*
LETTER FROM KAFKA
Dear Fräulein K, I can’t believe you ask,
Does God love us? You must joke.
We are the suicidal thoughts of God.
I always have a headache ready,
can easily arrange insomnia.
Today a neighbor coughed twice;
I know tomorrow
he’ll cough even more.
Do I complain too much?
My motto: If we cannot use arms,
let us embrace with complaints.
If only I could be not the nobody I am,
but the nobody I am paid to be.
On a balcony in my mind I leaned
to peony petals rimmed with rain,
when my superior, that good
sober man, asked if we carried
insurance for convicts —
I almost slapped him with both hands.
You see what an impossible
person I am. What strength it takes
to read this letter.
How you must hate me.
But I am unworthy of hate.
My father meanwhile grows and grows,
one colossal leg already in America —
he’s sprawling across the continents.
We have nothing in common, but then
what do I have in common with myself?
I must move away from home:
the sight of my parents’ nightshirts
makes me sick to the stomach.
I think of marriage
even more often than of death.
If only I could spend my life
in a cellar with nothing but paper
and pen, a ribbon of light
seeping in at the edge of the door —
But I won’t torment you by mail;
I’ll save it up until we meet.
If writing is prayer, who am I praying to?
not to the one who hangs
around our neck our daily stone.
Perhaps we shouldn’t meet.
I resent having to talk
when I could be writing you a letter.
You ask, But what is art?
Dear Fräulein: there is no art.
There is only the delight of failure.
Kindest Regards, K
~ Oriana
*
KAFKA’S DIARIES: “WHAT EXCUSE DO I HAVE FOR HAVING WRITTEN NOTHING YET TODAY? NONE.”
~ Franz Kafka so enthralled the twentieth-century literary imagination that he came to be seen as the representative genius of the modern age. To this day an ever-expanding cosmos of secondary literature swirls around his work. At the same time, scholars have widely acknowledged that this work is too singular and elusive to be subject to any reductive interpretation. After all, how far can analytical methods be applied to fiction that borrows its logic from the liminal space between waking and dreaming?
Often writing deep into the night, Kafka explored this unstable and destabilizing terrain in stories that have long been enshrined in the pantheon of modern literature. Yet his vision, idiom, and sensibility did not appear fully formed from the outset. Rather they were wrought and wrestled into being in the same arena where many writers enact the drama of linguistic self-creation—in his notebooks.
Between 1909 and 1923, Kafka kept various notebooks that he called his Tagebücher, or “diaries.” In the pages of these notebooks, he interspersed many different kinds of writing: entries recording daily events, reflections, and observations; literary sketches; drafts of letters, reviews, and other texts; accounts of dreams; autobiographical recollections; impressions, synopses, and critical considerations of books, plays, and other cultural events and phenomena; descriptions of people with whom he was acquainted or crossed paths, particularly their physical appearances, gestures, clothing, habits of speech and communication; examinations of his own bodily states and symptoms, moods and perceptions, inner conflicts and predicaments; outbursts of anguish and bouts of self-torment; outlines for planned works; excerpts from his reading material; snapshots of his urban environment, his family and office spheres, and the social and cultural milieus in which he moved; sporadic jottings; enigmatic aphorisms; and all-but-finished prose pieces and stories.
In these disparate writings the line between life and literature cannot be sharply drawn. Often it cannot be determined in a given passage whether Kafka is registering a private experience, crafting fiction, or transforming the one into the other. He worked on his diary entries with unvarying literary intensity, revising, adding, cutting, correcting. His impulse to give artistic shape to what he wrote apparently made no distinctions.
Kafka’s diaries therefore have far more than biographical value. While they illuminate a great deal about his world as a German-speaking Jewish writer in Prague—and as a son, a brother, a friend, a lover, an employee, a reader, a patron of theatrical and other cultural venues, a frequenter of coffeehouses and other establishments, an observer of and participant in contemporary trends and movements, an occasional traveler—they also go beyond our interest in the man and his time: On every page they reveal the writer at work.
Excerpt from First Notebook:
Today, for example, I committed three impertinences, toward a conductor, toward a superior of mine, well there were only 2, but they’re plaguing me like stomach pains. Coming from anyone they would have been impertinences, all the more so coming from me. Thus I went outside myself, fought in the air in the mist and worst of all no one noticed that I committed, had to commit, the impertinence as an impertinence toward my companions too, had to bear the right expression, the responsibility; but the most awful thing was when one of my acquaintances took this impertinence not as a sign of a certain character but as the character itself, called my attention to my impertinence and admired it. Why don’t I stay within myself? To be sure, I now tell myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and your superior remained calm as you left, the latter even said goodbye. But that means nothing. You can attain nothing when you abandon yourself, but what do you miss anyhow in your circle. To this speech I respond only: I too would rather receive a beating within the circle than myself give a beating outside it, but where the devil is this circle? For a while I did see it lying on the earth, as if sprayed there with lime, but now it just hovers around me, indeed doesn’t even hover.
Excerpt from Second Notebook:
I would like to explain the feeling of happiness that I have within me from time to time as I do right now. It’s really something effervescent that fills me completely with a slight pleasant tremor and that persuades me of abilities of whose nonexistence I can convince myself with absolute certainty at any moment even now.
If it weren’t beyond doubt that the reason I leave letters (even those expected to contain nothing of significance, like one right now) unopened for a while is only weakness and cowardice, which hesitate to open a letter just as they would hesitate to open the door of a room in which a person, perhaps impatient by now, is waiting for me, then one could explain this leaving unopened of letters much better still by thoroughness. That is, assuming I am a thorough person, then I must try to prolong as far as possible everything concerning the letter, thus open it slowly, read it slowly and many times, think about it for a long time, prepare the clean copy with many drafts and finally hesitate even to send it off. All this lies in my power, only the sudden receipt of the letter itself cannot be avoided. Well I slow down even that in an artificial way, I don’t open it for a long time, it lies on the table in front of me, it constantly offers itself to me, I constantly receive it, but don’t take it.
20 (December 1910) What excuse do I have for yesterday’s remark on Goethe (which is almost as untrue as the feeling described by it, for the real one was driven away by my sister)? None. What excuse do I have for having written nothing yet today? None. Especially since my disposition isn’t the worst. I constantly have an invocation in my ear: “If you would come, invisible tribunal!”
Wretched, wretched and yet well meant. Yes, it’s midnight, but since I’ve slept very well, that is an excuse only insofar as during the day I would have written nothing at all. The burning electric light, the silent apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments they give me the right to write and be it even the most wretched things. And this right I use hastily. So that’s who I am. ~
https://lithub.com/what-excuse-do-i-have-for-having-written-nothing-yet-today-none-glimpses-into-kafkas-workshop/?fbclid=IwAR2sp9qEbkwytgUH_SdqhlvKVx5qPYfKn9GjLVQLo6jOWAG1e5GMByl0K2I
Oriana:
He’s been called the poet of guilt and shame. I don’t think anyone exceeds him.
*
RUSSIA AND COLLECTIVE NARCISSISM
~ Russia suffers from collective narcissism. They’re convinced Russia is the best and super and best and righteous and good and is entitled to this or that and … you get the picture. Russians are either enamored by the idea, or leave the country. This creates a self-reinforcing loop where people who wish Russia to be different don’t remain in Russia, leading to a vicious cycle of victimization, self-aggrandizing and hate against anyone telling them they aren’t special. They’re just a country endowed with natural resources which also has nuclear weapons.
Here’s the thing though, Russia isn’t the first, or the last, country like that. There were plenty
throughout history who had the same idea about themselves (there still are those who do), who changed for the better. Two notable, relatively recent converts are Germany and Japan. A hundred years ago they had the same mindset as Russia does today. Weimar and post-Weimar Germany in particular is an alarmingly good match, and they were both changed for the better in every single way. The problem is this only happened as a direct consequence of the bloodiest armed conflict of all history, followed up by a foreign occupation and a schnellkurs on democracy and progressivism.
Russia can change. However like a person suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, it takes a lot to even contemplate the need to make a change. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine might be a good first start though. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Imagine building your whole personality around defending communism, Lenin, Stalin, Gulags, Holodomor, Asharshylyk, numerous invasions, treating collapse of USSR as a major tragedy, now praising Russian colonialism and genocides BECAUSE the US also started wars back in the day. ~ Chidera Akigwe Aloysius
*Asharshylyk was famine in Kazakhstan, due to forced collectivization
Daniel Wick:
I think Russians are in many ways critical of their government, country and culture. Anyone who has actually been to/lived in Russia knows this. A difference in opinion is not frowned upon. There is a mix of different opinions. Today we're able to watch street interviews on YouTube too.
