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PROUST TO HIS MOTHER
Ma chère petite Maman: A disastrous dawn.
I woke to go to the lavatory, lost
the safety pin I use to close my drawers.
Went wandering through a dozen creaky rooms,
rummaging in your dressers for another pin;
only managed to get slightly chilled.
(Slightly! Hah, hah, what a joke!)
That was the end of sleep, so I picked up
my mother-of-pearl fountain pen
and the blue stationery
you gave me for my birthday
(I had asked for lilac).
People might find it odd
that we write letters to each other
though we live under the same roof.
But you and I understand.
You have a writer’s soul:
that’s why you made me a writer.
I have to dream for us both.
Thank you for the flowers and the thorns.
Why do you torture me? A month ago
you put me in such fury that I seized
a visitor’s new hat and stomped on it,
then mailed you the torn lining
as proof of what you do to me.
You know I can’t get up before seven
in the evening, and expose myself to drafts.
So what if I dine alone at the Ritz
at four a.m., or sit in two pair
of long underwear and a fur coat
in front of a blazing fireplace —
go to bed fully dressed, in gloves and slippers,
or use fifteen towels when I wash —
even that is my art.
Do you have talent? means
Are you abnormal enough?
You say many men could boast
more misfortunes than I,
yet they get out of bed,
kiss their wife and go to work.
But can they suffer as much?
— the first requirement for a writer.
And so I gasp for breath
in the echoes of your widow’s flat.
Another tram shudders by
and your cabinets ring
that high-pitched note that dissects my nerves.
I long for spring — tulips and narcissi —
but I feel so helpless around flowers . . .
As for the time when I broke
a crystal vase because you wanted me
to wear the yellow gloves
while I preferred the gray —
I treasure the letter you wrote:
May this shattered glass, as in the Temple,
be a symbol of indissoluble union.
Even my asthma
is a language between us.
But I must ration myself.
Tomorrow I’ll write in more detail.
A thousand kisses, Marcel.
~ Oriana
Marcel Proust and his mother, Jeanne Weil ProustPROUST AND HIS MOTHER: A UNIQUE BOND:
On the 26th of September 1905, Jeanne
Clémence Weil, mother of writer Marcel Proust, died in Ile de France,
Paris. Madame Proust, as she was to be known, seeing as Marcel never got
married, was born Jewish on both sides of her family. Her
genealogy actually shows that Marcel Proust and Karl Marx were distant
cousins, albeit seven generations apart. Jeanne was a sensitive,
very intelligent, and well-educated young woman who had a
deep understanding of music and literature. Her schooling had been
primarily classical and because at the time girls could not attend the
lycées which served as preparatory schools for higher education, Jeanne
studied at home, probably with private tutors. Jeanne’s wealthy parents
married her off to the Catholic Dr. Adrien Proust in 1870 and she had
two sons, Robert and Marcel. Her presence is strongly felt in Marcel
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which opens with one of the
best known scenes in literary history, as young Marcel, unable to fall
asleep, waits restlessly for his mother to come and give him a goodnight
kiss:
“My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her “Kiss me just once again,” but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep.” (Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Volume One: Swann’s Way, 1913).
His mother’s strong character had a decisive influence on the great writer’s career. The only real biography of Jeanne is so far Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s book Madame Proust which tries to reveal the real Jeanne Weil Proust, covering her life and times from her German-Jewish background and her marriage to a Catholic grocer’s son to her lifelong worries about her son’s sexuality, health problems, and talent. The book offers valuable insight into the Prousts’ daily existence, but also a cultural evaluation of fin de siecle France, including high society, spa culture, Jewish integration, and the Dreyfus affair. It seems that, although Proust’s parents came from different religions, their atheism equalled out their differences. However, during the Dreyfus affair, some schisms appeared, which ultimately brought Jeanne even closer to her son Marcel. They both defended Drefus’ innocence, while Dr. Proust held him as a traitor.
From Bloch-Dano’s biography of Jeanne, we learn that “Marcel Proust’s relationship with his mother, like much else to do with this greatest of all novelists, was exceptional.The passages in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu concerning his goodnight kiss are among the most memorable in the entire novel. When, aged 25, he made a short visit to Fontainebleau, he wrote to his mother twice a day and made frequent phone calls in-between. After her death, he wrote to Robert de Montesquiou: “My life has now forever lost its only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation.” (…) Whatever her marital dissatisfactions, Madame Proust found ample compensation in her sons. She doggedly protected protected Marcel in childhood and alternately cajoled and chid during his twenties and thirties. Her resigned, if not wholly relaxed, attitude to his sexuality can be inferred from his description of a new friend who has gone “overboard” on him: “I say overboard in a good sense, so don’t go imagining that it’s an evil connection, great gods!!!” (Michael Arditti ‘Mother of all novels’, review of Madame Proust, By Evelyne Bloch-Dano, trans Alice Kaplan, The Independent, Friday 16 November 2007).
“Their relationship was intense; everyone knows that. What is made evident here is its complicated nature. To put it briefly: Marcel wanted simultaneously to be independent and to remain the little boy who was the center of his mother’s world (significantly, the narrator of A la recherche is an only child, brother Robert having been excised, though in life the brothers were close). Madame Proust also wanted Marcel to remain a little boy and to be independent of her. But though each wanted the same things they wanted them at different times. When she and Adrien Proust tried to force independence on him, the little child resisted and sought to climb back into the maternal ark. When he struck out independently, Jeanne seized hold of the reins and drew him back. So their love was rarely smooth; both experienced resentment. They quarrelled fiercely, so that the reconciliation might be all the sweeter. It was the most intense love-affair of Proust’s life.
Bloch-Dano is in no doubt that Jeanne recognized that Marcel was homosexual. But it was the one thing they could not talk about. Silence deepened his guilt and fed his resentment. Her death desolated him and yet liberated him to yield to the impulses he cherished and despised. She helped him in his work, doing much of the first draft of the translation of Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens for him (her grasp of English was much better than his). ‘Jeanne realized that the qualities her son lacked most were will power and perseverance. She persisted in helping him acquire them … Her confidence, her vigilance, her intelligence, her demands, and her love were the crucibles forging the iron will that would one day enable Marcel to go the distance. She would never see her efforts crowned.’ One wonders if her death wasn’t necessary to enable him at last to embark on the novel. It was to become what she had been: his ark.” (Allan Massie, ‘Mummy Dearest’, review of Madame Proust: A Biography, By Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Literary Review).
