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I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
~ Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric, the opening section
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WHY WE KEEP RETURNING TO SHERLOCK HOLMES
~ What’s a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say—the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it’s too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn’t seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you’re disappointed with it. It’s a lousy mystery, right?
Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you’re like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you’ve forgotten the solution, but that’s another matter.) But what’s the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, opines that a play which depends on keeping its secrets isn’t worth viewing twice—which he found out the hard way.
Which brings us to the mystery of Sherlock Holmes. If you’ve read a Holmes story, chances are you’ve read another, and if you’ve read two, you’ve probably read them all and re-read them all, and chances are you’ve picked every bone of that corpus clean, with a great deal of relish. Why on earth would you do that? Where’s the mystery in that?
I’ll spill my solution up front: the mystery is in Holmes. It’s been said that next to Jesus and Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes has had more ink spilled about him than any man, real or fictional. Holmes is the black box of literature. Doyle’s genius is not in what he reveals, but what he conceals. The True depth is not in the notes, but the silences.
When I speak of a black box, of course, I’m not speaking of plane crashes and the search for an actual box (although they do hold the answer to the mystery of why the plane crashed). In science and engineering, a black box is any system which can be viewed in terms of inputs and outputs, without any knowledge of its inner workings. Which describes Holmes to a t. The mystery that keeps us coming back to Holmes over and over again is in the black box.
Yes, I know: “You see, but you do not observe.” “We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination”. You can add up all his aphorisms and still come no closer to the inner workings of his mind, his imagination.
What makes Holmes unerringly center on the significant details to the exclusion of all the welter of others? How does he always guess right? (I know, “I never guess. It is a shocking habit—destructive to the logical faculty.” Well, then let us say, how does he strike the right set of properties, eh?)
There’s a mystery by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (probably best known for Solaris) called The Chain of Chance. A former astronaut is hired to investigate a chain of mysterious deaths by poisoning. There are several clues and several suspects. The story proceeds as a typical whodunit. But in the end, he finds that the inhalation of a random combination of certain chemicals at a factory led to all the deaths. It was mere chance. Chance is verboten in a mystery novel, of course, but most often the solution in real life, no matter the conspiracy-spinners.
But this is not meant to be a (fruitless) study of how Holmes’s thought processes work, but a suggestion as to how those processes are so closely guarded. Because if Holmes’s thoughts were laid bare, if his methods ever became commonplace, then Holmes would lose his mystery, and, dare I say it, his fandom. Of his background we know shockingly little: he has a brother (we learn in The Greek Interpreter), even more mysterious than he, and has French antecedents, the Vernet family of prominent French artists. He attended university, though he do not know what he studied or whether he finished. We learn nothing of his parentage or place of birth, nothing of his upbringing. (We learn even less of Watson’s background.)
Then there are the distractions: the famous slipper full of tobacco, the cigars in the coal scuttle, the scraping at the violin, even the drug-taking, all the other trappings of eccentricity which are trotted out in every story and serve so effectively to hide the detective from us. (I won’t speak of the deerstalker cap and the meerschaum pipe—those were added by William Gilette, the first interpreter of Holmes for the stage.)
And this is where Watson comes in. For every black box needs its recorder of input and output, its obsever. He is absolutely essential to Holmes, because he is the guardian. Watson is, of course, narrator and the stand-in for the reader, but he is more. He’s the filter Doyle relies on to keep Holmes’s thought processes opaque. And when Watson is not present, as in “The Adventure of The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”, there is disaster. Holmes is suddenly revealed as fallible. Holmes himself complains of it in The Blanched Soldier.
“Alas, that I should have to show my hand so when I tell my own story! It was by concealing such links in the chain that Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales.”
And in the Lion’s Mane he chases suspects round willy-nilly until he finally finds that the murderer is a jellyfish—shades of The Chain of Chance!
Any Holmes tale without Watson runs into the same trouble. No one has higher praise for Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution than myself—it was the inspiration for my own novel—and yet I am bound to say that I was disappointed in his more recent pastiche, The Canary Trainer. Why? No Watson. As narrated by Holmes, the story narrates a series of mistakes which almost reduce Holmes to a bumbler.
It’s Holmes’s very opaqueness, his mystery that keep us writing and reading about Holmes, that unapproachable mind that we keep attempting to approach. May we never reach it.
https://crimereads.com/the-mystery-is-holmes-why-we-return-to-conan-doyles-stories-over-and-over-again/
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TRUMP AND REAGAN “CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., argued Monday night that former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were essentially cut from the same cloth. “For all their differences in temperament and style,” he asserted in his speech at the Reagan presidential library, “there’s a deeper continuity in the beliefs of our 40th and 45th presidents.”
Cotton declined to “sketch out the similarities with great details about policies and programs.” Instead, he noted that both men adorned the walls of the Oval Office with paintings of President Andrew Jackson and thus both were, at heart, Jacksonian populists. It’s a rather weak case, but there is one to be made linking Reagan and Trump — just, perhaps, not the one Cotton intended.
The senator is correct that Reagan and Trump displayed starkly different temperaments and styles. As president, Reagan projected a sense of sunny optimism. His first inaugural address encouraged Americans to “dream heroic dreams” in support of “national renewal,” while his re-election campaign confidently declared it was “morning again in America.”
Trump, in sharp contrast, consistently presented an uglier and more pessimistic perspective. His inaugural address rattled off a list of grievances and grudges that constituted a dire state of “American carnage.” That dark and dismal tone for Trump’s inaugural — which a bewildered former President George W. Bush could only describe as “some weird s---” — only deepened as his administration wore on.
These presidents’ personalities were, in turn, projected on the nation they led. But while these stylistic differences are important, they ultimately matter less than the shared legacies of the two presidents.
The populist tradition is a long one in American history. Rather than reach all the way back to Jackson in the 1830s as Cotton did, we can find a more recent and more relevant example in the 1960s campaigns of George Wallace.
As many historians (including me) have noted, Trump’s political campaigns bore an eerie resemblance to the wild rallies that Wallace staged in the ‘60s. Like Jackson before him and Trump after, Wallace championed the cause of “the common people,” largely by stoking their sense of victimization and promising to exact revenge on the source of their resentment.
Reagan sits well within that tradition, too. During the 1960s and 1970s, as a surrogate for presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and then as a two-term governor of California, he sounded many of the same themes as Wallace in private and in public. Reagan pressed the precise “law and order” message that Wallace pioneered, for instance. He also used the same kind of racist dog whistles, including exaggerated stories about a “Chicago welfare queen” and a “strapping young buck” who used food stamps to “buy a T-bone steak.”
Little wonder that contemporaries saw the two men as linked. After Watergate seemingly ruined the Republican brand, National Review publisher William Rusher suggested starting over with a new Conservative Party — one led by a Reagan-Wallace presidential ticket.
“Reagan’s dirty little secret is that he has found a way to make racism palatable and politically potent again.”
Most notoriously, Reagan launched his general election campaign in 1980 with a visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi — the infamous site where three civil rights activists were killed in 1964, with the local police’s complicity. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan told the lily-white crowd. Such a “states’ rights” appeal, civil rights legend Andrew Young noted, was simply “the electoral language of Wallace, Goldwater and the Nixon southern strategy.” A Mississippi Republican admitted as much: The speech, he told reporters, was an effort to win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”
As president, Reagan continued in this vein, opposing affirmative action and busing programs while fighting to save tax exemptions for racially segregated schools. The reality of his stance on racial issues was, for many, obscured by the president’s cheery disposition. In a scathing article in The Nation titled “Smiling Racism,” civil rights activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roger Wilkins laid it bare: “Reagan’s dirty little secret is that he has found a way to make racism palatable and politically potent again.”
Of course, while civil rights leaders recoiled from Reagan’s racial record, those “George Wallace inclined voters” were drawn in by the same words and deeds. Rep. Trent Lott, R-Miss., told a convention of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform.” Even Trump’s white nationalist supporters have been more subtle.
While Reagan’s racial appeals “unleashed an invisible monster on American politics,” as Wilkins charged, more immediately visible were his efforts to downgrade trust in the very government he led. Trump ranted about agents of a “deep state” who are deliberately undermining the country, but in Reagan’s framing, government agents were well-intentioned but utterly incompetent. The president often joked that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
But Reagan didn’t simply voice voters’ distrust of the federal government. He deepened that distrust with the record of his own White House. As the conservative pundit P.J. O’Rourke concluded at the end of the Reagan era, “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
The proof came in many forms, some deliberate, some not. Like Trump would later, Reagan staffed key administration positions with officials who were bitterly opposed to the agencies they allegedly led. His first head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Thorne Auchter, had run a Florida construction firm that OSHA had repeatedly fined. He greatly reduced the agency’s operations to spare other businessmen the same fate. Similar appointments elsewhere — such as Anne Gorsuch Burford at the Environmental Protection Agency and Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — likewise helped hamstring agencies that conservatives loathed.
Other Reagan officials went further, using government posts to commit illegal deeds or line their own pockets. Even leaving aside the massive scandal that was Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration racked up a staggering record of corruption and criminality: bribes from military contractors, a series of rigged grants at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, misused funds at the EPA, lobbying scandals that circled around Reagan’s deputy chief of staff and a senior advisor, and on and on. Nearly three dozen Reagan administration officials were indicted in all.
The inquiries and investigations into the Trump administration are still unfolding, of course, and it’s not yet clear what the final tally of indictments and convictions might be. Whatever the case, the ultimate conclusions the public will draw — that the government is incapable of working well and government officials are capable of doing bad — will be very much in the tradition of Reagan.
There are, to be sure, major differences between the two presidents. (Most notably, Reagan eventually embraced immigration reform, including amnesty for many undocumented immigrants.) But when it comes to some of the key problems confronting us now — the craven appeals to the worst elements in our electorate and the cynical denigration of government service — Reagan and Trump were clearly on the same page. Reagan delivered his damage with a smile, while Trump did it with a scowl or a sneer. But the outcome was still the same.
As he prepares for his own possible run for the presidency, Cotton is confident that Republicans can carry on this tradition. He’s likely correct — and that’s precisely the problem. ~ Kevin M. Kruse
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-reagan-were-more-alike-you-think-n1291315
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DR. BANDY X LEE: THE SHARED PSYCHOSIS OF DONALD TRUMP AND HIS FOLLOWERS
~ The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.
One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition. Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejected the American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline, known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”
Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. These insights are now taking on renewed importance as a growing number of current and former leaders call for Trump to be impeached. On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.
Scientific American asked Lee to comment on the psychology behind Trump’s destructive behavior, what drives some of his followers—and how to free people from his grip when this damaging presidency ends.
What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?
The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
Why does Trump himself seem to gravitate toward violence and destruction?
Destructiveness is a core characteristic of mental pathology, whether directed toward the self or others. First, I wish to clarify that those with mental illness are, as a group, no more dangerous than those without mental illness. When mental pathology is accompanied by criminal-mindedness, however, the combination can make individuals far more dangerous than either alone.
In my textbook on violence, I emphasize the symbolic nature of violence and how it is a life impulse gone awry. Briefly, if one cannot have love, one resorts to respect. And when respect is unavailable, one resorts to fear. Trump is now living through an intolerable loss of respect: rejection by a nation in his election defeat. Violence helps compensate for feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy and lack of real productivity.
Do you think Trump is truly exhibiting delusional or psychotic behavior? Or is he simply behaving like an autocrat making a bald-faced attempt to hold onto his power?
