Edward Hopper: Sun in an Empty Room, 1963.
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BEFORE SUMMER RAIN
Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something, you don't know what, has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood
you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour
will grant. The walls, with ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.
And reflected on the faded tapestries now:
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.
Rilke, trans. Edward Snow
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MALE WRITERS WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND WOMEN
~ My favorite Hemingway was For Whom The Bell Tolls. I liked Maria. My favorite Fitzgerald was his letters. I liked Zelda. I liked the god-filled literature of Vonnegut, especially in comparison to his personal communication, where he lambasted his wife for being a whore. I liked A Clockwork Orange. The brutality reminded me of my classmates: rapists, racists, hunters, and God-fearing drunks. Why did I like Lolita? She reminded me of myself.
Here, in books, were the realities I encountered every day that I had been told over and over again did not exist.
At the center of all my favorite novels were women who were ciphers. Women who suffered the men around them. Women the narrator did not understand. Women the protagonist either fell in love with, scorned, pitied, or feared. Women whose interiority was obscured to the point of occlusion. Women who, at the last minute, revealed that everything the characters thought they understood about them was really just an illusion, after all.
It wasn’t until I went to college and spoke about reading Foster Wallace with my classmates that I realized other people did not see the power in capturing the pathetic death throes of (white) male-dominated reality in these novels, and instead saw the text of Foster Wallace as a glorification of masculinity. At first I couldn’t believe it. His themes were obvious critiques to me, chronicling all the traps masculinity entails: emotional castration, overt reliance on violence as communication, sexual manipulation that ultimately isolates the manipulator, spiritual emptiness, praise of silence, and a dedication to uphold the individual at all cost, especially at the cost of the individual themselves.
Even my favorite people were overwhelmingly preoccupied with Scott Pilgrim-esque fantasies of “winning” a “dream girl.” The exclusion of complex women wasn’t intentional, I realized with horror. It wasn’t some winking joke we were all in on. It wasn’t a grand metaphor for the way life was. It was accidental. It was out of ignorance. All of the women symbolized or stood for the status of the man they were in relation to.
I could write about Hemingway and his lesbian mentors, Vonnegut and his Madonna complex, Fitzgerald and his marital thievery, but instead I want to focus on Joelle Van Dyne: the leading lady of Infinite Jest who also goes by the moniker Madam Psychosis.
Joelle is so crippled by her own beauty and the onslaught of male desire that accompanies it she is no longer capable of existing publicly, and instead must resort to wearing a veil in public in order to be treated humanely. So great was her beauty that even her own father sexualized her. All the men in the novel orbit Joelle: fathers, sons, and addicts alike.
In Don Gately’s dream, she appears to him as a symbol of death. The men of the Incandenza family obsess over her, at their own peril. There is a missing video tape that is rumored to contain her image, and is so entertaining that to watch it is to become instantly addicted. This addiction “kills” the viewers capacity to experience joy in other areas of their life. Throughout the text it is unclear if Joelle is actually disfigured, or if her beauty (and her gender) is itself the disfigurement: so overpoweringly ‘other’ that no one can treat her as human unless she wears a disguise.
This metaphor seemed so overwhelmingly obvious and true. I wondered and still wonder, did Foster Wallace himself know what he had done?
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I did not escape the influences I’ve documented here. Most of the time I’m not necessarily bothered by this, though occasionally I am struck down by lightning bolts of shame. I remember reading Max Fischer’s biography of David Wallace and seeing myself in Mary Karr, who Wallace had an intense relationship with in the nineties. He pushed her out of a moving car and then later broke into her house. Yet later still, in an interview with Laura Miller, he mentioned her as one of the best poets working at the time. I had boyfriends like that. I often wondered whether they knew how cruel and confusing their behavior was.
His ignorance at his own foibles coupled with his inability to escape them in his fiction—in fact his almost orbital and predictable return to misogyny in his work—is perhaps the greatest tragedy and most central element of his legacy, and does not surprise me. I have read, after all, everything he has written and almost everything written about him.
One of my favorite articles of criticism about him is Zadie Smith’s “The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” Smith was one of the first novelists I read who was a woman. I read White Teeth, and marveled at its ambition, voice, and scope. I also read James Wood’s takedown of White Teeth. Smith was twenty-three when the novel was published. After White Teeth and Wood’s review, Smith’s style noticeably changed, her voice became more cultured, her prose less recursive, her stories less “hysterical.”
I missed the hysteria. Hysteria seemed warranted to me. Is this world not absolutely mad? Do we not engage with people every day who love us and hate us in equal measure because of what we represent or the potential we contain? I find influences do not cause either ecstasy (per Jonathan Lethem) or anxiety (Harold Bloom), but are instead a type of map we can follow to understand how an artist came to the literary tradition. It is an inevitable and embarrassing reality for every human that we learn not from ideal sources, but flawed ones. As we move through time our educators are inevitably revealed to be mortal after all.
Sometimes I would like to be like my protagonist Jonathan. How freeing it might be to ignore the reality of others and think of the world only through the story of yourself. He is obsessed with being “the best” of “figuring it out” and in the process “taking care” of all the women around him. He goes out of his way to convince others, especially women, that he is someone fundamentally different than who he actually is.
Understanding the difference between irony, empathy, cruelty, and sincerity is often dependent on understanding the context, and context can only be gained in the passage of time. Like a chimera, our understanding of life and our relation to one another is constantly changing. In every decision we make, we further become ourselves, and often the self we become is not the self we expected to be.To reinterate, his themes were obvious critiques to me, chronicling all the traps masculinity entails: emotional castration, overt reliance on violence as communication, sexual manipulation that ultimately isolates the manipulator, spiritual emptiness, praise of silence, and a dedication to uphold the individual at all cost, especially at the cost of the individual themselves. ~ Molly McGhee
https://lithub.com/men-who-dont-know-women-on-unlearning-the-lessons-of-dick-lit/
David Foster Wallace
Mary:
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*
ABOUT HAMAS
~ It is not known how many Gazans genuinely support Hamas. It is possible most of them support it, in which case hoping for any internal revolution is insanity. A much more optimistic scenario, which is also quite realistic, is that most Gazans do not support Hamas and do realize it is the principal cause of their misery. In that scenario an internal revolution is about as difficult as the job of the White Rose movement.
Hamas flag in rubble of Gaza
Hamas isn’t a political party, it’s not running a state and it’s not a religious cult either. Hamas is an organized crime ring, anchored in Islamic fundamentalism, that is also performing the duties of a state in Gaza. In other words, it is an unholy alliance between mafia and religious wackos. As such it has complete control over the distribution of goods in Gaza.
Those who do not work for Hamas live in abject squalor; being a member is basically a prerequisite to hold a job, with very few exceptions. Those who oppose Hamas die a violent death. The result is most people either work for or with Hamas and no one is willing to oppose them, it’s too dangerous and spies are everywhere.
There isn’t any way an internal resistance might organize either. People might not like Hamas, but they all know what happens to those who defy it. Religious organizations are all agents of Hamas and there isn’t a whole lot other ways for people down there to organize. Besides, if there are 10% genuine supporters any organization of three members or more will likely be infiltrated or spotted by an informant. The larger it gets the easier and quicker it becomes to notice.
Gazans cannot be counted upon to revolt. Even if they earnestly desire is to overthrow Hamas and finally have a chance to live a life worth living, they genuinely can’t do it. Hamas has all the guns and plenty of thugs to enforce their will. Protests, riots, peaceful demonstrations just get you raped, mutilated and killed — not necessarily in that order, but you’ll get all three, don’t worry.
