Sometimes the abyss stares back
*
ARCHAIC PENELOPE
It’s my waiting that creates you.
The tapestry I weave,
unraveling you in dreams,
is your secret map.
How you try
to read over my shoulder!
You’re too close,
thinking you are too far.
Here’s a seaweed-dripping cave
and a sea-nymph’s bribe:
immortality, but nothing else
will ever happen in your life —
and you pick mortality,
that beautiful blood flower.
Days slide off the loom of hours.
The moon sets, mottled with regrets
like a lamp with islands of dead moths.
Again you dream of home.
Wreathed with horizons,
you want me
to stroke your neck,
stiff from looking ahead;
weary of women
opening like shores,
you want my body to lead
into the body of silence.
You beg to know
how the story ends —
and it is I
who tie you to the mast.
~ Oriana
Penelope at the Loom by Bernardino Pinturicchio, 1509
*
NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM’S LAST LETTER TO OSIP MANDELSTAM, 1938
Osia, my beloved, faraway sweetheart!
I have no words, my darling, to write this letter that you may never read, perhaps. I am writing in empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here. Then this will be all you have to remember me by.
Osia, what a joy it was living together like children — all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to?
Remember the way we brought back provisions to make our poor feasts in all the places where we pitched our tent like nomads? Remember the good taste of bread when we got it by a miracle and ate it together? And our last winter in Voronezh. Our happy poverty, and the poetry you wrote. I remember the time we were coming back once from the baths, when we bought some eggs or sausage, and a cart went by loaded with hay. It was still cold and I was freezing in my short jacket (but nothing like what we must suffer now: I know how cold you are). That day comes back to me now. I understand so clearly, and ache from the pain of it, that those winter days with all their troubles were the greatest and last happiness to be granted us in life.
My every thought is about you. My every tear and every smile is for you. I bless every day and hour of our bitter life together, my sweetheart, my companion, my blind guide in life.
Like two blind puppies we were, nuzzling each other and feeling so good together. And how fevered your poor head was, and how madly we frittered away the days of our life. What joy it was, and how we always knew what joy it was.
Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone. Can this fate be for us who are inseparable? Puppies and children, did we deserve this? Did you deserve this, my angel? Everything goes on as before. I know nothing. Yet I know everything – each day and hour of your life are plain and clear to me as in a delirium.
You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply.
In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. The people with me were total strangers. When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are.
When I woke up, I said to Shura: ‘Osia is dead.’ I do not know whether you are still alive, but from the time of that dream, I have lost track of you. I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now. I speak only to you, only to you. You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears – now I weep and weep and weep.
It’s me: Nadia. Where are you?
Farewell.
Nadia
*
This letter was written in October 1938. Osip Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, in a transit camp near Vladivostok. The text is taken from Nadezhda’s memoir, Hope Abandoned, translated by Max Hayward. It is likely that Osip had died before the letter was delivered – an outcome tragically anticipated by Nadezhda in her letter.
Oriana:
The “filthy hotel” in Nadezhda’s dream — that was the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
I'm especially struck by the image of two blind puppies nuzzling each other. Nadezhda was the more devoted of the two, but we needn’t feel sorry for her: it appears that in a relationship, the one who loves more gains more happiness than the one who is more the receiver. As Auden says, “Let the more loving one be me.”
I am also struck by Nadia’s gratitude for everything the couple had together — their “happy poverty.” She was the one who remembered even insignificant-seeming details, like the cart loaded with hay that went by.
Their marriage was sacred to her: “Osia, what a joy it was living together like children — all our squabbles and arguments, the games we played, and our love. Now I do not even look at the sky. If I see a cloud, who can I show it to?”
Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam monument in Amsterdam sculpted by Hanneke de Munck, unveiled in September 2015
*
~ The mighty Soviet Union also had an army — a much larger and stronger one than the one Russia has now. And it was a superpower, while Russia is a regional force, at best. And it also threatened its neighbors and the whole world, and it flexed its muscles and thumped its hollow chest and bragged endlessly that it was going to turn the entire world into a replica of itself. It huffed and it puffed — and, in the end, it overestimated and overextended itself and up and fell apart, dissolved in the mist of history, bit the dust. ~ Mikhail Iossel
Stephen Scott:
I am also remembering Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1971), which predicted much of what has happened, Soviet collapse, a reunited Germany, considerable German influence over eastern Europe, and more.
[Wiki: While Amalrik was wrong about the likelihood of conflict with China, the Soviet–Afghan War played out perfectly as a stand-in for what Amalrik predicted: "a drawn-out, exhausting war, prosecuted by decrepit leaders, which drained the Soviet government of resources and legitimacy.”]
Tom Beck:
The Soviet Union spent seventy years investing in almost nothing worth a damn. I lived in Moscow in 1981–82, and when I came back I told people I didn’t think it would last another ten years. In addition to the incalculably inefficient economic decisions, my entire year there I did not meet a single person who genuinely believed in Soviet-style “Marxism/Leninism.”
I don’t know that Putin’s Russia will undergo a similar dismantling. It seems to me the specific circumstances are different. The Russian economy is still inefficient, but in markedly different ways. The failed belief in communism seems to have been replaced by the age-old Great Russian nationalism.
To be honest, what I suspect will happen is, chaos. Putin clearly intends to be president for life—and then some. Unlike the tsars to whom he is so frequently compared, he has no intention of establishing a certain succession. What will happen to and in Russia after he dies—which I’m sure will come as a complete surprise to him—can’t be predicted. I doubt it will be pleasant.
Dusk in KyivLori Beth:
The old story of the competition between the sun and the wind to get a man to remove his jacket. Putin could have showered Ukraine with sunlight but he chose to force Ukraine to pull the NATO jacket tightly around it.
Thomas Cantwell:
A work colleague who spent 8 years in the Air Force said it best. Russia is a third world country with nukes.
Mikhail:
Head of Russian-backed puppet government in Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, has announced mass “evacuation” of Donbas citizens to Russia, claiming Ukraine is planning an attack on the territory. Which is a bald-faced lie. A typical, transparent false-flag operation.
Not good. Things are about to heat up, one fears.
How desperately, doggedly Russia is searching for a pretext to invade. War is in the current Kremlin regime's ideological genes. It flows from the very nature of its existence.
The world is a complicated place, and most things in life are not clearcut, unequivocally monochromatic. Most things in life are shades of gray.
Still, it is important to keep some certainties in mind. Here is one: Putin is the bad guy of the current, extremely dangerous historical moment. Undeniably and almost cartoonishly so. One shouldn't lose sight of that.
Jon Landsbergis:
Putin should be worried about Climate Change, not NATO.
Half the worlds population sits South of Russia but as many regions become uninhabitable they will see one place with room, Russia!
This will make the psychic scar of the Mongol Hordes seem like a pin prick.
Mikhail:
**
Any state forced to devote so much of its energies to physically and psychologically controlling millions of its own subjects could not survive indefinitely. ~ Andrei Amalrik
from Wikipedia: ~ Before being exiled, Amalrik made a pilgrimage to those places where, in the 14th century, Muscovy was born. Standing before an amazing complex of wooden churches of Kizhi Pogost on the banks of Lake Onega, he felt a stab of wonderment: “How could one and the same people have created such churches and destroyed so many of them in blind rage?”
Kizhi church, Karelia, Russia*
COVID WON’T END UP LIKE THE FLU. IT WILL BE LIKE SMOKING.
~ It’s suddenly become acceptable to say that COVID is—or will soon be—like the flu. Such analogies have long been the preserve of pandemic minimizers, but lately they’ve been creeping into more enlightened circles. Last month the dean of a medical school wrote an open letter to his students suggesting that for a vaccinated person, the risk of death from COVID-19 is “in the same realm, or even lower, as the average American’s risk from flu.” A few days later, David Leonhardt said as much to his millions of readers in the The New York Times’ morning newsletter. And three prominent public-health experts have called for the government to recognize a “new normal” in which the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus “is but one of several circulating respiratory viruses that include influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more.”
The end state of this pandemic may indeed be one where COVID comes to look something like the flu. Both diseases, after all, are caused by a dangerous respiratory virus that ebbs and flows in seasonal cycles. But I’d propose a different metaphor to help us think about our tenuous moment: The “new normal” will arrive when we acknowledge that COVID’s risks have become more in line with those of smoking cigarettes—and that many COVID deaths, like many smoking-related deaths, could be prevented with a single intervention.