I assume the author hasn't been to Russia. Just talk to Russians and you'll see how everyone has their own opinion and the amount of criticism they have. I remember that in the 90’s there was almost no positive news about Russia coming from the Russian media it was actually unhealthy. Now it's probably more closer to 50/50 where there's both criticism and positive news reports on a variety of issues.
Mark Filipson:
The further the Russians are from Kremlin, the more fond of Russia they are. Sure, there are a lot of different opinions and well rounded individuals in Russia, but outside of Moscow and proportionally to distance from it, Russians become more and more pro-putinist. I have met a lot of die-hard anti-putinists outside of Russia, especially after the war started, but in general Russians have a bitter taste in locals' mouth in neighboring countries. In Baltics for example, any pro-Russian sentiment is getting increasingly frowned upon as the war progresses. Loads of Ukrainian refugees don't help the sentiment either.
Robert Denbeigh:
Interestingly, such collective narcissism is also visible in the USA.
Tomaž Vargazon:
Yeah, but also in China and Korea. Russia is just unusually bad at it.
Greg Kemnitz:
The US has always had a combination of we’re-so-awesome narcissism and we’re-so-screwed flagellation. The never-ending interplay between these extremes is actually healthy as it keeps things moving forward (people have been predicting the demise of the US for this-and-that reason since 1776), but it does mean that if you want to make conclusions about the US, you can find plenty of well-argued evidence from US sources for your position, no matter what it is.
Countries that don’t have flagellants — because they drive them out or put them in prison — are the ones you really need to worry about.
*
WHY RUSSIA THINKS IT’S A SUPER-POWER
~ Because they have nukes, a large land area, and have been surrounded by weaker nations they could bully at will for ages. I’m not saying that’s a legitimate argument, just that I believe that is “part of” their reasoning.
By contrast, China truly is a superpower. They also have nukes, a large land area, and smaller, weaker nations around them who are no threat. But China has a very large economy, and thus greater influence across the world. I think this should be one of the most critical criteria to define a superpower. Russia falls short in this regard.
Russia, I believe, has fallen prey to the mystique that they have projected to the world. They’ve told lies to the world for so long, they now believe their own lies are a reality. Unfortunately, they have recently ran headlong into a true reality in Ukraine, and are now struggling to understand what went wrong.
Poverty in Russia. You can claim I cherry-picked this image, and sure that’s true, since there’s poverty in every nation. But Russia stands out because scenes like this far more common—in fact a norm—more in Russia than it is in Western Nations.
This is hubris of too much nationalism. The people of any nation, I believe, have a right to be proud of their history and culture. Where nations fall afoul of reality is when the people start believing they are better than everyone else.
This is a mistake, and one commonly made by fascist states. The allure is attractive to the common folk, and it is in this method that fascists find their power base, but when such beliefs make them believe military adventurism will surely succeed, that’s when the nationalist house of cards collapses, just as it did for Hitler, Mussolini, Togo, and soon to come…Putin. ~ Eric
Wicklund, Quora
Stan Mould:
I think Russia has projected its mystique onto itself, deluding itself as a state that it is all-powerful.
That’s a true reflection of how a narcissistic, psychopathic personality works.
Tomaž Vergazon:
The blue shed in the background is marked “shit here”.
I’m assuming it’s an outhouse. In a city.
Jim Strong:
Corruption for 20+ years has depleted the Russian military! Putin had to know this since he was getting his share of the stolen monies from the oligarchs. He believed his own PR about Ukrainians meeting his army at the border with flowers, and the mystique of Russian cultural, societal and military superiority. The German Arian race, Japanese racial superiority and the restoration of the Roman Empire.
*
“Conventional forces need to win, to avoid losing. Guerilla forces just need to avoid losing, to eventually win.” ~ Henry Kissinger
*
PRESIDENT ZELENSKY, JANUARY 4, 23
In his nightly address to the nation, President Zelenskyy accused Russia of “following the devil by waging a war to ensure Vladimir Putin remains in power until the end of his life.”
“All this war that you are waging, you — Russia, it is not the war with NATO, as your propagandists lie,” said the President. “It is not for something historical. It’s for one person to remain in power until the end of his life. And what will become of all of you, citizens of Russia, does not concern him. The Russian leader is hiding behind his troops, behind missiles, behind the walls of his residences and palaces and behind his people. He hides behind you and burns your country and your future. No one will ever forgive you for the terror.”
Oriana:
“No one will ever forgive you.” This should be changed to “for a long time.” A matter of decades, of generations. Eventually, as we saw with Germany, a horrible past can be forgiven, but . . . Germany had to be de-Nazified first. It had to assume responsibility for its war crimes. Will Russia ever arrive at an equivalent point?
Not the Russia of today, which is mired in such deep lies, I wonder it doesn’t suffocate under the weight of this manure.
*
Russia
keeps deliberately killing civilians in Ukraine -- children, women, the
elderly. That's all it knows how to do anymore -- the lowest of the
low. There are no words, of course. No words. ~ Misha Iossel
*
RUSSIA REJECTS ZELENSKY’S CALL FOR TROOP PULLOUT, SAYING UKRAINE MUST ACCEPT “REALITIES.” WILL RUSSIA ACCEPT THE REALITIES OF THEIR OWN DEFEAT?
~ Russia will accept defeat but not yet. Even now, the Kremlin is trying to figure out how best to position the loss of Crimea to the Russian people when it does eventually happen. This is reflected in the dialogue of Russian State TV shows.
The West is increasing military support while Russia is running low on modern ammunition. At the same time, the Russian budget surplus is declining rapidly due to the EU oil embargo which just began but yielding immediate results. The Russian Government is currently unable to pay its soldiers and drawing from the State pension fund which will be a long-term disaster for ordinary Russians. This “perfect storm” should break Russia by the second half of 2023. ~ Gaza Sher, Quora
New graves at Tula Military Cemetery. 110 miles south of Moscow, Tula is the main weapons manufacturing center in Russia.
*
THE SOVIET UNION’S ATTACK ON POLAND IN SEPTEMBER 1939 (Dima Vorobiev)
~ The attack of Germany on Poland was covered among second-tier news in explicitly neutral terms as “a start of fighting between German and Polish forces”. Later, the Soviet newsfeed became increasingly tilted in favor of Germany, which Stalin in November 1939 cemented in his famous sentence, “It wasn’t Germany who attacked France and England, but rather France and England who attacked Germany, assuming responsibility for the current war.”
At about the same time, Molotov said:
“The real reason for the Anglo-French war against Germany is not that England and France vowed to restore the former Poland and, of course, not because they decided to take on the task of fighting for democracy… Their motives do not pertain to the sphere of any ideology, but to the sphere of their purely material interests, as powerful colonial powers… The imperialist character of this war is obvious to everyone.”
“In our eyes, in the eyes of the entire Soviet people, these are the same enemies of the world as all other warmongers in Europe. Only those who want a new bloodshed, a new massacre of peoples, only they want to make the Soviet Union and Germany butt their heads, only they want to thwart the beginning restoration of good neighborly relations between the peoples of the USSR and Germany.”
“The ideology of Hitlerism, like any other ideological system, can be recognized or denied—it is a matter of political views. But any person will understand that ideology can not be destroyed by force, we can not eradicate it through war. Therefore, it is not only senseless, but also criminal, to wage such a war as the war for the "destruction of Hitlerism" under the false flag of struggle for "democracy."”
The annexation of West Belorussia and West Ukraine from Poland was presented as a humanitarian act of protecting brotherly Slav minorities there from the chaos of crumbling Polish state. The art below shows the entry of Soviet troops on the Polish territory met by exuberant local population. The text says: “September 1939. West Ukraine and West Belorussia have started preparations to the celebration of October revolution” (i.e. the Bolshevik revolution of 1917):
Soviet tanks supposedly being greeted with flowers in 1939Michael Zajac:
At bottom center, the broken border post and crowned eagle represent the destruction of the Polish state and invalidation of its borders. The officer with his broken sword the intellectual class of Poland, awaiting his fate at the hands of the NKVD.
