and if our solar system is any indication, many of those moons may also be ocean worlds.
Other evidence points to the probable existence of many other ocean worlds (planets) as well, ones more like Earth when it was covered by water. Just how habitable they may be is still unknown and we won’t know much more until we, hopefully, find one.
The thought of millions or more ocean worlds in our galaxy alone, both planets and moons, is exciting. Learning more about our own planet’s watery past will help scientists find some of them and perhaps even discover evidence of alien aquatic life.
There are also implications for how life began on Earth, as Paul Voosen writes in Science. Some scientists think it began in nutrient-rich hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. But other theories suggest shallow ponds of water on dry land, which frequently evaporated, creating a concentrated bath of chemicals.
A global ocean is problematic for both scenarios. It could have diluted needed biomolecules in the ocean itself, and also made the shallow pools unlikely, since all or most of the land would have been submerged underwater. Thomas Carell, a biochemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, offers a different possibility: watery pockets within oceanic rocks that broke the surface in volcanic seamounts. He said: Maybe we had little caves in which it all happened.
Bottom line: New evidence from Harvard suggests that – a few billion years ago – Earth was a true water world, completely covered by a global ocean, with little if any visible land.
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WHERE DID THE LIQUID WATER ON MARS GO?
~ Today, Mars is a frigid desert. But dried up deltas and riverbanks reveal that water once flowed over the plant’s surface. Where did it all go? Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, hoping to understand how Mars became an arid wasteland while its neighbor, Earth, kept hold of its water and became a biological paradise.
Now, by plugging observations of the red planet into new models, a team of geologists and atmospheric scientists has come up with a new picture of Mars’s past: Much of the planet’s ancient water could have been trapped within minerals in the crust, where it remains to this day.
Prior research suggested that most of Mars’s water escaped into space as its atmosphere was stripped away by the sun’s radiation. But this new study, published today in the journal Science and virtually presented at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, concludes that Mars’s water experienced both an atmospheric exodus and a geologic entrapment.
Depending on how much water you start with, the new model estimates that anywhere between 30 and 99 percent of it was incorporated into minerals in the planet’s crust, while the remaining fraction escaped into space. It’s a big range, and both processes likely played a role, so “somewhere in there, the reality lies,” says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who wasn’t involved with the new study.
If the new model is accurate, then the story of the planet’s adolescence needs a rewrite. All of the water thought to be trapped in the Martian crust today means that the planet had far more surface water in its youth than previous models had estimated—and that early epoch may have been even more amiable to microbial life than previously thought.
FROM DRENCHED TO DESICCATED
A multitude of dried up riverbeds, deltas, lake basins, and inland seas make it clear that Mars once had a lot of water on its surface. It may have even had one or several different oceans in its northern hemisphere, although that’s a matter of intense debate. Today, aside from a possible series of briny underground lakes and aquifers, most of Mars’s water is locked up in the polar caps or in ice buried below the surface.
By looking at the chemistry of Martian meteorites of various ages, and by using NASA’s Curiosity rover to study ancient rocks and measure the current Martian atmosphere, scientists have been able to estimate how much surface water—as ice, liquid water, or water vapor—would have been present at various points throughout Mars’s history. They think that during its earliest epochs, if all that water were in liquid form, it could cover the whole planet in a shallow ocean 150 to 800 feet deep.
Mars had a more substantial atmosphere in the past, and its pressure allowed liquid water to exist on the surface. But work using NASA’s MAVEN orbiter found that much the planet’s atmosphere was stripped away by the solar wind—charged particles streaming from the sun—perhaps just 500 million years after Mars formed. The reasons why are not clear, although the early loss of the planet’s protective magnetic field probably played a critical role.
Either way, this atmospheric annihilation vaporized around 90 percent of Mars’s surface water, leaving the water vapor to be broken up by ultraviolet radiation and making Mars a dehydrated wasteland.
CLUES HIDDEN IN MARTIAN JEWELS
At least, that’s how the story goes. But it has some plot holes.