The only way Hamas can be defeated is if the international community finally starts treating it for what it is: a crime syndicate with religious backing, cosplaying a state. But it is a crime syndicate first and foremost, it always has been. Their leaders aren’t beyond our reach. They live in Qatar in a five star hotel and watch the conflict from a distance, sipping cocktails and enjoying the fruits of their labor. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
Terry Bowden:
Hamas uses the people of Gaza as cannon fodder. They want Israel to launch a large scale operation into Gaza that will kill thousands of Gazans. They will use it as a propaganda tool and as a means of recruiting new terrorist candidates.
Harold Citron:
And when the dead Palestinians aren’t available, Hamas will create them for the cameras. Just saw a video of a Palestinian man running past a bunch of journalists and cameramen into a hospital holding what appears to be a wounded baby covered in blood. Inside the hospital, the ‘baby’ is shown to be a doll.
It should be remembered that Hamas also runs all of the typical government services in Gaza — at least those that exist.
Hamas has social security programs, performs street maintenance, runs the schools, collects the garbage, etc.
I doubt it does those things very well, but it does do them.
That puts the average citizen of Gaza in a difficult position when it comes to deciding who to support.
Maya N:
Hamas actually runs relative few of the government services. A lot is provided by the UN and other international NGOs.
Melanie Drogr:
True, but if Hamas shouts loud enough that they were the ones, most won’t know.
Austin Lewis:
Yep. Hamas generally UNDERMINES services in Gaza and elsewhere.
Max Seryodkin:
Until we threw Putin’s protege Yanukovych out of our country, his people were doing the same thing, giving a set of products for voting for them, putting up children’s playgrounds and doing expensive repairs, but the quality of all this was disposable in order to bribe people, instead of simply fulfilling their duties city administration, they did it all ostentatiously and then stole billions from the budget of Ukraine.
Is this kind of help really considered helping people? no, because this is part of the corruption schemes that Western politicians do not pay attention to until the radicalization of power reaches the point of threatening Western existence.
Terry Brennan:
They are similar in that way to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Though Mr. Vargazon calls Hamas a criminal gang, they are equally a charity. That’s one of the contradictions that happen because the West doesn’t understand Islamic societies very well. Even a Western notion like “state” doesn’t always apply to Islamic societies.
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PARALLELS BETWEEN OCTOBER 7 2023 AND THE YOM KIPPUR WAR OF 1973
~ When the Palestinian militants of Hamas unleashed their attack inside Israel on Oct. 7, triggering the latest war in the Middle East, it was impossible to miss the significance of the timing.
The deadly assaults that killed more than a thousand Israeli troops and civilians in the first four days came just 50 years and a day after the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. That brief but intense war, like this month's Hamas attacks, seemed to catch the vaunted Israeli intelligence and front-line defenses with their guard down.
For a few days, the 1973 attackers from Egypt and Syria carried all before them, seizing territory they had lost in the Six-Day War of 1967 in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. It seemed possible for several parlous days that the Jewish state, then just 25 years old, might not survive.
But Israel was able to turn the tide, bolstered by enormous shipments of U.S. tanks, jet fighters and ammunition, driving the attackers back.
The Israelis pursued the retreating Arabs and eventually threatened their capital cities of Cairo and Damascus. At that point, the Soviet Union intervened directly and threatened all-out war in defense of its Arab allies. At one point, U.S. nuclear forces were placed on high alert (DEFCON 3). Eventually, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to back a U.N. peacekeeping force, and the crisis eased.
The memory of that war still burns bright in Israel, seared into the national psyche even half a century later. And while most Americans today had not yet been born in 1973, the fallout from that year continues to shape the lives of all who have come since.
The consequences of the Yom Kippur War played an outsize role in shaping not only the 1970s but the direction of U.S. foreign policy and energy policy ever since.
Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon had a secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who had dealt extensively with the Soviets and with all the key actors in the Middle East. Flying from Cairo to Damascus to Jerusalem, Kissinger was said to be conducting "shuttle diplomacy" in brokering a peace agreement after the front lines of 1973 had stabilized.
But then, as now, the Middle East fighting had to share the front page with developments in a domestic political crisis in Washington. In our moment, the news is the paralysis of Congress due to the lack of a speaker in the House. Having ousted their own elected leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House's majority Republicans have struggled to coalesce behind a successor, leaving the nation's legislative branch unable to conduct business.
Back in 1973, the domestic crisis was the crumbling presidency of Republican Richard Nixon. Nixon was in the first year of his second term, having won reelection in a 49-state landslide the previous November. But Nixon and his team were distracted by a separate domestic crisis that had increasingly occupied the White House staff that year.
It was 50 years ago — Oct. 20 — and a Saturday. Television news went into its own version of DEFCON 3, and the event was soon dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre. It would lead to a protracted argument in the Supreme Court over the tapes, which when released gave witness to Nixon's involvement in the Watergate cover-up. The House moved to impeach, and Nixon resigned.
Widening waves of shock and aftershocks
The enormous outpouring of U.S. support for Israel after the Yom Kippur assaults in 1973 led directly to a series of decisions by Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf region to cut off crude oil shipments to the United States. Although still producing large amounts of domestic oil, the U.S. had become heavily dependent on foreign producers with lower production costs.
The price of a barrel of crude oil went up 300% on the world market, and gasoline prices quadrupled at the pump. After generations of cheap oil and gas, Americans were ill-prepared for what was called the first "oil shock." But as the 1970s continued, the expanding repercussions of the Arab oil embargo and lesser disruptions that followed affected all aspects of American car culture.
Yet the focus for many Americans was not on the price of gas but its availability. For the first time since World War II, drivers were either waiting in line for a few rationed gallons or going without.
Moreover, the sudden spike in oil prices affected other energy prices as well, driving a larger upward movement in prices for all consumer goods. The resulting inflation would lead the Federal Reserve Board eventually to raise interest rates, creating years of "stagflation," the unwelcome combination of tight money and ever-escalating costs.
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"But we're not there yet," Yergin said. And much depends on whether that can be avoided.
The Iran issues are not all about oil. Iran has also emerged as a major supplier of Russia's drones and other forms of tech weapons used in Ukraine. That could make Russia and its nuclear arsenal once again a factor in the high-stakes politics of the region and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular.
Although there are differences within their ranks, both major parties in Congress support further aid to Israel and have expressed support for that country since this month's Hamas attacks.
But that does not ensure the aid that Israel is counting on. Just as in 1973, Israel relies on the U.S. as the ultimate guarantor of its security, an ally prepared to go as far as needed — whatever the consequences. That made all the difference in 1973, and it could do so again this fall.
At this point, with President Biden having addressed the nation on Israel and Ukraine aid, his administration is preparing new defense packages for both countries and new commitments to security on the border with Mexico. A bipartisan group in the Senate appears willing to go along. But the House is literally unable to act, hamstrung by its own leadership struggle in the Republican majority.
Unable to elect a speaker with the votes of the party's narrow majority and unwilling to make a deal with the Democrats, the Republicans are unable to deal with any legislation or any matter of any kind. House rules depend on there being a speaker before action may be taken.