The Poles were declared Soviet citizens, to be punished as traitors rather than a defeated enemy according to the laws of war. Since conscription required university graduates to serve as officers, the Soviets’ secret Katyń massacre of 22,000 Polish officers was actually a direct effort to destroy their nation by killing its intellectuals, clergy, and cultural and political leaders.
The image of Belarusian and Ukrainian locals greeting the invaders with flowers didn’t happen, but it presaged how a few hopefully welcomed the Nazis after nearly two years of brutal Soviet occupation. By the end of the war, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would experience the very worst of it, dealt out from both Berlin and Moscow.
Grzegorz B:
I'm writing this answer a 4 years later, after invasion on Ukraine. It's incredible how similar rhetoric is used in nowadays in Russian propaganda. That's the west/NATO fault, Russia fight against nazis for peace.
I also encounter many Russians, who asked the secret protocol of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, about division of Poland between Germany and Russia, reply that Poland signed non-aggression pact with Germany earlier in 1938. They try to equate the partition of another country with the use of force, with a treaty of non-aggression.
I'm a bit confused -- do they really believe it? Maybe a fact it was taught in school, pictured by propaganda that way really made them this seems logical? Or maybe it's just sort of “argument” to count not to weigh.
*
GOOD NEWS
~ While all social networks are rambling with hate and negativity, I want to dilute it with some good news and facts. The world is not so bad, look around:
The Norwegians decided not to drill oil wells in the Lofoten Islands (with oil reserves of $53,000,000,000) to preserve the islands ecosystem.
For the first time in the history of Malawi, a woman has been elected the Speaker of the country's Parliament. Esther Challenge has cancelled 1,500 marriages to underage girls and sent them back to school.
Swedish donors receive a text of gratitude every time their blood saves people.
Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, the nearly-endangered sea turtle population has increased by 980%.
Thai supermarkets have abandoned plastic bags and started wrapping their purchases in banana leaves.
Holland became the first country without stray dogs.
South Korea organizes dance parties for people over 65 to fight dementia and loneliness.
In Rome, you can pay for a subway ticket with plastic bottles. This way 350,000 bottles have already been collected.
California restricts the sale of dogs, cats and rabbits in stores to allow people to adopt pets from shelters.
Rice farmers around the world are starting to use duck fields instead of pesticides. Ducks eat insects and pinch weeds without touching rice.
Canada has passed a law banning the use of orcas and dolphins in the entertainment industry.
Holland plants the roofs of hundreds of bus stops with flowers and plants — especially for bees.
Iceland became the first country in the world to legalize the same wage for men and women.
German circuses use holograms instead of animals to stop animal exploitation in circuses.
Underwater robot LarvalBot is seeding the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef with microscopic corals grown specifically for ecosystem restoration.
To reduce the number of suicides, Sweden organized the world's first psychiatric ambulance.
4,855 people stood in line in the rain for hours to get a stem cell test to save the life of a five-year-old boy.
Indian Village Celebrates Birth Of Every Girl By Planting 111 Trees. Thus, 350,000 trees have already been planted.
Thanks to the ban on humpback whales, their populations have increased from several hundred to 25,000.
The Netherlands built five artificial islands specifically to preserve birds and plants. Two years later, there are already 30,000 birds and 127 species of plants growing there.
NASA satellites have recorded that the world has become greener than 20 years ago.
Since 1994, suicides have decreased by 38%. It saved about four million lives.
Oriana:
Let's take a break from all this positivity:
Jeannie Markowitz:
Also the men don’t bother you when you walk down the street. Only once did a man bother me in NY, on the subway. He was a little tiny man, not much bigger than me, and his face was covered with tattoos. He asked me about my family and if I had a boyfriend. I told him I was busy reading. “What? I’m Jewish too!” he said. Luckily my stop was next.
*
Wars that last only a short time are won by military superiority. If no side wins in a short time they become a confrontation between economies. ~ Rui Azevedo
THE BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE OUTLOOK OF FAMOUS NON-FICTION WRITERS
STEVEN PINKER
Shortly after publishing my book The Better Angels of Our Nature, on the historical decline of violence, I attended a conference sponsored by a foreign policy magazine at which a journalist asked me: “What would it take to eliminate extreme poverty worldwide?” Thinking it was a
trick question, I quipped: “Redefine ‘poverty’.” An eavesdropping economist said to me: “That was a cynical answer”, and recommended a short new book by the development expert Charles Kenny called Getting Better.
Though I already knew that war was in decline, especially wars between nation states, the book documented how every other measure of human well-being had increased over the decades: longevity, child mortality, infectious disease, malnutrition, democracy, literacy, basic education, and yes, extreme poverty. And it noted that the World Bank and the UN Sustainable Development goals had set the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030 as a feasible, albeit extraordinarily difficult, aspiration.
This lifted my view of history and the current state of the world to a higher level. The decline of violence was just one aspect of a historical process that we can legitimately call “progress” – not a romantic or utopian or naive ideal, but an empirical fact that we can see in graphs and numbers. It led me to ask what made this seemingly mystical process happen, and inspired me to write Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (Allen Lane)
MARY BEARD
When I was starting to write my PhD thesis, it was Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger that opened my eyes, and helped me see different things not just in Roman history but in the world around me too.
Its basic idea was to ask: “What counts as dirty (or polluted) in different cultures?” (Why is gravy on your tie “dirty” but on your potatoes not?) A large part of her answer to that was “ambiguity”: “dirty things” are often those that “fall between established categories”. And her key example was not gravy, but Jewish dietary rules, which she argued were based on precisely that kind of ambiguity (pigs, for example, are prohibited or polluted because they are animals with cloven hoofs but they do not, as most cloven hoofed animals do, chew the cud). She later questioned that idea herself and it’s probably wrong.
But it had already set me off on a new track. I had never before thought of asking that kind of question about the Romans. What did they think was dirty? And how different were they from us?
I am not sure that the answers I came up with were any more correct than those of Douglas herself. But her book showed me how to ask different questions –- and it showed that a book doesn’t have to be right to be important.
Mary Beard is a classicist and author of books including SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile) and Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Princeton).
MARGO JEFFERSON
It was 1966 or 67 when I first read Ralph Ellison’s essay collection Shadow and Act. Those were fierce, tumultuous years and I was avidly reading Black literature across generations and genres: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka; poets from the Harlem renaissance to the Black Arts Movement. I’d been floored by the greatness of Ellison’s Invisible Man. But these essays showed another Ellison, a scrupulous explorer of America’s cultural landscape, finding new paths through the fraught territory of American history and art. Racial bigotries enhanced by intellectual fallacies. The ethos and aesthetics of jazz; the ethos and aesthetics of literature and folklore. He probed the ways — stark and subtle — in which Black and white traditions engage and intermingle with each other, how they clash and cohabit. He parsed the relations between group and personal identity. He probed large themes and ideas, “the enigmas, the contradictions of character and culture”. And he never stopped pursuing “inflection, intonation, timbre and phrasings … all those nuances of expression and attitude which reveal a culture”.
His precision was scrupulous and expressive. It won me over. And because it sharpened my mind, it gave me room to disagree with him. He made me want to be a more independent thinker. Reading him, I realized that even great novelists (and poets) needed to write criticism, that criticism lets them delineate and transmit passion, character and history in ways that fiction did not. For me this change of hierarchies was a change of mind and a change of heart.
Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer prize-winning cultural critic and the author of books including Negroland (Pantheon) and Constructing a Nervous System (Granta).
MARCUS DU SAUTOY
The planet is facing a climate emergency. We need to reduce carbon emissions. But what can I personally do to help? I often feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues.
It was reading Sarah Bridle’s book Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air that helped me understand a very important way that I really could contribute. Change my diet. As Bridle explains, this is the easiest way to help save the planet. Bridle’s book is a follow up to David MacKay’s equally wonderful book Sustainable Energy –- Without the Hot Air. MacKay’s mantra is “numbers not adjectives”. I’m a numbers guy. I need things translated into numbers before I can make a decision about the best course of action. This is precisely the thesis of both books. It allows the reader to see and compare the impact of a change of behavior.
To see the effect through numbers that the production of meat and meat-related products has on the environment was a revelation. A quarter of the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change comes from food. Just giving up food from cows could have a massive impact. Bridle’s book changed how I eat. I am an aspiring vegan, which means I still can’t resist cheese. But perhaps I don’t need to be perfect. It just takes millions doing their bit imperfectly. More people reading this book might help.
Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford and author of Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut (4th Estate)
REBECCA SOLNIT
The language of politics can shut down or open up possibilities, as I was reminded when I recently reread one of Doris Lessing’s novels about her time in the Communist party in which party members speak to each other in stale and abstracted terms that obfuscate, distort and most of all bore.
The lingering impact of this kind of political language is part of why the Zapatistas’ sudden appearance on the world stage, with their uprising on 1 January 1994, and the battles they fought with language, were so astonishing and exciting for me and to many others. “Thousands of indigenous, armed with truth and fire, with shame and dignity, shook the country awake from its sweet dream of modernity,” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos wrote shortly thereafter, in a piece titled The Long Journey from Despair to Hope, which is collected in Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, a gorgeous English-language compilation edited by Juana Ponce de León and published in 2001. I have drawn inspiration from it ever since.
Marcos was a non-Indigenous Mexican leftist who had gone to Chiapas to lead the Indigenous communities in revolution, only to find that it was they who were to lead him, in reconceiving what revolution was and its goals could be. There was hope, ferocity and brilliance in his words for the next dozen years or so, but also playfulness, humor, vivid imagery, emotional immediacy and metaphors drawn from the natural world.
Poetry and politics are often treated as entirely separate matters; part of Marcos’s genius was to see that there was no great politic without poetry.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses (Granta).
JIM AL-KHALILI
As a scientist I have spent most of my life wading through dry academic textbooks. But I also have a passion for popular science. Often such books will be on subjects I just wish to know more about, but I also have to read outside my expertise as preparation for interviewing a guest on The Life Scientific on Radio 4. However, I cannot think of any book that has had a bigger impact on my thinking than Consciousness Explained by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. In this popular account of the origins of consciousness, Dennett offers an explanation of how it arises from interactions between the physical and cognitive processes in the brain. He writes in an extremely persuasive way and without recourse to any woo or pseudoscientific mysticism. I remember feeling that, for the first time, I might be able to understand what it means to be conscious and self-aware from a reductionist, scientific perspective.
This was about 30 years ago, and I know the science of consciousness studies has moved on since then. A number of critics of the book – both philosophers and neuroscientists – have argued that Dennett is denying the existence of subjective conscious states, while giving the appearance of a scientific explanation of them. But for me, at the time, it was a book that explained away one of the deepest mysteries of existence using logic and common sense. Whether right or wrong, it altered my entire worldview on the comprehensibility of reality.
Until I read this book my view was that the nature of consciousness was such an intractable problem that it wasn’t something we were anywhere near being able make sense of. While Dennett’s approach is not likely to be whole story – after all, the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe – it nevertheless blew me away that it was at least conceivable in principle to rationalize it.
Jim Al-Khalili is the University of Surrey’s distinguished chair in theoretical physics, a broadcaster and author of books including The World According to Physics and The Joy of Science (Princeton).
GAIA VINCE
No Logo by Naomi Klein didn’t just change my mind, it hurled it into a different orbit, giving me an entirely new perspective on how the globalized world works. It emerged, a firebrand, straight into the turn-of-the-century’s defining social movement, coming out in November 1999 during mass protests against the World Trade Organization, the so-called Battle of Seattle. I was in my 20s, navigating a landscape dominated by big brands, with opaque practices and unquestioned ubiquity in an increasingly deregulated neoliberal economy.
Rampant consumerism, Klein revealed, was a deliberate global movement, driven by large multinational corporations with disturbing political power, perpetuating poverty, global injustice, environmental degradation and resource depletion. However, we little people also have extraordinary power: activists can take down Goliath brands, she showed through detailed, extraordinary reportage from the frontlines of a burgeoning “global justice” movement.
The book is smart, wry, perceptive and absolutely of its time — its effect was electrifying. In that pre-smartphone era when more people read books, No Logo was everywhere. Ironically, the book itself became a brand, an accessory to carry on dates, signifying that its possessor was socially conscious and eco aware. It was one of a handful of important books that spurred a mental transition from seeing myself as an inhabitant of a fully formed world, to understanding that I was an interactive participant in a world that is constantly being created.
Gaia Vince’s latest book is Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/07/it-altered-my-entire-worldview-leading-authors-pick-eight-nonfiction-books-to-change-your-mind?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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THE IDEA OF A PRE-COLONIAL AFRICA
-%20detail%20of%20a%20brass%20plaque,%20one%20of%20many%20adorning%20the%20Court%20of%20Benin%20(in%20modern-day%20Nigeria),%20and%20plundered%20by%20the%20British%20Army%20c1892.jpg)
Equestrian Oba and his attendants (1550-1680): detail of a brass plaque, one of many adorning the Court of Benin (in modern-day Nigeria), and plundered by the British Army c1892.
~ We should expunge, forever, the epithet ‘precolonial’ or any of its cognates from all aspects of the study of Africa and its phenomena. We should banish title phrases, names and characterizations of reality and ideas containing the word.
When ‘precolonial’ is used for describing African ideas, processes, institutions and practices, through time, it misrepresents them. When deployed to explain African experience and institutions, and characterize the logic of their evolution through history, it is worthless and theoretically vacuous. The concept of ‘precolonial’ hides, it never discloses; it obscures, it never illuminates; it does not aid understanding in any manner, shape or form.
Let us begin with the fact that the ubiquitous phrase is almost exclusive in its application to Africa: ‘precolonial Africa’. How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents? If not, what explains the peculiar representation – treating the continent as if it were a single unit of analysis – when it comes to Africa? I am afraid it comes from a not-so-kind genealogy that always takes Africa to be a simple place, homogenizes its peoples and their history, and treats their politics and thought as if they were uncomplicated, each substitutable for the other across time and space. Once you are thinking of ‘Africa’ as a simple whole, it becomes easier to grossly misrepresent an entire continent in the temporal frame of ‘precolonial’.
In reality, ‘precolonial’ Africa never existed. It is a figment of the imagination of scholars, analysts, political types, for whom Africa is a homogeneous place that they need not think too hard about, much less explain to audiences. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a racist philosopher, who argued in the 1820s that Africa was a land ‘outside of Time’ and not a part of the movement of ‘History’. Our intellectual forebears in the 19th century fought against this false characterization. They were the first to remind people of the fact that Africa had always been a part of the movement of history and the global circuit of ideas. They knew what was behind Hegel’s effort to divide Africa into ‘Africa proper’, or ‘Black Africa’, and ‘European Africa’ – it was his need to reconcile his idea that Africa stood outside of history with the undeniable reality of the attainments of ancient Egypt. His ‘solution’ was to identify the achievements of Egyptian Africans as coming from exogenous sources and to remove it from ‘Africa proper’.
All who talk glibly about ‘precolonial’ Africa, insofar as the designation bespeaks a temporal horizon, award an undeserved victory to the racist philosopher. Of course, the ‘pre’ in ‘precolonial’ supposedly designates ‘a time before’ colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The ‘precolonial’ designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.
For one thing, the role of African thinkers in the evolution of Christianity becomes elided by a periodization that does not see a continuity between African events and events elsewhere, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. It also makes it difficult to track demographic continuities when it comes to cultural hybridities, including citizenship, in different parts of the Mediterranean continuum. And, as long as Roman colonialism lasted in North Africa, the region was not hermetically sealed from the rest of the continent, both across the Sahara, and east to the northern reaches of present-day Kenya.
As used, the term ‘precolonial’ Africa and the distortions it represents cannot illuminate our understanding of Africa and its history.
More importantly, it is wrong to think of colonialism as a non-African phenomenon that was only brought in from elsewhere and imposed on the continent. Africa has given rise to a rich tapestry of diverse colonialisms originating in different parts of the continent. How are we to understand them? For example, if ‘precolonial Morocco’ refers to the time before France colonized Morocco, it must deny that the 800-year Moorish colonization of the Iberian Peninsula, much of present-day France and much of North Africa was a colonialism. For, if it were, then ‘colonial Morocco’ must predate ‘precolonial Morocco’. I do not know how any of this helps us understand the history of Morocco. Similarly, a ‘precolonial’ Egypt that refers to Egypt before modern European imperialism would also deny Mohammed Ali’s colonial adventures at the head of Egypt in southern Europe and Asia Minor. Was ancient Egypt part of some precolonial formation? That strains credulity. To conceive of the history of Africa and Africans in terms only, or primarily, of their relation to modern European empires disappears the history of Africans as colonizers of realms beyond the continent’s land borders, especially in Europe and Asia.