The fate of the planet’s ancient water was previously estimated based on the types of hydrogen found in Mars’s present atmosphere. As water vapor in the air is bombarded by ultraviolet radiation from the sun, hydrogen gets stripped away from the oxygen in water molecules. Being a light gas, that free hydrogen easily escapes into space. Some of the water vapor, however, contains a heavier version of hydrogen called deuterium, which is more likely to remain in the atmosphere.
Scientists know what the natural ratio of hydrogen and deuterium should be on Mars, so the amount of deuterium left behind can be used to determine how much of the lighter version was once present on the planet. Deuterium therefore acts as a ghostly fingerprint that reveals the amount of past water that ultimately escaped into space.
Hydrogen is still escaping from Mars today, and scientists can measure the rate to work out how much water is being permanently lost. If this rate held steady over the past 4.5 billion years, it would be nowhere near enough to explain the disappearance of so much surface water, says lead author of the new study Eva Linghan Scheller, a doctoral student at Caltech.
Another clue came courtesy of all the orbiters and rovers examining Mars’s rocks. Over the past two decades, a lot of water-bearing minerals have been discovered, including plenty of clays. At first, only patches were found here and there. But today, “we see evidence for a huge volume of hydrated minerals on the surface,” Horgan says.
All those extremely old hydrated minerals suggest that, long ago, plenty of water was flowing across the ancient Martian soil—much more than the atmospheric deuterium signal indicated.
“It’s taken a while to find all the hydrated mineral exposures that we have found, and then to fully acknowledge their importance on a global scale,” says Kirsten Siebach, a planetary scientist at Rice University who wasn’t involved with the work.
TWO WAYS TO KILL A PLANET
One problem was that previous models didn’t adequately take into account the crust’s ability to lock up water inside minerals, Scheller says. She and her colleagues decided to make a new model to estimate where Mars’s water went over its entire 4.5-billion-year lifetime.
The model makes some assumptions, such as how much water Mars had to begin with, how much was delivered later by watery asteroids and icy comets, how much was lost to space over time, and how much volcanic activity deposited more water onto the planet’s surface. Depending on the values of those variables, the team found that Mars could once have had enough surface water to make a global ocean 330 to 4,900 feet deep.
Between 4.1 and 3.7 billion years ago, the amount of surface water decreased significantly as it was soaked up by minerals in the crust and as it escaped into space. None of the hydrated minerals found so far have been younger than three billion years, Scheller says, which implies that Mars has been an arid wasteland for most of its lifetime.
The new model helps address a discrepancy between the amount of water estimated by the deuterium measurements and the myriad water features that have been left on the surface. It wasn’t clear how so many rivers and lakes could emerge from so little water, Siebach says, but this new model offers a solution to that mystery by identifying additional water that could have been present on Mars.
However, the research doesn’t change how much water scientists think is available on Mars today—which isn’t much at all. Astronauts may one day bake hydrated minerals on Mars to unleash their water, Horgan says, but that would be an energy-intensive process.
“What this study does is that it says you have more water to play with early in Mars’s history, and that’s when Mars was most habitable,” Siebach says. Microbes, if they ever existed, may have spread through all that available water, but they would have struggled to survive by the time most of it vanished three billion years ago.
The idea that a significant volume of water can vanish into the crust also has implications for other rocky worlds, says Byrne of North Carolina State University.
Water binds to Earth’s minerals, too. But on our planet, plate tectonics recycles these minerals, constantly unleashing their water through volcanic eruptions, Siebach says. By contrast, Mars’s stagnant crust may have doomed the planet to become a bitterly cold desert. Did the same world-changing process happen on Venus? Does water end up locked in the crust of exoplanets far from our solar system?
The paper is also a really stark reminder of how lucky we are to call Earth home. Water gets lost to hydrated minerals here too, but we have active plate tectonics that constantly reuses and recycles all that life-giving H2O. Modern Mars is a hellhole, and while it is a fun place to visit, most of us probably don’t want to live there. ~
*
I SING THE TRUCK ELECTRIC
~ All major delivery companies are starting to replace their gas-powered fleets with electric or low-emission vehicles, a switch that companies say will boost their bottom lines, while also fighting climate change and urban pollution.