I believe it is both. He is certainly of an autocratic disposition because his extreme narcissism does not allow for equality with other human beings, as democracy requires. Psychiatrists generally assess delusions through personal examination, but there is other evidence of their likelihood. First, delusions are more infectious than strategic lies, and so we see, from their sheer spread, that Trump likely truly believes them. Second, his emotional fragility, manifested in extreme intolerance of realities that do not fit his wishful view of the world, predispose him to psychotic spirals. Third, his public record includes numerous hours of interviews and interactions with other people—such as the hour-long one with the Georgia secretary of state—that very nearly confirm delusion, as my colleague and I discovered in a systematic analysis.
Where does the hatred some of his supporters display come from? And what can we do to promote healing?
In Profile of a Nation, I outline the many causes that create his followership. But there is important psychological injury that arises from relative—not absolute—socioeconomic deprivation. Yes, there is great injury, anger and redirectable energy for hatred, which Trump harnessed and stoked for his manipulation and use. The emotional bonds he has created facilitate shared psychosis at a massive scale. It is a natural consequence of the conditions we have set up. For healing, I usually recommend three steps: (1) Removal of the offending agent (the influential person with severe symptoms). (2) Dismantling systems of thought control—common in advertising but now also heavily adopted by politics. And (3) fixing the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to poor collective mental health in the first place.
What do you predict he will do after his presidency?
I again emphasize in Profile of a Nation that we should consider the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation, including the establishment of a shadow presidency. He will have no limit, which is why I have actively advocated for removal and accountability, including prosecution. We need to remember that he is more a follower than a leader, and we need to place constraints from the outside when he cannot place them from within.
What do you think will happen to his supporters?
If we handle the situation appropriately, there will be a lot of disillusionment and trauma. And this is all right—they are healthy reactions to an abnormal situation. We must provide emotional support for healing, and this includes societal support, such as sources of belonging and dignity. Cult members and victims of abuse are often emotionally bonded to the relationship, unable to see the harm that is being done to them. After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth. And the situation with Trump supporters is very similar. The danger is that another pathological figure will come around and entice them with a false “solution” that is really a harnessing of this resistance.
How can we avert future insurrection attempts or acts of violence?
Violence is the end product of a long process, so prevention is key. Structural violence, or inequality, is the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. And reducing inequality in all forms—economic, racial and gender—will help toward preventing violence. For prevention to be effective, knowledge and in-depth understanding cannot be overlooked—so we can anticipate what is coming, much like the pandemic. The silencing of mental health professionals during the Trump era, mainly through a politically driven distortion of an ethical guideline, was catastrophic, in my view, in the nation’s failure to understand, predict and prevent the dangers of this presidency.
Do you have any advice for people who do not support Trump but have supporters of him or “mini-Trumps” in their lives?
This is often very difficult because the relationship between Trump and his supporters is an abusive one, as an author of the 2017 book I edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, presciently pointed out. When the mind is hijacked for the benefit of the abuser, it becomes no longer a matter of presenting facts or appealing to logic. Removing Trump from power and influence will be healing in itself.
But, I advise, first, not to confront [his supporters’] beliefs, for it will only rouse resistance. Second, persuasion should not be the goal but change of the circumstance that led to their faulty beliefs. Third, one should maintain one’s own bearing and mental health, because people who harbor delusional narratives tend to bulldoze over reality in their attempt to deny that their own narrative is false.
As for mini-Trumps, it is important, above all, to set firm boundaries, to limit contact or even to leave the relationship, if possible. Because I specialize in treating violent individuals, I always believe there is something that can be done to treat them, but they seldom present for treatment unless forced.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/
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TIMOTHY SNYDER: IS UKRAINE HISTORICALLY RUSSIAN?
Two-and-a-half years ago, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, setting off the largest war the world has seen since 1945.
Although Russia's leaders have offered various spurious justifications for their illegal war of aggression, Vladimir Putin's most consistent explanation has been ideological: Russia is an ancient state, and Ukraine is historically Russian land.
Let us take advantage of this half-anniversary to consider this claim.
Anniversaries take hold of the imagination, especially the round ones. The fullness of years and the beauty of numbers seduce us into myths of eternity and goodness. But history, unlike legend, is composed of fragments, of bits, of things we understand halfway, and seek to grasp ever better.
This is one reason why few historians grapple with the gilded myths that Putin has put forward about the ancient past, most notoriously in a long essay in 2021 and then in a tedious interview with Tucker Carlson in 2024.
When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.
Putin is in love with a legend. Historically speaking, this is very familiar: new regimes, such as Putin's, seek compensation in myths of ancient origin.
Putin's idea of Russia, his justification for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, his rationalization of his attempt to destroy Ukraine as a people — it all rests on a very familiar sort of tall tale: we were here first. These stories are generally complete falsehoods, from the “we” through the “were” and the “here” and the “first.” And so it is for Putin.
But the stories get repeated so often that they take on a kind of leaden plausibility, like a bad habit. It takes a little work to throw them off. So here goes!
The legend begins with a single obscure incident, understood by Putin to prove the existence and endurance of a Russian state: Long ago there was a city called Novgorod, inhabited by people who were unable to get along. These quarrelsome folk, the Slavs, invited three Viking brothers, known as the Rus, to come and rule them. The arrival of Vikings began an unbroken tradition of a Russian "centralized state."
As he says, Putin has the story from a medieval chronicle, "The Tale of Bygone Years," probably from the early twelfth century. The monk (or monks) in Kyiv who compiled this text had heard about the arrival of the Vikings known as the Rus from Scandinavia, which had taken place about four hundred years earlier. In the intervening centuries, the various parts of the fractious Scandinavian clans had founded, taken over, and lost control of a number or towns in eastern Europe. The monk or monks knew were trying to explain why the Kyivan part of a Scandinavian ruling clan still known by the name Rus was more important than other clans in other places.
"The Tale of Bygone Years" is one of dozens of helpful medieval sources which touch on the Scandinavians in eastern Europe, which mix fable and useful information. These texts have to be read critically and together, and alongside the findings of archeologists and numismatists who have worked in the places in question. In what follows I will be doing this.
Having understood that, historians can choose to go the extra mile, and note that the factual claims (1-5) are balderdash. It only really makes sense to do this in a constructive rather than in a destructive spirit, in an effort to reveal something about what we actually do know about early medieval Scandinavia and eastern Europe, and how we know it. It is in that spirit that I will proceed. Let us consider each claim in turn.
1. There was a city called Novgorod when the Vikings known as the Rus arrived.
There was not. Novgorod had not yet been founded at the time of the arrival of the Rus in the territories that are now northeastern Russia. It was founded about a quarter millenium later. (It had also not yet been founded when Vikings first began to lay claim to Kyiv, which already existed and was probably controlled by Khazars.)
2. There were three Viking brothers.
3. The Vikings accepted the invitation and peacefully and durably ruled.
4. The people of this city were in some sense Russians because they were Slavs.
5. These Vikings were also in some sense Russians, since they called themselves “Rus.”
6. The existence of an ethnic group in a town more than a thousand years ago means a right to rule today by a dictator who calls himself a name that he also associates with that ethnic group.
7. The existence of the rulers of that ethnic group more than a thousand years ago means a right to rule today by a dictator who calls himself a name that he also associates with those rulers.
8. Events in one location more than a thousand years ago justify the existence and actions of a transcontinental empire engaged in a war of aggression against a neighboring state.
9. An algorithm exists whereby we can justify repression and war today via obscure, distant events.
10. This algorithm is known to dictators who tell the story, carry out the repressions and start the wars.
When spelled out like this, the claims reveal their magical character. Even if claims 1-5 were completely correct, the moral and political interpretations Putin offers in claims 6-10 are illogical and repugnant.
Such “reasoning” is why few historians will engage Putin's legend directly. It has nothing to do with history -- with assembling evidence, with questioning hypothesis, with making reasonable arguments based upon sources and traditions of interpretation. It is a claim to power, whose only sense arises from the power itself. That is really all that needs to be said.
Having understood that, historians can choose to go the extra mile, and note that the factual claims (1-5) are balderdash. It only really makes sense to do this in a constructive rather than in a destructive spirit, in an effort to reveal something about what we actually do know about early medieval Scandinavia and eastern Europe, and how we know it. It is in that spirit that I will proceed. Let us consider each claim in turn.
1. There was a city called Novgorod when the Vikings known as the Rus arrived.
There was not. Novgorod had not yet been founded at the time of the arrival of the Rus in the territories that are now northeastern Russia. It was founded about a quarter millenium later. (It had also not yet been founded when Vikings first began to lay claim to Kyiv, which already existed and was probably controlled by Khazars.)
[The Khazars (/ˈxɑːzɑːrz/) were a nomadic Turkic people that, in the late 6th-century CE, established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan ~ Wikipedia]
Novgorod is attractive for a Russian myth because it exists now and it existed at the time the monks were writing. But it did not exist at the time of the events the monks were recounting. But this is just the very beginning of the profound untruthfulness of the story.
Here is what we know. Traders from Scandinavia were present around the body of water we now call Lake Ladoga in the sixth century. Around the middle of the eighth century, the Vikings who called themselves Rus established a trading emporium at a site that Russian archaeologists call Ladoga, but which the Vikings themselves called Aldeigja.
Packed away in storage in the Hermitage in St.Petersburg is a bronze figure from Aldeigja in its early days: Odin with his two ravens. This contemporary piece of evidence, similar to other figures from Scandinavia, and one among thousands, tells us more than later chronicles about the time and place and people.
The power center associated with Aldeigja was probably called the Rus Khaganate. We believe that it was called this because of contemporary evidence: a recorded encounter between Rus emissaries and the king of the Franks.
About a century after the foundation of Aldeigja, the Vikings known as Rus established another trade center, which they called Holmgar∂, and which Russians later called Gorodishche.
The town Novgorod in its turn was founded more than a hundred years after that and about a mile away. It had nothing to do with the first encounter of the Rus and the locals. It could not have done so, since it did not then exist.
2. There were three Viking brothers.
This is a different sort of claim. One can show with considerable certainty, on the basis of the archaeological evidence, when Scandinavian Rus towns such as Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ were established, and have a pretty good idea of who lived there and what occupations were pursued.
One cannot of course disprove, on this basis, that there were once three Viking brothers. The reasons to disbelieve this claim are of a different kind, arising from the study of political myth and its structures.
The number 3 has a profound significance in Indo-European stories about the origin of the world. According to Tacitus, the ancient Germanic peoples (whose culture preceded that of the Germanic Vikings), believed that the earth god had a son, and that son had three sons, and those three sons founded all the other peoples. Odin was himself one of three brothers.
In Viking times, the settlement of new (from the Viking perspective) lands was systematically justified by a story of the arrival of three brothers, usually sons or grandsons of Odin. In this manner the Viking clan who had power justified its position and its right to control lands (and native peoples). The Tale of Bygone Years, which is essentially one saga among many others, reproduced this standard trope of the Scandinavian sagas.
3. The Vikings accepted the invitation and peacefully and durably ruled.
In the case of this bit of nonsense, both literary and archaeological methods help. One does not have to be a student of early legends to understand that the "invitation" story is suspect. Right down to the present, invading armies claim that they have come only at the invitation of the people whose lands they now occupy.
Contemporary Russians should be particularly sensitive to this, since the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in 1919, the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 were all justified by supposed invitations from within the invaded country.