Meanwhile, the historic crises of the moment continue.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207015189/israel-hamas-yom-kippur-war
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UKRAINIAN AND RUSSIAN CASUALTIES
~ Putin’s propagandists say that Russia killed a million of Ukrainians and that the losses are 8:1; so, they try to state that Russia had lost 125,000 personnel.
According to the Ukrainian side, Russia lost 290,000 personnel.
The Russian side doesn’t comment on its losses.
The last time Russians commended on their losses was in September 2022, when minister of defence Shoigu claimed that less than 6,000 Russian servicemen died. That number was grossly understated.
Journalists of BBC and ‘Mediazona’ found names of 34,112 of Russian servicemen killed in Ukrainian war since February 2022, by mentions in the media and social networks (as of 13 October 2023). Journalists believe the actual number is much higher.
A high-ranking NATO official on the sidelines of the meeting of defense ministers of the Alliance countries said that total Russian losses are around 300,000, corroborating numbers by the Ukrainians.
"As for the losses, the Russians are suffering heavy losses, and we know this. We know for sure that the Russians suffer significantly more losses than the Ukrainians. Therefore, we believe that we are approaching the figure of about 300,000 Russian soldiers and mercenaries who have died since the invasion in February 2022,” the NATO official stated.
So, here it is: 34,000, 125,000 or 300,000?
Pick the number that you prefer. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Doug Thompson:
These Russian are not from St Petersburg or Moscow so they don't matter, is the impression you get. But either way it's a wasted life for Putin’s ego. But then Russia is a wasted country when you compare how China has transformed itself, and the lives of its people.
Mark Daichendt:
The NY Times reported on August 18, 2023 the total losses (killed and wounded) for Russia was ~300,000 and for Ukraine ~200,000. These were estimates from US officials.
Russia: 120,000 killed and 170,000–180,000 wounded.
Ukraine: 70,000 killed and 110,000–120,000 wounded.
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There is a distinct sense that the entire current era of our lives is coming to an end, with most of its foundational illusions having been depleted. What exactly is coming to replace it is not quite clear yet. ~ Misha Iossel
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
~ W.B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”
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RZHEV, A SMALL TOWN IN RUSSIA
~ A year ago, 42-year-old Mikhail Smirnov from Rzhev, Tver region of Russia, was mobilized to the Russian army.
Friends told him not to go to war, but Smirnov was afraid that his property would be taken away. He owned a modern house and 2 apartments.
His concern was unfounded: there was no law allowing the state to confiscate property for not showing up to the enlistment office, but Smirnov decided to show up. He was sent to the front.
Last month, a closed coffin was brought to Rzhev.
Locals were told that it was the body of Mikhail Smirnov. The city administration announced that the body would be buried on October 2 and invited residents to the funeral.
Smirnov’s acquaintances (he had no close relatives) suspected a substitution: they were told that the body was brought from Luhansk (Smirnov said that he was fighting in Bakhmut), and the death certificate indicated the year of birth in 1995, although the Rzhev man was 42 years old.
Friends demanded to open the coffin.
When they looked at the body, they realized it wasn’t their friend Smirnov in the coffin: the person in the box was much younger, no gray hair (the face was disfigured). The teeth were different.
The funeral has been postponed.
DNA was taken for analysis, which will take at least 3 months.
The administration insisted that the body needed to be buried, just so that it wouldn’t lie in the morgue.
The relatives agreed to hold the funeral without waiting for test results.
On October 9, an unknown body under the name of Mikhail Smirnov was buried in Rzhev.
Not in his parents’ grave, but still as Mikhail Smirnov. Because the heirs — not close family members (Smirnov’s mother and sister died last year) wanted the death payout.
After receiving the death money, the relatives stopped answering messages from Smirnov’s friends.
What happened to Smirnov is unknown. And who was the person buried? How many other coffins that families didn’t open, had bodies that weren’t their sons or husbands?
About 30 coffins arrive to Tver region from the front in Ukraine every second day.
The city of Tver is the regional center, population 400,000. It’s only 180 km from Moscow.
In 2023, the average monthly wage in Tver is around 52,000 rubles ($520).
Rzhev is a much smaller town, population only 55,000. The average monthly wage in Rzhev is 48,000 rubles ($480).
Rzhev is 220 km from Moscow.
Russians living in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg have no idea how people live in regional towns. They have absolutely no idea.
They don’t understand the type of relationships in the families, the struggle, the everyday poverty.
Russians living in cities like St. Petersburg live in their own bubble. They’ve never seen hospitals that haven’t been renovated since 1975. They don’t understand the level of depravity and hopelessness, driving people to alcoholism.
They rejoice at the school desk named after their murdered son.
They thank the authorities for the bag of dumplings they received for their murdered husband.
They bury a stranger’s body and put a sign on the grave with the name of a relative.
And then they happily rush to buy a white Lada. ~ Quora
Grant Petrel:
The gift of the Mafia state just keeps on giving, the earlier Marxist one, no better.
The inter generational struggle has created a poverty of the mind.
Psychologically damaged people with little resilience.
Sarah Bleaka:
Those are like photographs from Romania after the fall and death of Ceausescu. Sense of hopelessness in those small towns you posted. How very sad.
Kevin Goetz:
Or from.backwoods Appalachia in the USA.
Dominykas Neureušis:
Sad that people like this have no idea how people in Europe live, and repeat the lies told by the media about the ‘decadent West’. They genuinely believe they are the superior nation, and you really can’t blame them - living in this level of poverty, they simply can’t know any better.
Russia is essentially an organized crime gang that also ‘runs’ a country.
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COULD THE SOVIET UNION RISE AGAIN?
Europe in 1919
The Soviet Union arose as a coup in Russian Free Democratic Republic, which was at the time fighting a desperate battle against advancing German and Austrian forces. Nationalist movements were everywhere and an absolutely brutal war was being fought in western Europe. The Soviets pushed the Russian Republic out of centers of power and not so much sued for peace as utterly surrendered to the Germans and their allies. The resulting peace gave all the concessions to Germany it hoped for and she could turn her focus westward. The war in the west turned even uglier and lasted for another year.
This bought the Bolsheviks enough time to defeat the remnants of the Russian Democratic Republic. By that time German army was defeated in the west, Austria-Hungary fell apart, Ottoman Empire descended into a civil war and the victorious Entente could finally spare some resources again.
Those resources were thin. The war bankrupted two of the richest, most powerful nations at the time: Britain and France. USA had a strong economy, but little interest in affairs beyond the Americas. War continued in eastern Europe and the Middle East and Bolsheviks could defeat their key opponents first. Then they marched westwards and took over Ukraine and parts of Poland, they were stopped at the gates of Warsaw in 1921. But by that time the imperial powers were spent and could not hope to push the Bolsheviks out and they had enough time to consolidate their power and take the most valuable regions of the old Russian Empire to become a formidable force.
Those aren’t common conditions. If Russia collapsed into a civil war right now there would be plenty of support for whomever. You bet Chinese weapons would flow to their chosen power in vast amounts and there would be Western support for the other side — to speak nothing of what Ukrainians would send. Russia would fight and fight and fight, until there would be nothing worth fighting for any more in the eastern land. It would be a desolate wasteland no one would care about any more and stay that way.
The Soviet Union could become a meaningful power only because it arose at just the right time in history. Those conditions won’t be replicated easily. ~ Quora
Mark Hoheisel:
It was also helped by riding on a new populist ideology much as Napoleon benefited from the ideas of the French Revolution. Socialism/Communism no longer has that novelty or appeal and at least at the moment there isn’t any equivalent new ideology around. The world’s conflict zones are making do with old religious and nationalist banners.