The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.
The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.
President Joe Biden said in January that “this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and vaccine holdouts are indeed prolonging our crisis. The data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point. Last month, only 1 percent of adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they wanted to get vaccinated soon, and just 4 percent suggested that they were taking a “wait-and-see” approach. Seventeen percent of respondents, however, said they definitely don’t want to get vaccinated or would do so only if required (and 41 percent of vaccinated adults say the same thing about boosters). Among the vaccine-hesitant, a mere 2 percent say it would be hard for them to access the shots if they wanted them. We can acknowledge that some people have faced structural barriers to getting immunized while also listening to the many others who have simply told us how they feel, sometimes from the very beginning.
The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk. Yet smokers, like those who now refuse vaccines, often continue their dangerous lifestyle in the face of aggressive attempts to persuade them otherwise. Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.
In either context, public-health campaigns must reckon with the very difficult task of changing people’s behavior. Anti-smoking efforts, for example, have tried to incentivize good health choices and disincentivize bad ones, whether through cash payments to people who quit, gruesome visual warnings on cigarette packs, taxes, smoke-free zones, or employer smoking bans. Over the past 50 years, this crusade has very slowly but consistently driven change: Nearly half of Americans used to smoke; now only about one in seven does. Hundreds of thousands of lung-cancer deaths have been averted in the process.
With COVID, too, we’ve haphazardly pursued behavioral nudges to turn the hesitant into the inoculated. Governments and businesses have given lotteries and free beers a chance. Some corporations, universities, health-care systems, and local jurisdictions implemented mandates. But many good ideas have turned out to be of little benefit: A randomized trial in nursing homes published in January, for example, found that an intensive information-and-persuasion campaign from community leaders had failed to budge vaccination rates among the predominantly disadvantaged and low-income staff. Despite the altruistic efforts of public-health professionals and physicians, it’s becoming harder by the day to reach immunological holdouts. Booster uptake is also lagging far behind.
This is where the “new normal” of COVID might come to resemble our decades-long battle with tobacco. We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort. This plausible outcome has important, if uncomfortable, policy implications. With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use. Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated. And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.
To compare vaccine resistance and smoking seems to overlook an obvious and important difference: COVID is an infectious disease and tobacco use isn’t. (Tobacco is also addictive in a physiological sense, while vaccine resistance isn’t.) Many pandemic restrictions are based on the idea that any individual’s behavior may pose a direct health risk to everyone else. People who get vaccinated don’t just protect themselves from COVID; they reduce their risk of passing on the disease to those around them, at least for some limited period of time. Even during the Omicron wave, that protective effect has appeared significant: A person who has received a booster is 67 percent less likely to test positive for the virus than an unvaccinated person.
But the harms of tobacco can also be passed along from smokers to their peers. Secondhand-smoke inhalation causes more than 41,000 deaths annually in the U.S. (a higher mortality rate than some flu seasons’). Yet despite smoking’s well-known risks, many states don’t completely ban the practice in public venues; secondhand-smoke exposure in private homes and cars—affecting 25 percent of U.S. middle- and high-school children—remains largely unregulated. The general acceptance of these bleak outcomes, for smokers and nonsmokers alike, may hint at another aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others. A large number of excess deaths could end up being tolerated or even explicitly permitted. Noel Brewer, a public-health professor at the University of North Carolina, told me that anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.
Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu. And yet this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person. Noymer, of UC Irvine, said that the effects of endemic COVID, even in the context of persistent gaps in vaccination, would hardly be noticeable. Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.
Chronic problems eventually yield to acclimation, rendering them relatively imperceptible. We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums. I have no doubt that the system will adapt in this way, too, if the coronavirus continues to devastate the unvaccinated. Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”
COVID is likely to remain a leading killer for a while, and some academics have suggested that pandemics end only when the public stops caring. But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit. ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
What appalls me is the whole anti-vax movement. Parents don't seem to realize that measles can cause deafness, and scarlet fever heart damage. And no, the child does not become healthier the more diseases s/he has had. His or her body sustains avoidable damage.
But when it comes to covid, the analogy with smoking falls apart when we ponder the fact that many people have only a mild infection, and some remain asymptomatic. Chronic smoking, especially heavy smoking, always leads to lung and heart damage, and more. It is indeed far more lethal.
The campaign against smoking needs to continue. But I also favor a campaign that presents ALL vaccines in a positive light -- it's a matter of educating the public, just as we did in the case of smoking.
*
WHAT CAUSED THE ROARING TWENTIES? NOT THE END OF THE FLU PANDEMIC
~ On the afternoon of November 8, 1918, a celebratory conga line wound through a three-mile-long throng on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. From high-rise windows, office workers flung makeshift confetti, first ticker tape and then, when they ran out, torn-up paper. They weren’t rejoicing over the close of the influenza pandemic, although the city’s death rate had begun to fall. That afternoon, New Yorkers let loose for another reason: the end of the Great War.
The jubilance proved short-lived. A report from the United Press had prematurely declared an armistice in Europe; in reality, it would be a few days more before the war officially ended [on November 11, 1918]. “For the moment,” reported the New York Times, “the whole population of New York was absolutely unrestrained, giving way to its emotions without any consideration of anything but the desire to express what it felt.”
In that same edition of the Times that detailed the celebration and described fake caskets for Kaiser Wilhelm being hoisted through the streets, a smaller headline documented 1061 new cases and 189 deaths from the influenza epidemic, still afflicting Americans coast to coast. “About twenty persons applied to the Health Department yesterday personally or by letter to adopt children whose parents have died during the epidemic,” the paper read.
Just a week earlier, over the East River in Queens, purpled bodies had piled up in the overflow shed of Cavalry Cemetery, enough that the mayor brought in 75 men to bury the accumulated corpses.
Together, the end of the war and the influenza pandemic closed out a tumultuous decade and introduced a new era with an indelible reputation: the Roaring Twenties.
*
On social media and in conversations from behind the shelter of masks, many Americans bat around the idea that the nation is poised for a post-Covid-19 summer [this article was written in May 2021] of sin, spending and socializing, our own “Roaring 2020s.” On the surface, the similarities abound: A society emerges from a catastrophic pandemic in a time of extreme social inequality and nativism, and revelry ensues. But, historians say, the reality of the 1920s defies easy categorization.
If the influenza pandemic shaped that uproarious decade, its impact cannot be neatly measured. The misnamed “Spanish flu” left some 675,000 Americans dead. The sickness particularly afflicted young people — the average age of victims was 28. That death toll dwarfs the number of U.S. combat deaths (53,402, with some 45,000 additional soldiers dying of influenza or pneumonia) during World War I. Despite that disparity, authoritative histories of the era relegated the influenza pandemic on the fringes in favor of a narrative dominated by the war.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once described the 1920s as “the most expensive orgy in history.” Between quotes like that and canonical works like The Great Gatsby, the author has an outsized role in how the Roaring Twenties are viewed today. “I blame Fitzgerald for a lot of [misconceptions]” about the decade, says Lynn Dumenil, a historian who revisited the decade in her book The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. In her class at Occidental College, Dumenil would show the feverish, champagne-fueled party scene in Baz Luhrman’s movie adaptation of Gatsby, as good an example as any of the “unnuanced” pop-culture vision of the decade as a flapper bacchanal. “There’s this notion of the ’20s as a wild period where everyone is just grabbing everything they can get,” adds Nancy Bristow, history chair at the University of Puget Sound. This idea is broad-brush hyperbole of a reality that held true for only a certain class of Americans—not everyone.
“The 1920s were really a time of social ferment,” says Ranjit Dighe, an economic historian at the State University of New York, Oswego. Shifts in women’s roles, leisure time, spending and popular entertainment did characterize the ’20s, so those exaggerated aspects of the decade, while focused on a primarily white and upper/middle-class experience, do have a firm basis in reality. “Only [in the 1920s] did the Protestant work ethic and the old values of self-denial and frugality begin to give way to the fascination with consumption, leisure and self-realization that is the essence of modern American culture,” Dumenil, David Brody and James Henretta write in a book chapter on the era.
Notably, these changes had been brewing for years, leaving historians with no obvious link between the Roaring Twenties’ reputation and the pandemic.