The ancient Scandinavians also knew this trick, and the story of their being "invited" to the region of Aldeigja and Holmgar∂, in what is now northwestern Russia, is an obvious colonial tale. Not only is it certainly fictional, its purpose was to deny (not to affirm) the agency of the local people.
The entity that Putin has in mind was the Rus Khaganate. The name Rus referred to the Scandinavian clan; the Scandinavians borrowed the term “kagan” for ruler from the Khazars, their partner in the slave trade. Vikings were in the area in order to facilitate trade southward for Arabic silver. The chief goods they traded were at first furs and then slaves.
During the period in question, the Vikings known as the Rus understood systematic slave raids in the area, killing the adult men and then selling women, boys and girls into slavery. The power center around Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ had its ascent and its collapse. Either it was attacked by other Scandinavians, or it was challenged by local rebellions of peoples subject to slave raids, or perhaps both. The Rus Khaganate seems to have collapsed in about 870. Rus and other Scandinavian traders remained active, and trade emporia would be revived and new towns founded, but the first Rus polity seems to have ended then.
4. The people of this city were in some sense Russians because they were Slavs.
Here one must apply the literary criticism not to the Tale of Bygone Years but to Putin himself. He never actually says that the people in the Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ regions were Russians; he wrongly believes that they were Slavs, and implies a Russian identity by claiming that their actions laid the basis for a "centralized Russian state." This is, of course, a trick.
It is absurd to imagine Russians existing 1200 or 1300 years ago, and Putin avoids the absurdity by slipping in his imaginary Russians by silent implication. And so the point must be made explicitly: there were no Russians anywhere in the world 1200 or 1300 years ago. There was no notion whatever of a Russian people.
The backup position would be that these people were Slavs and thus in some sense proto-Russians.
That is not how history works: there is no natural, inevitable progression from people speaking a language 1200 or 1300 years ago to the cultural identities or political regimes of today.
But even if one believes in this political magic, and even if one believes that people speaking a Slavic language 1200 or 1300 years ago were somehow proto-Russians, there is still a major problem. The people who lived in the area at the time did not generally speak Slavic languagues. They were mainly Finns, not Slavs.
For that matter, Finns seem to have been the most important group not only in the Aldeigja and Holmgar∂ regions, but in all of what is now northeastern Russia, including what is now the Moscow region. (There was, of course, no city of Moscow at the time.)
5. These Vikings were also in some sense Russians, since they called themselves “Rus.”
Here again we confront an implicit claim, one that is is backed by a semantic trick. There is now a country called the Russian Federation, which is named after an earlier country called the Russian Empire, which was named after Vikings who called themselves Rus, or after the medieval power centers established by the Rus, the first of which was the Rus Khaganate.
There is a power in names, just as there is a power in anniversaries and round numbers. If those people were called Rus, must they not have been Russians? Well, no. The Rus came first. The Russian Empire was named after them about a thousand years after they appeared. The naming confuses things, but it need not confuse us.
At the time period in question, other European rulers had no difficulty establishing who the Rus were: they were Swedes. In the poems and stories they sang and wrote, and in the traces they left in their burial ground, the Rus were unambiguously Scandinavians. To be sure, they were influenced by the peoples with whom they came into contact: Finns, Balts, Arabs, Bulgars, Khazars, Slavs. This was a period of the globalization of Scandinavia, and the Rus were part of an exploratory impulse that reached four continents
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Rus were Scandinavian traders and clans. Later on, as some Rus settled ever further south, for example in Gnezdevo, Chernihiv, and Kyiv, the Scandinavians reinforced their elite status by marrying Scandinavians from Scandinavia, by treating them as allies and friends, and by expanding upon and sharing in Scandinavian culture.
After the collapse of the Rus Khaganate, other Rus managed to establish another power center, much later, at Kyiv. Now rather than cooperating with the Khazars they were taking over their land and tribute centers. The Rus (or other Scandinavians) also built the first towns in other parts of eastern Europe, for example in the area around Moscow (which of course did not exist at the time).
After telling his deeply implausible legend about Novgorod, Putin's next move is to cite the Tale of Bygone Years about Kyiv. The person or people who wrote that saga was concerned to show that the Rus ruler of Kyiv, was the most important prince in the region. By the time of the writing of the chronicle, Novgorod did exist, and so a story presented itself which linked the two places and showed the superiority of Kyiv.
The story is that a Viking from Novgorod managed to take Kyiv by dressing himself up as a trader and fooling the naive local rulers. At his moment of his triumph this Viking produced a baby and proclaimed that the child was byblood the true ruler of the land. After this improbable succession of events that Viking of the story proclaimed Kyiv “the mother of Rus cities,” a bit of language meant to assure people in the twelfth century that the present rulers of Kyiv should dominate over other Rus in other towns.
One could perform the same kind of analysis on this story. At the time The Tale of Bygone Years was written, there was no Russia. There were no Russians. There were clans of Scandinavians called Rus, who were engaged in a contest of dominance, with towns and emporia that rose and fell. Part of this contest was a story, set down in the early twelfth century, describing the arrival of the Rus in Kyiv, a historical event of the early tenth century.
Rus did in fact arrive in Kyiv, but not as the story describes. The Vikings in the story could not have come from Novgorod, since at the time the Rus began to settle the Kyiv area Novgorod had not yet been founded. It was much later on, when both cities did exist, at the time of the chronicle, when the Scandinavians in Kyiv wanted to justify both their own pedigree and their own dominance. The story can only be understood in these terms. Otherwise it is just comical.
The baby thing is ridiculous; no Viking ever went to war with a baby on display, nor did any Viking have the idea of a royal dynasty of which the baby would be the heir. The dressup game is a fictional stratagem familiar from Scandinavian sagas as well as contemporary Byzantine war stories. Even if one ignores the legendary and preposterous character all that, the timing of the events is challenged by the recorded birth and death dates of the clever wardrobe Viking and the portable baby Viking.
The hero of the Kyiv story, the clever wardrobe Viking known as Helgi (or Oleh or Oleg in Ukrainian or Russian) is a semi-mythical character. There is no reason to believe that he represented a dynasty coming from Novgorod, since Novgorod did not exist yet, and since the Rus khaganate had ceased to exist. It is likely that, if he came at all, Helgi came from Gnezdovo, which was a rival of Chernihiv and Kyiv at the time. Helgi means “hero” and this Helgi is one of dozens who populate medieval Scandinavian stories. This Helgi supposedly died by fulfilling a complicated prophesy involving his horse, a story which features in multiple north European settings.
The Kyiv incident could not have happened, did not happen, and even had it happened would have no implications for the present war. It is not really worth the effort to press the point further about Kyiv, not least because the validity of the Kyiv tale, which is nil, would depend on the validity of the prior Novgorod story, which is nil.
You can see why historians hesitate to engage in all this. What Putin is doing has nothing to do with history as a discipline. He is engaged in building a legend, which us based on other legends. And each of his sentences is so rich in various kinds of error that it takes hundreds of words to explain all of the wrongness!
And in taking the tale seriously, the historian fears that he has made it more serious. This is what I called “dancing with a skeleton” in my book Reconstruction of Nations, where I discourage it. I am only doing it now since the both the myth and the war persist, and people (even outside Russia) persist in justifying the war by the myth.
By concentrating upon the fundamental legend, the one on which all the others depend, I hope to have shown that the structure itself is empty.
The rules Putin sets down for interpreting the past cannot be accepted. It is nothing more than fantasy following force. This is the most important point. If we grant that tyrants are right to start wars because of fictions of brothers and babies, because of stories that are not even wrong, then every single corner of the world is subject to invasion and the entire international legal order is void.
Even were we to accept the way Putin thinks about the past, which we absolutely should not do, it would lead to a very different conclusion than he thinks. The best guesses of long-dead monks are not a solid basis for contemporary statehood. Tbe Tale of Bygone Years cannot do what Putin asks of it.
If, in order to exist today, states have to prove their ancient pedigree and their durable ethnic and political history, then Putin would have to accept that there is no basis for the existence of today’s Russian Federation.
Were Putin to follow his own logic, he would not be invading Ukraine, but handing over European Russia to Finland or Sweden. ~ Timothy Snyder, 2024
https://snyder.substack.com/p/putins-legend?r=5w9fu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
Mary:
The thorough debunking of Putin's mythologizing about Russia and Ukraine was interesting as an example of something found in many places at many times...the mythologizing of history, framing a narrative to fit political or ideological goals. I would venture to say every country has its mythologies: stories that have more to do with belief than facts.
These stories serve as propaganda and are often fiercely defended by their "true believers." Here in the US we have the "Lost Cause" myth about the Civil War, and the "Manifest Destiny" story about the settlers and homesteaders taking the West. The believers and inventors of these stories, unsurprisingly, are always the heroes. It can take a lot of work to debunk such mythologies, which often have passionate defenders because the stories serve to keep those who tell them in power.
Oriana:
"There were three Viking brothers" — wait, why does that sound like something I've heard many times before? Not specifically the word "Viking" — though it's wonderful to understand that it was the Vikings who founded Kiyv (and various other towns — Vikings traveled using rivers) — but "there were three brothers." "The king had three sons" etc — this is a device used in countless fairy tales, "three" being a magic number. Humanity seems strangely trinitarian, a pattern that came into being long before Christianity.
We seem to have a need for this kind of mythologizing. But at this point we are advanced enough to realize that yes, we have all sorts of mythologies. These mythologies have often been used to excuse the inexcusable, e.g. the genocide of local people because "we" (however we choose to define it -- is it only people who ancestors came from Northern Europe?) have a Manifest Destiny (never mind the need of evidence — destiny is beyond evidence). "White man's burden" was another useful phrase. Due to my background, I am aware of the incredible lie of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." A whole volume could be written about powerful phrases that eliminate the need for thinking and can be used to justify all kinds of horrors.
Putin wants the "Russian world" to become one of those power phrases. But it's too crude, too anachronistic. As Modi told Putin, ours is not the era of imperial conquest. Putin is too late; it's too late in history to try to resurrect the Tzarist empire by grabbing nearby lands and turning their cities into rubble. It's too late to conduct trench warfare. But to escape enslavement, we have to debunk the mythologies. Here an interesting example is Prigozhin, who, at the beginning of his aborted rebellion, said something like, "They [Putin and his clique] are lying to you. Ukraine was never a threat. Nato was not a threat. This was is about greed and ambition."
But I'm afraid that the words of an insider were unheard by the Russian masses.
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RUSSIA CONFESSES: “WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE”
This last week of August, authorities in Russia made two important confessions that I share with you.
The head of the ruling party United Russia in the State Duma, Vladimir Vasiliev, said:
“We don't have enough people. Migrants must bring their families to Russia due to a shortage of Russians.”
Let me unpack this simple but crucial statement.
Firstly, a popular myth about Russians having conservative family values is bust. Russians have no conservative values and that’s why they have no kids.
Another lie is Putin embracing Christian tradition. Almost all of the new migrants and their families are Muslims. Russian Orthodox Christians do not have children and the shortage is compensated by Muslim migrants.
There’s no concerted effort to bring migrants from Christian countries because Russian elites are atheist and don’t care where they come from or which God they pray to.
“We gotta let families of migrants in if they decide to come. Even if they are low-skilled specialists. We don't have enough people today.”
Chechen warlord Ramsan Kadyrov is also a defender of traditional family values within Islamic tradition. It turned out that his daughters have second passports with fake names that allows them to fly inconspicuously to Europe to attend fashion shows in Paris.
Another confession was delivered by two top propagandists Vladimir Soloviev and Mardan.