The thought of his mother perishing obsessed Marcel. On 1 February 1907, two years after she passed away, he published a long article on the front page of the Le Figaro about a man who had killed his mother – and then killed himself. The subject obviously presented inconceivable horrors to Marcel. In an exceptional LRB article, Michael Wood discusses the multiple implications of this unique mother-son relationship. “Michel Schneider says, ‘The mother and the son love each other to a degree they can’t cope with, they hate each other but they don’t know it,’ and Compagnon, with equal elegance, affirms that ‘the love of the mother includes the hatred of the mother,’ getting the genitives to do their double work, meaning love and hatred for and of each other. But what if these people don’t hate each other at all? What if they love each other in a mode of intricate, endless dependence?” (Michael Wood, ‘Proust and His Mother’, London Review of Books, Vol. 34 No. 6 · 22 March 2012). The thought of his mother getting old and disappearing from his life tormented the writer and her end devastated him. The spell she had on him seeped through his writing, nourishing it until the end of his life. So, thank you, Madame Proust!
Mary:
I find Proust's intense relationship with his mother strange...and distasteful.
I can understand the intellectual connection, especially with her better grasp of the English language being a great assist to him, allowing a close collaboration on translations, but even so, the connection seems stiflingly close, abnormal, and infantile. Everything about his life and habits reminds me of Mannerism...a deliberate adoption of extreme distortion to achieve an effect..there is an excess in all of it. Certainly a deliberate "styling" of one's life in all actions, habits and affinities. Even his masterpiece exemplifies this, monstrously long, with breathless endless sentences and thousands of characters.
I read the whole thing in translation while in school, but must confess I literally remember none of it. The paper I wrote afterward was all in the passive voice — I think a result of the reading experience itself, an actual criticism of the novel and its world, that did not in any way seem alive and engaging to me. I could not care about any of these people and their milieu....they all seemed like dressed up paper dolls in a world I didn't recognize.
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Mothers and writers.
Strong as death.
Beyond an intertextuality which is rather little woven, the writings about the mother of our writers vary from passion to hatred. Think of Romain Gary's "The Promise of Dawn", Albert Cohen's "My Mother's Book", or Hermance by the lovely name, Bernanos' mother.
Let's keep three examples, two of which we know well.
The passionate sweetness of Proust
"Maman sometimes had a lot of sorrow, but we didn't know it, because she only cried with gentleness and spirit." She died making me a quote from Molière* and a quote from Labiche. Marcel Proust against Sainte-Beuve "Conversation with Maman.”
"She carries my life with her, just like Daddy carried his." Letter to Anna de Noailles. September 1905
"I love only one person in this world, that's Maman." Letter to Louis Abulféra. September 1905
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To Ewelina Hańska, Balzac's terrible confession:
"If you only knew what my mother is: a monster and a monstrosity all in one. At the moment she is burying my sister after my poor Laurence and my grandmother perished because of her. She hates me for thousand reasons. She hated me before I was born. ~ Letter to Madame Hańska. October 17, 1842.
He does it again in "Le Lys”:
"What vanity could I hurt, newborn me? What physical or moral disgrace was my mother's coldness worth me? Was I then the child of duty, the one whose birth is accidental, or the one whose life is a reproach? Fed up in the countryside, forgotten by my family for three years, when I returned to my father's house, I counted on it for so little that I suffered from people's compassion. “The lynx in the valley". Pleiades 1949. Page 771.
Comforting about Guy de Maupassant. His mother, very educated, was a childhood friend of Flaubert, who influenced his young friend.
"One loves one's mother almost without knowing her, without feeling her, because this is as natural as living; and one can only realize the depth of the roots of this love at the moment of the last separation." No other affection compares to this one, for all the others are by encounter, and this one is by birth; all the others are brought to us later by the chance of existence, and this one lives on in our own blood since the first day."
"Strong as Death" by Guy de Maupassant. (Part 2 Letter from Annie to Olivier)
Badass, who wrote the terrible "Mother to Monsters" anyway…
Two years ago (for the centenary of his death), the tribute of the descendants of his brother Robert and the Society of Friends of Marcel Proust
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NOT EVERYONE LOVES PROUST
Crushingly dull. Rather infantile. A mental defective?
Lots of people love Marcel Proust. Most writers, probably. These six writers, definitely. He is frequently heralded as one of the greatest writers of all time—but not everyone is on board. Even Proust is not without his detractors, and in his case, some of them are pretty notable detractors indeed, including at least one Nobel Prize winner, a Gothic novelist, a couple of modernist masters, and a currently questionable but still important second-wave feminist. Below, indulge in some of their withering commentary on the French writer and his ecstatically interminable and ultra-famous novel.
Kazuo Ishiguro, in an interview with HuffPo:
To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull. The trouble with Proust is that sometimes you go through an absolutely wonderful passage, but then you have to go about 200 pages of intense French snobbery, high-society maneuverings and pure self-indulgence. It goes on and on and on and on. But every now and again, I suppose around memory, he can be beautiful.
Evelyn Waugh, in a 1948 letter to Nancy Mitford:
I am reading Proust for the first time—in English of course—and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel. And as for the jokes—the boredom of Bloch and Cottard.
D. H. Lawrence, in his essay “The Future of the Novel”:
Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of Ulysses and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust . . . Is Ulysses in his cradle? Oh, dear! What a grey face! . . . And M. Proust? Alas! You can hear the death-rattle in their throats. They can hear it themselves. They are listening to it with acute interest, trying to discover whether the intervals are minor thirds of major fourths. Which is rather infantile, really.
So there you have the “serious” novel, dying in a very long-drawn-out fourteen-volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed? The audience round the death-bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes and length, after hundreds of pages: “It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-coryambasis,” the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: “That’s just how I feel myself.”
Which is the dismal, long-drawn-out comedy of the death-bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell.
Germaine Greer, writing in The Guardian:
If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.
Susan Hill, writing in The Spectator:
Since I was 18 I have been told I should read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu by people who knew all seven volumes by heart and loved every line. You cannot, it seems, be lukewarm about Proust. Knowing that love of it is a badge of honor, and mark of a finely attuned and appreciative literary mind, I have tried eversomany times to get beyond Book One. Indeed, I have probably read Book One more often than I have read Great Expectations, which is saying something. I have even plucked Volume Three or Seven, off the shelf and tried to start there, so please don’t judge me, or tell me I haven’t given it a chance. It’s no good. I find the endless sentences distancing, the people without interest. I cannot care about upper-class French people of the 19th century. Mea culpa, of course. My loss too. But if I have not managed to find the key by the age of 70, I guess I never will. I am denied any enjoyment of Proust’s great novel and there it is. I tried to find one word to sum up how it seems to me. The word is “anaemic.”
Candace Bushnell, in her “By the Book” interview with The New York Times:
I’m too old to be embarrassed by books I haven’t read, people I haven’t slept with and parties I haven’t gone to. However, the one writer I’ve never been able to tolerate is Proust.
James Joyce, in a 1920 letter to Frank Budgen:
I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.