The “New Woman” of the 1920s, typically white and middle- or upper-class, with bobbed hair and newfound social freedom, departed drastically from Victorian norms. With the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, (white) women had won the right to vote, and divorce rates reached one-in-seven by the mid-decade. “Respectable” women now wore makeup, and flappers clad in shockingly short skirts wore sheer pantyhose and smoked.
More traditional or religious Americans lamented the prevalence of “petting parties.” But, as Dumenil writes in The Modern Temper, the idea of the “New Woman” took root before the 1920s. As early as 1913, commentators noted that the nation had struck “sex o’clock”; in the next three years, Margaret Sanger opened one of the country’s first birth control clinics and went to jail days later. These social changes applied mostly to more well-off white women, since other groups of women had been working and having premarital sex well before the ’20s.
Prohibition is the backbone of 1920s mythology, which paints drinking as a glamorous indiscretion. Organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League had long agitated to dry up the nation’s heavy boozing. Such groups argued that an alcohol ban would reduce societal ills like domestic violence. They also capitalized on xenophobia, since saloons were political hubs for working-class people and immigrants. National success came in 1920, when a ban on selling alcohol went into effect.
The decade’s raucous reputation gets some things right: Prohibition did transform Americans’ relationship with alcohol, turning drinking into a coed, social activity that moved out of disreputable saloons into homes, Dighe says. New York alone housed more than 30,000 speakeasies, many run by gangsters.
But that’s not the whole picture. Alcohol consumption itself decreased in the ’20s. In rural areas, the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan took it upon itself to enforce the Volstead Act and act upon anti-immigrant hostilities. (Historian Lisa McGirr has argued that Prohibition helped kickstart the penal state and the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color and immigrants.) This dark side of Prohibition highlights an undercurrent of nativism and racism throughout the ’20s: White Oklahomans murdered several hundred Black neighbors in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and national quotas enacted in 1924 slammed the door closed on immigration. And those speakeasies in Harlem, with their chorus girl extravaganzas, bathtub gin, and Madden’s No. 1 beer? White patrons came there to go “slumming.”
The ’20s were “a prosperity decade, no question about that,” says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolution—most notably electricity and the advent of the assembly line—led to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.
Examine this upbeat picture of consumerism more closely, though, and you’ll realize the economic boost of the ’20s was checkered. A sharp recession kicked off the decade, caused partially by the declining demand for American agricultural products after the war’s end brought European farming back into commission. (The limited data on the 1918 influenza’s impact indicates that for the most part, it caused short-term, not prolonged, business losses; scholars haven’t linked it to the prosperity of the following decade.) Then, as now, income inequality reached staggering rates. By the end of the ’20s, despite per capita income nearly doubling, the top 1 percent of U.S. families reaped more than 22 percent of the nation’s income.
The wealthy and middle class profited. African Americans, many of whom had moved to Northern cities for work as part of the Great Migration, newcomers to the country, and farmers did not share in that prosperity. The 1920 census marked the first time more than half the country’s population lived in urban areas. For rural Americans, particularly farmers, the ’20s “were roaring as in a roaring fire that was burning people out,” says curator Liebhold.
*
The influenza pandemic’s origins remain contested [Oriana: there is strong evidence that it began in China and was brought into the U.S. by Chinese laborers], but the disease spread quickly through the world beginning in the spring of 1918, striking crowded military camps and then American cities and towns in three to four waves. The “purple death” got its name from the colors victims’ oxygen-starved bodies turned as their lungs drowned in their own fluid, and it killed quickly, sometimes within hours of the first symptoms. Americans donned masks, schools and public gathering places temporarily shut down, and one-third of the globe fell ill. Doctors, with a flawed understanding of the virus’ cause, had few treatments to offer. Life insurance claims rose sevenfold, and American life expectancy decreased by 12 years.
Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis hypothesizes that the 1918 pandemic falls into an ages-old pandemic pattern, one that our Covid-19 present may mimic, too. In his 2020 book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, he argues that increasing religiosity, risk aversion and financial saving characterize times of widespread illness. Christakis expects the Covid-19 crisis to have a long tail, in terms of case numbers and social and economic impacts. But once the brunt of the disease abates in the U.S., which he forecasts for 2024, “all of those trends will reverse,” Christakis says. “Religiosity will decline… People will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs, in restaurants, in bars, in sporting events and musical concerts and political rallies. We might see some sexual licentiousness.”
Like the 1920s, Christakis also predicts lasting social and technological innovations will characterize this decade—think of how remote work and mRNA vaccines might shift status quos permanently. “People are going to want to make sense of what happened,” he says, positing that “we’ll likely see an efflorescence of the arts” post-pandemic. That’s not to say our A.C. (After Covid-19) reality will be all rosy. “We’ll be living in a changed world,” Christakis says, and that includes the lives lost (about 1 in 600 in the U.S.), the economic havoc wreaked, shortfalls in education, and the number of people left disabled due to Covid-19.
In Apollo’s Arrow, Christakis points to an Italian tax collector and shoemaker’s remembrance of the period that followed the Black Death in 1348 as an example of the collective relief we might experience at the pandemic’s end. Agnolo di Tura wrote:
“And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worries about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing.”
*
Mapping the post-pandemic events of the 1920s onto the nation’s post-Covid-19 future resembles trying to trace the path of a nearly invisible thread in an elaborate tapestry. At its height, the influenza pandemic routinely made front-page headlines nationwide, says J. Alexander Navarro, a historian who co-edited the University of Michigan’s digital Influenza Encyclopedia, but by the beginning of 1919, before the pandemic had run its course, those articles grew shorter and less prominent.
“When we look around, unlike the Great War, there are no monuments to the flu; there are no museums to the flu; there are no heritage sites to the flu; there’s not a stamp for the flu, all the signs we associate with commemoration,” Guy Beiner, a memory studies scholar, said during a presentation hosted by the Institute of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He describes the pandemic as an instance of “social forgetting,” an event not wiped from memory but simply left unspoken.
Even historians largely neglected the 1918 pandemic, until Alfred Crosby reignited the field in a 1976 book, where he captured these contradictions:
‘Americans barely noticed and didn’t recall ... but if one turns to intimate accounts, to autobiographies of those who were not in positions of authority, to collections of letters written by friend to friend ... if one asks those who lived through the pandemic for their reminiscences, then it becomes apparent that Americans did notice, Americans were frightened, the courses of their lives were deflected into new channels, and that they remember the pandemic quite clearly and often acknowledge it as one of the most influential experiences of their lives.’
One of the many theories about why 1918 influenza faded from historical memory holds that the trauma of World War I subsumed it. “I don’t think you can divorce the experience of the 1918 pandemic with that of the war,” says Navarro, noting that in places like Denver, Armistice Day coincided with the day social distancing restrictions eased. Public health messaging intertwined the two crises, calling mask-wearing “ patriotic” and promoting slogans like “Help Fight the Grippe: Kaiser Wilhelm’s Ally.” In Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen’s 1931 account of the previous decade, Only Yesterday, he labels the Twenties as the “post-war decade” and mentions the pandemic a grand total of once.
“My guess is it did not sit with the story that Americans tell about themselves in public. It’s not the story that they want to put in fifth-grade U.S. history textbooks, which is about us being born perfect and always getting better,” says Bristow, who wrote American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Americans believed themselves “on the verge of putting infections disease to rest forever,” she explains, and instead, “We couldn’t do anything more about it than anybody else.” Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson, who held the office throughout the multi-year pandemic, never once mentioned it in his public comments.
Navarro floats another theory: Deaths from infectious disease epidemics happened more routinely then, so the pandemic may not have been as shocking. (According to data compiled by the New York Times, despite the much higher proportion of deaths from the 1918 influenza, the Covid-19 pandemic has a larger gap between actual and expected deaths.) Without a solid scientific understanding of the flu’s cause—evangelical preacher Billy Sunday told congregants it was a punishment for sinning—people struggled to make sense of it.
Multiple historians pinpointed another significant discrepancy between the scarring impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and that of the 1918 influenza: Whereas many Americans today have remained masked and distanced for over a year, the 1918 influenza raged through communities quickly. Restrictions were lifted after two to six weeks, Navarro says, and most people still went in to work.