For years, they’ve been telling their audience that Russia is an almighty country. That it’s stronger than decadent America and Europe. That we gonna defeat liberals with our traditional values and long range missiles.
They have changed tune literally overnight.
“It’s your problem that you believed in Russia’s might,” Mardan said in his video podcast. “That nobody would ever dare to attack us. I don’t understand why you thought that way?”
Russians thought that way because YOU have said so repeatedly. And now that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are all over Kursk region and Kremlin is not doing anything about it, propagandists are blaming their audience for believing them.
In Russia, propaganda gaslights you!
“Russia is not ready to fight with the West. And patriots must forget about strikes on the decision making centers in Berlin, London, and Washington,” chimed in Soloviev.
It’s too late for Quora’s Russian patriots. Soloviev and Mardan have pocketed millions of dollars in wages and they’re back to square one.
Russia is not a Christian country. Russians don’t believe in traditional family values. Russia doesn’t wage war against the West.
If Kafka and Orwell were alive today and lived in Russia they would be begging to be admitted to an insane asylum.
Russian Match TV commentator accidentally turned off the lights at the stadium during a soccer match. “I won’t do it again!” he apologized.
In Russia, television blinds you!
~ Misha Firer, Quora
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RUSSIA AND THE RULE OF LAW
Russian military bloggers say that Ukrainian forces broke through defenses in Belgorod region — that’s the second Russian region getting invaded.
Meanwhile, Russian volunteers who arrived to Kursk region with “humanitarian aid” for the Russian army (food, water, socks and jocks for soldiers, because the Russian army doesn’t provide for its troops — officers steal all the money) — so, these “volunteers” complain about traffic police cameras, which continue to send them tickets for speeding — while they are driving over the speed limits to avoid drones or shelling.
The traffic police office responded that “war is war, but a violation is a violation” and fines that have already been issued in the system can only be challenged in court.
You know, in Russia the law is the law!
~ Elena Gold, Quora
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THE ORIGINAL PLANS FOR THE “FINAL SOLUTION”
The Axis powers were fully aware of their actions being vile, disgusting and inhumane. During the Wannsee Conference, when the final solution (holocaust) was quite literally planned and agreed on by high ranking Nazi leaders, the stenographer was ordered to stop writing the minutes of the meeting if anyone started being clear about murdering Jews. They did this because they knew it was criminal and evil, and did not want there to be evidence of what they were planning on doing. Even the sanitized minutes of the meeting were supposed to be destroyed, but one copy survived due to someone keeping it against the rules.
Eichmann’s List of Jews still to be eliminated
Weissrussland = Belarus
Lettland = Latvia
Poland isn’t mentioned here as such, but most of Nazi-occupied Poland existed as “Generalgouvernement” (Poles called it "Gubernia").
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Carl Hamilton: I reject the notion that the allies had done similar things prior to WW2. I am critical of imperialism and colonialism, and there are genocides and other atrocities [committed by the Allies] to talk about. Most of them were carried out in gross negligence or casual cruelty in general. However, this kind of industrial murder was a unheard of, and we should not forget that Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis.
The Nazis might have taken inspiration, from US race laws for example, but what they did was incomparable in terms of atrocities. That isn’t to say I think that the any of the countries which fought against Germany and Japan were innocent by a long shot, but they were nothing relative to what Germany and Japan brought upon the world in just 6 years.
~ Carl Hamilton, Quora
Nerses Zurabyan:
They knew what they were doing, as evidenced by a quote attributed to Hitler that can still be found the the Holocaust Museum: “after all who today speaks of annihilation of Armenians?”
They knew what they were doing and thought they can get away with it, because there was a precedent 25 years prior — what we new call the Armenian Genocide by a German ally — Ottoman Turkey. If they could systematically eradicate an entire nation and get away with it, Nazis thought they can as well.
What we also need to remember is that the nazi plan wasn’t to ONLY wipe out Jews; although they had priority due to their low place on the nazi ethnic pyramid.
Gypsies, homosexuals, physically crippled, certain religious groups and perhaps the most numerous of them all; Slavs (Untermensch) were to be cleansed, and a lot of that happened in parallel with the Jewish genocide. And for all those people to be replaced with fast breeding ‘pure aryans’. Probably the wet dream of any German ultranationalist to see a 500 million strong Germany.
If the nazis had their way, 100+ million people would be murdered either in concentration camps, starvation, hard labor, human experiments, etc,
William Garrison:
The list implies that the Nazis would have gone after the Jews in Ireland, Sweden, Türkiye, Spain, Switzerland, and Portugal despite these being neutral.
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NAZI GERMANY IN 1945; TOO LITTLE GASOLINE TO PROPERLY BURN THE BODIES
Germany's ineffectiveness in 1944 and 1945 can be attributed to a combination of strategic missteps, overwhelming Allied pressure, and internal collapse. By 1944, the tide of World War II had turned decisively against Germany. The Allies had gained significant momentum, both on the Western and Eastern fronts, and were closing in on German territory from multiple directions.
The main reason for Germany's struggles was the relentless Allied bombing campaign. The strategic bombing of German cities, industrial centers, and transportation networks severely crippled the country's ability to sustain its war effort. Factories producing essential war materials were destroyed, and the disruption of transportation networks made it difficult to move troops and supplies efficiently. This constant bombardment not only weakened Germany's industrial capacity but also demoralized the civilian population, further eroding the nation's ability to continue the fight.
On the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union's massive offensives pushed German forces back relentlessly. The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-1943 had already marked a turning point, and by 1944, the Red Army was advancing steadily westward. The sheer scale of the Soviet military machine, combined with the harsh winter conditions and the vastness of the Eastern Front, stretched German resources to their limits. The loss of experienced soldiers and the depletion of equipment further weakened Germany's ability to mount effective defenses.
In the West, the successful D-Day invasion in June 1944 marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The Allied forces, comprising American, British, and Canadian troops, established a foothold in Normandy and began their push towards Germany. The liberation of France and the subsequent advances into Belgium and the Netherlands put immense pressure on German defenses. The Battle of the Bulge, Germany's last major offensive in the West, ultimately failed, depleting their reserves and leaving them vulnerable to the final Allied push into Germany.
Internally, Germany was also facing significant challenges. Adolf Hitler's increasingly erratic leadership and refusal to listen to his generals led to disastrous military decisions. The Nazi regime's oppressive policies and the Gestapo's brutal enforcement created a climate of fear and distrust, further undermining morale. Also, the German economy was in shambles, with severe shortages of food, fuel, and other essential resources.
By 1945, Germany was essentially fighting a losing battle on all fronts. The combined might of the Allied forces, the relentless Soviet advance, and the internal collapse of the Nazi regime made it impossible for Germany to sustain its war effort. The final months of the war saw the Allies closing in on Berlin from both the east and the west, leading to the eventual surrender of Germany in May 1945. ~ Rebecca Williams, Quora
Barry Dean Kobe:
Once the Ploiești oil fields in Romania were captured by the Russians in August of 44, oil was cut off from the Wehrmacht, and the German army started to really go downhill from there. It was so bad that they barely were able to round up enough gasoline to burn Hitler and his wife, in the end. They tried to burn Goebbels and his wife afterwards, but they had so little gasoline left they couldn’t do it. Even though the bodies were slightly burned, you could easily tell it was Goebbels and his wife.
Ruben G. Rodriguez:
The day Germany lost the war was December 11th 1941 when Hitler declared war on the US 4 days after Pearl Harbor. Do not forget that there was still strong pro German and isolationists in the US till that moment. Had he denounced the cowardly attack by the Japanese would have been an interesting quandary for the US. Germany should have played the diplomatic card shrewdly. The Germans had gone as far into the USSR as was possible. The Generals in charge of logistics had outlined this before Barbarossa began about the limit of their logistics.
George Fletcher:
The bombing campaign was ONE reason, but not the main reason. The level of attrition on the Eastern Front crippled Germany’s ability to wage war on any other front. Allied bombing until 1944 wasn’t accurate enough to severely disable the German war effort. As the Germans lost more men and machines in 1944 their ability to resist aerial bombardment declined. The Soviets were already approaching the German border by that time.
The ferocity and accuracy of bombing increased hugely in 1945, Something like half of all Allied tonnage was dropped in the period Nov 1944 to March 1945, but by then the tide of war had turned irrevocably against Germany.
William Chapman:
So desperate for fuel was Germany that Speer directed the entire 1944 potato harvest — seed potatoes included — be requisitioned and diverted to the war effort for the production of aircraft fuel. The ME-262 ran mostly on fuel produced from potatoes. This caused widespread starvation in Europe in the Fall/Winter of 1945. A major cargo in the Berlin Airlift was potatoes.
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THE POSITIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING
Can visualizing death make you happier? Research says yes. Here are four surprising ways to harness the power of negativity.
It’s sixty years this year since Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking— and though his message may have been radical back then, it’s the conventional wisdom now. Self-help gurus, motivational speakers, business people, presidential candidates, and many psychologists agree: optimism is the foundation of a happy life, and negativity is for losers.
Those of us who consider ourselves naturally cantankerous and gloomy have always felt left out of what the philosopher Peter Vernezze calls “the cult of optimism.” But now there’s a reason for us to feel more hopeful… in an appropriately downbeat way, of course.
A growing body of research suggests that negative thinking, if strategically pursued, has a role to play in happiness, too. Ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions, from the Stoics to the Buddhists, recognized the life-enhancing potential of trying less strenuously to be happy. Here are four ways to benefit from their approach.
FOCUS ON THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO, NOT THE BEST
Visualizing your ideal future is a staple of self-help bestsellers—but vividly picturing success can backfire badly. In one series of experiments, when thirsty experimental subjects were asked to visualize drinking an icy glass of water, their energy levels actually dropped: apparently, they were less motivated to find real water because they’d already imagined drinking some.
Besides, negative visualization can be an excellent antidote to anxiety. The Stoics called this “the premeditation of evils,” while modern-day researchers call it “defensive pessimism”—a strategy deployed regularly by between 25 and 30 percent of Americans, according to the researcher Julie Norem.
Consider the logic: when you try to persuade yourself that everything will work out for the best, you risk reinforcing your unspoken belief that it would be utterly catastrophic if they didn’t. Instead, try soberly working through how badly things could really go. You may find that your fears get cut down to manageable size.
Consider getting rid of your goals
For many years, the popularity of goal-setting rested, in part, on something known as the “1953 Yale Study of Goals.” Reportedly, this showed that among members of Yale’s graduating class of 1953, those who had specific, written-down goals for the future ended up, twenty years later, immensely wealthier than the rest.
But when the journalist Lawrence Tabak, searching for an original source, got in touch with the gurus who relied on the study, they all pleaded ignorance, and suggested asking other gurus—because the study, as a Yale archivist confirmed, almost certainly never existed.
Among management scholars, too, the pro-goal consensus is breaking down. Recent research suggests that the “overpursuit of goals” can prompt employees to cut ethical corners. Meanwhile, studies of successful entrepreneurs, undertaken by the business professor Saras Sarasvathy, reveal that they rarely stick rigorously to detailed, multi-year business plans. Instead, they just start, and keep correcting their course as they go. Their philosophy isn’t so much “ready, aim, fire” as “ready, fire, aim”—and then to keep on re-aiming.
Don’t get too attached to “positive thinking”
Tell yourself you’re a winner, and you might end up feeling worse.