UPS has placed an order for 10,000 electric delivery vehicles. Amazon is buying 100,000 from the start-up Rivian. DHL says zero-emission vehicles make up a fifth of its fleet, with more to come.
And FedEx just pledged to replace 100% of its pickup and delivery fleet with battery-powered vehicles by 2040.
(The U.S. Postal Service has smaller electric ambitions, only committing to go electric with 10% of its new delivery trucks — a decision that has led some lawmakers to cry foul over the purchasing plans.)
Switching to electric vehicles for shorter distances makes a lot of sense for companies like FedEx.
Compared to the 18-wheelers that carry packages between states, delivery vehicles — typically vans and smaller trucks — are much easier to electrify, with current battery technology providing enough range for many routes. And companies also have plenty of charging time.
Jackson calls it an "ideal situation."
"If you think about it, our vehicles operate throughout the day picking up and delivering our customers goods," Jackson says. "And in the evening, they come back to our stations and they'll be parked there overnight."
And, while electric vehicles are still expensive up front, Jackson says this switch will also serve the bottom line. Electric vehicles save money on fuel, and because they have fewer moving parts, they're also cheaper to maintain.
"That experience that we've had over the last decade with with respect to electric vehicles ... not only did they have high operational efficiency and and performance, but they were also cheaper to operate as well," Jackson says.
A delivery truck may not be as jaw-dropping as a flying car, but GM is seeing dollar signs. On a recent earnings call, the automaker's CEO, Mary Barra, cited analysis that found electric commercial vehicles could be a $60 billion market within a decade.
This focus on electrifying commercial vehicles is a shift, for automakers and for many sustainability advocates.
Jane Lin, a professor at the University of Chicago, says efforts to cut carbon from transportation have largely focused on passenger vehicles. That's perfectly logical — there are a huge number of them, far outstripping the number of commercial vehicles.
When looked at as individual vehicles, she says, "trucks are much dirtier vehicles, much less efficient." So each commercial truck or van that goes electric has a bigger impact than a commuter's vehicle making the switch.
Lin emphasizes that electrification is not the only way for delivery vehicles to reduce their emissions: companies could consolidate trips or use smaller vehicles, for instance, and those changes could sometimes be even better than going electric.
The shift to electric commercial vehicles is coinciding with a pandemic trend: online shopping has exploded, leading to a surge in deliveries.
"Everybody has gone online to do online shopping. And I don't think that's going to go away after the pandemic," Lin says.
And when it comes to your neighborhood, that can only mean one thing, according to Lin.
"You're going to see a lot more of these delivery vehicles," she said. ~
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/17/976152350/from-amazon-to-fedex-the-delivery-truck-is-going-electric
*
THE LITTLE-KNOWN FEMALE SCIENTISTS WHO MAPPED 400,00 STARS OVER A CENTURY AGO
~ As team names go, the Harvard Computers has kind of an oddball ring to it, but it’s far preferable to Pickering’s Harem, as the female scientists brought in under the Harvard Observatory’s male director were collectively referred to early on in their 40-some years of service to the institution.
A possibly apocryphal story has it that Director Edward Pickering was so frustrated by his male assistants’ pokey pace in examining 1000s of photographic plates bearing images of stars spotted by telescopes in Harvard and the southern hemisphere, he declared his maid could do a better job.
If true, it was no idle threat.
In 1881, Pickering did indeed hire his maid, Williamina Fleming, to review the plates with a magnifying glass, cataloguing the brightness of stars that showed up as smudges or grey or black spots. She also calculated—aka computed—their positions, and, when possible, chemical composition, color, and temperature.
The newly single 23-year-old mother was not uneducated. She had served as a teacher for years prior to emigrating from Scotland, but when her husband abandoned her in Boston, she couldn’t afford to be fussy about the kind of employment she sought. Working at the Pickerings meant secure lodging and a small income.