“Talking about [influenza] being forgotten is different from whether it had an impact,” Bristow says. But she hasn’t found much evidence that concretely ties the under-discussed pandemic to the societal upheaval of the ’20s. “One of the places you could find it would be in the writing, and we don’t see it there,” she says. Hemingway briefly remembers “the only natural death I have ever seen” from the flu, but in a minor work. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Anne Porter draws on her bout of near-fatal flu, writing “All the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night.” But that novella wasn’t published until 1939.
Arts and culture undoubtedly flourished in the ’20s as a shared American pop culture emerged thanks to the advent of radio broadcasting, widely circulated magazines and movies. The first “talkie” debuted in 1927 and joined paid vacations and sports games in an explosion of for-fun entertainment options. The Harlem Renaissance gave the nation artists like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, who performed at the glitzy speakeasy The Cotton Club. While a Clara Bow movie about WWI, Wings, won Best Picture at the first-ever Academy Awards, Bristow says the pandemic didn’t appear much in cinemas, and musical references are also few and far between. (Essie Jenkins’ “The 1919 Influenza Blues” presents a rare exception to this rule: “People was dying everywhere, death was creeping through the air,” she sings.)
Young people, who’d watched peers die from influenza, spearheaded these cultural shifts. “After the Great War cost millions of lives, and the great influenza killed some 50 million [worldwide], many—particularly young people—were eager to throw off the shackles of the old and bring in the new,” says John Hasse, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History. But keep in mind, Hasse explains, that the jazz music and dancing that characterized the performing arts of the decade had roots that preceded the pandemic, like the Great Migration, jazz recording technology, and evolving attitudes about dancing in public.
Just because the memory of the flu wasn’t typeset, filmed or laid on a record doesn’t mean it didn’t bruise the American psyche. About, all 1 in 150 Americans died in the pandemic; one New Yorker recalled neighbors “dying like leaves off trees.”
Pandemics don’t come with a consistent pattern of mental health side effects because humans have responded with different public health measures as our understanding of infectious diseases has evolved, says Steven Taylor, a University of British Columbia, Vancouver professor and the author of 2019’s The Psychology of Pandemics. But he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to psychologically impact between 10 and 20 percent of North Americans (a number sourced from ongoing surveys and past research on natural disasters).
Typically, one in ten bereaved people go through “prolonged grief disorder,” Taylor notes, and for every pandemic death, more family members are left mourning. Studies show that one-third of intensive care Covid-19 survivors exhibit PTSD symptoms, and first responders already report deteriorating mental health. Even people with a degree of insulation from this firsthand suffering might still experience what Taylor calls “Covid stress syndrome,” an adjustment disorder marked by extreme anxiety about contracting Covid-19, xenophobia and wariness of strangers, traumatic stress symptoms like coronavirus nightmares, concern about financial security, and repeated information or reassurance seeking (from the news or from friends).
“Most pandemics are messy and vague when they come to an end,” says Taylor. “It won’t be waking up one morning and the sun is shining and there’s no more coronavirus.” We’ll doff our masks and let down our guards piecemeal. Overlay Covid-19 and the 2020s with the influenza pandemic and the 1920s and you’ll see unmistakable parallels, but looking closely, the comparison warps. If there were a causal link between the influenza pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, clear evidence of a collective exhalation of relief hasn’t shown up under historical x-rays.
The historical record tells us this: Some 675,000 people in the U.S. died of influenza then, and “in terms of a mass public mourning, people just went on with their lives” Navarro says. An estimated 590,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19 by the third week of May [Oriana: the current figure is 956,896, according to Worldometer; we seem to be slowly marching toward one million, but the death rate is declining]. How Americans will remember—or choose to forget—this pandemic remains an open question. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-caused-the-roaring-twenties-not-the-end-of-a-pandemic-probably?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I don't think people will ever forget the current pandemic. The disruption has been too profound for that. During the 1918 flu there was no general lockdown. Also, the pandemic showed us how vulnerable we are to infectious disease, and how the modern world makes it much easier for viruses and bacteria to spread. Another pandemic could strike within ten years; it would not be surprising.
Will 2022 finally bring us that “summer of sin” — our own mini Roaring Twenties? It’s not safe to speculate. Yet another variant may emerge. Although viruses tend to mutate toward a milder form, this is not always the case. Most experts expect this coronavirus to stay with us like the ordinary flu, mutating each season. In any case, some people may choose to keep masking simply because it helps them avoid respiratory diseases and lessens the impact of air pollution.
Speaking of ordinary flu, there have been dramatically fewer cases of it during the pandemic, most likely due to masking. Parents have been reported to remark, “My child has never been healthier.”
Now, wearing the mask even after there is no mandate for it is not exactly a repetition of the Roaring Twenties. I think that at least a section of the population will have learned to be more cautious, more aware that the next pandemic could be around the corner. Will this lead to greater religiosity? Probably not, since the quick development of drugs and vaccines and other treatments showed us, again, that helps comes not from heaven, but from science and medicine.
It will be interesting to see if working from home will continue. Many have discovered that it saves a ton of money. We have also discovered that there are essential workers and the not-so-essential ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if this caused some restructuring of jobs. Our non-roaring twenties are likely to be about work rather than parties.
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ALL IN THE FAMILY; WHY WE CHOOSE THE PARTNERS WE DO
~ Much of our sense of what is attractive comes into focus when viewed through the lens of successful reproduction. Childbearing and childrearing have fed into our idea of what we want in a partner. Health, fecundity, and the willingness and ability to invest in parenting are not exclusively or inevitably desired in a partner, but they are reliably found attractive across different populations, though there are of course some cultural differences. These biological preferences also align with mate choice in other species. It’s clear that what we want in a partner has roots that stretch back long before Instagram, makeup counters, marketing campaigns or corsetry. Safe to say, these preferences have something to do with our basic human nature.
There are also individual differences in partner choice. Your ideal partner is vanishingly unlikely to be my ideal partner, even if we are matched for gender, age and sexual orientation. To an extent, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. But even these differences between people’s preferences are somewhat predictable: a person’s family influences the partner he or she chooses. Several studies have found that, on average, there’s some physical similarity between one’s parent and one’s partner. That is, your girlfriend might well look a little bit like your mother. This physical similarity is apparent whether you ask strangers to compare facial photos of partners and parents, or whether you assess things such as parent and partner height, hair or eye color, ethnicity, or even body hair.
Why? Familiar things are attractive. So long as something isn’t initially aversive, and you’re not over-exposed, then in general something will become more appealing the more you encounter it. Part of the attraction to parental features could be attributed to this familiarity effect. Yet familiarity doesn’t account for the whole phenomenon. First, people’s partners seem to be more likely to resemble the parent of the corresponding gender: girlfriends match mothers, and boyfriends match fathers, irrespective of whether they’re in a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Second, emotional closeness to a parent increases the likelihood that your partner will resemble your parent.
Another possible reason is that, biologically speaking, prime reproductive partners sometimes look a little like our parents. Of course, incest itself is a different game: reproduction between close relatives can lead to dangerous recessive genetic disorders. And yet, some genes work well together, so a partner with subtle resemblance to family members might actually be one whose genetic material contains some of that useful overlap. A wonderful study of all known couples in Iceland across a 165-year period found that those with the most grandchildren were related at about the level of third or fourth cousin – no more, no less. So it seems there is some evolutionary advantage to finding traces of parental features attractive.
What about sibling appearance? Of course, not every woman in our study had a partner who looked like her brother, and that is true of women in the world at large. But when we compared our data to the data from previous studies, it appeared that people’s boyfriends resemble their brothers about as much as people’s partners resemble their parents. Since siblings resemble their parents, it’s possible that brother-boyfriend resemblance is merely an essential corollary of parent-partner resemblance, or even vice versa.
Although the similarity that we saw between partners and brothers was only subtle, these subtle effects matter because human behavior is a messy thing, arising from a complex interplay of impulses and influences. The formation of a relationship between two people is an unusually complicated behavior. There is a great deal of published research on our preferences, choices, and attractiveness judgments within relationships, because this sheds light on why we humans do what we do, as well as what the future of our species might look like. Even though we have a robust aversion to incest, it just so happens that this aversion does not seem to extend to people who resemble our family members. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/keeping-it-in-the-family-why-we-pick-the-partners-we-do?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
My experience confirms it: we are attracted to the familiar. But I wonder about the idea that women are attracted to someone who resembles their father. This may be occasionally the case, but when it comes to marriage, I side with those who say, “Both men and women tend to marry their mother.” Unfortunately, this seems to be especially true if the mother was demanding, critical, and hard to satisfy. And we may still be trying to please our mother even after she’s been dead for a while — it’s just that it’s disguised as trying to please the demanding, critical husband.