Anatole France, famously (but probably apocryphally):
Life is too short, and Proust is too long.
https://lithub.com/in-search-of-a-time-lost-a-selection-of-prousts-letters-translated-by-lydia-davis/
Oriana:
I totally agree with Anatole France. I also agree with Kazuo Mishigura: The first volume is an exception. It actually has a plot, and is exquisitely written. The romance of Swann and Odette, a courtesan, is a novel in itself.
I have managed to read a few pages of the second volume and realized that I didn’t care enough about the characters to bother deciphering the long sentences and convoluted, endless paragraphs. But this reminds me of Boy-Żelenski, the Polish translator of Proust, who took the liberty of dividing the enormous sentences into manageable shorter sentences, and rambling paragraphs into shorter, more concise paragraphs — allegedly turning Proust into a literary feast for Polish readers.
But life is still too short.We live longer, but we seem to have too little time to dissect every twinge.
“The only life of consequence which can be said to be truly lived is literature.” ~ Marcel Proust
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THE THIRD SELF
“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.”
But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.
But just as self-criticism is the most merciless kind of criticism and self-compassion the most elusive kind of compassion, self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.
How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver (b. September 10, 1935) explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays.
Oliver writes:
It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:
The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.
Echoing Borges’s puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity (“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.
The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:
~ Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. ~
Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:
~ Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary.
So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.
Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).
Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art:
~ Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about. ~
In a sentiment that calls to mind Van Gogh’s spirited letter on risk-taking and how inspired mistakes move us forward, Oliver returns to the question of the conditions that coax the creative self into being:
~ No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. ~
Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:
Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-third-self-mary-oliver-on-time-concentration-the-artist-s-task-and-the-central-commitment-of-the
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ABOUT TRUMP’S NOMINATIONS
“This is like the legend of Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to nominate his horse as a Roman consul. ~ John Bolton (FB)
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TIMOTHY SNYDER: THE CRUSADE AGAINST AMERICA
How does America end?
Novels can expand the imagination to fit the things that are happening around you. In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a few men who wish to oppress women are able to organize a Christian Reconstructionist coup and establish a new regime under what they present as God's law. In the story, they are able to destroy the United States of America and supplant it with Gilead, which battles against former Americans, never fully controls all former territories, and ultimately falls.
Thanks to Donald Trump, we now must contemplate the possibility of a misogynist Christian Reconstructionist secretary of defense. Pete Hegseth lacks the normal qualifications for such a post. He has never run a large organization and has no view of national security. In none of his books does he have anything much to say about the world.
Reading him, one would have no way to understand why the United States has a military at all. Hegseth has two ideas about what the armed forces are for: a site to express Christian Reconstructionism and gender ideology; and a means defeat other Americans inside America.
For Hegseth, gender ideology more important to him than the world itself, let alone the security interests of the United States. He wants us to believe that the two are the same thing: that women in uniform prove the existence of a Leftist plot to destroy America. This case is not really made. Hegseth is right that the purpose of the armed forces is to make war, and that politics can distract from this. But what he is offering is precisely politics.
Hegseth is no doubt correct in many of his critiques of the armed services. But he himself has no proposals about how the armed forces should be deployed, or in the service of what goals and interests. He does not believe in the alliance with Europe and Canada that has kept the peace: in his view, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.” But he is absolutely sure that our existence depends upon everyone agreeing with his views about women in uniformed service. But why is this so important? His arguments for his gender ideology are self-referential and circular: he thinks so, other men think so, nature.
Women have fought and killed men in combat throughout history, as customs and technology permitted. It is a modern prejudice to deny this. Hegseth tries to sweep the board of history clear by claiming that even the Spartans, whose society was organized around war, did not have women fighters. But our source on Sparta, Herodotus, reminds us that the greatest warriors of the age, famously undefeated by Persia, were the Scythians. And the Scythians did have female warriors, cavalry armed with recursive bows. Custom and technology permitted them to fight, and they did. Judging by the archeological finds in today's southern Ukraine, about one in five Scythian warriors was female. It took a while for archeologists to realize this, because of the male-ego-preserving prejudice that all warriors are male. It was only the DNA evidence -- nature, as it were -- that forced the conclusion that was in fact obvious from the female skeletal remains.
Hegseth writes that "to create a society of warrior women you must separate them first from men, and then from the natural purposes of their core instincts." This is pure gender ideology. He is just making this up. Women who have seen combat have not been separated from men or their instincts. They are sometimes traumatized. As are men. Armies fight with women when and because it works. Women can kill men and then raise children and, historically speaking, have done so. They are doing so right now.
Hegseth does not confront his broad claims about women in warfare with the evidence from the most important war of our time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has little to say about Russia and its Chinese backer: how, for example, would dissolving NATO help, when that is exactly what Russia wants? The lesson he draws from the war in Ukraine is that women can assist in logistics, which is certainly true. But he dodges what for him should the central issue. In the Russo-Ukrainian war, an much smaller apolitical mixed-gender army, the Ukrainian one, has held back a much larger, politicized, patriarchal, anti-woke, anti-gay, and anti-transsexual army, the Russian one. This would seem to be relevant; Hegseth ignores it.
On the same lands once controlled by the ancient Scythians, the contemporary Ukrainian army includes women, and in roughly the same ratio, one in five or one in six soldiers. Roughly five thousand Ukrainian women serve in combat roles. This is not the result of some leftist ideology. Indeed, Ukrainian women in the army have to deal with a great deal of sexism. But they fight because they want to defend their country. Their government wishes them to because there is a war to be won. The other day a kindergarten teacher shot down a Russian cruise missile with an Igla manpad. She is a woman, and she had to train and train to learn to use the Igla, just as Scythians had to train to use their recursive bows. When custom and technology permit, women can fight.
On the other side, the Russian army is explicitly modeled on a gender ideology that resembles Hegseth's. The Russian army is just what Hegseth believes the American army should be: male, patriarchal, deployed in what leaders explicitly describe as an anti-woke war for traditional values and Western civilization. This Russian army carries out war crimes on the lands that it occupies, including the murder of civilians (a behavior that Hegseth defends when Americans do it) and the rape of women. Hegseth might not care about any of this. But we all should. And we should note that this Russia army has vastly underperformed all expectations on the battlefield. Nearly three years into a war that was expected to last for three days, Russia has called in ten thousand North Koreans to try to retake Russian territory in Kursk region that is occupied by Ukraine.
Again, the point is not that Ukraine is woke; it is not, whatever woke might mean. It is a country suffering a horrific war; Ukrainians do not need our culture wars superimposed on them. There is a real world, a real history of war, a real war going on now in Ukraine:on a greater scale, with greater losses, with greater stakes than Iraq and Afghanistan -- and that Hegseth puts the evidence aside in the service of propagating his gender ideology. Hegseth complains that Europeans do not defend themselves. But Ukraine’s defense budget almost three times greater than America’s as a percentage, and its people are engaged in war on a scale greater than anything Americans have experienced. Why do they get no credit from Hegseth?