When researchers in Canada tested the efficacy of self-help affirmations—specifically the phrase “I am a lovable person!”— they found that those who already had low self-esteem experienced a further decline in their mood.
Trying to control your emotions, as the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner has shown, can be an invitation to “ironic effects”: struggle too hard to eliminate negativity, and you risk generating more of it. As in the old parlor game, when you try not to think about a polar bear, you may find that being hyper-vigilant about stamping out unhappy moods merely puts unhappiness center stage.
By contrast, early Buddhist psychology advocated treating thoughts, whether negative or positive, more like smells, sights, tastes and sounds: things that arrive in your awareness, rather than things that constitute the essence of who you are. This stance of “non-attachment”—now also supported by research as an effective way of dealing with physical pain—embodies what you might define as the opposite of positive thinking: learning, instead, to resist the urge to manipulate your inner states.
4. Don’t ignore death
The anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that countless human activities, from wars to great art, are ultimately motivated by the subconscious desire to deny the fact that, in the end, we’re going to die.
These days, with the processes of dying hidden behind the doors of hospices and funeral homes, it’s never been easier to perpetuate the delusion of immortality—until the moment when the reaper inevitably intrudes. We might benefit from rediscovering the lost tradition of “memento mori,” which focused on building reminders of death into daily life: the dual result was to make everyday experience feel more valuable while reducing the horror of death when it arrived. (The Death Clock iPad app is a modern example: it purports to calculate the date on which you’ll die, then starts a countdown to keep you aware.)
Although research suggests that reminders of death can prompt people to behave more aggressively, there is also evidence that, in the right contexts, remembering our mortality triggers compassion. In one example, people walking through a graveyard proved 40 percent more likely to help a stranger— specifically, one of the researchers, who pretended to drop her notebook—than those walking down an ordinary block.
Another study found that visualizing their own death led people to become more grateful.
Death is what we all have in common: the most negative of negatives, perhaps… but also the most unifying.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_harness_the_power_of_negative_thinking
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WHY CANNED FOOD COMES IN RIBBED CANS
You might think the ribbed design on canned food is just a quirky touch meant to make jellied cranberry sauce look more interesting, but it actually serves a crucial purpose. Those ridges, also known as corrugations, are essential for reinforcing the can's structure. If you've ever seen a bin full of crushed soda cans, you have already seen how easily a smooth-sided can crumples under pressure. In contrast, a ribbed soup can is much tougher to flatten. This is because the corrugated ridges add strength to the tin by creating a series of tiny arches along the surface. These in turn more evenly distribute pressure, similar to how the arches of a bridge help it carry heavy loads.
As another example, I was once part of a team-building exercise where we had to build a tower out of paper. Flat sheets collapsed quickly, but folding them into accordion shapes or rolling them into tubes made the structure much stronger. Similarly, ribbing in a can prevents it from denting or collapsing under pressure — so no unexpected bean explosions! But the ridges have another job that goes beyond just strength.
In addition to making the can stronger, the ridges on a can help it withstand heat. During the canning process, the contents are sealed and then brought to high temperatures to kill off any bacteria, helping to ensure that the food inside stays safe to eat. This heating process causes the contents to expand, creating pressure within the can. The ribbed design allows the can to flex slightly under this pressure, accommodating the expansion without cracking or bursting open.
These ridges also help the can remain intact after it leaves the factory, when it might have to endure extreme temperatures during transport and storage. Whether in a hot warehouse or a cold delivery truck, the ridges help to keep the can secure, protecting the food inside until its expiration date — though that food might still be good long afterward.
This is especially important when you consider food safety. If a can develops an unseen dent or crack, it could compromise the seal, allowing bacteria to enter and making the food inside unsafe to eat. This trusty ribbed design is the result of more than a century of innovation that started with a container that wasn't even a can.
BEFORE RIBBED CANS, FOOD WAS STORED IN GLASS JARS
In the early 19th century, food was stored in glass jars that were heated to high temperatures to kill bacteria and then sealed to keep the contents safe. This method was developed in response to a 1795 food preservation prize offered by Napoleon Bonaparte, who offered a reward to anyone who could create a reliable way to preserve food for his armies during their long campaigns.
One major problem: the glass jars were fragile and not practical for military use. The next big leap came in 1810 when English inventor Peter Durand developed tin-plated iron cans. These were far more durable and portable, making them ideal for wartime (a precursor to other long-term storage creations like canned bread, which was popular in World War II). However, opening these cans was a challenge. Before the invention of the can opener nearly 50 years later, people had to use tools like hammers and chisels to access the food inside.
Over time, the design of cans continued to evolve. including the innovated ribbed design. So, the next time you see those ribs on the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving, be sure to impress your relatives with some obscure canning knowledge.
https://www.thetakeout.com/1648559/why-canned-food-ribbed-tin/
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SING-SING: A GEM OF A FEEL GOOD MOVIE ABOUT THE POWER OF ART
I like to start with a review form the Roger Ebert page: “We’re here to be human again”
If you read the synopsis of “Sing Sing,” you might mistake it for a movie you’ve seen before. It’s a drama starring Colman Domingo as one of a group men in serving time in prison whose participation in a theater arts program gives them something to look forward to and improves them as human beings. It ends on what a studio boss might call an “up note.” But it doesn’t move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I’ve seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters — and of life itself — is rare and precious.
Domingo plays Divine G, one of many real people who went through the program. He was an actor and aspiring playwright in high school before his life went off the rails. He’s a devotee of theater, loves to act and read plays, and approaches it all with the quiet fervor of somebody who found religion behind bars. Some of the most memorable images in “Sing Sing’ focus on Domingo’s face in closeup as Divine G performs, thinks, or silently observes others.
The prison is a cold, cruel place full of violent men whose daily life revolves around trying not to antagonize the alpha dogs within the prison population or the guards looming over them. Discipline/punishment seems arbitrary. Cells get “tossed’ by guards in a heedless manner that seems meant more to humiliate and terrorize than find forbidden things.
The theater program is an oasis from all of that. “We’re here to be human again,” one participant says. It’s also a place where the effectiveness of art as a tool of enlightenment can be demonstrated just by showing a bunch of actors doing their thing.
Paul Raci, who was so memorable as the hero’s mentor in “The Sound of Metal,” is a measured and understated but strong presence as the group leader who has to wrangle all of the egos assembled in front of him every week. He has an ego himself: the movie doesn’t get into the details, but it’s inferred that he writes all of the original plays performed by the group, that while he takes suggestions for what types of material to combine, it’s ultimately his show, and he has to go off and struggle with the blank page just like any other author.
There’s a bit of tension courtesy of a dynamic but edgy and sometimes combative new troupe member, Divine Eye. He’s played by Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who went to Sing Sing for armed robbery in real life and is playing a fictionalized version of himself here. At first, it seems as if the movie is setting up a rivalry between the two Divines, possibly an “All About Eve” scenario about jealousy and treachery in a theater group.
But here, as elsewhere, “Sing Sing” doesn’t choose a well-trod path. Divine G is a fundamentally decent person who has insecurities like anybody (the suppressed terror in the character’s eyes when he fears he’s about to be eclipsed by a newcomer is beautifully expressed). But he also has enough self-control and confidence to see beyond the immediate moment and transform a potentially ruinous situation into something beautiful just by being his best self. The burgeoning relationship between these two actors is the secret backbone of the movie, and its conclusion has the kind of understated sincerity that old movies by directors like Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder used to do so well.
“Sing Sing” is a small enough movie that it won’t be playing in every multiplex. But you should still try to see it with an audience if possible because it’s the kind of film that reaffirms what the experience is about. You can feel the collective mental hum of an audience recognizing what the movie is up to — usually a few beats after it has started down a specific path, because it’s pretty sly about what it’s doing. Sometimes the movie seems to be going off on a tangent, only to reveal itself as an element that would diminish the whole if removed.
I learned, and rediscovered, a lot about film, theater, and the arts while watching “Sing Sing.” The more you sit with it, the more you admire everything it does and is.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sing-sing-film-review-2024
Linda Marric,:
The story revolves around a group of prisoners participating in a theater program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. What begins as a simple acting exercise soon transforms into a profound exploration of identity, redemption, and the human capacity for change. The characters are complex, their interactions charged with a mix of tension, humor, and raw emotion that draws the audience into their world. The film does not shy away from the harsh realities of prison life but also highlights the moments of camaraderie and self-discovery that emerge from the program.
Colman Domingo’s performance as Divine G, the charismatic leader of the group, is nothing short of mesmerizing. He brings depth and nuance to the role, capturing the pain, hope, and resilience of a man who is both a mentor and a fellow inmate. Domingo’s portrayal is complemented by a strong supporting cast, including real-life former inmates who bring their own experiences to the screen, blurring the lines between performance and reality.
Greg Kwedar’s direction is both sensitive and unflinching. He balances the film’s darker moments with flashes of humor and hope, creating a narrative that is as uplifting as it is heartbreaking. The use of a real prison setting adds to the film’s authenticity, immersing the audience in the oppressive atmosphere of the correctional facility while also showcasing the transformative power of art.
The cinematography is stark and intimate, with close-up shots that capture the vulnerability and intensity of the characters’ experiences. The film’s pacing is deliberate, allowing the emotional weight of each scene to fully resonate with the audience.
Sing Sing is not just a film about prisoners; it’s a story about humanity, redemption, and the power of creative expression. It challenges the viewer to look beyond the labels of ‘criminal’ or ‘inmate’ and see the individuals underneath, each with their own stories, dreams, and potential for change.
Sing Sing is a powerful and moving film that leaves a profound impact. It’s a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the importance of programs that offer hope and rehabilitation to those behind bars.
Kelechi Ehenulo:
You feel that essence [of Coleman Domingo] coming together from the opening scene in Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing. He plays John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, an inmate falsely imprisoned in New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility for a crime he didn’t commit. Through the prison’s acting program Rehabilitating Through the Arts (aka RTA), he finds purpose as educator and leader as they prepare for the troupe’s latest theater production. Yet, here in this opening moment, Divine is allowed to escape from the prison walls, allowing for his troubles to disappear. He stands alone, center of stage fearlessly delivering a monologue from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whilst in character, Divine owns that stage. In reality, Domingo’s depth and passion shine through.
Sing Sing is beautiful, sincere and heartfelt, a story laced with hope, courage and vulnerability that speaks proudly on the transformative power of the arts. In a year where we’ve seen budgets slashed, cinema closures, community programs under threat, Kwedar’s film is a comforting and much-needed balm for the soul.
"Divine G" and "Divine Eye"
With Hollywood fully leaning into the all-too familiar bubbles of nostalgia and fan servicing, Kwedar’s film relies on the effectiveness of simple storytelling – a true story that trusts its audience with the cinematic experience without the need for callbacks and franchise reassurance.
Like a spiritual successor to The Shawshank Redemption, it possesses the same level of camaraderie and brotherhood without diluting the harsh realities found in prison. For every joyful moment, the audience is not far away from the claustrophobic cells that trap inmates like caged birds, the daily regiment of obedience and control, and the constant threat of violence and trauma. Yet, however lightly it endeavors those talking points, what makes Sing Sing unique in its own right is how it challenges stereotypes with mental wellness at its forefront. The inmates are seen as human, paving the way for healing, reconciliation and second chances.