And it’s almost proverbial that the children of alcoholics tend to marry an alcoholic.
But after this brief dive into the dark side, let me return to the main thesis: we are attracted to the familiar. Looks do matter, but I don’t mean the usual features of what is regarded as attractive. I mean the similarity to people you were close to when growing up. It’s even been suggested that we become “imprinted” on a certain facial features, a way of moving (brisk rather than relaxed), the sound of voice, mannerisms, laughter, perhaps even a scent.
Personally, I noticed I am more likely to feel good around men who look like my cousins. It’s a certain shape of face, mouth, eyebrows. I feel an automatic trust — because I was fond of my cousins and trusted them to be good human beings (which they were). I’d be the first to admit that this is not rational — this is imprinting, a carryover from past experiences.
And perhaps it’s trust that matters here most. In my case, it’s primarily the trust that these men will be the protective kind. I feel safe in their presence. Should danger arise, they will not abandon me. But let’s not get overdramatic. Let’s say it starts raining: I know that my cousin-like companion will take off his jacket and hold it over me.
One time my late husband and I were hiking when we observed a gross breach of that kind of trust. Ahead of us walked a man and two little girls, around nine or ten. Suddenly it began raining. The man stopped, opened his backpack, took out a raincoat with a hood, and put it on, carefully closing all the snap buttons. “I thought he’d hold the raincoat over the girls,” I said, with a shock in my voice. “I thought the same thing,” my husband said, also shocked.
Now, perhaps the man wasn’t the girls’ father, nor even their step-father. It didn’t matter: he was the big strong adult, and the girls were entrusted to his care.
Returning to familiarity, spreading the coat over children would have been taken for granted by my cousins. So the familiarity in appearance spreads over into expecting familiar moral values. It generates trust — the basic assumption that you are dealing with a good human being. And that comes before even other things I greatly value, such as intelligence, competence, the capacity for hard work and self-discipline. O well, I’m talking about my cousins again . . .
My cousins, Stach and Franek (standing between my mother and grandmother), before I was born
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THE MYTH OF “THE ONE”
There is no such thing as The One — the person who will give you everything. I get letters from people who say, “I love this person, the sex is great, we’re emotionally connected, but I don’t know if they’re the one.” You know if someone is the one when you decide to treat them that way. ~ Dan Savage
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DOES ROMANTIC LOVE LIVE UP TO ITS MYSTIQUE?
~ I have spent much of the past decade talking to people about love. I make it clear that any type of love is a welcome topic but when I ask what love is, my interviewees often shoot straight to romantic love. This is partly down to the inadequacy of our language: that small word has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is also because of the multibillion-pound industry that has convinced us the search for “the one” is the be-all and end-all. Mention love and that’s where we immediately go.
But does this obsession with romantic love still reflect the lives we lead? In my new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind our Closest Relationships, I have spoken to people from different backgrounds who have made me rethink our acceptance of romantic love as the dominant narrative. For some it is not a priority, for others it is a restrictive stereotype, while for others it can be a source of risk. As Valentine’s Day comes round again maybe it’s time for a different perspective.
Human love is a special thing, unique in its longevity and the sheer number of beings we are capable of loving. We can love our family, our friends, our lovers. We can also love across the species boundary and the spiritual divide. And as AI romps ahead it may be that one day we can find love with an avatar or robot.
In part, writing my book was driven by a desire, born of a decade of research, to get us to re-engage with and celebrate the different types of love in our lives. All forms of love carry the same joys and benefits as romantic love. In some cases, such as with our best friends, the love we have for them can be more emotionally intimate and less stress inducing than any we have with a lover.
Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”.
This change is particularly striking for women. Go back 100 years and your survival was predicated on finding a man who would support you and your inevitable brood of children. But with emancipation and the arrival of contraception women can choose not to partner themselves to anyone else and can remain happily child-free.
Instead, they can build loving relationships with other people and beings who are capable of fulfilling all their needs. Relationships, science shows us, are underpinned by the same biological and psychological mechanisms and are as beneficial to health and wellbeing as romantic love. Any hierarchy of importance is a cultural construct.
Even when we consider romantic love there is a spectrum of opportunity beyond monogamy which we rarely acknowledge. At one end are the aromantics who do not experience romantic love. It shows how far we have swallowed the romantic love narrative that they are characterized as being cold and unloving. But my aromantic interviewees do not lack love. They have full and loving lives, with family, friends, even queer platonic partners with whom they may have children. Their main issue is navigating a world where every person, every media outlet appears to be obsessed with romantic love.
At the other end of the spectrum are the polyamorists. A group who experience romantic and sexual love with more than one partner. Again, the all-pervasive narrative of romantic love has led us to depict those who practice polyamory in a less than favorable light. They are characterized as being promiscuous, immoral, untrustworthy and dissatisfied.
But to be successful, polyamorous relationships have to be based on trust, truth and open communication. They are moral because love for another is openly acknowledged rather than hidden in the secret of an affair. And while people can stay in monogamous relationships because of the legal ties that bind them, polyamorists recommit to their relationships every day.
The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behavior and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences.
Perhaps when one's survival, social standing and acceptance is predicated on coupling up, the obsession with romantic love is understandable. And it will always have a place in the spectrum of love. But we can experience love in so many different ways that we underestimate, even neglect. We are missing out on so much.
Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/feb/13/romantic-love-different-ways-to-connect?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR04FwbIt8-pY2m7vUL-JoDGBbTorjfo9wRMv_wmkKChJQ6LS0sxM4QOkT4#Echobox=1644767821
Oriana:
Romantic love isn’t the most intense kind of love. A mother’s love for a young child is apparently the strongest bond there is. Not that it’s without ambivalence . . . and yet we have this image of a mother running into a burning building to save her child. Could you count on your romantic partner to run into the flames?
Still, that’s not to put down romantic love. It’s a lovely insanity, and at the beginning we tend to learn a lot of new things, and expand our interests. This “personality enlargement” is possibly the most rewarding part.
And there is of course also the dark side of romantic love. Sometimes life isn't long enough to provide enough time for healing the wounds that romantic love can inflict. That danger is part of the package. It's a very rare person who can resist accepting the package, pain and all.
But
that’s not to say, or imply, as this article seems to be doing, that
romantic love is just so much hype. It’s a complicated emotional state
that does have a dark side (“I killed her because I loved her”). The
suffering caused by heartbreak is very bad for health. But practically
every adult knows the rewards of romantic love. I’m especially drawn
to “personality enlargement” that comes from the kind of interaction
between two people that happens only if they are in love.
Just the adventure of getting to know another person in that particular way is part of the appeal.
At
the same time I agree that we need to honor all kinds of love,
including a bond between humans and their pets. And I agree that the
myth of The One, the Soulmate, the Twin Flame, has seen its better days.
We increasingly realize that we could be happy with various other
individuals — that our current mate is in part an accident of being in
the right place at the right time.
So yes, by all means, let’s
celebrate all kinds of love. But romantic love is special, and will
never cease being special. The human brain is hard-wired for it. It’s
almost inevitable to fall in love at eighteen, but it’s also possible to
fall in love at eighty. Think about this for a moment — the power of
what might be called the love drive is overwhelming.
Mary:
Romantic love, the idea of The One, the one and only, the soul mate, is a cultural construct, and I believe one with much destructive potential in terms of individual lives, expectations, dissatisfaction and regrets. It asks the beloved to fill every need, to complete the self, to be everything. An impossible task. If the beloved cannot completely fulfill, and no one can, there is doubt and disappointment, and many times, the continued search for the perfect One meant to be yours, surely out there waiting to be found.
Literature, from the poetry of courtly love through the great age of the novel, has done much both to elaborate this ideal, and to hold its flaws up to criticism. One of the most interesting such love stories is in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Cathy and Heathcliff are those romantic lovers, so passionately and exclusively joined that they are emotionally fused that Cathy can say "I Am Heathcliff." This kind of romantic passion is thrilling, especially to the teenage reader, but it is destructive, devouring the partners and inflicting grief on everyone around them. Their love is like a curse it takes three generations to heal.