Hegseth served in a combat role in Iraq, and usefully and colorfully shares details from his time in combat. What he does not share is any evidence that women made things worse; nor does he show any appetite for such evidence. He has not been to the front of the Russo-Ukrainian war; amidst writing multiple books, he has not found the time to see what large-scale modern combat looks like on the defining battlefield of our time. Given that one side has women in combat and the other espouses something very much like his ideology, this is a serious omission. It suggests that Hegseth has an ideological commitment which is not in fact related to military reality.
Perhaps not incidentally, Russia's hope for victory rests in people like him: gender ideologists who side with Russian gender ideology. Hegseth, although he condemned Russia at the beginning, seems to be taking steps in that direction. By early 2023, he was following a standard MAGA formula of changing the subject from Ukraine to the border with Mexico. By 2024, he presented the war in Ukraine as the fault of the Biden administration. Never does he acknowledge the work Ukrainian resistance does for American interests: it holds back both Russia and China, the countries Hegseth presents as threats when he briefly changes the subject from his gender obsession. Ukrainian resistance defends an international order based upon law. It makes nuclear proliferation less likely. And it gives hope to people who support democracy.
That might of course be the key: Hegseth is not one of those people. He does not believe that United States should be a democracy, and says so: we are “not a pure democracy, instead a constitutional republic predicated on the fact that our rights come from God.” Like Putin, Hegseth seems to know personally what God wants. During the war, Putin has militarized Russian schools, making them propaganda machines. Hegseth believes that American schools should be “boot camp” that prepare children for “spiritual battle.”
Russian propaganda again and again claims that invading Ukraine makes the world safe from gays and transsexuals. Hegseth is snide about the people he calls "trannies," claiming that anyone gender fluid or non-binary could be nothing more than a useless diversion: "Men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa, are a distraction. It might be your thing, but it’s weird and does not add substantive value to anyone." These kinds of clear statements make certain kinds of men feel better about themselves, no doubt. Like gender obsession generally, they tend to be cues about pro-authoritarian politics.
And then of course there is history and what actually happens, which tend to defy the cofortable simplifications of Hegseth’s identity politics. Hegseth's claim is belied by the history of the origin of the United States. The Polish officer Casimir Pulaski is credited with reforming the American cavalry and with saving the life of George Washington at the Battle of Brandywine. Pulaski was killed in action at Savannah. It is hard to imagine an American victory in the Revolutionary War without Pulaski. And so without Pulaski it is very possible that there would never have arisen an American republic. That would seem to be something of “substantive value.” And yet it seems that Pulaski was either intersex or a biological female who dressed as a man.
Hegseth does not need to know early American history, though, since he disavows the American republic. He is a Christian Reconstructionist who believes that God's law should prevail. The Constitution has to be understood, Hegseth claims, as subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally. He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text.
Hegseth denies the rectitude of the First Amendment, which separates church and state: "without God, America is not America." He says explicitly that "the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding" is to blame for the malaise that followed. Switching his metaphysics for a moment, he claims that the separation of church and state opened "the gates of Mordor." Constitutional patriotism is not a good thing, since it can "untether us from the timeless truth, from the Bible." Of course, as is always the case, God's law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.
The enemy within, broadly defined as "the Left," is presented as already having a plan to annihilate everyone else. This is, of course, what fascists always say: it is legitimate to destroy the other side, because however invisibly and conspiratorially and secretly, it is planning to kill you first. Thus for Hegseth, the Left has the goal of "erasing America’s soul, culture, and institutions. We are the ones standing in their way—and have been targeted for annihilation." Hegseth does not dwell, for some reason, on the actual countries that actually want the American system to break.
Only the “enemy within” captures his imagination. Hegseth enjoins his readers to "remember the plan the Left has for you—utter annihilation." And again: "In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”
Trump's nominee for the position of secretary of defense seems to believe that we need a cleansing civil war. He instructs us that "we are not only fighting a battle against foreign enemies." "Sometimes," he writes, "the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.”
For this view he obscurely calls upon the Book of Judges and the story of Gideon, although how this biblical citation helps his case is unclear. It is not obvious from the story which god was Gideon's, or who the internal enemies would have been, or what the point was, since Israel collapsed right afterwards anyway. Gideon collected gold which his people then worshiped, and he had many wives and concubines. It is that polygamous aspect of the Bible that seems to draw in people like Hegseth: the dream of patriarchy, the fantasy that controlling women somehow means a safer society or a safer country.
Hegseth has a tattoo that reads "Deus vult," which means "God wills it" in Latin. JD Vance has defended Hegseth's tattoo's as Christian; we are all supposed to feel guilty, Vance instructs us, because if we query the tattoo we are simply ignorant bigots who disrespect Christianity. Specialists of course know that the tattoo is associated with far-right nationalism and terrorism. It was one of the slogans at the Nazi rally in Charlottesville.
And of course the history of Christianity is rich and open to many interpretations: for example, Hegseth's idea that God's law, as interpreted by him and his friends, should apply here on Earth, superceding the Constitution, and justifying a holy war against Americans. "Deus vult" is a direct and explicit invocation of the medieval Crusades, which Hegseth believes should continue inside the United States in the twenty-first century. This is, interestingly, also an echo of Putin. His whole rationale of the invasion of Ukraine has to do with an invocation of the middle ages and Putin’s claim that God wills that Russia and Ukraine be together.
In Hegseth’s view, "America cannot, and will not, survive otherwise. This time in our history calls for an AMERICAN CRUSADE. Yes, a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom." Although Hegseth ritually mocks "triggered" Leftists for understanding him literally, and drops the word "metaphorically" into his prose from time to time, it is quite clear what he means: "We cannot outsource or delegate our crusade. Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, and physically. This is, by the way, why the Second Amendment exists."
Historically speaking, of course, Hegseth is wrong about the Second Amendment: it was written to allow the United States to prepare for war against actual foreign enemies, not to enable Americans to massacre one another in a holy war. But Hegseth's invocation of the Second Amendment and "physical" weapons makes his attitude unmistakable. As with citizens, so with the army: the purpose of "America’s military might" is "the defeat of our enemies, internal and external." The "internal" always comes first for Hegseth. Trump, who regularly talks about “internal enemies,” is the occasion: "Let’s make the crusade great again.”And, in closing: "See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”
It is not hard to see why Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense. Trump plans to purge the armed forces of high officers who care about the United States and leave only loyalists. Trump wants to use the armed forces in operations inside the United States, including the oppression of “enemies within,” which is to say, his political opponents. Hegseth gives every sign of being a person who would embrace such actions as an American crusade.
In fact, they would amount to a crusade against America. What would thus look like? Where would it lead?