It should come as no surprise when I say Colman Domingo is currently living his best life. With impeccable fashion taste (as demonstrated with his outfits during awards season), and his roles in Euphoria, Rustin, The Color Purple, Zola and Candyman, he’s a star shining brighter than ever. There’s a warm gravitas behind his voice that always commands attention. That natural magnetism and smoothness in his on-screen presence always allows him to find the truth behind his character. And no matter the role, whether it is playing an inspirational Civil Rights leader, a youth mentor, or portraying the wickedness of Mister, he makes everything seem effortless.
Sing Sing is beautiful, sincere and heartfelt, a story laced with hope, courage and vulnerability that speaks proudly on the transformative power of the arts. In a year where we’ve seen budgets slashed, cinema closures, community programs under threat, Kwedar’s film is a comforting and much-needed balm for the soul.
With Hollywood fully leaning into the all-too familiar bubbles of nostalgia and fan servicing, Kwedar’s film relies on the effectiveness of simple storytelling – a true story that trusts its audience with the cinematic experience without the need for callbacks and franchise reassurance. Clint Bentley and Kwedar’s deft approach with the script tackles mass incarceration in a new light. Like a spiritual successor to The Shawshank Redemption, it possesses the same level of camaraderie and brotherhood without diluting the harsh realities found in prison. For every joyful moment, the audience is not far away from the claustrophobic cells that trap inmates like caged birds, the daily regiment of obedience and control, and the constant threat of violence and trauma. Yet, however lightly it endeavors those talking points, what makes Sing Sing unique in its own right is how it challenges stereotypes with mental wellness at its forefront. The inmates are seen as human, paving the way for healing, reconciliation and second chances.
The fact that most of the actors on screen are played by former inmates adds that layer of authenticity for the film. The therapeutic scenes led by The Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci see the inmates placed out of their comfort zones, reciting with closed eyes and focussed breathing on memories from a happy moment in their lives. Their auditions – filled with slow dolly shots and close ups, thanks to Pat Scola’s beautiful cinematography, create space and breathing room to tap into their newly-shed vulnerabilities.
Some of the film’s best scenes involve the relationships it invests time in. Divine and Mike Mike (Sean San Jose) share a moment on how peer pressure and lack of acceptance can force an individual to give up the art discipline they love. Alongside Domingo, Clarence Maclin’s Divine Eye is a natural scene-stealer, portraying a highly charged ‘gangster’ stereotype who gradually unravels his thespian softer side.
Kwedar’s clever direction plays into the notion of not judging a book by its cover, knowing there is always more to the story than what the criminal justice system likes to unfairly tell. For Domingo and Maclin, it forms the basis of a powerful on-screen dynamic and friendship, constantly challenging and answering the question of how do you keep hope alive when the system pushes you towards a breaking point. Kwedar and Bentley’s script doesn’t provide easy answers, not when it delves into Eye’s source of his anger or Divine’s gaslighting clemency hearing to prove his innocence. But these psychological swings it takes are incredibly moving, earnestly crafted and designed to pull on the heartstrings even when its third act tends to rush towards its ending.
Yet, if Sing Sing and Colman Domingo are not part of the award season conversation, then a cinema crime has truly been committed. There’s a life-affirming resonance that speaks volumes on the arts’ cultural importance. They are our source of comfort in times of need, help us confront our personal struggles, allow us to find command ground or for instilling a consciousness when we’re simply not equipped to articulate our mood. For the way it celebrates community, this is a compelling reminder of human endeavor and its relentlessness to pursue something greater. For that reason alone, Sing Sing takes on a double meaning: to soar above adversity. That’s what makes it special and without a shadow of a doubt, this is one of the best films of the year.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian:
There’s charm, energy and optimism in this big-hearted film, inspired by the Rehabilitation Through the Arts project that teaches theater skills to US prisoners. The movie’s genesis is an Esquire magazine article from 2005 about an ensemble fantasy-comedy musical performed by inmates of Sing Sing maximum security facility in New York state. The movie invites us to hear the words in the title as joyful imperatives. It is performed largely by genuine former inmates playing themselves, featuring rehearsal scenes interspersed with variously tense or moving private conversations. There is a resemblance to Alan Parker’s Fame, to which the film playfully alludes, although the proceedings are evidently too serious to allow for the more obvious comparison with Max Bialystock’s song Prisoners of Love at the end of The Producers.
Everything here is so uplifting that it seems churlish to find fault. But however rousing and admirably intended, there is something surreal and out of place in the characterization of its leading role, which is dominatingly and fascinatingly played by the excellent Colman Domingo, whose many awards include the London critics’ circle prize for innovation named after the late Derek Malcolm. Domingo plays John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate who was in real life a visionary and inspirational driving force behind the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program and wrote many plays for it. The real Divine G has a cameo, while the group’s star player, a serious tough guy who was transformed by his encounter with Shakespeare, is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, here playing himself and doing so very capably. Most of the other roles also are played by former prisoners, but the group’s director, Brent Buell, is played by Paul Raci.
Domingo’s Whitfield looks in fact every inch a seasoned Broadway star: witty, stylish, elegant and dapper, and something of a celebrity – another prisoner actually asks for his autograph – but also self-deprecating and thoughtful, always ready to listen to others’ creative input. It’s a really engaging and sympathetic performance – but it is utterly, and almost bafflingly, different from everyone else’s, and the real Whitfield is not really anything like that. At times, Domingo is like an imprisoned Henry Irving. [a famous Victorian actor and stage manager]
Domingo clearly does not want to downplay his performance or create a social-realist approximation of the real performers’ personalities, or indeed Whitfield’s actual personality. He’s bigger than that, and while it makes for a very absorbing spectacle, it is oddly out of joint with the rest of the cast, and always in danger of upstaging Maclin, who in some ways is the film’s key character. Well, it’s an intriguing filmic tribute to the rehabilitation program: effective altruism in action.
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” That’s one of the unexpected gems I found in Sing Sing, a uniquely affirmative movie.
If you’ve done even a tiniest part of acting, a school play or a church play or just about anything that can be called “theater,” you know that the amazing part is the rehearsals. I love this quote: “The rehearsal process is the point. It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.” ~ Richard Whittaker, https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2024-08-09/sing-sing/
I tried hard to find a negative review of the movie worth presenting here, but didn’t really find one with any depth. Basically, the negative reviewers seem to focus on this movie as too easy on the viewer’s conscience as a participant in a society that unjustly incarcerates black men, and indulges in feel-good clichés — while, if anything, it’s the negatives reviews themselves that are the cliché of Woke accusations.
This movie is in fact too great to be reduced to such accusations. Each character is an individual and not a symbol of this or that “social problem.” It’s a profound drama that I can imagine seeing again in order to get more of the nuances of the interplay of the personalities. But even one viewing doesn’t fail to impress. It’s not an ordinary prison movie. It’s a movie about real people and real transformation. It dares to be unexpected. My favorite moment shows a new inmate using the N word, and being told “Here we don’t use that word. We prefer ‘beloved.’” To deliver this with authenticity takes daring. Sing Sing can get away with anything because of its emotional power — the power of feeling real.
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IS HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS SIMPLY ELECTROMAGNETIC?
Could the thorny question of human consciousness be answered by simple electromagnetic waves? One improbably dualist scientist believes so, and he suggests the human mind is a combination of physical matter and electromagnetic field. This is a big question, and the proposed answer here is controversial.
The University of Surrey’s Johnjoe McFadden “posits that consciousness is in fact the brain’s energy field,” the university says in a statement, making McFadden’s dualism a question of matter and energy, the institution says—not the classic “body and mind” distinction. Throughout history, philosophers around the world have tried to account for the special-seeming nature of human beings within the world or even, some fear, the entire universe.
From where does our robust self-awareness and sentience arise? People who believe everything is physically present and caused are called materialists, meaning there’s nothing extra that can’t be measured—what you see and touch is what humans are. Dualists instead believe there’s something extra.
The mind, dualists say, is separate in some way. That could mean a separate, immeasurable, living soul that lives after death, or it could be as “simple” as the hotly contested idea of qualia: the hint at an extra color humans can’t see, for example, as that relates back to consciousness.
The idea of a scientific lampshade on mind-body dualism certainly isn’t new, but McFadden’s research, published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, is the latest to try to marry the fields [this article was written in October 2020]. Deep breath:
“I argue here that nearly all examples of so-called ‘integrated information’, including neuronal information processing and conventional computing, are only temporally integrated in the sense that outputs are correlated with multiple inputs: the information integration is implemented in time, rather than space, and thereby cannot correspond to physically integrated information. I point out that only energy fields are capable of integrating information in space.”
Basically, McFadden is saying he doesn’t believe the physical structures inside the brain account for how information extends through our “minds” and form integrated ideas. That, he says, must be happening within the added medium of the brain’s electromagnetic field.
And all of this, McFadden claims, is supported by experiments on the nature of brain activity. This sounds wild—it genuinely is wild—but McFadden is a molecular geneticist and is following a centuries-old tradition of introducing the absolute latest knowledge into a new theory of what makes us human.
That means as long as the human brain is alive, McFadden says, it generates an electrical glow in which the real nitty-gritty human stuff is happening. And the best part is that his theory is testable in the laboratory.
“There are of course many unanswered questions, such as degree and extent of synchrony required to encode conscious thoughts, the influence of drugs or anesthetics on the cemi [conscious electromagnetic information] field or whether cemi fields are causally active in animal brains,” he explains in the paper. “Yet the cemi theory provides a new paradigm in which consciousness is rooted in an entirely physical, measurable and artificially malleable physical structure and is amenable to experimental testing.”
Oriana:
As the bard said, "I sing the body electric."
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OR IS IT QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT?
For the past 30 years, scientists have investigated whether the human brain might require quantum processes to achieve cognition.
A new study from Shanghai University uses mathematical models to suggest that certain fatty structures (which sheath the nerve cell’s axon) could potentially produce quantum entangled biphoton pairs, potentially aiding in synchronization across neurons.
However, scientists have long argued that the brain is too hot and messy for this type of phenomenon to occur, and detecting this phenomenon as it occurs in the brain would be an incredibly difficult task.
It has long been argued that the human brain is similar to a computer. But in reality, that’s selling the brain pretty short. While comparing neurons and transistors is a convenient metaphor (and not completely out of left field), the brain is ultra-efficient, its energy is renewable, and it’s capable of computational feats that even the most advanced computer can’t pull off. In many ways, the inner workings of the human brain make up an unknown computational frontier.
Although your brain is superior to your laptop—or even the world’s most advanced supercomputer—these machines run on classical physics. But there’s another kind of a computer out there: a quantum one.
Now, a new study from Shanghai University submits yet another piece of evidence to the neurological court—that one particular process of the human brain exhibits behavior akin to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon when two particles (usually photons) become inextricably linked even across vast distances. This phenomenon confounded even the most brilliant of minds, including Albert Einstein, who called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”
The study, published this month in the journal Physics Review E, suggests that a fatty material called myelin that surrounding the nerve cell’s axon—the fiber that transmits electrical impulses to other nerves or body tissues—provides an environment in which the entanglement of photons is possible. This could potentially explain the rise of cognition, and especially synchronization, which is essential for information processing and rapid response.
“Consciousness within the brain hinges on the synchronized activities of millions of neurons, but the mechanism responsible for orchestrating such synchronization remains elusive,” the paper reads. “The results indicate that the cylindrical cavity formed by a myelin sheath can facilitate spontaneous photon emission from the vibrational modes and generate a significant number of entangled photon pairs.”
The team built mathematical models detailing how infrared photons could impact the myelin sheath and impart energy to chemical bonds—specifically, carbon-hydrogen bonds embedded in this fatty tissue. This, in turn, could spur biphoton generation with many pairs exhibiting entanglement, and serve as a type of “quantum communication resource” within the nervous system.