This kind of passionate romantic love is all tied up with death, from Romeo and Juliet through Young Werther and Hugo's Gilliatt in Toilers of the Sea. You can get carried away with the drama of these emotions, these love stories, and see their ends as tragic. Or you can take a step back and see these dying lovers as fools deluded by false promises of completion if they can only find the One, and be faithful, all the way to self-immolation on the altar of love.
I wouldn't be so critical if these ideas if weren't still held so dearly by so many, leading not to happiness and satisfaction, but misery and grief. I'm more of the mind set of "love the one you're with." There’s room for all kinds of love, and more, certainly, than just that One in every life.
Oriana: THE NEED FOR SOMETHING ELSE IN LIFE BESIDES ROMANTIC LOVE
I share the pragmatism of Kurt Vonnegut who suggested that we love “whoever is there is to be loved.” A life wasted waiting for The One is an empty life. Everyone needs a love, a passion, aside from romantic (or marital) love. It can be a vocation, or it can be simply love for children and friends and pets. It can be cooking, it can gardening. To a young woman in love I’d say, “To be happy and remain undestroyed when romantic love fails, you must have something else in your life.” Otherwise you are a slave to love. I started out that way, but writing saved me.
Speaking of Cathy’s saying, “I AM Heathcliff” — we can’t imagine Heathcliff saying, “I am Cathy.” A man was supposed to have that “something else” in life. Otherwise the woman would have too much power over him, and such men are not respected.
If you don’t want to be destroyed by romantic love, you must have something else going on in your life. Writing fits wonderfully as long as it’s looking outward, “gazing at the world.” But it can be cooking or gardening, it can be love for children, friends and pets.
To any young woman (young women being particularly vulnerable) I say: have a life that's rich in many ways. Have a variety of passions and activities you enjoy. Don't let your happiness depend on only one of them. Have a rich life, with many kinds of love.
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Robert Kaplan:
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IF EXTRAVERTS HAVE MORE CHILDREN, WHY DOES INTROVERSION PERSIST?
~ If extraversion provides a clear reproductive fitness advantage, then one might expect that introversion would be strongly selected against, and therefore extremely rare. Yet, that is not the case.
The simplest explanation for the persistence of introversion is that extraversion has a down side. Extraverts may be more effective at enhancing their own social status by virtue of their extensive social networks. In the process, though, they are more likely to get into arguments and have a higher risk of violent injuries. Extraverts are also at greater risk of contracting infectious diseases. Moreover, their social drive might predispose them to neglecting their families so that their marriages crumble and their children are at greater risk of harm.
These factors seem to provide a real advantage for introverts, even if they are counterbalanced by the greater capacity of extraverts to handle psychological stress with associated health advantages.
Despite these qualifications, the evidence is clear enough. Extraverts have a substantial reproductive advantage. By that logic, genes predisposing people to extroversion should long ago have beaten out those that predispose to introversion. There should be almost no introverts today.
How can one reconcile the reproductive advantage of extraverts with this lack of evidence for natural selection acting to reduce introversion? One possibility is that there are no “extraversion genes” on which natural selection could act.
Yes, it is true that extraversion is strongly heritable (at around 60 %) just as some other personality traits are. Oddly, this does not mean that there are genetic variants that predispose either to extraversion or introversion.
Thanks to the success of the Human Genome Project, it is now possible to study genotypes in detail and analyze them for correlations with personality traits using fancy statistical procedures. When this was done, researchers drew a complete blank. There is no evidence of particular gene variants underlying extraversion which would account for the persistence of introversion in the world despite extraverts having more children. In other words, natural selection has nothing upon which to act.
So how could extraversion be so substantially heritable?
Researchers have come up with an explanation that interprets extraversion as more of a side product of being strong and healthy than some trait that may be inherited like eye color.
EXTRAVERSION AS A RESPONSE TO HEALTH AND STRENGTH
How can you have high heritability for extraversion without genetic alleles that distinguish introverts from extraverts? One hypothesis is that social assertiveness is dependent on being in good health. It is a facultative adaptation that gets expressed only if a person is in good condition, meaning that they are strong, well-nourished, and physically attractive.
This principle likely holds for all social animals: those that are in poor health avoid social interactions. Farmers know that a sheep who is separated from the flock is likely to be sick. By the same reasoning, individuals who are in better health are likely to be more actively engaged in social interactions and more willing to assert their dominance in interactions with others.
Similarly, people who are strong, healthy, and physically attractive, are more likely to enter the rough and tumble of social interactions with relative strangers. Researchers find that extraverts are, more physically imposing, and more physically attractive, than introverts both in modern societies and amongst indigenous residents of the Amazon region.
So the logic is that they are better equipped to assert themselves in relationships with others, even if this entails some risks of conflict and aggression.
If these ideas are correct, then extraversion itself is not associated with genes that are subject to natural selection. Instead, what is inherited are the thousands of genes affecting disease resistance, growth, physical attractiveness and strength. These traits contribute to being in good physical condition. People in good physical condition behave in more extroverted ways.
If this condition-dependent hypothesis turns out to be correct, it will force us to think of personality as a lot more fluid than was true before. One implication is that a person who overcomes serious illness is liable to behave in more extroverted ways. Likewise, the strongest child in a group of relative weaklings may be more socially assertive than if they were in the company of athletes. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201701/do-extraverts-have-more-children
Oriana:
I don’t really buy the explanation about greater health and attractiveness of extraverts. I think the differences are neurological. This is an old theory, but it strikes me as valid: extraverts have the sort of nervous system that diminishes sensory input, so they need to seek out stronger stimuli, e.g. louder music, a large party. Introverts are easily overwhelmed by strong stimulation since they enhance sensory input. They find sensory excess (loudness, crowds) unpleasant, even hellish. Introverts seek quiet and often solitude (or being together with just one person), and then they engage in depth either with their own thoughts or creative process, or in attentive listening to the other person.
Is this genetic, or is the sensitivity of the nervous system set during some critical period in early childhood? Or both?
In any case, there are both advantages and disadvantages to where we are on the sensitivity spectrum. Introverts strike me as having more depth, intelligence, and complexity — but I realize I may be biased because of my own extreme preference for depth, intelligence, and complexity.
I also think that a particular situation can be a strong determining factor. When I talk with someone who appears to be a kindred mind, I feel comfortable and talk openly. I may even talk a lot! I have also been praised for being a good listener. Introverts can be quite interested in human behavior, but they want to inquire in depth.
Still, the article opened my eyes to the importance or strength, size, health, and physical attractiveness in shaping a person.
Mary:
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THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE CAN BE HAPPIER THAN THE FIRST
~ Arthur Brooks' new book is From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the second half of Life. He spoke to All Things Considered about not leaving happiness to chance, and the two types of intelligence needed for happiness.
~ The point of the work that I'm doing as a social scientist is to not leave your happiness up to chance, but to remarkably increase the odds by doing the work at 25 and 45 and 65 so that by the time you're 75 and 85 and beyond, you're happier than you've ever been.
And I found that there are people who have cracked the code, but more importantly, that we don't have to leave happiness in the second half of life up to chance. We can find a new kind of success if we're willing to make some jumps and some changes and show some humility and have an adventure that's better than the first half.
ON THE INTELLIGENCE NEEDED FOR HAPPINESS
There's a very interesting set of findings that said success early on is based on one of two types of intelligence. The first is called fluid intelligence, which gives you the ability to solve problems, to crack the case, to innovate faster and to focus harder than pretty much all the competition early on in your career. This is your Elon Musk brain, and this increases through your 20s and into your 30s.
But then it tends to decline through your 40s and 50s, meaning that you need to move to the second kind of intelligence, which is increasing in your 40s and 50s and even your 60s, and it will stay high for the rest of your life. That's called your crystallized intelligence, which is your wisdom, your ability to compile the information that's in your vast library to teach better, to explain better, to form teams better. In other words, not to answer somebody else's questions, but to form the right questions.
FLEXIBILITY
One of the biggest things that I teach my students at the Harvard Business School is that what you think right now is not what you're going to think later. The things that you want are not the things that you're going to want later.
Your abilities are going to change, your views are going to change. The things you care about [are] going to change, and that's good and that's healthy. And that kind of flexibility is key.