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"Suffering doesn't make you good" is a way to break that attitude of indifference "Oh, you are suffering, well it will make you: good/stronger/better.” We all know by now that in medical terms reduction of pain increases the speed of healing — it is the same for all suffering.” ~ Kirsten Miles
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Roland Bartetzko on Ukrainian casualties:
~ When the Russians tried to encircle Kyiv last year, many of the Ukrainian defenders had as good as zero military training. There was simply no time to do this.
Many military commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) had no combat experience and as a result, they made costly mistakes.
In addition, many Ukrainian soldiers had no body armor and no ballistic helmets. They also had no TCCC (tactical combat casualty care) training and not enough medical supplies. All this contributed to a relatively high number of casualties.
To make matters worse, at the time, the Russians had total artillery superiority. Some of the earlier battles in the East were meat grinders.
Today, the situation has completely changed. New recruits for the AFU receive extremely thorough and practice oriented training. Their personal gear is of the highest quality and they fight with experienced combat veterans and commanders.
Russia’s artillery fire also isn’t that devastating anymore.
What probably has contributed most to the decrease of Ukrainian casualty numbers is the introduction of Western-made Main Battle Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, and Armored Personnel Carriers. The Leopards, Bradleys, and Marders provide their crews with maximum protection.
Therefore, referring to Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder really doesn’t make any sense. ~ Quora
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WAS HITLER ACTUALLY A NICE GUY IN PERSON?
~ As gruesome as it sounds, yes. Hannah Arendt could have well used Adolf Hitler as a hallmark of the banality of evil.
If by anything else, this became evident in a clandestine recording by YLE (Finnish broadcasting corporation in 1942. It is the only time Adolf Hitler’s ordinary table voice has been recorded, and turned out he was completely normal.
We have a tendency to imagine Hitler as a ravaging maniac lunatic, and as a psychopath. Nothing could be further away the truth. Hitler was a deeply narcissistic individual, but a very much functional narcissist.
Hitler had several redeeming qualities:
He hated child abuse, abuse of women, etc, having himself been seriously abused. [by his father, an alcoholic who beat him and beat his mother, Klara]
He hated porn and exploitation of women.
He was deeply anti-elitist. He came from the lower ranks of the people, and he got much better along with the little people than the aristocrats or plutocrats
He hated vanity and the pompous lifestyle many Nazi bosses led.
He was easy to talk to outside of business. He had an extremely wide range of general knowledge.
He was easy-going with children, and he was known as a matchmaker among the Nazi elites.
He liked animals, and dogs in particular. (No, he did not hate cats like Mussolini did.)
He liked natural beauty & scenery, and had an eye for architecture.
He was a health fanatic, and he hated drugs and alcohol, and tobacco especially.
He hated law breakers and criminals; yes, the paradox is obvious.
This banality of evil — that anyone can become a dark lord in suitable circumstances — is striking. Hitler resembled far more a humble company CEO than a crime linchpin.
~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
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HUMANS AND THE COMPUTER DESK
~ In the 1980s and 90s, the personal computer revolutionized workplace productivity — but it also led to a sharp increase of office work-related pain.
Poor posture, muscle strain, backache, eye strain, carpal tunnel syndrome; these are some of the most common complaints caused by the sedentary office job, says Laine Nooney, a computer and video game historian and assistant professor at New York University.
Nooney's 2023 book The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal chronicles the origin of the personal computer and its toll on the human body. "I think a lot of us don't realize how much pain we live in because of our interactions with computing," they say. "We don't remember a time before this kind of stress on the body.”
Nooney says when personal computers first entered the workplace in the late 1970s and 80s, they were primarily used for administrative jobs. "It wasn't the executive or the managerial class that was first interested in having computers in their offices," they say. Instead, computers landed on the desks of people fairly low on the corporate ladder.
It had an immediate impact on the physical and psychological wellbeing of these workers, Nooney says. They point to an ethnographic survey by researcher Shoshana Zuboff, first published in 1988, wherein employees were asked to draw themselves before and after the computer became a part of their workday.
In the 'before' drawings, people depicted their days as full of motion: retrieving physical files, walking back and forth between cabinets, filling out paper forms. Zuboff noted that they often depicted themselves as happy in these pictures.
The 'after' drawings showed a gloomier scene. Gone were the small-but-constant motions, replaced by eight hours at a computer, and workers drew themselves as unhappy.
In the 1990s and 2000s, as computers spread into homes and became pervasive in office jobs, the physical effects became more pronounced; now, chronic pain affects around one in 5 adults in America.
Sitting at a computer is worse than binging TV
Nooney says that today, working at our desks is worse for our bodies than watching TV for hours on end. When we watch TV, we're more likely to shift positions, and the distance between us and the screen tends to be greater.
Meanwhile, office workers have just one primary posture: sitting in the same sedentary position, with hands on the keyboard and heads in a specific placement, staring at the screen.
Laptops, Nooney says, are even worse. "The turning down of the head is much more pronounced on a laptop. There's really no accommodation for anything resembling an ergonomic posture for the keyboard. And so it's not like any of this stuff has ever gotten better as computing has 'innovated.' And in some cases I would say it's gotten quite worse."
How to prevent computer pain
To counteract some of the pain, Nooney says people could try to move more throughout the workday.
But they also acknowledge that much of the pain plaguing office workers is outside the individual level — because computers were never designed for our comfort. They were designed for productivity.
"When we feel pain in our neck, or our wrists, or our arms, that pain is a historical legacy of a sort," says Nooney. "And it actually has to do with things that are way, way bigger than you, and forces that shape and dictate the kind of ways we use technology that no one individual is really in control of.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/10/1200611619/ted-radio-hour-draft-10-10-2023?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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“I am glad that I paid so little attention
to good advice;
had I abided by it I might have been saved
from some of my most valuable mistakes.”
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
THE TWILIGHT OF ANTIQUES
My parents spent lavishly on antiques in the 1970s. My childhood was spent with coasters always required, even in my own room. I was constantly being told to be careful of the furniture. There were rooms I wasn’t allowed in unsupervised, because I might knock over a Ming vase or something.
Ming vase When my father ran into financial troubles, he always counted on there being about $1M worth of antiques in the house. My parents had spent maybe $250k in today’s dollars to acquire their collection, and he assumed they had appreciated, as antiques always had.
When my father passed, we had an appraiser come out to value everything. We got quite a shock. The antique market had been flooded by all the elderly people dying with their huge antique collections. At the same time, younger, affluent people in their 30s and 40s no longer wanted or expected to pay $20k for an antique dresser.
Because my father’s antiques were so beaten up and needed restoration work, they couldn’t even be sold for the severely depressed prices that were now available.
Appraiser after appraiser told us the same thing. My father’s priceless antiques were now basically firewood.
I kept a couple of really neat pieces I had room for. Then we let a whole batch of them go for $500. We were happy to get that because otherwise, we’d have had to pay to get them moved somewhere else.
Honestly, I’m just glad my father never found out they were worthless. ~ Charles Kendrick
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THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A NUN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES
Women became nuns for different reasons.
Some women truly had a calling to the monastic life. Religion was at the center of people’s lives in the Middle Ages, and most were extremely devout. Not surprisingly, some women became nuns out of a genuine desire for this kind of life, even if this put them at odds with their families. These included women like Saint Clare, who founded her own order in the Franciscan tradition, the Poor Clares; and Saint Catherine of Siena, who authored treatises and prayers, and engaged in active correspondence with the Pope.