“When a brain is active, millions of neurons fire simultaneously,” Yong-Cong Chen, a co-author of the study, told New Scientist. “If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role.”
If you’re sensing some “woah, if true” quality to this research, you’re not alone. For one, this phenomenon would need to be seen in a biological setting (likely in the brain of a mouse) before scientists get too excited about the brain’s newfound “quantum communication resource.” And that’s a process that the authors readily admit would be difficult.
Additionally, the idea of quantum entanglement playing a role in consciousness isn’t a mainstream one—Hameroff, one the leading minds behind the idea that quantum phenomena could drive aspects of cognition, even told New Scientist months ago that “it was very popular to bash us” after the publication of their consciousness model.
But science is in the business of hypothesis and rigorous testing to discern the true nature of existence. And, as history has shown, what once seemed liked “spooky action a distance” can quickly become the cornerstone of the quantum world.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61854962/quantum-entanglement-consciousness/
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WHY DOESN’T THE HEART GET TIRED LIKE OTHER MUSCLES?
Your heart is an incredibly powerful organ. Every day it beats about 100,000 times. Imagine the energy takes it to squeeze a tennis ball – that’s not far off the force your heart is using each time it beats to pump blood around your body.
So, with that many reps each day, why doesn’t it burn out?
While your heart is a muscle, it’s not quite the same as your skeletal muscles – such as the biceps and quads – that are attached to your bones.This is primarily because the heart is made of cardiac muscle, consisting of special cells called cardiomyocytes.Unlike other muscle cells in the body, cardiomyocytes are highly resistant to fatigue.True, cardiomyocytes are primarily powered by mitochondria (the energy house of the cell), similar to your other muscles.
However, cardiomyocytes have as much as 10 times the density of mitochondria, skyrocketing their energy output.
The cardiomyocytes have also evolved to have an enhanced blood supply, being better than ordinary muscle cells at extracting oxygen from the blood. Plus, the heart has another secret weapon: it’s flexible in terms of fuel, able to consume glucose, free fatty acids and lactate.
So, why aren’t all muscles made of cardiomyocytes? For all their benefits, cardiomyocytes contract without nerve supply, making them incapable of voluntary and purposeful movements.
But when it comes to beating constantly and without tiring, your heart has evolved to do its job brilliantly – it has no time for DOMS (delayed onset muscle fatigue) after a hard workout. Which is fortunate, because, when it comes to your cardiac muscles, rest days are not an option.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/heart-muscle-tired
Oriana:
It's important to note that a healthy heart prefers to run on fatty acids. That may be one reason why eating fatty fish is good for heart health.
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THE UNIQUE SHAPE OF THE HUMAN HEART: SMOOTHNESS VERSUS TRABECULATIONS
Mammals, from the mighty blue whale to the tiny shrew, inhabit nearly every corner of our planet. Their remarkable adaptability to different environments has long fascinated scientists, with each species developing unique traits to survive and thrive.
Despite such vast biological diversity, it was believed until recently that the structure and function of the heart across mammals was the same. But research by my colleagues and me reveals that the human heart is an outlier, distinctly different from those of our closest relatives, the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas.
So, why are humans the odd ones out?
Humans diverged from chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes), our last common ancestor, between five and six million years ago. In contrast, people evolved to stand upright to engage in greater amounts of activity, such as persistence while hunting. And we have developed considerably larger brains.
These changes to humans’ bodies were associated with a much greater metabolic demand, requiring more blood to be pumped to our muscles and brain. Our research suggests that the human heart has adapted to support our upright stance, movement and larger brain.
Over the last ten years, we have been conducting assessments of the cardiovascular system of great apes across the globe. We have been fortunate enough to work with dedicated veterinarians and care staff in the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia. An important aspect of these assessments has been the use of cardiac ultrasound through which we can assess the structure and function of the heart, how large it is and how the muscle contracts, twists and rotates.
Our previous research has suggested that the structure of the human heart may be different from that of the chimpanzee. Using cardiac ultrasound, we discovered that the left ventricle – the heart’s main pumping chamber – in chimpanzees contains bundles of muscles arranged in a mesh known as “trabeculations”.
For our current study, we wanted to examine if trabeculations exist in the other great apes, which we found that they do. In contrast, humans have a smooth wall of the left ventricle. This difference is especially pronounced at the bottom of the left ventricle, where the human heart’s smoothness is nearly four times greater than that of our great ape relatives.
Our research didn’t just reveal structural differences in the human left ventricle compared to that of the great apes; we also uncovered a important difference in function. By using a specialized technique called “speckle-tracking echocardiography”, which tracks heart muscle movement during contraction and relaxation, we examined how the muscle thickens, twists, rotates and lengthens.
The results were striking. Humans, who have the least trabeculation, exhibited much greater twist and rotation at the apex (the tip of the heart) during contraction. In contrast, non-human great apes, with their heavily trabeculated hearts, showed much less movement.
We believe the human heart evolved away from the trabeculated structure seen in the other great apes to enhance its ability to twist and contract more efficiently. This increased twisting motion, along with the smooth ventricular walls, probably allows the human heart to pump a larger volume of blood with each beat. This meets the heightened demands of our physical activity and larger brains.
Our research challenges the assumption that heart structure is uniform across mammals. Instead, subtle but crucial differences in heart anatomy and function have emerged in response to unique environmental challenges.
Cardiac disease
While our current research has shed light on the evolution of the human heart, our work analyzing the hearts of endangered great apes continues. Sadly, cardiac disease is the leading cause of death in captive great apes.
Unlike humans, great apes do not appear to develop coronary artery disease. Rather, their heart muscle undergoes a fibrotic, or thickening, process which causes poor contraction and a susceptibility to arrhythmia, which is a problem with the rhythm of the heartbeat. The cause of this disease is unknown. So, we at the International Primate Heart Project have been conducting assessments of great ape cardiovascular physiology across the globe to further understand the disease.
Before our involvement, little was known about the normal cardiovascular physiology of great apes. Through collaboration with veterinary practitioners, our research has generated vital data, significantly improving our understanding of human heart evolution, as well as the understanding, diagnosis and management of heart disease in great apes.
https://theconversation.com/what-the-unique-shape-of-the-human-heart-tells-us-about-our-evolution-235463?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE TWO WAVES OF AGING: PEOPLE AGE DRAMATICALLY AT TWO POINTS IN LIFE
Scientists have found that human beings age at a molecular level in two accelerated bursts – first at the age of 44, and then again at 60.
In a study published in the journal Nature Aging, scientists at Stanford University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore followed 108 participants over several years to observe aging changes in their molecules — RNA, proteins and participants’ microbiomes.
The scientists found that human aging does not happen in a gradual, linear way. Rather, the majority of the molecules they studied showed accelerated, non-linear changes at the ages of 44 and 60.
Xiaotao Shen, an assistant professor in microbiome medicine at Nanyang Technological University and first author of the study, told CNN that the results show “we are not becoming old gradually.” Some points in time are particularly important for our aging and health, he added.
For example, the ability to metabolize caffeine notably decreases – first around the age of 40 and once more around 60. Components involved in metabolizing alcohol also diminish, particularly around the age of 40, Michael Snyder, chair of the department of genetics at Stanford and an author of the study, told CNN, referring to the two waves of aging.
Snyder added that, anecdotally, “people often get muscle injuries and see their fat accumulation hit in their 40s (related to lipid metabolism), and definitely sarcopenia (muscle loss) hit people in their 60s — this is a very big deal.”
Both age groups experienced changes in proteins which hold tissues together, which likely helps explain skin, muscle and cardiovascular changes, he added.
Disease risks also rise faster, particularly after the age of 60. The study found that people age 60 or older are more susceptible to cardiovascular disorders, kidney issues and type 2 diabetes.
Finding patterns like these can help with the diagnosis and prevention of diseases, according to the study, which said it had also identified “clinically actionable markers” that can be used to improve health-care management and the well-being of aging populations.
The study focused on participants between the ages of 25 and 75 for nearly two years, on average. Participants all lived in California, were healthy and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Samples of blood, stool, skin and nasal and oral swabs were taken from them every three to six months.
Since accelerated aging in women could have been attributed to menopause (which is typically between ages 45 and 55), the researchers performed analysis on separate male and female datasets. To their surprise, they found the results were similar – suggesting a transition point around 55 could be a common phenomenon for both sexes.
A previous study by researchers in Germany and the United States had found that there is another “wave” of aging around 75, but the latest research was not able to confirm those findings because of the limited age range of the cohort in the trial, Shen told CNN.
As for what to take away from their findings, the researchers advise making lifestyle changes such as drinking less alcohol and exercising more when nearing these pivotal years in your 40s and 60s.
Snyder advised people approaching their 60s to watch their carb intake and drink plenty of water to aid kidney function.
“Take care of yourself more closely at specific time points during your life span,” advised Shen.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/20/health/dramatic-human-aging-scli-intl-wellness/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
from another source:
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that humans undergo two major changes in their molecules and microorganisms around ages 44 and 60.
Scientists found these age-related molecular changes are associated with certain health risks, including cardiovascular disease.
Past research shows that, at the protein level, the most notable changes take place around ages 34, 60, and 78.
A new study recently published in the journal Nature Aging adds to what we know about how aging affects the inside of the body. Scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that humans undergo two major changes in their molecules and microorganisms around ages 44 and 60.
For this study, researchers analyzed data from 108 people living in California between the ages of 25 and 75. Study participants were tracked for an average of 1.7 years with a maximum of about 7 years.
Throughout the study, participants donated blood and other biological samples every few months, which allowed scientists to track changes in their bodies’ molecules and microbiomes.
The research team tracked age-related changes in more than 135,000 different molecules and microbes for almost 250 million distinct data points.
“We are tracking people in incredible detail — measuring as many molecules as possible (tens of thousands) and their microbes to get a detailed picture of their health,” Michael P. Snyder, PhD, professor of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine and senior author of this study explained to Medical News Today. “In the process, we can also see how they age.”
As Snyder and his team looked at the data more closely, they noticed that about 81% of the molecules and microbes they identified change more at certain ages than at other times of a person’s life span. The two ages with the largest molecule and microbe changes, scientists found, occur when a person is in their mid-40s and early 60s.
For example, with people in their 40s, Snyder and his team discovered significant changes in the number of molecules related to alcohol, caffeine, and lipid metabolism, as well as cardiovascular disease and skin and muscle.
At the age of 60, the biggest molecular changes were related to cardiovascular disease, immune regulation, kidney function, carbohydrate and caffeine metabolism, and skin and muscle.
Snyder said it is important for researchers to continue to examine what happens to the body during biological aging because we can then take action to reduce many of the problems associated with aging.
“The goal is to have people live long healthy lives. You (can) track these changes and take action with this information. For example, get on statins as you hit your 40s or just before, (and) make sure you exercise through life. In your 60s, drink plenty of water for keeping healthy kidneys, eat immune boosters, and antioxidants,” he said.
At the age of 60, the biggest molecular changes were related to cardiovascular disease, immune regulation, kidney function, carbohydrate and caffeine metabolism, and skin and muscle.
Snyder said it is important for researchers to continue to examine what happens to the body during biological aging because we can then take action to reduce many of the problems associated with aging.
This study establishes that changes in various classes of molecules involved in human health seem to happen at specific time periods in a person’s life, rather than gradually throughout someone’s life.