Everybody knows that the pandemic is not something that we wanted, but it's also been an incredible opportunity for a lot of people. For me, I was able to quietly write this book and set up a strategic plan for the rest of my life.
Let's not forget that there are certain things that we don't want to go back to. ~
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/16/1080840387/retirement-happiness-social-science-ageing-book
Oriana:
Not a satisfying article, I know. I went to Amazon to find out more about the book, and learned that perhaps the most useful part of it deals with ditching the addiction to workaholism. This is not a book for those who want to see the later years through rose-tinted glasses. It forces the reader to face the reality of age-related decline. Though there are exceptions in creative arts, these are exceptions, not the rule. This is where flexibility becomes a savior. For me, it was the steady work of compiling my weekly blog — I found my purpose mainly (though not exclusively) in trying to make each blog a jewel.
And guess what . . . many people would still describe me as a workaholic, but I take it as a compliment. My work is my passion. I feel very lucky to be a happy workaholic.
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THE LORD VISITS ABRAHAM IN MAMRE, GENESIS 18
~ And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;
2 And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground,
3 And said, My Lord, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:
4 Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:
5 And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.
6 And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.
7 And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.
8 And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.
And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.
10 And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him.
11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.
12 Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?
13 And the Lord said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old?
14 Is any thing too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.
15 Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.
16 And the men rose up from thence, and looked toward Sodom: and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way.
17 And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do;
18 Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? ~
Oriana:
This pleasant scene of hospitality is made confusing because of the changing pronouns: “they” and “he” when “he” apparently means the Lord.
It’s obvious that Abraham treats the three visitors as beings of the highest rank — and yet it also seems that they are simply three men, travelers whose feet got dusty from walking in open sandals, and who surely are yearn for cool shade and tasty food and drink. But discussing this visit, we tend to talk about The Three Angels. Yet the text consistently refers to three men, not angels.
Is one of these angels the Lord himself? After all, the opening verse states: And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he [Abraham] sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. The heat of the day immediately made me remember Yahweh walking in the Garden of Eden “in the cool of the day.” In that story, it was a walking and talking deity; now we have three men — or is it two angels and Yahweh — who talk and eat the delicacies offered to them. So the Lord walks, talks, and eats (mixing dairy and flesh!)
Since the calf is merely “dressed” and not roasted, it’s possible that the meat was cut into small pieces that could be put on skewers and roasted over the fire. Whatever the practical details of this feast, one thing seems sure: if these are two angels and Yahweh himself, they eat real food, and not some special “food of the gods.” No nectar and ambrosia here, but veal and curds (this could mean sour milk, which is wonderfully refreshing), bread and cake.
But afterwards one of them — is it the Lord himself? — speaks and announces that Sarah, who is past childbearing, shall have a son. And in what is arguably one of the most wonderful and humorous scenes in the bible, Sarah laughs. But the Lord is not amused; from this point on he becomes more and more “the Lord” to whom nothing is impossible — yet nevertheless he walks and talks and eats. Specifically, he is on his way to Sodom; and secondly and more scandalously, he eats both meat and dairy (when the Lord does it, it’s kosher).
There is really no doubt that in the early books of the bible the deity is imagined as having a body. Most likely it’s a vigorous body, not the body of an old man.
And there seems nothing celestial about any of the three visitors. If these are three angels, as my nun insisted, then they have no wings, no unusually tall stature, and no radiance. One could indeed provide a secular interpretation: these really are simply three men, and even if one of them utters prophecies, well, there have always been men (and occasionally women) who spoke of the future as if they had special knowledge. As for Sarah’s belated child-bearing, perhaps she was still only menopausal, and not post-menopausal: some exceptional women have given birth in their late forties and at near-fifty. So the whole story becomes simply human, an example of hospitality accorded to travelers.
Not that the secular interpretation is satisfying; of course we want angels and miracles. We want fascinating stories spun around a mystery that can be interpreted in more than one way. Religion was born of group rituals, but also of the stories of ancestors, repeated in a way that added supernatural elements to them.
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Example of Bertrand Russell's humor (His 1918 prison sentence)
“I was much cheered, on my arrival, by the warder at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.
One time, when I was reading, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to silence me, yelling: "You must remember that prison is a place of punishment!”.
— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967–1969), Ch. VIII: The First War, p. 257
Bertrand Russell was sentenced to Brixton prison in 1918 on the tenuous grounds that he had interfered in British war time foreign policy. Russell had argued that British workers should be wary of the United States Army on British soil, for it had abundant and brutal experience in strike-breaking. He was released after serving six months, but was closely supervised until the end of the First World War.
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MEMORY OF FRIGHTENING EVENTS INVOLVES DNA BREAKAGE
~ The urgency to remember a dangerous experience requires the brain to make a series of potentially dangerous moves: Neurons and other brain cells snap open their DNA in numerous locations — more than previously realized, according to a new study — to provide quick access to genetic instructions for the mechanisms of memory storage.
The extent of these DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in multiple key brain regions is surprising and concerning, says study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, because while the breaks are routinely repaired, that process may become more flawed and fragile with age. Tsai’s lab has shown that lingering DSBs are associated with neurodegeneration and cognitive decline and that repair mechanisms can falter.
“We wanted to understand exactly how widespread and extensive this natural activity is in the brain upon memory formation because that can give us insight into how genomic instability could undermine brain health down the road,” says Tsai, who is also a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a leader of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative. “Clearly, memory formation is an urgent priority for healthy brain function, but these new results showing that several types of brain cells break their DNA in so many places to quickly express genes is still striking.”
In 2015, Tsai’s lab provided the first demonstration that neuronal activity caused DSBs and that they induced rapid gene expression. But those findings, mostly made in lab preparations of neurons, did not capture the full extent of the activity in the context of memory formation in a behaving animal, and did not investigate what happened in cells other than neurons.
In the new study published July 1 in PLOS ONE, lead author and former graduate student Ryan Stott and co-author and former research technician Oleg Kritsky sought to investigate the full landscape of DSB activity in learning and memory. To do so, they gave mice little electrical zaps to the feet when they entered a box, to condition a fear memory of that context. They then used several methods to assess DSBs and gene expression in the brains of the mice over the next half-hour, particularly among a variety of cell types in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, two regions essential for the formation and storage of conditioned fear memories. They also made measurements in the brains of mice that did not experience the foot shock to establish a baseline of activity for comparison.
The creation of a fear memory doubled the number of DSBs among neurons in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, affecting more than 300 genes in each region. Among 206 affected genes common to both regions, the researchers then looked at what those genes do. Many were associated with the function of the connections neurons make with each other, called synapses. This makes sense because learning arises when neurons change their connections (a phenomenon called “synaptic plasticity”) and memories are formed when groups of neurons connect together into ensembles called engrams.
“Many genes essential for neuronal function and memory formation, and significantly more of them than expected based on previous observations in cultured neurons … are potentially hotspots of DSB formation,” the authors wrote in the study.
In another analysis, the researchers confirmed through measurements of RNA that the increase in DSBs indeed correlated closely with increased transcription and expression of affected genes, including ones affecting synapse function, as quickly as 10-30 minutes after the foot shock exposure.
“Overall, we find transcriptional changes are more strongly associated with [DSBs] in the brain than anticipated,” they wrote. “Previously we observed 20 gene-associated [DSB] loci following stimulation of cultured neurons, while in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex we see more than 100-150 gene associated [DSB] loci that are transcriptionally induced.”
SNAPPING WITH STRESS
In the analysis of gene expression, the neuroscientists looked at not only neurons but also non-neuronal brain cells, or glia, and found that they also showed changes in expression of hundreds of genes after fear conditioning. Glia called astrocytes are known to be involved in fear learning, for instance, and they showed significant DSB and gene expression changes after fear conditioning.
Among the most important functions of genes associated with fear conditioning-related DSBs in glia was the response to hormones. The researchers therefore looked to see which hormones might be particularly involved and discovered that it was glutocortocoids, which are secreted in response to stress. Sure enough, the study data showed that in glia, many of the DSBs that occurred following fear conditioning occurred at genomic sites related to glutocortocoid receptors. Further tests revealed that directly stimulating those hormone receptors could trigger the same DSBs that fear conditioning did and that blocking the receptors could prevent transcription of key genes after fear conditioning.