Not that the promotion represented a financial windfall for Fleming and the more than 80 female computers who joined her over the next four decades. They earned between 25 to 50 cents an hour, half of what a man in the same position would have been paid.
At one point Fleming, who as a single mother was quite aware that she was burdened with “all housekeeping cares …in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses,” addressed the matter of her low wages with Pickering, leaving her to vent in her diary:
I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.… Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?… And this is considered an enlightened age!
Harvard certainly got its money’s worth from its female workforce when you consider that the classification systems they developed led to identification of nearly 400,000 stars.
Fleming, who became responsible for hiring her coworkers, was the first to discover white dwarfs and the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, in addition to 51 other nebulae, 10 novae, and 310 variable stars.
An impressive achievement, but another diary entry belies any glamour we might be tempted to assign: 'From day to day my duties at the Observatory are so nearly alike that there will be little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs, and of work involved in the reduction of these observations.'
Pickering believed that the female computers should attend conferences and present papers, but for the most part, they were kept so busy analyzing photographic plates, they had little time left over to explore their own areas of interest, something that might have afforded them work of a more theoretical nature.
Another diary entry finds Fleming yearning to get out from under a mountain of busy work:
'Looking after the numerous pieces of routine work which have to be kept progressing, searching for confirmation of objects discovered elsewhere, attending to scientific correspondence, getting material in form for publication, etc, has consumed so much of my time during the past four years that little is left for the particular investigations in which I am especially interested.'
And yet the work of Fleming and other notable computers such as Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon is still helping scientists make sense of the heavens, so much so that Harvard is seeking volunteers for Project PHaEDRA, to help transcribe their logbooks and notebooks to make them full-text searchable on the NASA Astrophysics Data System.
https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/the-little-known-female-scientists-who-mapped-400000-stars-over-a-century-ago-an-introduction-to-the-harvard-computers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Harvard Computers and Edward Pickering
*
THE PROPHETS VERSUS THE HEBREW WISDOM TRADITION (where shall sanity be found?)
“The three major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — may be considered, respectively, the manic, the depressive, and the psychotic articulation of the prophetic message. As for calm, sane, moderate versions of prophecy, in effect there are none. Sanity and calmness make their home not in Israel’s prophetic tradition but in its wisdom tradition. Wisdom accepts; prophecy rejects; and it requires a kind of madness to reject the basic givens of an entire society, all the more to suggest that history should begin again with a new creation of the world.
*
The cliché that the madman thinks he is God is more nearly true for these mad prophets than for any other writers in all of world literature. The prophets “play” the old themes of Israelite history and theology in a crazed and driven new way. But at every point, as God tries on and sometimes immediately tosses aside each new idea, each new image, the underlying question in his mind, too terrifying for ordinary words, is “If this is true, if this works, then . . . can we begin again?” ~ Jack Miles, “God: A Biography”
Gustave Doré: Valley of Dry Bones
AN UPDATED VERSION OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN PARABLE
A man was walking in the street one day when he was brutally beaten and robbed.
As he lay unconscious and bleeding, a psychologist, who happened to be passing by, rushed up to him and exclaimed,
"My God! Whoever did this really needs help!"
Mary:
Oh my god, that story underlines the reluctance to admit evil, the desire to just understand everything away and avoid holding anyone responsible.
Oriana:
I love the phrase “to understand everything away.” True, Spinoza said, “To understand all is to forgive all.” But that doesn't free us from the duty to take action: first and foremost to help the victim, and then -- if it's possible -- the perpetrator, who likely was once an abused child. Mere incarceration, without any effort at rehabilitation and job training, is likely to lead to repeat criminal activity.
Van Gogh: Good Samaritan
*
HOW FAIRY TALES AND WINNIE THE POOH SOWED THE SEEDS OF ATHEISM
Before
my first religion lesson (which came as a shock to me — that stuff was
supposed to be real?), I’d gotten to know a lot of fairy tales, both
from preschool and thanks to my father reading to me at bedtime. He was
especially good at reading Winnie the Pooh. So already at five and six I
knew there was the real world, where trucks and trains and planes moved
at great speed because they had an engine that needed fuel, and the
world of the imagination, where a witch could fly on a broomstick.