It’s important to note that the factors involved in aging often interact and influence each other. For example, diet can impact the gut microbiome, which in turn can influence the production of hormones and immune cells. Understanding the dynamic fluctuations of molecules and microbes across our life span is crucial for maintaining health and preventing disease. We can use these data points to help our patients understand the importance of certain interventions. ~
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/aging-human-body-dramatic-molecular-changes-40s-60s#Many-factors-involved-in-age-related-molecular-changes
Oriana:
Rather than statins (unless absolutely necessary), I suggest berberine (it lowers blood sugar and leads to an excellent lipid profile) and CoQ10. Another very effective “intervention” is exercise. Eating a lot of cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, bok choy, and others in the cabbage family) is also a must.
Bok choy is an excellent source of magnesium, calcium, and potassium, as well as fiber and vitamins C, E, and K. 
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ALZHEIMER’S AND INFECTIONS
Harvard researchers found themselves asking that question several years ago after noticing remarkable similarities between amyloid beta, thought to be a major player in the disease’s progression, and proteins active in the body’s immune system.
That discovery has blossomed into a new avenue of investigation against the nation’s leading cause of dementia, sixth-deadliest illness, and — according to a 2011 survey — the runner-up to cancer in health fears among the public.
Led by Robert Moir, an assistant professor in neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Rudolph Tanzi, Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Child Neurology and Mental Retardation at HMS and MGH, the work is focused on whether the development of amyloid beta plaques in the brain — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease and the target of several recent drug candidates — might in many cases be a response to infection.
Proven correct, the explanation would fill a significant blank in our framework for the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, create a new understanding of amyloid beta’s role in the body, and possibly open new fronts for treating or preventing the condition by attacking infection before plaques begin to form.
It also has the potential to lump Alzheimer’s with diabetes and other autoimmune diseases in which a revved-up immune system goes too far and turns on the body. Scientists have already noted enough similarities between Alzheimer’s and diabetes that some have wondered whether Alzheimer’s should be thought of as “type 3 diabetes.”
Though knowledge about Alzheimer’s has advanced in recent decades, its causes are only partially understood. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tanzi played a role in discovering a trio of genes that cause early onset Alzheimer’s, which runs in a small number of families and can strike before age 50. That condition, also called familial Alzheimer’s, accounts for only about 5 percent of cases.
The remaining cases, called sporadic Alzheimer’s, typically occur later in life, in a person’s mid-60s or beyond. Advancing age is the biggest risk factor — scientists don’t know exactly why — and genetics also plays a role, though less so than in early onset Alzheimer’s.
A variant of the gene APOE, or apolipoprotein E, has been identified as a risk factor in sporadic Alzheimer’s. But having the variant doesn’t make the disease inevitable, and not having it doesn’t rule it out. Which has left scientists wondering what other non-genetic factors are at play.
A significant roadblock to discovery has been a lack of clarity on the role of amyloid beta in the body. The Alzheimer’s community has largely viewed it as an aberrant byproduct that serves no useful purpose in the brain — “metabolic garbage,” as Tanzi once put it.
That view has persisted even as understanding of other aspects of Alzheimer’s has advanced. The prevailing hypothesis today is that amyloid beta aggregates to form plaques in the brain. Those plaques then cause the development of tangles made up of the protein tau within nerve cells. This triggers inflammation — a natural immune response that in this case compounds the damage. Connections between nerve cells are severed and the cells die. Cognitive ability inexorably declines, producing the disease’s most feared outcome.
The idea that Alzheimer’s disease might be caused by infection isn’t new, Moir noted. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s, some scientists considered it the strongest hypothesis. That changed in 1984 with the discovery of amyloid beta, which came to dominate subsequent research.
Though support for what came to be called the “pathogen hypothesis” has endured, Tanzi, director of MGH’s Genetics and Aging Research Unit, said that the disease outline he and Moir are developing differs in important ways. While the pathogen hypothesis is most often offered as an alternative to the amyloid beta hypothesis, Moir and Tanzi’s model is not an alternative, but rather fits within the amyloid beta-tau-inflammation paradigm. It fills in blanks, offering an explanation for how the process starts and for the true nature of amyloid beta.
Circumstantial evidence for the importance of amyloid beta is significant, Moir said. It appears to have developed some 400 million years ago and has not only survived evolutionary pressures to appear in humans today, but is present in 60 percent of vertebrates, including fish, reptiles, and birds.
Further, when Moir started to look more closely at the protein, he noticed similarities to key infection-fighting proteins called antimicrobial peptides in the innate immune system — the body’s first and most ancient line of defense.
“It tells you, first, it’s doing something important,” Moir said. “When we started to look at amyloid beta we realized this thing looked similar to antimicrobial peptides.”
Moir compared amyloid beta with LL-37, a potent part of the immune arsenal without which we’d all die from raging infections before reaching our terrible twos. That investigation, supported by a grant from the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, led to a 2010 paper in which Moir’s team proposed that amyloid beta was an antimicrobial peptide, one that demonstrated infection-fighting abilities comparable to, and in some cases better than, penicillin.
A paper published last year in Science Translational Medicine took the work further, showing that amyloid beta protected against fungal and bacterial infection in nematode worms, laboratory mice, and cell cultures of human neuronal tissue. The work also showed that infecting the brains of lab mice with salmonella resulted in plaque formation 48 hours later, and that those mice lived longer than mice that didn’t develop the plaques.
When the researchers looked even closer, Moir said, at the center of each plaque was a single microbe.
Those findings, backed by the National Institutes of Health, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust, suggest a model of Alzheimer’s disease initiation that takes into account both infectious and genetic causes, Tanzi said. The process begins with amyloid beta plaques in the brain. In the case of an infection, the culprit is a single microbe — a virus, bacterium, or fungal spore.
In the case of genetic disease, seeding relies on a higher-than-normal proportion of extra-long amyloid beta proteins. Amyloid beta, Tanzi explained, comes in two predominant forms. One is a chain of 40 amino acids, which tends to remain in solution, and the other 42 amino acids, which is the predominant form in plaques.
Tanzi compared the plaque formation — whether through amyloid beta’s 42 amino acid form or due to a microbe — to lighting a match. That leads to the development of tau protein tangles in nerve cells, which Tanzi compared to a brush fire. Then comes inflammation, a raging forest fire which Tanzi believes does much of the damage that leads to cognitive decline.
“It’s inflammation that really throws you down the slippery slope,” he said.
The brain was once thought of as kept relatively sterile by the blood-brain barrier, a membrane that selectively admits key molecules such as glucose and amino acids while blocking potentially harmful invaders.
The brain was once thought of as kept relatively sterile by the blood-brain barrier, a membrane that selectively admits key molecules such as glucose and amino acids while blocking potentially harmful invaders.
Some notable diseases have long been known to slip through, including syphilis and rabies. But recently it’s become apparent that there’s a lot more life in there than scientists had understood, Moir said. “The things creeping around in the brain will scare the heebie-jeebies out of you.”
Figuring out what is and isn’t in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is the logical next step, one that Moir and Tanzi are undertaking through the Brain Microbiome Project. The researchers are examining brain bank samples from people who died of Alzheimer’s with those who didn’t. In the initial phase, they are searching for viruses by scanning for their genetic material.
When all is said and done, Moir said, it might be that Alzheimer’s is a “dysbiosis” of the brain, a sign that the microbiome is out of whack. Further, Tanzi said, if microbial culprits are identified, it might be possible to treat those infections early in life — possibly even with a vaccine — before the earliest plaques begin to form.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/devastating-chain-of-events-found-in-alzheimers-path/
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NOT JUST CHANGES IN SPEECH AND VOICE — VISION TOO CAN PREDICT DEMENTIA 12 YEARS BEFORE THE DIAGNOSIS
The eyes can reveal a lot about the health of our brain. Indeed, problems with the eyes can be one of the earliest signs of cognitive decline. Our latest study shows that a loss of visual sensitivity can predict dementia 12 years before it is diagnosed.
Our research was based on 8,623 healthy people in Norfolk, England, who were followed up for many years. By the end of the study, 537 participants had developed dementia, so we could see what factors might have preceded this diagnosis.
At the start of the study, we asked participants to take a visual sensitivity test. For the test, they had to press a button as soon as they saw a triangle forming in a field of moving dots. People who would develop dementia were much slower to see this triangle on the screen than people who would remain without dementia.
So why might that be?
Visual issues may be an early indicator of cognitive decline as the toxic amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease may first affect areas of the brain associated with vision, with parts of the brain associated with memory becoming damaged as the disease progresses. So vision tests may find deficits before memory tests do.
There are several other aspects of visual processing that are affected in Alzheimer's disease, such as the ability to see outlines of objects (contrast sensitivity) and to discern between certain colors (the ability to see the blue-green spectrum is affected early in dementia), and these can affect people's lives without them being immediately aware it.
Another early sign of Alzheimer's is a deficit in the "inhibitory control" of eye movements, where distracting stimuli seem to hold attention more readily. People with Alzheimer's seem to have an issue ignoring distracting stimuli, which may show up as eye-movement-control issues.
If dementia makes it harder to avoid distracting stimuli, then these problems could increase the risk of driving accidents – something we are currently investigating at Loughborough University.
RECOGNIZING FACES
We have some evidence which suggests that people with dementia tend to process new people's faces inefficiently. In other words, they don't follow the usual pattern of scanning the face of the person they are talking to.
In healthy people, this would be from eyes to nose to mouth. We do this to "imprint" the face and remember it for later. People can sometimes sense when the person they are talking to does not do this.
In fact, some doctors working with people with dementia will recognize that someone has dementia when they meet them. People with dementia can sometimes seem lost, because they do not purposefully move their eyes to scan the environment, including that of the face of the people they have just met.
It would follow that you would then later be less able to recognize people as you have not imprinted their features. So this early issue in not recognizing people you have just met could be related to ineffective eye movement for new faces, rather than being a pure memory disorder.
CAN EYE MOVEMENTS IMPROVE MEMORY?
However, as visual sensitivity is related to memory performance (even using non-visual tests), we are also testing whether getting people to do more eye movements helps to improve memory.
Previous research on the matter is mixed, but some studies found that eye movement can improve memory. Perhaps that explains why we found that people who watch more TV and read more have better memory and less dementia risk than those who do not.
While watching TV or reading, our eyes flick back and forth over the page and TV screen.
However, people who read often also tend to have been in education longer. Having had good education provides brain reserve capacity so that when connections in the brain are damaged, the negative result is less.
In other studies, eye movements from left to right and right to left done quickly (two eye movements per second) were found to improve autobiographical memory (your life story). However, some studies suggest this beneficial effect of eye movement only benefits right-handed people. We are not sure why this is.
Despite these exciting findings, treatment for memory problems using deliberate eye movements in older people has not been done that much yet. Also, using deficits in eye movements as a diagnostic is not a regular feature, despite the possibilities in eye movement technology.
One of the bottlenecks may be access to eye-tracking technologies, which are expensive and require training to use and analyze. Until cheaper and easy-to-use eye trackers are available, using eye movements as a diagnostic tool for early-stage Alzheimer's is not possible outside the laboratory.
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-vision-can-predict-dementia-12-years-before-diagnosis-study-shows?utm_source=pocket_discover_health
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ending on beauty:
I love the dark hours of my being
Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden
– gathering him in its warm roots –
fulfilled the dream that the dead boy
lost in his sorrows and his songs.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly, modified by Oriana