It is bad enough that the term distorts the history of African states’ involvement in overseas provinces. It is worse that it misdescribes the evolution of different African polities over time. The deployment of ‘precolonial Africa’ is undergirded by a few implausible assumptions. We assume either that there were no previous forms of colonialism in the continent, or that they do not matter. We talk as if colonialism was brought to Africa by Europe, after the 1884-85 Berlin West Africa Conference. But it takes only a pause to discover that this is false.%20detailing%20the%20Western%20Sahara.%20Courtesy%20the%20Bibliothe%CC%80que%20Nationale%20de%20France,%20Paris.jpg)
Mansa Musa, the ninth king of the Mali Empire, holding a golden orb or coin: from Sheet 6 of a Catalan Atlas (1375) detailing the Western Sahara. Courtesy the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
African history is replete with accounts of empires and kingdoms. By their nature, empires incorporate elements of colonization in them. If this be granted, Africa must have had its fair share of colonizers and colonialists in its history. When, according to the mythohistory (the founding myth of the empire) of Mali, Sundiata gathered different nations, cultures, political leaders and others to form the empire in the mid-13th century, he did not first seek the consent of his subjects. It was in the aftermath of their being subdued by his superior force that he did what Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century insisted all rulers should do if their rule is to escape repeated challenges and last for an appreciable length of time: turn might into right. Ethiopia, another veritable empire, is a multinational, multilingual, multicultural state whose members were not willing parties to their original incorporation into the polity. Whether you think of the Oromo or the Somali, many of their successor states within Ethiopia are, as I write this, still conducting anticolonial struggles against the Ethiopian state.
Ọ̀yọ́ was an empire whose reaches, at its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries, extended from its capital in present-day Nigeria’s southwest as far west as present-day Togo, with complex systems of governance for the capital and for outlying areas. As an imperial formation, Ọ̀yọ́ was also a significant colonizing power in West Africa. The Nigerian archaeologist Akinwumi Ogundiran maintains that Ẹdẹ-Ilé, another city in southwest Nigeria, was founded by Ọ̀yọ́ denizens as a frontier colony to secure the border of the empire against competing potentates who, significantly, were their non-Yorùbá neighbors. Additionally, there are other areas within Nigeria and in other parts of Africa where various forms of colonization took place.
So it seems as if Africa is no different from other parts of the world where varieties of colonization and imperialism flourished before the arrival of the modern version. The modern colonialism that came to Africa in the 19th century has since so dominated our imaginations that it has distorted how we see many aspects of history, including that of colonialism and empire themselves. ~
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Yoruba shrine head (12th to 14th century), terracotta, Nigeria.The articles in this week's blog almost all demonstrate how much perspective determines and limits how we understand, see and interpret the world. From the racist, Eurocentric perspective, colonialism is what European powers did in third world countries, an invention of European empire builders, and while they may concede empires existed previous to their own, in Rome, China, India, they go blind when it comes to Africa, seeing it only as the Dark continent, historically homogeneous and unimportant until colonized and its people exploited to profit the colonial empires built by Europeans .
What you see is determined by who you are, when you are and where you are. The erasing, the refusal to acknowledge pre-European colonization obfuscates all African history up to that time...the nations, kings, wars, art, dismissed as insignificant, denied and forgotten. That this rewriting of history has its foundation in racism is made abundantly clear by their separation of Egypt from the rest of Africa. The splendors of ancient Egypt cannot be allowed to Africans, Egyptians cannot have been black. This is still a hot topic, with Afrocentrists claiming Egypt for the Black race, while others say that prejudices along the lines of skin color were not part of the distinctions made in the ancient world, not the basis for ordering or interpreting society.
Oriana:
The classification of Egypt as Hamito-Semitic is by now an established consensus among scholars. So there is the Asian connection, which is also true of ancient Israel. But that doesn't mean that Egypt should not be seen as part of cultural richness of Africa. The same goes for Ethopia, also Hamito-Semitic -- so what? It's still Africa, and part of the African heritage.
As for non-controversial cultural riches, we have the Kingdom of Benin with its marvelous bronzes.
And yes, we need a new history of Africa that takes a closer look at all the varied ancient kingdoms and their cultures. After all, that's part of the human heritage, and more knowledge would enrich the whole world.
SOCIAL CLASS AND BACON
~ Some linguist interviewed a retired English butcher. He said he got social clues on how to treat housewives by what cut of bacon they ordered. If they ordered belly bacon, he replied: “Here you go, dearie." That meant they were working class. If they ordered back bacon, that meant they were middle class English. He would reply: “Right away, Ma'am." (The British upper-class don't go grocery shopping.) Basically how you were treated was based on your dress.
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Edwardian middle class men wore bowlers
Working class men wore cloth caps.Charles:
In the art world people are also treated in how they are dressed. When I worked in a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, we are taught to look at shoes first. If their shoes are expensive you jump on the potential buyers fast. If they are carrying backpacks, or if they look like artists, nobody wants to talk to them.
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LEONA ZACHARIAS HELPED SOLVE AN EPIDEMIC OF BLINDNESS AMONG NEWBORNS
~ Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia University. But throughout her career, she labored behind men with loftier titles who got the bulk of the credit. In the 1940s, when premature newborns were going blind after being born with perfectly healthy eyes, Zacharias was part of the team that worked to root out the cause.
NIMESH PATEL: They didn't realize that was likely a late stage of a retinal detachment and permanent vision loss.
KATIE HAFNER: Until recently, I had no idea that she [Katie’s maternal grandmother] had a Ph.D, a singular accomplishment for a woman back in the 1930s. And it would be many years before I learned she played a central role in solving that tragic puzzle of the babies going blind nearly 80 years ago. But before we get to the science, I want to tell you a little bit about my grandmother.
She loved dogs more than people, or so it seemed to the humans in her life. She owned a succession of standard poodles, and as a Mozart aficionado, she gave her dogs names such as Lorenzo, Papageno, Cherubino. Every morning she would cut toast for them into perfect small squares. When we were visiting, my sister and I would fight over the privilege of tossing the morsels into the air for the dogs to catch, seeking our grandmother’s hard won approval by way of her beloved dogs.
I do have a single sweet memory of my grandmother. I was seven, maybe eight. It was summer and we were visiting my grandparents in suburban Boston, and I woke up one morning with conjunctivitis. Both my eyes were nearly crusted shut, and it was my grandmother who treated my eyes, twice a day. She applied ointment with incredible tenderness and gentleness. She held my hand and talked my fears away.
Leona Zacharias was born Leona Ruth Hurwitz in New York City, to a middle-class Jewish family with Eastern European roots. Her father was a hard-working math teacher. There was never any question about whether she would attend college, and her parents encouraged her to pursue a career, which was very unusual advice to give to a young woman at the time.
Two weeks after Leona graduated from Barnard with a degree in biology, she married Jerrold Zacharias. She was 20. Within a few years, they had their first daughter, my mother, and even then, Leona stayed on the path laid out for her by her parents. The CV shows that within her first decade of marriage she had earned a master's degree in zoology, followed by a Ph.D. in anatomy, both from Columbia.
Just for context: in 1936, my grandmother was the sole female research fellow at Columbia. A couple of years later, of the 54 science Ph.D.s awarded, 8 went to women, and she was the only woman to receive a Ph.D. in anatomy. Still more impressive, a prominent science journal published her Ph.D. dissertation.
She kept working through the birth of a second daughter in 1942 and a few years later, when my grandfather was tapped to join the physics department at MIT, my grandmother and the two girls followed him to Boston. From the dates on the CV it looks like she had no trouble landing a job almost instantaneously as a lecturer in ophthalmic research at Harvard Medical School. It was a job that would define her career.
On that CV I also see a lot of references to something called retrolental fibroplasia. It was a disorder that would upend the lives of thousands of families around the world.
In the 1940s, all through the medical community, there was talk of premature babies going blind shortly after being born with perfectly normal healthy eyes and no one knew why. The first case was documented on February 14th, 1941, when Dr. Stewart Clifford, a Boston pediatrician, made a routine home visit to examine an infant girl, born prematurely, three months earlier. Although the baby's general development was excellent, he was shocked to see that the baby's eyes were opaque and they were jerking abnormally from side to side, a phenomenon whose medical name is nystagmus. The baby had gone blind.