Parenthetically, while I have no concrete proof of this — so take my ruminations for what they are worth — I feel like some of these women, who defied their families to become nuns, were products of families going overboard in training them to be submissive and pious. You really can’t stamp out a truly rebellious, active or independent spirit: taught to be meek and obey from an early age as a way to make them compliant, some of them came to the conclusion they would rather obey a distant God and maybe the almost as distant Pope, rather than their fathers or uncles.
For the less religious and more practical, nunnery was actually a good option in medieval times — which is why medieval Jesus, like any other important groom in that era, required a substantial dowry of his brides.
Not everyone could become a nun. If you came from a poor family and could only offer your labor, you could, at best, become a tenant farmer for a monastery, and render your service that way. Actually taking the vows and therefore gaining access to the benefits of monastic life required a financial contribution, with the result that most nuns came from well-off classes of society and had families that were willing — either genuinely or through social pressure — not only to forgo a bargaining chip in the form of a marriageable female, but to part with a substantial sum in the process. (Of course, some nuns were infertile wives of important men, whose husbands were only too happy to pay a monastery to take a barren spouse off one’s hands.)
Even in cases of women who entered nunneries agains the objections of their powerful families — eventually those families would cave to pressure and start financially supporting their daughters’ endeavors in order to gain at least some influence in the church.
You can actually go through the list of famous medieval nuns or female saints from that era, and you will notice that virtually all of them came from an upper-class background. That is because economic realities and the politics of class pervade even sacred spaces, as much as religious people are loathe to admit this (and something which the Protestant Reformation tried — and failed — to eradicate). If you were poor, if you didn't contribute any money to a monastery, there is no way that the monastery would spend its own funds feeding and clothing you, educating you and having you write letters to popes and cardinals all day. If you couldn’t pay the equivalent of a marital dowry, you didn't get to marry Jesus. This was true even of the Poor Clares who, at least in the early days of the order, took a strict vow of poverty. Sure, those women slept on the ground, went barefoot in winter and ate almost nothing, but the monastic infrastructure, and the activities the order engaged in, required funds. And where would those funds come from? The nuns’ families, of course.
Women who were particularly wealthy, or important enough (or, in some cases, former royal mistresses being bought off) could even buy their own nunneries. It was not unusual for a woman with no prior background in monastic life to just become an abbess, straight out the gate.
This was different, by the way, from the power dynamics of men from important families becoming monks. If a family dedicated one of its sons to the Church, they could hope for that son to become a bishop, God willing a cardinal, maybe even the Pope one day — putting him in the position of manipulating big politics and gaining great wealth to benefit his clan. Having one’s daughter become a nun fed no such ambitions. Although some nuns gained influence and some became renowned scholars and mystics, women generally had much less power in the Church than did men. And so, allowing one’s daughter or sibling to take the vows AND giving her the financial means to do that was a tall order for most upper class and wealthy merchant families.
For women who could pull it off, however, monastic life had many benefits in the Middle Ages:
Freedom from the horror of child-bearing. An upper class or a merchant class woman was expected to marry young (in the case of the aristocracy or royalty, around the age of 15), and to keep having children, one after the other, until she either died or her uterus fell out. Serial child-bearing was a lot less adorable in the Middle Ages than it is today. Maternal medicine was non-existent. Lots of women died in childbirth or of post-partum complications, and did so in horrific, prolonged pain. (When the movie industry shows us women dying in childbirth, it’s far more peaceful and romantic than it is in real life, and especially the way it was before modern medicine.) Lots of children died too, more so among the elites because everyone was everyone else’s cousin. Upper-class mothers were also not allowed to bond with their children, because that would interfere with their breeding and other duties. In short, motherhood was a real nightmare in the Middle Ages, even for upper-class women, and becoming a nun was a way out of it.
Freedom from marriage. If you were an upper-class woman in the Middle Ages, you’d spend most of your time married, even after your childbearing years were over. Some of those marriages were companionate, but many weren’t. Husbands were free to beat their wives — the possibility that a woman of this rank could be pregnant at any moment being the only, and not always effective, deterrent — and they cheated on their wives openly and with impunity; often in set-ups where the wife and the mistress saw each other constantly and traveled in the same circles. If your husband died, you’d be recycled within a year, tops, especially if you were still within your window of fertility. It didn’t matter whether you were ready to enter another marriage, it didn’t matter if you were still grieving your previous husband, it didn’t matter how young your children were, and it certainly didn’t matter if you even liked the next one. You'd just be told to pack up your stuff, and you’d get shipped to an unfamiliar place to live with a stranger. And in another five years, maybe another.
Freedom from male guardianship. Although they were still subject to the Church’s male leadership, nuns led lives of relative independence, where they at least weren’t being traded as commodities. Arguably the absolute best position for a woman in the Middle Ages was to be an upper-class, guardian-less widow with a minor son, but that was rarely attainable. Being a nun was the next best thing.
Relative safety during conflict. Contrary to what many people believe about the “laws of chivalry”, it was neither unprecedented nor even that uncommon for upper-class women to become victims during armed conflicts which raged through Europe basically non-stop. Being important was no guarantee of safety. Cecily Neville, for instance, was accosted in Ludlow Castle in 1459 by Lancastrian forces after her husband and his retainers fled to save their lives. The Lancastrians sacked the castle and … did something. We’re not sure what. But it is very likely — though there is no irrefutable proof — that Cecily and one of her daughters were assaulted. Whether sexual assault was involved, or just a thrashing, the mother and daughter were significantly manhandled. Cecily was one of the most important women in England. She was a descendant of Edward III and a cousin of the current king. (And the mother of the future king, though this was precisely what her attackers were trying to prevent.) This is far from an isolated example, and although elite families had a way of suppressing damaging information about their womenfolk, wartime violence did not spare even high-born women. But assaulting a nun was different. It was considered a crime so heinous (at least after pagan Viking raids came to an end) that even stone-cold killers in that era were generally too mindful of God’s wrath to go there. This does not mean this never happened, but it was very uncommon. As a result, a nun’s habit conferred relative safety.
Educational opportunities. Upper-class women were generally well educated in the Middle Ages, but in that era, good education meant the ability to speak several languages, a good command of Latin, the ability to play a musical instrument and some passing familiarity with literature. An in-depth study of anything, however, was frowned upon. Nuns, unlike worldly women, had the freedom to pursue advanced education, and many studied subjects like astronomy, botany, Ancient Greek, Hebrew and advanced theological subjects.
There is also the fact that at least in some orders, and certainly at the time when High Middle Ages segued into the Renaissance, many nuns lived lives of comfort, even luxury. It was, basically, a form of genteel retirement. The worldliness and libertinism of (some) nuns was a perennial concern for the Papacy and one of the complaints of Protestant reformers.
In short, medieval nunnery was neither dour nor motivated by tragic circumstances, and was in fact an attractive alternative to marriage and motherhood for those medieval women who could afford alternatives.
~ Kate Stoneman, Quora
Mary:
In my view one of the best things to be if you were a medieval woman was become a nun. It was free of negatives like marriage and childbirth and never-ending pregnancies. It was also full of opportunities for education and self expression, and even influence and power. I think of Hildegarde of Bingen of course, but we have also learned that nuns could be manuscript illustrators, writers, preachers and musicians. They could even defy their bishops when necessary. The nuns who taught at my high school (Ursulines founded by St. Angela Merici) upheld that tradition by resisting their own bishop when they thought it necessary. They were also primarily dedicated to educating women.