I
took a great delight in the world of the imagination, but, unlike some
children, I knew very well that there were no witches flying around on
broomsticks, and no talking animals (which saddened me).
In addition, there wfairy tales there could be a savior figure — a hunter rescuing Little Red Hood and her Grandas no mention of god or angels in the fairy tales and books like Winnie the Pooh. In ma,
or the Prince rescuing the Princess — but those saviors and protectors
were always either human or helpful animals, e.g. ants separating the
seeds for Cinderella. Animals did talk, but there was no god and no church.
Then, through the force of indoctrination and intimidation,
the voice of a child who sees that the Emperor has no clothes (I wasn’t
the only one; many children seemed terribly confused during those first
religion lessons) was muzzled. But as I grew older, it returned.
And now there were novels, plays, movies, and — this turned out to be
the most important — mythologies. I loved the Greek myths. I could see
with again that the world of the imagination and the world of reality
were two clearly separate worlds. That religion belonged to the world of
the imagination was finally an inescapable conclusion. "It's just
another mythology" was the unforgettable thought that was to change my
world. I had just turned fourteen. Going to church no longer made sense.
But the seeds of that separation were sown when I heard my first fairy tale.
*
The current popularity of various kinds of fasting, not just for weight loss but also to reduce symptoms in chronic inflammatory diseases, got me interested in the many functions of the “hunger hormone,” ghrelin.
GHRELIN: MUCH MORE THAN A HUNGER HORMONE
Oriana:
Ghrelin is produced mainly in the stomach. It is also produced in the brain (in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus), where it stimulates the pituitary gland to secrete growth hormone.
The levels of ghrelin increase with fasting and decrease after eating (but longer fasting does not mean that there is more and more ghrelin; its levels rise up to a point, and then remain stable)
Typically, ghrelin rises during the night and decreases after the first meal.
Ghrelin stimulates the release of growth hormone, which in turn has multiple effects on metabolism, food intake, sleep, and memory.
Ghrelin is called the “hunger hormone” because it increases appetite. However, there are other hormones that increase appetite, such as orexin (also involved in sleep and arousal), and especially neuropeptide Y. Neuropeptide Y increases appetite, especially for carbohydrates. But the production of neuropeptide Y is induced by ghrelin.
At higher levels, inhibits insulin secretion. Thus, it inhibits glucose uptake by muscle and fat ceells (adipose tissue). Ghrelin also regulates glucose levels by stimulating the liver to produce glucose.
It plays a role in the regulation of gastric acid release, gastric motility [how fast food passes thru the stomach], and the turnover and renewal of gastric mucosa.
Ghrelin decreases thermogenesis, i.e. the expenditure of calories needed to produce body heat.
And now for the surprising functions of ghrelin:
It improves survival after a heart attack by reducing the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. This means less adrenaline.
Ghrelin prevents muscle atrophy by inducing muscle differentiation and fusion, i.e. it helps with muscle formation.
Ghrelin also regulates bone formation by stimulating the proliferation and differentiation of osteoblasts.
It is also involved in the control of both male and female reproductive capacity. This is a complicated subject that I merely want to mention.
Ghrelin influences the immune system through its anti-inflammatory effects.
Alas, ghrelin can facilitate cancer metastatis in advanced forms of cancer. “However, the role of ghrelin in cancer is currently unclear. Ghrelin has predominantly anti-inflammatory effects and may play a role in protecting against cancer-related inflammation.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22826465/
A high-fat diet decreases blood ghrelin levels, while a low-protein diet increases ghrelin.
Main source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24100676/
GHRELIN’S NEWLY DISCOVERED FUNCTION IN MEMORY
~ A team of neuroscience researchers at the University of Southern California have identified a surprising new role for the "hunger hormone" ghrelin. Ghrelin has previously been recognized for its unique role in sending hunger signals from the gut to the brain, but, as presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, these new findings suggest that it may also be important for memory control.