Over the next several years, as more and more cases surfaced that resembled Dr. Clifford’s patient, physicians came to understand that this was not a one-off. It was an epidemic, and one that reached far beyond Boston. But as always happens when a new disease emerges, physicians and scientists began asking: Why now?
Dr. Nimesh Patel is a pediatric ophthalmologist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. He says that before the 1940s, many premature babies simply died.
NIMESH PATEL: The neonatal survival was not that good. So only in the 1940s, these industrialized countries started having better neonatal survival. So they started encountering a problem they had never seen before.
KATIE HAFNER: Once incubators came into widespread use, premature, very low birthweight babies were staying alive. Unlike many diseases that disproportionately affect poor patients, one of the mysteries of this was that it seemed to be hitting affluent areas especially hard. Where these more advanced interventions were available, doctors were seeing more cases of this blindness.
NIMESH PATEL: So in the 1940s it was first described as retrolental fibroplasia.
KATIE HAFNER: Which literally means a proliferation of fibrous tissue behind the lens.
NIMESH PATEL: They didn't actually understand what they were even seeing at that point. They just saw a membrane behind the lens, but they didn't realize that was likely a late stage of a retinal detachment and permanent vision loss. So the work that was going on here was more just characterizing the disease and trying to figure out what's going on, and that was really important.
KATIE HAFNER: In other words, it was a mystery not unlike the Thalidomide crisis a decade later in the 1950s, when doctors were seeing newborns with deformities unlike anything they'd encountered before. When it came to this infant blindness in the 1940s, scientists were similarly baffled. Retrolental fibroplasia was a frightening mystery that was being studied especially closely in Boston in 1946 just as my grandmother arrived to work at Mass Eye and Ear. By the late 1940s, the syndrome had exploded into a full-blown epidemic.
In one famous case, in 1950, an African-American baby named Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born six weeks early in Saginaw, Michigan. Soon after birth, he was diagnosed with retrolental fibroplasia, which led to permanent blindness. Luckily this didn’t dampen his musical genius. You may know him as Stevie Wonder.
Like Little Stevie Wonder, thousands of children around the world would lose their eyesight. And now as I'm sitting at MIT leafing through my grandmother’s files, I'm thinking, Hmm, did she play any role in figuring out the cause?
Whatever she did, she did it with one hand tied behind her back. Because according to the job titles on her CV, despite her Ph.D., it looks like she never advanced much beyond the associate level throughout her career.
Without equal status of any kind, my grandmother was nevertheless diving headlong into her work on Retrolental Fibroplasia, all while being the good MIT faculty wife, hosting dinner parties for junior faculty, going to cocktail gatherings, and carrying out any number of domestic duties. Plus, her younger daughter was still under her roof, and that daughter was a teenager.
In the meantime, her husband, my grandfather, was being celebrated with all sorts of recognition. Through it all, she’s publishing a bunch of papers, right through the 1950s, and she presented at least one of them at an ophthalmology conference.
Ok so in folder 32, we are looking at a paper, Advances in Pediatrics, Volume Three, 1948, and it's just called “Retrolental Fibroplasia” by T.L. Terry, Boston, Massachusetts. Written in red is my grandmother's name, Leona Zacharias. And then somebody named Everett wrote, “with best wishes to the real author.”
To understand any of this, first I had to understand how all these characters are related. The sole author of that paper, T.L. Terry, was a prominent ophthalmologist at Mass Eye and Ear. He led the lab that my grandmother went to work for in 1946.
Terry is the one who gave retrolental fibroplasia its name. His role was so central from the start that the disease was also known as Terry Syndrome. Terry died shortly after my grandmother arrived at Mass Eye and Ear in 1946. And this article with his name on it appeared two years after that, in 1948.
Does that mean my grandmother actually wrote Terry’s paper? Did she finish it posthumously, or possibly edit it? Why would this man named Everett-somebody, whoever he was, make a point of naming my grandmother the real author?
A quick scan of the paper tells me it’s a definitive history of retrolental fibroplasia and it gives a full report on what was known about the disease to date, as well as some speculation as to its cause. Could it be due to something hereditary? Gestational illness? Infection? The thinking was all over the place.
I find a summary of a 1949 paper. It was published just as the blindness epidemic was starting to peak. There’s my grandmother’s name as co-author.
The first author was V. Everett Kinsey. That's the Everett who scribbled the note, “best wishes to the real author” on the Terry paper. Okay, one mystery solved.
Zacharias and Kinsey published a compendium of possible causes: birth order; the sex of the baby; iron; vitamin A; and oxygen, which is given routinely to premature babies with underdeveloped lungs.
It’s evident that after Terry's death in 1946, Everett Kinsey took over the lab and he was my grandmother's boss. Also evident is the fact that Kinsey and Zacharias became a real team.
Also in the archive are several large black and white photographs of the blind children themselves. Children my grandmother is likely to have met. The photos are heartbreaking.
Since retrolental fibroplasia was hitting premature infants in developed countries all over the world, rooting out the cause became a worldwide collaboration. By 1953, researchers in at least a dozen different places were sharing their findings, which was a real logistical challenge. All hard copies and stamps on envelopes back then.
Gradually, the data coming in from all these places began to point to the unlikeliest of culprits: oxygen. In the United States, England, and other developed countries, incubators were growing more sophisticated, allowing for higher levels of oxygen concentration, and that, it turned out, was the problem.
NIMESH PATEL: And what happened was that people found that if you had too much oxygen, the blood vessels weren't growing normally in the back of the eye.
It was almost like the eye said, ‘I don't really need blood vessels cuz I'm getting all this supplemental oxygen’. And then as a secondary cause, once the oxygen is pulled away, now the eye tries to make new blood vessels and it can actually pull on the retina and cause a detachment.
KATIE HAFNER: This was figured out in 1955. And the lesson was sobering. Oxygen? It was something that seemed so obviously benign. Not giving enough oxygen could be dire for preemies with undeveloped lungs. And remember, there was no easy way to measure a baby's oxygen level in order to calibrate the amount given. So it made perfect sense to give premature babies a lot of it. As soon as new standards were put in place and once oxygen levels were reduced, the incidence of the disease decreased sharply.
The Lasker Award the highest prize awarded in the United States for contributions to medicine, and in 1956, the Lasker was awarded to two men. One was an ophthalmologist at Johns Hopkins named Arnall Patz, and the other was Everett Kinsey.
My aunt tells me about a trip she and my grandparents took to England in 1954 just as scientists were homing in on oxygen as the culprit. While they were there, Leona went to visit a hospital with surprisingly unsophisticated equipment. Not an incubator in sight, despite their widespread use in England. And no retrolental fibroplasia.
Arnall Palz was very clear about his conclusion that where hospitals were affluent enough to take care of of these preemies with a lot of oxygen is where the incidence was high and in lesser places it didn't show up.
And then he said, ‘I bet she did all the work Kinsey got credit for’.
Is it actually possible? Kinsey never told Patz about my grandmother's contributions, even after publishing several papers with her and acknowledging her role with his “Best wishes to the real author” inscription?
I go back to the paper itself. And there at the bottom of the front page, in a small typeface is a tiny star. It’s asterisk, then this, quote, “Edited after Dr. Terry’s death by a committee.” The first name listed on that committee: Dr. Leona Zacharias.
There’s her credit. So yes, she was acknowledged. But in the end, that asterisk is a metaphor for the way many women’s contributions in my grandmother’s era were acknowledged. Yes, it’s there if you look hard enough. At the bottom of the page. In a small font. And here’s what’s true: It’s not the asterisk people who are asked to give speeches. It’s not the asterisk people who get tenure and promotions, who become deans or department chairs or even full professors.
Retrolental fibroplasia is now called retinopathy of prematurity, or ROP, and contrary to what you might think, definitely contrary to what I thought, it's still a problem. In the developing world, where access to advanced care isn’t readily available, ROP is one of the leading causes of childhood blindness. And in developed economies, it’s a constant concern because of the latest advances in neonatal care.
NIMESH PATEL: Babies are so young and born much earlier and surviving, their oxygen requirements to keep them alive are much higher. So before you could turn the oxygen down on a 28 week baby and they still may survive, well if you have a 22 week baby with a lot of other problems, heart disease, lung disease, you can't turn the oxygen down. I still have patients in the NICU who are on high flow. They're intubated, and so that really requires a lot of screening and treatment to keep their eyes intact.