THE UNCHURCHED BELT
~ The Unchurched Belt is a region in the far Northwestern United States that has low rates of religious participation. The term derives from Bible Belt and the notion of the unchurched.
The term was first applied to the West Coast of the United States in 1985 by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, who found that California, Oregon, and Washington had the United States' lowest church membership rates in 1971, and that there was little change in this pattern between 1971 and 1980.
Since 1980, however, California's church membership rate has increased; in 2000, the state had a higher percentage of church members than several states in the Northeast and Midwest. Some religious groups are undercounted in surveys of religious membership.
The most common religious affiliation. States in gray have “no religion” as the most common “affiliation.”
As of 2000, the six states and provinces reported to have the lowest rate of religious adherence in North America were Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Nevada, and West Virginia. Although West Virginia is reported to have a low rate of religious adherence, it is above the national average rate of church attendance. Sociologist Samuel S. Hill, comparing data from the North American Religion Atlas and the American Religious Identity Survey, concluded that a "disproportionately large number of West Virginians" were not counted.
In 2006, Gallup reported that the lowest rates of church attendance among the 48 contiguous states were in Nevada and the New England states of Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine. Church attendance in the western states of Oregon, Washington, and California was only slightly higher. A 2008 Gallup poll comparing belief in God among U.S. regions found that only 59% of residents in the Western United States believe in God, compared to 80% in the East, 83% in the Midwest, and 86% in the South.
A 2011 Gallup poll showed that when it comes to the number of people seeing religion as important in everyday life, New Hampshire and Vermont were the least religious, both with 23%, followed up with 25% in Maine.
There has been debate as to whether the Western United States is still the most irreligious part of the United States, due to New England surpassing it as the region with the highest percentage of residents unaffiliated with any religion. On a state level, it is not clear whether the least religious state resides in New England or the Western United States, as the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) ranked Vermont as the state with the highest percentage of residents claiming no religion at 34%, but a 2009 Gallup poll ranked Oregon as the state with the highest percentage of residents identifying with "No religion, Atheist, or Agnostic", at 24.6%. ~ Wiki
https://news.gallup.com/poll/232223/religious-regions.aspx
Oriana:
who’s the least religious of them all?
Is it the East Coast, or the West?
The unchurched is best.
I can live without knowing that answer as to which coast leads in being "unchurched." The overall trend toward secularization cannot be denied.
I regret that I won’t live long enough to see the religion reduced to the lunatic fringe, as the US catches up to Europe. So many crucifixes to be taken off the walls! Or else the churches will remake themselves into community centers, in effect secularizing themselves also. I’ve heard that mainline Protestant churches are pretty close to that already. The Unitarians are already there.
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NEADERTHAL MYSTERIES REMAIN
A new analysis of ancient genomes is deepening scientists’ understanding of the Neanderthal DNA carried by human populations in Europe and Asia — genetic traces that may have medical relevance today.
The finding, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, tracks the genetic legacy of the archaic relatives of our species, Homo sapiens, with more precision, thanks to a critical mass of invaluable data, according to the researchers.
Most humans alive today can trace a very small percentage of their DNA to Neanderthals — a result of prehistoric sexual encounters between our ancestors and the now-extinct Stone Age hominins before the latter disappeared around 40,000 years ago.
However, Neanderthal DNA is slightly more abundant in the genomes of East Asian populations.
This discrepancy has long perplexed scientists because Neanderthal remains have been found extensively across Europe and the Middle East but not further east of the Altai Mountains in Central Asia.
“So what’s puzzling is that an area where we’ve never found any Neanderthal remains, there’s more Neanderthal DNA,” said study coauthor Mathias Currat, a senior lecturer of genetics and evolution at the University of Geneva.
On average, Neanderthal DNA accounts for about 2% of the genetic makeup of people in Eurasia, while in East Asia the proportion can be as high as 4%, Currat said.
Currat and his colleagues at the University of Geneva came up with an explanation for this inconsistency by analyzing the distribution of the DNA inherited from Neanderthals in the genomes of humans over the past 40,000 years.
“We are beginning to have enough data to describe more and more precisely the percentage of DNA of Neanderthal origin in the genome of Sapiens at certain periods of prehistory,” Currat explained.
The researchers found that, over time, the distribution of Neanderthal DNA didn’t always look as it does now.
DILUTING THE GENOME
The study team mined information from a database of more than 4,000 ancient genomes from across Europe and Asia collected by a team led by Dr. David Reich, professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The genomes of Stone Age Homo sapiens who lived as hunter-gatherers in Europe after Neanderthals’ extinction contained a slightly higher proportion of Neanderthal DNA than those who lived in Asia for samples older than 20,000 years, the researchers found.
The study team thereby concluded that the current pattern of a higher percentage of Neanderthal ancestry in Asian populations compared with those in Europe must have developed at a later stage, mostly likely during the Neolithic transition when farming began to replace hunting and gathering as a way of life some 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
At that point in time, the first farmers from Anatolia, in what’s now western Turkey and the Aegean, began to mix with the existing hunter-gatherers in Western and Northern Europe. This resulted in a lower proportion of Neanderthal DNA observed in European genomes during this period.
“The thing was that they had less Neanderthal ancestry so they diluted the (Neanderthal ancestry) in European populations,” Currat said.
He said it was less clear how this transition unfolded in Asia because of a relative lack of information. The study included 1,517 samples from Europe versus 1,108 from Asia — an area more than four times as large.
Tony Capra, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, said the paper was “an example of a very exciting and promising strategy for integrating analysis of ancient human DNA from different geographic locations with modern genomes to connect the dots of evolution through time and space.” He wasn’t involved in the research.
Some of the genetic traces left by encounters with Neanderthals could make a difference in modern humans’ health. For example, Neanderthal DNA may play a small role in swaying the course of Covid-19 infection, according to a September 2020 study. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/18/world/neanderthal-ancestry-dna-percentage-scn/index.html
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STUDY REVEALS IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SAPIENS BRAIN AND NEANDERTHAL BRAIN
Results believed to be first compelling evidence that modern humans were cognitively better than Neanderthals.
Neanderthals have long been portrayed as our dim-witted, thuggish cousins. Now groundbreaking research has – while not confirmed the stereotype – revealed striking differences in the brain development of modern humans and Neanderthals.
The study involved inserting a Neanderthal brain gene into mice, ferrets and “mini brain” structures called organoids, grown in the lab from human stem cells. The experiments revealed that the Neanderthal version of the gene was linked to slower creation of neurons in the brain’s cortex during development, which scientists said could explain superior cognitive abilities in modern humans.
“Making more neurons sets the basis for higher cognitive function,” said Wieland Huttner, who led the work at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. “We think this is the first compelling evidence that modern humans were cognitively better than Neanderthals.”
Modern humans and Neanderthals split into separate lineages about 400,000 years ago, with our ancestors remaining in Africa and the Neanderthals moving north into Europe. About 60,000 years ago, a mass migration of modern humans out of Africa brought the two species face-to-face once more and they interbred – people alive today of non-African heritage carry 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA. By 30,000 years ago, though, our ancient cousins had vanished as a distinct species and the question of how we out-competed Neanderthals has remained a mystery.