Ghrelin is produced in the stomach and secreted in anticipation of eating, and is known for its role to increase hunger. "For example, ghrelin levels would be high if you were at a restaurant, looking forward to a delicious dinner that was going to be served shortly," said Dr. Elizabeth Davis, lead author on the study. Once it is secreted, ghrelin binds to specialized receptors on the vagus nerve -- a nerve that communicates a variety of signals from the gut to the brain. "We recently discovered that in addition to influencing the amount of food consumed during a meal, the vagus nerve also influences memory function," said Dr. Scott Kanoski, senior author of the study. The team hypothesized that ghrelin is a key molecule that helps the vagus nerve promote memory.
Using an approach called RNA interference to reduce the amount of ghrelin receptor, the researchers blocked ghrelin signaling in the vagus nerve of laboratory rats. When given a series of memory tasks, animals with reduced vagal ghrelin signaling were impaired in a test of episodic memory, a type of memory that involves remembering what, when, and where something occurred, such as recalling your first day of school. For the rats, this required remembering a specific object in a specific location.
The team also investigated whether vagal ghrelin signaling influences feeding behavior. They found that when the vagus nerve could not receive the ghrelin signal, the animals ate more frequently, yet consumed smaller amounts at each meal. Dr. Davis thinks these results may be related to the episodic memory problems. "Deciding to eat or not to eat is influenced by the memory of the previous meal," says Davis. "Ghrelin signaling to the vagus nerve may be a shared molecular link between remembering a past meal and the hunger signals that are generated in anticipation of the next meal."
These novel findings add to our understanding of how episodic memories are generated, as well as the relationship between memory and eating behavior. In the future, researchers may be able to develop strategies for improving memory capacity in humans by manipulating ghrelin signaling from the gut to the brain. ~
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190709171807.htm
GHRELIN FOUND TO REGULATE THE FORMATION OF NEW NERVE CELLS IN ADULT BRAIN
~ A gut hormone, ghrelin, is a key regulator of new nerve cells in the adult brain, a Swansea-led research team has discovered. It could help pave the way for new drugs to treat dementia in patients with Parkinson's Disease.
Blood-borne factors such as hormones regulate the process of brain cell formation — known as neurogenesis — and cognition in adult mammals.
The research team focused on gut hormone acyl-ghrelin (AG), which is known to promote brain cell formation. A structure change to the hormone results in two distinct forms: AG and unacylated-ghrelin (UAG).
The team, led by Dr. Jeff Davies of Swansea University Medical School, studied both AG and UAG to examine their respective influences over brain cell formation.
Acyl-ghrelin promotes neurogenesis, while unacylated ghrelin impedes it.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201021/Gut-hormone-found-to-be-key-regulator-of-new-nerve-cells-in-the-adult-brain.aspx
Oriana:
At this point, you may be wondering, “Well, what doesn’t ghrelin do?” Multi-functionality is typical of hormones. In addition, it turns out that there is a need to differentiate between acylated and unacylated ghrelin. At this point, let us leave this complexity to “further research.”
*
TWO THIRDS OF COVID HOSPITALIZATIONS ARE DUE TO FOUR UNDERLYING CARDIOMETABOLIC CONDITIONS
~ Dariush Mozaffarian and colleagues from the Friedman School estimated that, among the 906 849 total COVID-19 hospitalizations that occurred in US adults as of November 18, 2020:
30% (274 322) were attributable to obesity
26% (237 738) were attributable to hypertension
21% (185 678) were attributable to diabetes; and
12% (106 139) were attributable to heart failure.
The model also estimated that age and race/ethnicity resulted in disparities in COVID-19 hospitalizations due to the 4 conditions. For example, approximately 8% of hospitalizations among adults aged <50 years were estimated to be due to diabetes vs 29% of hospitalizations among those aged ≥65 years. Obesity, however, was an exception as it had equally detrimental impact on COVID-19 hospitalizations across age groups.
Across all age groups, COVID-19 hospitalizations attributable to all 4 conditions were higher in Black adults vs White adults, and generally higher for diabetes and obesity in Hispanic adults vs White adults. For example, among adults aged ≥65 years, diabetes was estimated to cause approximately 25% of COVID-19 hospitalizations among White adults, vs about 32% among Black adults and 34% among Hispanic adults.