In the novel The Handmaid's Tale, people very much like Hegseth come to power, oppress women, and turn the armed forces into domestic shock troops who fight a civil war. It is important to see accusations of sexual assault and Hegseth's persistent polygamy in this light: the notion that women are just objects goes hand in hand with the idea that the real fight for American soldiers is against other Americans.
Misogyny is not the elevation of masculinity but its collapse, both as morality and as politics.
Although the richness of Atwood's story is in the exposition of a modern patriarchy, I find it important to note that Gilead, the Christian Reconstructionist state, does not endure for long. The Christian Reconstructionist coup attempt of the story corresponds to the purge of the armed forces announced by Trump and the subsequent use in domestic actions suggested by all of Hegseth's writings. Such a thing would wreck America rather than rescue it.
There is a danger of oppression inherent in giving power to incompetent misogynists who claim to know God's will. But the more immediate danger for our republic from such men is chaos and collapse.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQXKNFKtqNCdKFTFQScWqdxBrpp
my thanks to Violeta Kelertas
Mary:THE OLD AMERICA IS ALREADY GONE
Thinking about affairs in Russia and the United States right now it sometimes seems both states may be moving toward self destruction through failures of leadership inherent in each. Putin's disastrous project in Ukraine has emptied the prisons to supply soldiers, who then, if they survive to return, act as criminals without fear, bringing violence with them, making the police useless. Putin's war has also gone far to bankrupt both the military and the economy.
In the US the christofascists and the oligarchs, with their chosen con man's return to power, are already busy with their project to dismantle the government and end the term of the US as leader of the free world. Like the Soviet Union, the old America is already gone.
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POLISH GENERAL WHO FOUGHT WITH WASHINGTON MAY HAVE BEEN FEMALE
Researchers believe a famed Polish general who fought in the American Revolutionary war may have been female or possibly intersex.
A new Smithsonian Channel documentary examines the history of Casimir Pulaski, a Polish cavalryman who became a protege of George Washington.
Researchers began their work when a monument to the general in Savannah, Georgia, was set to be removed. Pulaski’s bones were contained in a metal box under the monument, which was erected in 1854. Charles Merbs, a forensic anthropologist at Arizona State University who worked on the case, said that allowed researchers to exhume the skeleton for study.
“Basically I couldn’t say anything about what I found until the final report came out,” Merbs told ASU Now. He worked with Dr Karen Burns, a physical anthropologist at the University of Georgia, and other experts.
“Dr Burns said to me before I went in: ‘Go in and don’t come out screaming.’ She said study it very carefully and thoroughly and then let’s sit down and discuss it. I went in and immediately saw what she was talking about.
“The skeleton is about as female as can be.”
Another team member, Virginia Hutton Estabrook, a Georgia Southern University professor of anthropology, told NBC News: “One of the ways that male and female skeletons are different is the pelvis. In females, the pelvic cavity has a more oval shape. It’s less heart-shaped than in the male pelvis. Pulaski’s looked very female.”
The most immediate question was whether the skeleton was indeed Pulaski. Previous researchers had failed to identify the bones, lacking DNA for a match.
Estabrook said: “It is remarkable that the will to persist in this project continued more than a decade after it was declared by a team of experts that this was as far as it could possibly go.”
This time, researchers were able to confirm the skeleton through the mitochondrial DNA of Pulaski’s grandniece, known injuries and physical characteristics. The Smithsonian Institute funded the research.
Pulaski was raised as a man in an aristocratic Polish Catholic family, learning to fight and ride. He put those skills to the test against the invading Russians before leaving Poland in 1772 and finding his way to Paris. According to the Smithsonian documentary, the American delegation there sent him across the Atlantic with letters of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin.
Pulaski joined the American forces and on 11 September 1777 fought the British at Brandywine, south of Philadelphia, probably saving Washington from capture in a damaging defeat. The Pole went on to formalize the American cavalry, demanding better resources and training.
He was fatally wounded at the Siege of Savannah in October 1779, dying aboard ship days later.
Researchers said contemporary accounts of the general painted him as private and deeply driven, a fierce fighter and skilled horseman. He never married or had children.
“I don’t think, at any time in his life, did he think he was a woman,” Merbs said. “I think he just thought he was a man, and something was wrong.”
As much as 2% of babies may be born intersex, according to a survey of medical literature from Brown University. That means the children could be born with characteristics – genital, chromosomal or hormonal – that put them outside the “platonic ideal that for each sex there is a single, universally correct developmental pathway and outcome”.
Pulaski is considered a Polish American hero, honored each year at the Casimir Pulaski Day parade in New York City. The Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey is named for the general, as is the Fort Pulaski national monument in Georgia.
Speaking to NBC, the New York Pulaski Day parade president, Richard Zawisny, said he was “a little shocked” by the news Pulaski may have been female or intersex.
“But in this day and age,” he added, “I don’t think it will matter to most people.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/06/casimir-pulaski-polish-general-woman-intersex
. . . a bit more:
Estabrook said her
team is not the first to suspect that Pulaski might not have been a man.
Others also noticed the delicate bone structure after the skeleton was
extracted from the Pulaski monument in Savannah, Georgia. The general
was only between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4 inches tall. The facial structure and jaw angle were decidedly female, Estabrook said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/revolutionary-war-hero-casimir-pulaski-might-have-been-woman-or-n991371
Oriana:
The likely cause was an adrenal disorder that causes an excess of androgens to be produced in the body.
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EXHAUSTION AT WORK CAN LEAD TO DIFFICULTY CONTROLLING EMOTIONS
Working long hours can lead to people having issues moderating behavior due to ‘ego depletion’, research shows
If a hard day in the office leaves you crabby and uncooperative, you may have an excuse: scientists say exercising self-restraint can exhaust parts of the brain related to decision-making and impulse control, leaving you less able to manage your behavior towards others.
The researchers say their results tie into the theory of “ego depletion” – a controversial idea in psychology that willpower is a limited resource that gets used up by effort.
The results, they add, suggest it might be best to take a break after a day of mental exertion before engaging in other tasks.
“If you want to have a discussion with your partner and feel that you are mentally exhausted, don’t,” said Erica Ordali, first author of the study from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy. “Take your time. Do it in another day.”
While the idea of ego depletion has been around for decades, it has garnered criticism, with some studies failing to replicate results. Ordali, however, noted an important factor may be that the tasks used in these studies to sap self-control often only last 10 minutes.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ordali and her colleagues reported how they explored the impact of a longer duration, by asking 44 participants to undertake various computer-based activities for 45 minutes, including watching emotive video clips.
While half the participants were asked to use self-control during the activities, for example not showing their emotions in response to the videos, the other group did not have to exert self-control.
Each participant was also fitted with an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, allowing the researchers to measure their brain activity.