“One concrete fact is that wherever homo sapiens went they would basically out-compete other species there. It’s a bit weird,” said Prof Laurent Nguyen, of the University of Liège, who was not involved in the latest research. “These guys [Neanderthals] were in Europe a long time before us and would have been adapted to their environment including pathogens. The big question is why we would be able to out-compete them.”
Some argue that our ancestors had an intellectual edge, but until recently there has been no way to scientifically test the hypothesis. This changed in the last decade when scientists successfully sequenced Neanderthal DNA from a fossilized toe fragment found in a Siberian cave, paving the way for new insights into how Neanderthal biology differed from our own.
The latest experiments focus on a gene, called TKTL1, involved in neuronal production in the developing brain. The Neanderthal version of the gene differs by one letter from the human version. When inserted into mice, scientists found that the Neanderthal variant led to the production of fewer neurons, particularly in the frontal lobe of the brain, where most cognitive functions reside. The scientists also tested the influence of the gene in ferrets and blobs of lab-grown tissue, called organoids, that replicate the basic structures of the developing brain.
“This shows us that even though we do not know how many neurons the Neanderthal brain had, we can assume that modern humans have more neurons in the frontal lobe of the brain, where [the gene’s] activity is highest, than Neanderthals,” said Anneline Pinson, first author of the study.
Chris Stringer, head of human origins research at the Natural History Museum in London, described the work as “pioneering”, saying that it started to address one of the central puzzles of human evolution – why, with all the past diversity of humans, we are now the only ones left.
“Ideas have come and gone – better tools, better weapons, proper language, art and symbolism, better brains,” Stringer said. “At last, this provides a clue as to why our brains might have outperformed those of Neanderthals.”
More neurons does not automatically equate to a smarter type of human, although it does dictate the brain’s basic computing capacity. Human brains contain about twice the number of neurons as the brains of chimpanzees and bonobos.
Nguyen said the latest work is far from definitive proof of modern humans’ superior intellect, but demonstrates that Neanderthals had meaningful differences in brain development. “This is an exciting story,” he added. ~
Mary:
Anything on early hominims and how our evolution proceeded is fascinating. We are finding Neandertals had more in the way of culture than we thought — witness burial practices, painting or marking on cave walls, tool making.
Oriana:
I would be fascinating if they still existed, those quite capable distant cousins of modern humans. But then, given all the wars within our own species, I can see that only one kind of Homo would be tolerated.
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THE EPIGENETIC SECRETS BEHIND DOPAMINE, DRUG ADDICTION AND DEPRESSION
~ New research links serotonin and dopamine not just to addiction and depression, but to the ability to control genes. ~
As I opened my copy of Science at home one night, an unfamiliar word in the title of a new study caught my eye: dopaminylation. The term refers to the brain chemical dopamine’s ability, in addition to transmitting signals across synapses, to enter a cell’s nucleus and control specific genes. As I read the paper, I realized that it completely upends our understanding of genetics and drug addiction.
The intense craving for addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine may be caused by dopamine controlling genes that alter the brain circuitry underlying addiction. Intriguingly, the results also suggest an answer to why drugs that treat major depression must typically be taken for weeks before they’re effective. I was shocked by the dramatic discovery, but to really understand it, I first had to unlearn some things.
“Half of what you learned in college is wrong,” my biology professor, David Lange, once said. “Problem is, we don’t know which half.” How right he was. I was taught to scoff at Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his theory that traits acquired through life experience could be passed on to the next generation. The silly traditional example is the mama giraffe stretching her neck to reach food high in trees, resulting in baby giraffes with extra-long necks. Then biologists discovered we really can inherit traits our parents acquired in life, without any change to the DNA sequence of our genes. It’s all thanks to a process called epigenetics — a form of gene expression that can be inherited but isn’t actually part of the genetic code. This is where it turns out that brain chemicals like dopamine play a role.
All genetic information is encoded in the DNA sequence of our genes, and traits are passed on in the random swapping of genes between egg and sperm that sparks a new life. Genetic information and instructions are coded in a sequence of four different molecules (nucleotides abbreviated A, T, G and C) on the long double-helix strand of DNA. The linear code is quite lengthy (about 6 feet long per human cell), so it’s stored neatly wound around protein bobbins [histones], similar to how magnetic tape is wound around spools in cassette tapes.
Inherited genes are activated or inactivated to build a unique individual from a fertilized egg, but cells also constantly turn specific genes on and off throughout life to make the proteins cells need to function.
When a gene is activated, special proteins latch onto DNA, read the sequence of letters there and make a disposable copy of that sequence in the form of messenger RNA. The messenger RNA then shuttles the genetic instructions to the cell’s ribosomes, which decipher the code and make the protein specified by the gene.
But none of that works without access to the DNA. By analogy, if the magnetic tape remains tightly wound, you can’t read the information on the cassette. Epigenetics works by unspooling the tape, or not, to control which genetic instructions are carried out. In epigenetic inheritance, the DNA code is not altered, but access to it is.
This is why cells in our body can be so different even though every cell has identical DNA. If the DNA is not unwound from its various spools — proteins called histones — the cell’s machinery can’t read the hidden code. So the genes that would make red blood corpuscles, for example, are shut off in cells that become neurons.
How do cells know which genes to read? The histone spool that a specific gene’s DNA winds around is marked with a specific chemical tag, like a molecular Post-it note. That marker directs other proteins to “roll the tape” and unwind the relevant DNA from that histone (or not to roll it, depending on the tag).
It’s a fascinating process we’re still learning more about, but we never expected that a seemingly unrelated brain chemical might also play a role. Neurotransmitters are specialized molecules that transmit signals between neurons. This chemical signaling between neurons is what enables us to think, learn, experience different moods and, when neurotransmitter signaling goes awry, suffer cognitive difficulties or mental illness.
Serotonin and dopamine are famous examples. Both are monoamines, a class of neurotransmitters involved in psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders and addiction. Serotonin helps regulate mood, and drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are widely prescribed and effective for treating chronic depression. We think they work by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain, which boosts communication between neurons in the neural circuits controlling mood, motivation, anxiety and reward. That makes sense, sure, but it is curious that it usually takes a month or more before the drug relieves depression.
Dopamine, on the other hand, is the neurotransmitter at work in the brain’s reward circuits; it produces that “gimme-a-high-five!” spurt of euphoria that erupts when we hit a bingo. Nearly all addictive drugs, like cocaine and alcohol, increase dopamine levels, and the chemically induced dopamine reward leads to further drug cravings. A weakened reward circuitry could be a cause of depression, which would help explain why people with depression may self-medicate by taking illicit drugs that boost dopamine.
But (as I found out after reading that dopaminylation paper), research last year led by Ian Maze, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, showed that serotonin has another function: It can act as one of those molecular Post-it notes. Specifically, it can bind to a type of histone known as H3, which controls the genes responsible for transforming human stem cells (the forerunner of all kinds of cells) into serotonin neurons. When serotonin binds to the histone, the DNA unwinds, turning on the genes that dictate the development of a stem cell into a serotonin neuron, while turning off other genes by keeping their DNA tightly wound. (So stem cells that never see serotonin turn into other types of cells, since the genetic program to transform them into neurons is not activated.)
That finding inspired Maze’s team to wonder if dopamine might act in a similar way, regulating the genes involved in drug addiction and withdrawal. In the April Science paper that so surprised me, they showed that the same enzyme that attaches serotonin to H3 can also catalyze the attachment of dopamine to H3 — a process, I learned, called dopaminylation.