“National data show that Black and Hispanic Americans are suffering the worst outcomes from COVID-19. Our findings lend support to the need for prioritizing vaccine distribution, good nutrition, and other preventive measures to people with cardiometabolic conditions, particularly among groups most affected by health disparities,” said Mozaffarian in the same press release. “Policies aimed at reducing the prevalence of these four cardiometabolic conditions among Black and Hispanic Americans must be part of any state or national policy discussion aimed at reducing health disparities from COVID-19.” ~
https://www.patientcareonline.com/view/study-two-thirds-of-covid-19-hospitalizations-attributable-to-4-major-cardiometabolic-conditions?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=03042021_TOP-20-M1D0062_POC_TopCon%20Video%20Program&eKey=aXZ5MzMzQGNveC5uZXQ=
OUR AMAZING BODIES (CONTINUED, Part 2)
16. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood the number is reduced to 206. Some of the bones, like skull bones, get fused into each other, bringing down the total number.
17. It's not possible to tickle yourself. This is because when you attempt to tickle yourself you are totally aware of the exact time and manner in which the tickling will occur, unlike when someone else tickles you.
18. Less than one third of the human race has 20-20 vision. This means that two out of three people cannot see perfectly.
19. Your nose can remember 50,000 different scents. But if you are a woman, you are a better smeller than men, and will remain a better smeller throughout your life.
20. The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
21. The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms and potted plants. Scientists have no idea why this is so, but attribute it to the growing imbalance of hormones in the body during pregnancy.
22. The life span of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average. Every day the average person loses 60-100 strands of hair. But don't worry, you must lose over 50% of your scalp hairs before it is apparent to anyone.
23. The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as an encyclopedia. Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream, and is itself made up of 80% water. Though it interprets pain signals from the rest of the body, the brain itself cannot feel pain.
24. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can't repair itself.
25. Your eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.
26. By 60 years of age, 60% of men and 40% of women will snore.
27. We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening, because during normal activities during the day, the cartilage in our knees and other areas slowly compress.
28. The brain operates on the same amount of power as 10-watt light bulb, even while you are sleeping. In fact, the brain is much more active at night than during the day.
29. Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour. Neurons continue to grow throughout human life. Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons.
30. People who dream more often and more vividly, on an average have a higher Intelligence Quotient.
31. The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.
32. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body. This is true for men as well as women.
33. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee.
34. A human fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
35. By the age of 60, most people will have lost about half their taste buds.
36. About 32 million bacteria call every inch of your skin home. But don't worry, a majority of these are harmless or even helpful bacteria.
37. The colder the room you sleep in, the higher the chances are that you'll have a bad dream.
38. Human lips have a reddish color because of the great concentration of tiny capillaries just below the skin.
39. Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute.
40. Like fingerprints, every individual has an unique tongue print that can be used for identification.
41. A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it has been decapitated. \
42. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.
43. Humans can make do longer without food than sleep. Provided there is water, the average human could survive a month to two months without food depending on their body fat and other factors. Sleep deprived people, however, start experiencing radical personality and psychological changes after only a few sleepless days. The longest recorded time anyone has ever gone without sleep is 11 days, at the end of which the experimenter was awake, but stumbled over words, hallucinated and frequently forgot what he was doing.
44. The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest blood type, A-H or Bombay blood, due to the location of its discovery, has been found in fewer than one hundred people since it was discovered.
45. Every human spent about half an hour after being conceived, as a single cell. Shortly afterward, the cells begin rapidly dividing and begin forming the components of a tiny embryo.
46. Your ears secrete more earwax when you are afraid than when you aren't.
47. Koalas and primates are the only animals with unique fingerprints.
48. Humans are the only animals to produce emotional tears.
49. The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet in the air.
ending on beauty:
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.
. . . You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
~ Seamus Heaney, Postscript
(these are not swans [below], but I can't resist the image)
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