Among other results, the team found participants in the self-control group showed increases in delta brain wave activity in the areas of the prefrontal cortex related to decision-making and impulse control, compared with their brain activity at the start of the activities. No such change was seen for the other group.
Crucially, said Ordali, delta waves are typically seen during sleep rather than wake – suggesting parts of the brain had “dozed off” in participants who had exerted self-control.
The team then asked both groups to take part in a variety of games, including one known as “hawks and doves”, where individuals had to decide whether to cooperate to share resources, or behave in a hostile manner to secure them.
The results reveal 86% of participants who were not asked to exert self-control at the start of the study behaved like doves, engaging in peaceful cooperation. In contrast, the figure was just 41% among participants initially given self-control tasks, suggesting they tended to behave like hawks.
The team found no differences when it came to games that examined participants’ general social preferences, such as how altruistic they were.
The team then split another 403 participants into two groups and repeated the study, but without recording participants’ brain activity. Again, participants who were asked to show self-control subsequently behaved more aggressively.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study, urged caution noting most of the behavioral results did not show significant effects, while the connection between brain and behavior was not strong.
“These are interesting results and are consistent with a commonsense view of fatigue,” he said. “But given all the past controversy and the weakness of this data, I would want to see if they were replicated independently before calling the press about it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/11/exhaustion-work-difficulty-controlling-emotions-scientists?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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RUSSIAN SOLDIERS BRING WARTIME VIOLENCE HOME
“I’m a veteran of the special military operation, I’m going to kill you!” were the words Irina heard as she was attacked by a man in Artyom, in Russia’s far east.
She had been returning from a night out when the man kicked her and beat her with his crutch. The force of the strike was so strong that it broke the crutch.
When the police arrived, the man showed them a document proving he had been in Ukraine and claimed that because of his service “nothing will happen to him”.
The attack on Irina is just one of many reported to have been committed by soldiers returning from Ukraine.
Verstka, an independent Russian website, estimates that at least 242 Russians have been killed by soldiers returning from Ukraine. Another 227 have been seriously injured.
Like the man who beat Irina, many of the attackers have previous criminal convictions and were released from prison specifically to join Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The BBC estimates that the Wagner mercenary group recruited more than 48,000 prisoners to fight in Ukraine. When Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash last year, Russia’s defense ministry took over recruitment in prisons.
These cases have severely impacted Russian society, says sociologist Igor Eidman.
"This is a very serious problem, and it can potentially get worse. All the traditional ideas of good and evil are being turned upside down," he told the BBC.
"People who have committed heinous crimes — murderers, rapists, cannibals and pedophiles — they not only avoid punishment by going to war, the unprecedented bit is that they are being hailed as heroes.”
There are numerous reasons why Russian soldiers lucky enough to return from the war would think they are above the law.
Official media call them "heroes," and President Vladimir Putin has dubbed them Russia's new "elite". Those recruited into the army from prisons either had their convictions removed or they were pardoned.
It is not unheard of for released convicts return from the war in Ukraine, reoffend and then escape punishment for a second time by going back to the front.
This makes some police officers despair. “Four years ago, I put him away for seven years,” policeman Grigory told the Novaya Gazeta website.
"And here he is in front of me again, saying: 'You won't be able to do anything, officer. Now's our time, the time of those who are shedding blood in the special military operation.’"
Russian courts have routinely used participation in the war against Ukraine as a reason to issue milder sentences.
But many cases don’t even reach court. Moscow has introduced a new law against “discrediting the Russian armed forces,” which has made some victims of crimes by veterans afraid to report them.
Olga Romanova, the head of prisoner rights NGO Russia Behind Bars, says a sense of impunity is driving up crime rates.
"The main consequence is the gap between crime and punishment in the public mind. If you commit a crime, it is far from certain that you are going to be punished," she tells the BBC.
In 2023, the number of serious crimes registered in Russia rose by almost 10%, and in the first half of this year the number of military personnel convicted of crimes more than doubled compared to the same period a year before.
Sociologist Anna Kuleshova argues that violence is becoming more acceptable in Russian society, especially because criminals can now escape punishment by going to war.
"There is a tendency to legalize violence. The idea that violence is a kind of norm will probably spread - violence at school, domestic violence, violence in relationships and as a way to resolve conflicts.
"This is facilitated by the militarization of society, the turn to conservatism and the romanticization of war. Violent crimes committed within the country are being atoned by the violence of war.”
Igor Eidman, Olga Romanova and Anna Kuleshova all spoke to the BBC from outside Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e7vl01gngo (My thanks to Charles Sherman)
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NOW A RUSSIAN BALLET DANCER FALLS OUT A WINDOW
A famous Russian ballet dancer, Putin-critic and opponent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Shklyarov, was found dead at the age of 39.
He fell out from a window of his 5-floor apartment.
Shklyarov condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, stating that he opposed “any kinds of military actions.”
”It is impossible to watch everything that is happening today without tears,” Shklyarov wrote on Instagram in a post, which he later deleted.
Putin’s critics and ”traitors” (disloyal servants) have a high propensity to fall from heights — the death usually occurs when the person is home alone and the doors are locked. Police can never discover any foul play.
The news on such “falls from heights” are published in local criminal chronicles and amplified by Kremlin bots online — it’s as much a punishment for disloyalty as it is a threat to these who might be thinking of defecting or voicing their views.
As to the locked doors, an infamous practice by the KGB was to get to apartments of Soviet dissidents when they were out and move some items or furniture. It was driving the people crazy and affecting their mental health.
Liquidating someone “cleanly” — no witnesses or something that the police could use to figure out what happened — and at the same time doing it in a way that is Putin’s “trademark”, brazenly, that’s the whole purpose of such acts.
Putin has perfected the art of gravity-assisted political censorship.
The person could be easily killed in a street and masked as a robbery went wrong — but Putin’s goal isn’t to just liquidate one critic. It’s to get rid of critics altogether.
Putin prefers his critics living in constant fear.
Russia isn’t a country.
It’s a KGB mafia state. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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WHAT THE GERMAN SOLDIERS THOUGHT ABOUT THE AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN WWII
German soldiers in World War II had different notions about their American enemies both in respect and criticism. German soldiers respected the bravery of the Americans but concluded that they were often not very experienced and relied too much on their better resources.
German soldiers realized that the Americans had the tendency of holding close together and thus exposing themselves during easy obvious movements. This was a total opposite of the Germans reliance on lurking and flexible quick movements. The more the Americans relied on heavy weapons and large supplies the more the Germans thought deeply about their tactical weaknesses.
colorized photo of American soldiers in WW2
Even with all these shortcomings the Germans admired how obstinate the Americans were and fought on even after such heavy losses. Sometimes they even felt that from their viewpoint was obstinacy or even fanaticism but still respected it.