KATIE HAFNER: Leona Zacharias died in 1990, just shy of her 83rd birthday.
I’ll always treasure that singular childhood interlude of intimacy I had with her [when Leona treated Katie’s conjunctivitis] and now I can add to that the intense connection I felt during those two days while reading through her papers, when that closed fist of a person I knew seemed to be extending an open palm, inviting me into her brilliant mind. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/leona-zacharias-helped-solve-a-blindness-epidemic-among-premature-babies-she-received-little-credit/
Mary:
Institutionalized racism, like institutionalized anti-feminism determines not only how you think about things, but what you can or can't see. Preconceived assumptions can make facts invisible. Consider the case of the premature babies and their blindness. Improvements in knowledge and technology made it possible for these early-born babies to actually survive. Wonderful. But they're going blind, in droves. The fact that it was oxygen that caused this was hard to discover because oxygen is vital to life, and these infants needed supplemental oxygen simply to stay alive. The crux was figuring out how much was enough, and how much was too much, triggering the growth of vessels that pulled the retina away, leaving permanent blindness ...a balance we still struggle with, as preemies are surviving births from earlier and earlier points in their development.
After a good long search, Leona Zacharias' granddaughter was able to unearth evidence that she had been instrumental in discovering the culprit leading to all these blind infants. And even that evidence remains non specific. We will never know more because Leona was a female scientist, she worked under males, an assistant in their labs, usually getting not even a mention or footnote in papers of discoveries published under her male supervisor's name. Her acknowledgement comes under an asterisk, in small print, obliquely, as a member of the editing committee for the paper. This was typical for the times...the rare woman who was educated, a scientist, working to solve a serious problem, would remain, like all those "pre-colonial" Africans, invisible, unknown, denied. It is now, in a different world, that her granddaughter can even imagine the questions she asks, and the history she uncovers.
How can we escape the limiting confinement of our perspective? Like the old, whose years have pushed them into an odd and singular space?? Yes, but there are other ways to remove the blinders..as in the list of people talking about books that "changed their minds" in fundamental ways. Or by engaging in the kind of grueling artistic process Kafka did, refusing to settle on the preconceived, accepted and expected, anywhere and everywhere. Challenging your assumptions...from the kind of blindness nationalism breeds, to the tendency to catastrophic thinking that ignores the positives happening around us, that should bolster hope, and bless us, even on the darkest days.
It really seemed to me this blog had a unified theme, examined from different angles.
Oriana:
Slowly, slowly things are improving. I think the very existence of Marie Curie -- like the discovery of the sophisticated Benin bronzes -- made certain arguments invalid, but mental attitudes lag behind. Cecilia Payne established that hydrogen was the most abundant element in the universe, followed by helium -- an electrifying discovery for its times -- but who knows her name? " I first read about her on Facebook, of all places. "She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948." We could add many examples from medical schools just half a century ago. So it goes -- but there has been progress.
What we badly need is an American woman president. May we live long enough to see one.
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The great beauty and power of compassion is that compassion not only benefits those who receive it but also those who are compassionate, and as well, those who observe compassionate behavior. ~ Joan Halifax
THE OLD CAN BLESS
“ 'We are blest by Everything/Everything we look upon is blest...' writes Yeats — the last, and lasting, lines of one of his reflective poems on aging published when he was sixty-eight.
“Blessing is the one gift we want from the old, and the one great gift only they can bestow.
Anyone can applaud above-average achievements and award the outstanding. The old, however, are able to recognize the beauty that is hidden from sight, not because they have seen so much through the years, but because the years have forced them to see so oddly. What one needs blessed are the oddities of character specific to our solitary uniqueness and therefore so hard to bear. I can bless my own virtues, but I need a well-grained, long-suffering eye to bless the virtues concealed in my vices.” ~ James Hillman
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IN GOD’S IMAGE?
~ We don’t see the image of God when we look in the mirror. Too many of us only see a lifetime of mistakes and regrets. Shattered dreams and skinned knees. If only we’d start seeing ourselves as made in the image of God, we might be able to be more kind to other rough and wounded souls. ~ Andy Vaughn
https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/galleries/5-things-christians-say-but-few-believe.aspx
Oriana:
The idea that we are made in God's image is perhaps the most positive statement in the Bible. I think this may be interpreted in more secular terms, as our highest self. As Saint Teresa of Avila said, “If only we remembered what a Visitor we have within.” The highest self has access to collective wisdom and, above all, stays calm during turbulence. Even if we despair, that inner self is never depressed.
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And here is a marvelous discussion of the "God hypothesis":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2u54a1FL28&t=14s
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A church carved into stone…Ethiopian civilization 800 years ago.*
CANCER DEATHS DOWN BY 33% SINCE 1991
~ There’s great news from the war on cancer. A new report from the American Cancer Society shows that the cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991. An estimated 3.8 million deaths have been averted due to the decline. The study was based on the most recent data available from 2020.
Currently, the top six causes of death in the U.S. are heart disease, cancer, COVID-19, accidents, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases.
“The biggest reason for the decline that started in 1991 was the prevalence of smoking in the United States started going down in 1965,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, according to CNN. “Now, in certain diseases, our ability to treat has improved, and there are some people who are not dying because of treatment.”
Over the past six decades, the prevalence of smoking in the U.S. has gone down dramatically. In 1965, 42% of Americans smoked cigarettes; in 2019 it was just 14%. Cigarette smoking is known to cause lung, bladder and pancreatic cancers.
Another big reason for the drop in cancer mortality has been the development of the HPV vaccine. There was a 65% drop in cervical cancers in women in their 20s between 2012 to 2019. HPV infections are a leading cause of cervical cancers.
“There are other cancers that are HPV-related – whether that’s head and neck cancers or anal cancers – so there’s optimism this will have importance beyond this,” Dr. William Dahut, the American Cancer Society’s chief scientific officer said.
Since 1991 there has also been a decrease in mortality for leukemia, melanoma and kidney cancer.
The cancers that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid (98%), prostate (97%) and melanoma (94%). The deadliest form of cancer is pancreatic cancer, which has a 12% survival rate.
“The report showing the U.S. has cut cancer deaths by one-third over the last 30 years is great progress, which we’ve achieved through driving smoking rates down, improving early detection, and delivering better treatments for many cancers. It means millions of American families have been spared the immeasurable loss of a loved one,” White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator Dr. Danielle Carnival said in a statement.
“The report also underscores that there’s more work to do to save more lives,” she continued. “President Biden’s vision for ending cancer as we know it is building on the progress we’ve made with an all-hands-on-deck effort to develop new ways to prevent, detect, and treat cancer – and ensure that the tools we have and those we develop along the way reach all Americans.”
The good news on the cancer front comes as there appears to be a breakthrough in the treatment and prevention of the disease on the horizon. There are multiple vaccines in the works that use the same mRNA technology behind the highly successful COVID-19 vaccines that could be used to prevent and treat cancer.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the co-founders of BioNTech, the German firm that partnered with Pfizer to manufacture a revolutionary mRNA COVID vaccine, told The Guardian they believe that cancer vaccines based on mRNA technology might be ready to be used in patients “before 2030.” ~
https://www.upworthy.com/cancer-deaths-are-down-an-incredible-33-since-199?mc_cid=37e6a3cc46&mc_eid=362fe951ca
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MICROBURSTS OF EXERCISE LEAD TO SERIOUS BENEFITS
~ A study published in December 2022 by Nature Medicine (which surveyed the fitness tracking records of over 25,000 people with an average age of 60, who didn’t regularly exercise), found that small bursts of movement throughout the day – be that two minutes of fast walking or quickly climbing the stairs – showed a 50 per cent decrease in death from cardiovascular problems and a further 40 per cent decrease in the risk of dying from cancer, compared to those who had no spurts of movement at all. Put simply, even the smallest amounts of exercise can increase our life expectancy – so next time you’re faced with the choice of “stairs or lift?” always choose the former.
JUST WALK
“There is a large body of research correlating higher step count with reduced ‘all cause’ mortality,” says Worthington. “What this means is that higher step count is not only linked with reduced death from cardiovascular disease and obesity-related conditions, but other causes less directly associated with exercise too, such as cancer and even suicide.” He suggests aiming to walk between 7,500 and 11,000 steps each day to improve your health – and even if you don’t reach these numbers, 500 steps is better than none at all. “The great thing about step count is that it’s cumulative – not only across the day but the week, too,” he points out.