Together, these results represent a huge change in our understanding of these chemicals. By binding to the H3 histone, serotonin and dopamine can regulate transcription of DNA into RNA and, as a consequence, the synthesis of specific proteins from them. That turns these well-known characters in neuroscience into double agents, acting obviously as neurotransmitters, but also as clandestine masters of epigenetics.
Maze’s team naturally began exploring this new relationship. First they examined postmortem brain tissue from cocaine users. They found a decrease in the amount of dopaminylation of H3 in the cluster of dopamine neurons in a brain region known to be important in addiction: the ventral tegmental area, or VTA.
That’s just an intriguing correlation, though, so to find out if cocaine use actually affects dopaminylation of H3 in these neurons, the researchers studied rats before and after they self-administered cocaine for 10 days. Just as in the human cocaine users’ brains, dopaminylation of H3 dropped within the neurons in the rats’ VTA. The researchers also found a rebound effect one month after withdrawing the rats from cocaine, with much higher dopaminylation of H3 found in these neurons than in control animals. That increase might be important in controlling which genes get turned on or off, rewiring the brain’s reward circuitry and causing an intense drug craving during withdrawal.
Ultimately, it looks as though dopaminylation — not just typical dopamine functioning in the brain — may control drug-seeking behavior. Long-term cocaine use modifies neural circuits in the brain’s reward pathway, making a steady intake of the drug necessary for the circuits to operate normally. That requires turning specific genes on and off to make the proteins for those changes, and this is an epigenetic mechanism driven by dopamine acting on H3, not a change in DNA sequence.
To test that hypothesis, the researchers genetically modified H3 histones in rats by replacing the amino acid that dopamine attaches to with a different one it doesn’t react with. This stops dopaminylation from occurring. Withdrawal from cocaine is associated with changes in the readout of hundreds of genes involved in rewiring neural circuits and altering synaptic connections, but in the rats whose dopaminylation was prevented, these changes were suppressed.
Moreover, neural impulse firing in VTA neurons was reduced, and they released less dopamine, showing that these genetic changes were indeed affecting the brain’s reward circuit operation. This might account for why people with substance use disorder crave drugs that boost dopamine levels in the brain during withdrawal. Finally, in subsequent tests, the genetically modified rats exhibited much less cocaine-seeking behavior.
To put it plainly, the discovery that monoamine neurotransmitters control epigenetic regulation of genes is transformative for basic science and medicine. These experiments show that the tagging of H3 by dopamine does indeed underlie drug-seeking behavior, by regulating the neural circuits operating in addiction.
And, equally exciting, the implications likely go well beyond addiction, given the crucial role of dopamine and serotonin signaling in other neurological and psychological illnesses. Indeed, Maze told me that his team’s latest research (not yet published) has also found this type of epigenetic marking in the brain tissues of people with major depressive disorder. Perhaps this connection even explains why antidepressant drugs take so long to be effective: if the drugs work by activating this epigenetic process, rather than just supplying the brain’s missing serotonin, it can take days or even weeks before these genetic changes become apparent.
Looking ahead, Maze wonders if such epigenetic changes might also occur in response to other addictive drugs, including heroin, alcohol and nicotine. If so, medicines based on this newly discovered epigenetic process could eventually lead to better treatments for many types of addiction and mental illnesses.
In a commentary accompanying the research, Jean-Antoine Girault of Sorbonne University in Paris made a final, intriguing observation. We know that typical neural impulse firing works by causing a ripple effect of dynamic changes in calcium concentration inside neurons that eventually reach the nucleus. But Girault noted that the enzyme that catalyzes the attachment of dopamine to H3 is also regulated by levels of intracellular calcium. In this way, electrical chatter between neurons is relayed to the nucleus, suggesting that neural activity — driven by a behavior — could attach the dopamine epigenetic marker to genes responsible for drug-seeking behavior. That’s how the experiences one has in life can select which genes get read out, and which do not.
Lamarck would be proud. ~
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-epigenetic-secrets-behind-dopamine-drug-addiction-and-depression-20201027/
Mary:
Serotonin, dopamine and epigenetics — we seem to be finding things about how they interact that suggests possible usefulness in some of our most miserable of ills, such as depression.
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THOSE AWFUL NIGHT-TIME LEG CRAMPS
From various sources on the Internet:
“Cramps are likely the result of tired muscles and nerve problems. The risk of having night leg cramps increases with age. Pregnant people also are more likely to have night leg cramps. Kidney failure, diabetic nerve damage and problems with blood flow are known to cause night leg cramps."
This would indicate that lion mane extract — which is supposed to help regrow nerves — would be the best remedy.
"The older you are, the more likely you are to have leg cramps. This is because your tendons (the tissues that connect your muscles to your bones) naturally shorten as you age. Women are also more likely to get them. Up to 60% of adults get leg cramps at night, as do up to 40% of children and teenagers.
Night leg cramps (nocturnal leg cramps) can happen to anyone at any age, but they happen most often to older adults. Of people over age 60, 33% will have a leg cramp at night at least once every two months. Nearly every adult age 50 and older will have them at least one time.
Approximately 40% of people will experience leg cramps during pregnancy. Healthcare providers believe that’s because the extra weight of pregnancy strains your muscles.
Possible causes for leg cramps at night (nocturnal leg cramps) include:
Sitting for long periods of time (like at a desk job).
Overusing your muscles.
Standing or working on concrete floors.
Having poor posture during the day.
Kidney failure, diabetic nerve damage, mineral deficits and issues with blood flow.”
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Potassium deficiency is also a possibility.
The Avocado: A Potassium Powerhouse
Soaking in a warm bath near bedtime might be a preventative measure.”
Magnesium is allegedly involved but it’s done nothing for me to prevent cramps. I take it for other benefits.
Stretching!! It would make sense to try stretching at bedtime. Here you probably already know how to stretch those shrinking tendons. Just as you’ve learned to stretch your hands, you can learn to stretch your legs whenever you remember. Frequent leg stretches just might do it.
Back when I used to swim, as I got older I got cramps (mainly in the toes) practically every time. I suspect it was the coldness of the water and whatever damage accumulates during aging.
So avocados, yams, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, bananas and other potassium-rich foods may help. But I suspect that stretching exercises are most effective (though not 100%).
Pickle Juice
Some athletes swear by pickle juice as a fast way to stop a muscle cramp. They believe it’s effective because of the high water and sodium content. But that might not be the case. While pickle juice may help relieve muscle cramps quickly, it isn’t because you’re dehydrated or low on sodium. It is more likely because the pickle juice sets off a reaction in your nervous system that stops the cramp, according to recent research.
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For menstrual cramps, ibuprofen worked best — but it shouldn’t be taken for a long time in large doses (it may take three ibuprofens to stop menstrual cramps — four is the maximum dose).
Still, on a particularly crampy night, ibuprofen might help even with leg cramps.
I think stretching at bedtime will be most helpful. Gett the toes to face toward the body as much as possible; relax, repeat.
And lion mane extract just might help — if not with toe cramps, then in the prevention of dementia. (By the way, that extract is a godsend when it comes to neuropathy.)
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ending on beauty:
EARLY FALL
The first cold morning,
the first lost tomato
pulled rotting from the vine,
the first grey, rainfilled sky —
sunless as February,
lonely as April,
before spring learns
the secret of love.
~ John Guzlowski (photo below also by John Guzlowski)
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