German soldiers thought that because they had been present at the war for longer they understood more of its bitter truths. For their part the Americans were considered to be more optimistic and less prepared for the brutality of fighting.
The Germans were a little jealous of the Americans. It was almost as if the Americans had an unlimited supply while the German army was running out at every turn. The German soldiers thought the Americans were a peculiarly strange lot. They paid regard to the Americans for their bravery and sense of will but did not like their methods. They felt the Americans were tough fighters but also somewhat naive. ~ History Hist, Quora
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THE MOST IMPORTANT ACTION EISENHOWER EVER TOOK
The most noteworthy, important action Ike ever took was when the Allies found the German concentration/death camps, he ordered that the Germans living nearby be forced to go through the camps to be witnesses to all the horror. He said that people would later deny it had happened and he wanted plenty of eyewitnesses around to say it HAD happened. ~ Matthew Burgess, Quora
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Embarrassed Republicans Admit They've Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They've Been Praising Reagan (THE ONION)
WASHINGTON—At a press conference Monday, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight D. Eisenhower for years.
The GOP’s humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, who realized his party had been extolling “completely the wrong guy” after he watched the History Channel special Eisenhower: An American Portrait.
“When I heard about Eisenhower’s presidential accomplishments—holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets—it hit me that we’d clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point,” Priebus told reporters. “I couldn’t believe we’d been associating terms like ’visionary,’ ’principled,’ and ’bold’ with President Reagan. That wasn’t him at all—that was Ike.”
Following his discovery, Priebus directed RNC staffers to inform top Republicans of the error and explain that it was Eisenhower, not Reagan, who carefully managed the nation’s prosperity, warned citizens of the military-industrial complex’s growing influence, and led the country with a mix of firm resolve and humble compassion.
“Wait, you’re telling me Reagan advocated that trickle-down nonsense that was debunked years ago? That was Reagan?” Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said upon hearing of the mistake. “I can’t believe I’ve been calling for a return to Reagan’s America. I feel like an asshole.”
According to sources, millions of younger Republicans have spent most of their lives viewing Reagan a stalwart of conservative principles, and many were “horrified” to learn that the former president illegally sold weapons to Iran, declared amnesty for 2.9 million illegal immigrants, costarred in a movie with a chimpanzee, funneled aid to Islamic militants in Afghanistan, and suffered from severe mental problems.
In the wake of the GOP’s revelation, Congress has passed bills to rename Reagan National Airport and the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier in honor of Eisenhower. A number of potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders have also rushed to reframe their agendas in terms of “Eisenhower ideals” while distancing themselves from Reagan.
“It’s absolutely mortifying to suddenly realize that the man you had long credited as a champion of fiscal conservatism actually tripled the national debt and signed the largest peacetime tax hike in U.S. history,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, adding that he was ashamed to learn that the man he once called his hero stood by silently while the AIDS epidemic exploded.
“Frankly, I can’t even believe that fucker had the balls to call himself a conservative.”
“But we must move beyond this mess and look ahead toward our country’s future, a future much like the one envisioned by the great Ronald Reagan,” Gingrich added. “Oh, sorry—force of habit.”
The misplaced adulation of Reagan has reportedly affected more than just Republican rhetoric, and seems to have had an impact on policy. Former president George W. Bush told reporters he “honestly thought” everyone wanted him to follow in Reagan’s footsteps, which led him to emulate the 40th president’s out-of-control deficit spending, fealty to the super-rich, and illegal wars.
While the GOP’s error has gone largely unnoticed by the American public, a number of citizens admitted to having been puzzled by Republicans’ slavish celebration of Reagan during recent years.
“I never understood why everyone elevated him to the level of a party icon,” said 89-year-old Nancy Reagan. “Ronnie was certainly sweet and I loved him very much, but let’s face it, he was a terrible president.”
https://theonion.com/embarrassed-republicans-admit-theyve-been-thinking-of-e-1819572284/
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UNSURE IF TO HAVE CHILDREN? YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
It’s at least somewhat comforting to know that I’m not alone in feeling lost and confused about potential parenthood. More people are waiting to have kids, and a nationally representative survey estimates that one in five people over the age of 18 are childfree by choice. Those numbers are actually growing, says social psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, PhD, a professor at Michigan State University who researches childfree adults.
Despite these stats, the assumption that people should and will have kids still exists in our media, politics, and, of course, our social networks. Because of that societal given, people rarely grant themselves space to explore if they even want to have kids, says psychologist Lisette Sanchez, Ph.D., founder of Calathea Wellness.
Dr. Sanchez adds that, in her experience, people often conflate their values and desires with those projected onto them by family members, friends, or society at large. So the disconnect between what you want versus what you think you’re supposed to want can lead to cognitive dissonance, or the discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs at once, she explains.
THE BOOK THAT HELPED ME SORT THROUGH IT ALL
Last January, a year and a half after that OB/GYN appointment, a text from my friend Janet offered a way forward. “Are you still going back and forth about kids? I feel like I still am,” she wrote. We went on vacation the previous summer and had a long convo about how stuck we felt on this question.
She’d recently listened to a podcast where Ann Davidman, LMFT, co-author of Motherhood: Is It Meant for Me? shared her experiences working with women struggling with this decision. “I think this book might be worth checking out,” she wrote.
Normally, I’m not one for self-help books, but after months of obsessive thoughts, conversations with my therapist, and pros and cons lists that went nowhere, it was clear that I needed something to break through my indecisiveness. We decided to read this one together.
I was in for my annual exam, and my OB/GYN asked me all the usual questions: When was your last period? Any irregular symptoms? How’s the birth control working for you? When I mentioned that I had an IUD that was about to hit its five-year expiration date, she asked, “Well, what do you want to do?”
Indeed, what did I want to do? That simple question set off a chain reaction of doubt and confusion that would plague me for the next three years. My options—get a new IUD, switch to a different method of birth control, or go off birth control entirely—felt deeply tied to what my future could look like and whether there was a baby in it.
I was turning 30, newly married, and had recently overcome chronic work burnout by making a career pivot. My husband and I were buying our first house, and an obvious next step, as dictated by the American dream, was having children. And yet, here I was deeply confused and full of existential dread.
At that point, the assumption that I would eventually become a parent was already punctuating my life in a way it hadn’t before getting married. Family members recommended adding baby gates and childproofing measures to our home “just in case” any kids came along. But most of the time, the nudges were subtle: scrolling through Instagram and being inundated with pregnancy announcements and newborn photoshoots. Even getting my period every month felt like a reminder of what my body could do.