Tsai says the finding that glia are so deeply involved in establishing memories from fear conditioning is an important surprise of the new study.
“The ability of glia to mount a robust transcriptional response to glutocorticoids suggest that glia may have a much larger role to play in the response to stress and its impact on the brain during learning than previously appreciated,” she and her co-authors wrote.
DAMAGE AND DANGER
More research will have to be done to prove that the DSBs required for forming and storing fear memories are a threat to later brain health, but the new study only adds to evidence that it may be the case, the authors say.
“Overall we have identified sites of DSBs at genes important for neuronal and glial functions, suggesting that impaired DNA repair of these recurrent DNA breaks which are generated as part of brain activity could result in genomic instability that contribute to aging and disease in the brain,” they wrote.
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/memory-dna/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3xKnJultrzx1mNCTTdtplcVKV3xl4yfrRYZKY2uqv46LjjMdYgAYHZc9A#Echobox=1644250387-1
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CONSERVATIVES AND EXTRAVERTS MORE LIKELY TO GET COVID (and other infectious diseases)
~ The COVID pandemic, which has killed millions across the world, is largely rooted in human social behavior. Through such processes as coughing and related respiratory acts, the virus gets itself replicated from one human body into another. It thrives on close contact between people.
In light of the human behavioral element of COVID, my research team (a subset of The New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) conducted a study to help us better understand the behavioral factors that underlie the spread of this virus—a virus that has turned all of our worlds upside down in so many ways.
Extraversion is a continuous trait measure with sociability near its core (see Costa & McCrae, 1985). The idea of this trait being "continuous" essentially means that scores on extraversion vary by degree, with some people being extremely high on this dimension (extraverts), some being extremely low on this dimension (introverts), and most people being somewhere in the middle.
Recent research has found that those who are relatively extraverted are less likely to follow recommended guidelines related to protection from the virus compared to those who are more introverted (see Han et al., 2021).
A straightforward hypothesis related to this issue, then is simply this: Extraverts may well be more likely to actually acquire COVID compared with introverts. Such a result would be consistent with the evolutionary framework of balancing selection), which suggests that evolutionary benefits of extraversion, such as increased mating opportunities and larger social circles, might be offset by such adverse outcomes as injury and early death. Following this reasoning, perhaps across the human evolutionary experience, extraverts have been more likely to be "selected out" during intermittent pandemics, which have long been a part of human history.
An additional evolutionary perspective as to why and how extraversion might relate to COVID infection proclivity pertains the behavioral-system hijacking hypothesis. This idea, which is admittedly beyond the scope of our data, suggests that the coronavirus, which has known effects on the nervous system, may actually hijack behavior and temporarily make people relatively sociable so as to increase its spread across an increased number of human hosts.
CONSERVATISM AND COVID
Given the tendency for nearly any issue to become politicized in modern times, it is unfortunate—but not surprising—that the COVID pandemic has become highly politicized. And it makes sense that this fact has led to differentiated behaviors related to the pandemic across the political spectrum.
Gollwitzer et al. (2020) found that people who live in relatively conservative areas (based on voting patterns) have been less likely to follow social-distancing guidelines relative to those living in areas where people are more likely to vote for liberal political candidates.
In light of this basic reasoning, we predicted that people who self-identify as conservative would be more likely to wind up becoming infected with the virus relative to those who self-identify as liberal.
Our study included over 200 adults from both the US and the UK. We targeted individuals who are 40 or older, as younger people are less likely to be symptomatic. In our final sample, about 1/4 of participants reported having received, at some point, a positive COVID test or they reported having tested as positive for the anti-bodies, implying that they'd had the disease at some point.
Participants completed a simple survey that included a measure of various facets of extraversion, including the sociability facet, which was the particular sub-dimension of extraversion that was of interest to us. Participants also completed a political orientation index reporting the degree to which they self-identified as politically liberal or conservative.
Our results were relatively straightforward:
1. There was no effect for country of origin: The results came out the same in participants regardless of whether they were from the US or the UK.
2. After controlling for a broad array of other variables, the sociability facet of extraversion emerged as a significant predictor of whether someone had become infected with the coronavirus: Social extraverts were significantly more likely than were others to have had COVID.
3. Across both the US and UK samples, those who self-identified as politically conservative were more likely to have tested positive for COVID relative to their self-described liberal counterparts.
Issues of human behavior have been at the core of the spread of the virus from the outset. The research described here explores the behavioral science of COVID. Specifically, we found that those who have been infected with COVID are more likely to (a) score as relatively sociable on indices of extraversion and (b) identify as relatively politically conservative. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202105/extraverts-and-conservatives-are-more-likely-get-covid
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HEAVY METAL FROM THE DINOSAUR-KILLING ASTEROID MAY BECOME A CANCER TREATMENT
~ Iridium—the world’s second densest metal—can kill cancer cells by filling them with a deadly singlet version of oxygen, while leaving healthy tissue unharmed.
First discovered in 1803, iridium gets its name comes from the Latin for “rainbow.” Hard, brittle, and yellow, the metal comes from the same family as platinum and is the world’s most corrosion-resistant metal.
Iridium is rare on Earth, but is abundant in meteoroids—and large amounts of iridium have been discovered in the Earth’s crust from around 66 million years ago, leading to the theory that it came to this planet with an asteroid which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The researchers created a compound of iridium and organic material, which they can directly target towards cancerous cells, transferring energy to the cells to turn the oxygen (O2) inside them into singlet oxygen, which is poisonous and kills the cell—without harming any healthy tissue.
“This project is a leap forward in understanding how these new iridium-based anti-cancer compounds are attacking cancer cells, introducing different mechanisms of action to get around the resistance issue and tackle cancer from a different angle,” says study coauthor Cookson Chiu, a postgraduate researcher in the chemistry department at the University of Warwick.
Shining visible laser light through the skin onto the cancerous area triggers the process—this reaches the light-reactive coating of the compound and activates the metal to start filling the cancer with singlet oxygen.
Photochemotherapy—using laser light to target cancer—is fast emerging as a viable, effective, and non-invasive treatment. Patients are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional therapies, so it is vital to establish new pathways like this for fighting the disease.
The researchers found that after attacking a model tumor of lung cancer cells, which the researchers grew in the laboratory to form a tumor-like sphere, with red laser light (which can penetrate deeply through the skin), the activated organic-iridium compound penetrated and infused into every layer of the tumor to kill it—demonstrating how effective and far-reaching this treatment is.
They also proved that the method is safe to healthy cells by conducting the treatment on non-cancerous tissue and finding it had no effect.
“Our innovative approach to tackle cancer involving targeting important cellular proteins can lead to novel drugs with new mechanisms of action. These are urgently needed,” says Pingyu Zhang, a fellow in the chemistry department at the University of Warwick.
Furthermore, the researchers used state-of-the-art ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry to gain an unprecedented view of the individual proteins within the cancer cells—allowing them to determine precisely which proteins are attacked by the organic-iridium compound.
“Remarkable advances in modern mass spectrometry now allow us to analyze complex mixtures of proteins in cancer cells and pinpoint drug targets, on instruments that are sensitive enough to weigh even a single electron!” says Peter O’Connor, professor of analytical chemistry.
After analyzing huge amounts of data—thousands of proteins from the model cancer cells—they concluded that the iridium compound damaged the proteins for heat shock stress and glucose metabolism, both known as key molecules in cancer.
“The precious metal platinum is already used in more than 50 percent of cancer chemotherapies. The potential of other precious metals such as iridium to provide new targeted drugs which attack cancer cells in completely new ways and combat resistance, and which can be used safely with the minimum of side-effects, is now being explored,” says Peter Sadler, whose lab is in the department of chemistry at the University of Warwick.
Sadler adds: “It’s certainly now time to try to make good medical use of the iridium delivered to us by an asteroid 66 million years ago!” ~
https://www.geologyin.com/2017/12/heavy-metal-found-in-meteoroids-kills.html?fbclid=IwAR0Q3-cEnbtcfkI_fV4Q-btoS0uhhZT7EJa1DPScvsjLz2ODeWymYY8Tb8o
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ending on beauty (even if nihilistic)
“And if the wine you drink, the lip you press,
end in the nothing all things end in —Yes,
then fancy while thou art, thou art but what
thou shalt be—nothing—thou shalt not be less.”
~ Omar Khayyam
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