STILL NOT CONVINCED?
Consider the powerful effect that exercise, however low-intensity, has on your mood as well as your body. “The great thing about exercise is that it’s a tonic that works for everyone,” says Worthington. “We all have access to this great medicine that we can take anywhere, at any time, and make a measurable positive change to both our physiology and our psychology.”
https://www.vogue.co.uk/beauty/article/short-easy-workouts?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF GLYCINE
GLUTATHIONE
Glycine is needed for the production of glutathione, a crucial antioxidant enzyme. In addition, glutathione regulates gene expression, DNA and protein synthesis, cell proliferation and apoptosis, signal transduction, cytokine production and immune response, and protein glutathionylation.
Glycine is one of three amino acids that your body uses to make glutathione, a powerful antioxidant that helps protect your cells against oxidative damage caused by free radicals, which are thought to underlie many disease.
Because glutathione levels naturally decline with age, ensuring that you get enough glycine as you get older may benefit your health.
CREATINE
Glycine is also one of three amino acids that your body uses to make a compound called creatine.
Creatine provides your muscles with energy to perform quick, short bursts of activity, such as weightlifting and sprinting.
When combined with resistance training, supplementing with creatine has been shown to increase muscle size, strength and power.
It has also been studied for its beneficial effects on bone health, brain function and neurological conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
While your body naturally creates creatine and it can be obtained through your diet, getting too little glycine may reduce how much you produce.
COLLAGEN
Collagen is a structural protein that contains high amounts of glycine. In fact, every third to fourth amino acid in collagen is glycine.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It provides strength for your muscles, skin, cartilage, blood, bones and ligaments.
Supplementing with collagen has been shown to benefit skin health, relieve joint pain and prevent bone loss.
MAY IMPROVE SLEEP QUALITY
While there are several ways you can improve your sleep quality, such as not drinking caffeinated beverages late in the day or avoiding bright screens a few hours before bedtime, glycine may also help.
This amino acid has a calming effect on your brain and could help you fall and stay asleep by lowering your core body temperature.
Research in people with sleep issues has shown that taking 3 grams of glycine before bed decreases how long it takes to fall asleep, enhances sleep quality, lessens daytime sleepiness and improves cognition.
MAY PROTECT THE LIVER FROM ALCOHOL-INDUCED DAMAGE
Research suggests that glycine may reduce the harmful effects of alcohol on your liver by preventing inflammation.
It has been shown to reduce concentrations of alcohol in the blood of alcohol-fed rats by stimulating the metabolism of alcohol in the stomach rather than the liver, which prevented the development of fatty liver and alcoholic cirrhosis.
What’s more, glycine may also help reverse liver damage caused by excessive alcohol intake in animals.
While moderate alcohol-induced liver damage can be reversed by abstaining from alcohol, glycine may improve the recovery process.
In a study in rats with alcohol-induced liver damage, the liver cell health returned to baseline 30% faster in a group fed a glycine-containing diet for two weeks compared to a control group.
MAY PREVENT HEART DISEASE
Increasing evidence suggests that glycine offers protection against heart disease.
It prevents the accumulation of a compound that, in high amounts, has been linked to atherosclerosis, the hardening and narrowing of the arteries.
This amino acid may also improve your body’s ability to use nitric oxide, an important molecule that increases blood flow and lowers blood pressure.
In an observational study in over 4,100 people with chest pains, higher levels of glycine were associated with a lower risk of heart disease and heart attacks at a 7.4-year follow-up.
After accounting for cholesterol-lowering medications, the researchers also observed a more favorable blood cholesterol profile in people who had higher glycine levels.
What’s more, glycine has been found to reduce several risk factors of heart disease in rats fed a high-sugar diet.
Eating and drinking too much added sugar can raise blood pressure, increase levels of fat in your blood and promote dangerous fat gain around the belly — all of which can promote heart disease.
REDUCES THE RISK OF DIABETES
Higher levels of glycine are associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, even after accounting for other factors that are associated with the condition, such as lifestyle.
Glycine has also been shown to increase insulin response in people without diabetes.
MAY PROTECT AGAINST MUCLE LOSS
Glycine may reduce muscle wasting, a condition that occurs with aging, malnutrition and when your body is under stress, such as with cancer or severe burns.
Interestingly, in mice with muscle wasting conditions, such as cancer, research has shown that glycine was able to stimulate muscle growth whereas leucine was not.
ENRICHING YOUR DIET WITH GLYCINE
Due to its sweet taste, you can easily incorporate glycine powder into your diet by adding it to:
Coffee and tea
Soups
Protein shakes
Yogurt
TAKE COLLAGEN SUPPLEMENTS
You can boost your glycine intake by taking collagen protein supplements.
This is likely more efficient, as glycine competes with other amino acids for absorption and is therefore absorbed less efficiently by itself than when it’s bound to other amino acids, as in the case of collagen.
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CHILDHOOD LEUKEMIA MAY REQUIRE A COMMON INFECTION (LIKE FLU) TO BE ACTIVATED
~ Childhood leukemia is driven by common childhood infections meeting pre-cancerous cells in the blood, scientists believe.
Experts at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London have found babies develop the risk for leukemia in the womb, but will not go on to develop the disease without a second ‘hit’ from a viral or bacterial infection, such as flu.
The research highlights the importance of allowing infants to socialize with other children early in their lives, to prime their immune systems against infections.
The discovery came by studying pairs of twins, where only one initially developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) — the most common type of the cancer in children.
Identical twins are around 15-25 per cent more likely to go on to develop ALL if their sibling already has the disease, while less than one per cent of non-identical twins or other siblings go on to develop the disease.
Researchers followed the twins for up to 15 years and found the high risk only applies if the identical twins shared a single placenta before birth — which only happens in around 60 per cent of identical twin pairs.
FINDINGS CONFIRM THE DISEASE MAY BE TRACED BACK TO THE WOMB
It confirms that the conditions needed to trigger leukemia first arise in the womb, and even the healthy twin will carry "pre-leukemia" cells in the blood, which have occurred through a spontaneous developmental error, and passed between the two.
But clinically silent cells will not develop into cancer without a post-birth "hit", probably from common childhood infections.
Prof Sir Mel Greaves, the founding director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer and Professor of Cell Biology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “Our study provides new insights into the origins of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“These new findings confirm that the disease can be traced back to the womb when pre-leukemia cells spread via the twins’ shared blood supply.
What remained a mystery until now was why sometimes only one twin is diagnosed with leukemia.
We still do not know for certain what leads to the first ‘hit’ of genetic changes in the womb, but we think that the second ‘hit’ of genetic changes is probably triggered by common childhood infections – opening up the possibility of ‘priming’ the immune system in infancy to avoid the development of the disease later on in life.”
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common type of childhood cancer, accounting for 80 per cent of leukemia cases in children.
The team are now focussed on finding the the second infection-driven hit after birth.
BOOSTING THE GUT COULD PROTECT CHILDREN AGAINST DISEASE
They believe that the gut microbiome may be playing a key role in protecting children against developing leukemia even if they have pre-cancerous cells. Although vaccines have little impact on preventing ALL, boosting the gut in early life may help.
Prof Greaves added: “Risk of ALL is elevated by C-section birth, lack of breast feeding and paucity of social contacts in infancy.
Conversely, attendance at play groups in infancy is protective. So, to some extent, risk can be modified without medical intervention.”
The findings will also allow doctors to assess the risk of ALL for twins, firstly by determining whether the twins are identical and sharing a placenta and then by regularly tracking the levels of pre-leukemia cells in their blood.
Sarah McDonald, the deputy director of research at Blood Cancer UK, who funded the work said: “Understanding the mechanism as to how the cancer develops in identical twins, and why often only one develops leukemia is an important question to answer.
“It helps us understand both the risk of the other sibling developing leukemia and provides insight into how leukemia develops in all children.
“This research shows that in cases where one twin develops leukemia, and both twins share a placenta during pregnancy, two events are needed to determine whether the other sibling develops the disease — one before birth and the other after.”
The research was published in the journal Leukaemia [note the British spelling] ~
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/20/childhood-leukaemia-likely-driven-common-infections-flu/
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ending on beauty:
This rain, what is it but the tears
of women from another century,
an ocean drop by drop
reaching us only now
~ Oriana
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