So, after that gyno appointment, I thought about motherhood constantly. I imagined Christmas mornings and family Halloween costumes, birthday parties, and bedtime stories. I held my newborn nephew in my arms and wondered what it would feel like to cradle a child of my own. At the same time, I picked at my doubts about having kids like a scab. I learned way too much about all the things that can go wrong in pregnancy. I made mental lists of everything that I wanted to accomplish before the life-changing event of parenting—and then, all of the things I would have to accomplish to justify not having a kid.
I didn’t fit into the narratives common among aspiring parents or the blissfully childfree. I have zero drive or longing to have a baby (and the girl with the list wasn’t exactly helping me see things differently, IYKYK). But I don’t dislike children either. I fell into some secret third category no one talks about: the ambivalent undecided.
The agony of ambivalence
I could be washing the dishes, going on a walk, taking a shower, or trying to fall asleep, and BAM! My brain asked, Will my husband resent me if we don’t have kids? Would having kids mess up our relationship? Would I be a terrible mother? Rebuttals from my logical brain—He has said multiple times this is not a dealbreaker. You’d probably be a fine mom—didn’t help. The endless worries and questions snowballed totally out of my control.
Not knowing what I wanted made me feel deeply insecure too. I was used to being clear-eyed, prepared for the next step, confident in my skills and abilities (classic overachieving Virgo). But this time, I had no gut feeling or intuition to guide me. I didn’t understand why this was so hard. Why didn’t I know this essential thing that was apparently so obvious to everyone else?
One of my lowest moments happened a year into my crisis, when my sister-in-law invited my husband and me to celebrate her first Mother’s Day. Normally, I would be thrilled, but this time, my anxious brain imagined fielding endless “You’re next!” comments, feeling like a freak for being the only childless woman present. Just the thought of gatherings dedicated to the question that haunted my every waking moment made me nauseous.
From the first page of the book, my confusion felt validated. “Are you struggling with not knowing if you want to have children? Does it seem like everyone else just knows, and you don’t?” Davidman and her co-author, a former psychotherapist, Denise L. Carlini wrote. Despite fluffy language, like “You are the definer of you,” and “With an open heart and a lucid mind…” I was willing to keep going.
The book, which Davidman describes as a self-guided version of the IRL workshops she and Carlini used to run back in the 90s, is structured into 12 chapters. Janet and I would complete one chapter a week, as the authors recommend, and set a recurring Zoom date to talk about what we learned.
At the beginning of the book, even before you start week one, the authors set some ground rules: Keep what you’re learning to yourself (with the exception of the buddy system Janet and I were using) and avoid the opinions or needs of people like your partner or your family.
Next, set aside what they call “externals” or factors like age, a partner’s desire for kids and the desires of extended family, and financial constraints. After all, the goal isn’t to figure out if you could have a kid, it’s whether you want to have one.
You’re also supposed to hit pause on your fears around procreation too. For me, those included being unhappy or terrible as a mother, pregnancy and childbirth (again, blame the girl with the list), being judged by my family for not having kids, and regretting my choice either way. I wrote them down in my notebook, ripped out the page, and tucked them into my desk.
Once that was done, we followed the same routine in each chapter: Read an overview of what to expect that week, do a guided visualization exercise, and then journal. We chased that with a short reading about the themes we explored in those two thought starters and sometimes there’d be an additional activity to do on your own. Honestly, it was a commitment.
MY JOURNEY TO FIGURING OUT WHAT I REALLY WANTED
Every week, I would start by turning off the lights in my office and shutting the door. Then I’d sit cross-legged on my couch and cue up the week’s visualization exercise audio from Carlini on my phone.
In theory, these visualization exercises were meant to help you imagine yourself doing or being somewhere else. Over the course of a few minutes, Carlini asked me to conjure up vivid encounters and experiences. In week three, for example, she asked us to walk on the beach. “While strolling along the sand, feel the warm sun on your skin, and the gentle breeze kissing your face,” Carlini said on the recording. She prompted me to look down the beach and see a little girl—aka my younger self. “Ask this little girl the following questions: ‘What do you need?’ ‘What do you want?’ How does she answer?”
This exercise, and every other visualization, left me seeing and feeling absolutely nothing. My failed attempts made me worry that I wasn’t getting the emotional insights I needed to make the right choice. Thankfully, the journaling part really worked for me. For example, even though I couldn’t picture my younger self in week three, I could write about the idea of her. The words came spilling out onto the page.
Despite pushing through most of the prompts, I questioned how certain themes or activities were helping me decide baby vs no baby. When we were asked to “try on” the decision of being childfree by writing a letter to the child we never had, I thought, Why should I have to apologize to a hypothetical kid in a hypothetical exercise? But Davidman argues, “It’s about slowly uncovering either wounds or unfinished business that needs a little more of your attention,” she says. The idea is that when you know what drives you, what’s important to you, etc., then you can make empowered decisions about your life.
Clarity finally came on week 11. There was an exercise that asked me to read the following question out loud, then record my first thought or feeling: “Do I want to be a mom, a mother, a parent?”
The first thought that came to my head: I’m not interested in being a parent. It was like a gut punch—if a gut punch could ever be a good thing. Then the book asked me to stand in front of a mirror, look myself in the eyes, and repeat the question (I know). But the same answer screamed back from inside my head. I’m not interested in being a parent.
Something deep inside of me clicked into place. I’m pretty sure I laughed out loud. It was really as simple as that: I’m not interested. Davidman says that these aha moments often happen by the time readers get to week 11. At that point in the program, she says, “You’ve done enough work, you’ve peeled back so many layers to see and feel the truth.”
My truth: This choice wasn’t about disliking kids or really even about being a good parent or a happy parent. The heart of the issue for me was about parenting itself. I quite literally was not interested in any aspect of that experience, good or bad. Baby milestones, tantrums, school pickups, soccer practice, skinned knees, sleepless nights…I could not imagine doing that for the rest of my life. All along, that lack of desire wasn’t confusion—it was a sign. Now, I had the courage to acknowledge it.
Making the decision
Knowing what I wanted was just the first step. “What feels right for you is one thing; what you decide to do about it is another thing,” Davidman says. For example, you might realize that you really want to have a child but you don’t have the financial stability to make it feasible right now. In my case, I knew that my desire to be childfree was opposite of my husband’s desire to have children. It was time to talk.
“I’ve had months now to work on this and figure this out for myself—I don’t expect you to automatically be OK with this,” I told my husband.
After processing his sadness with a therapist over the next few weeks, my husband felt stuck on what a childfree life could look like. I also wasn’t sure what to imagine once traditional, child-oriented milestones were out of the picture either. I suggested that we each identify our values and use those to figure out what a fulfilling life could look like. Then we could come together, share our lists, and see how they meshed.
My list: Make a legitimate attempt to write a novel, visit a new place every year, cultivate a close “auntie” relationship with my nephew and my friends’ kids, and make my community organizing work more sustainable over the long term.
When my husband and I came back together, I was actually surprised to see how aligned we were. We finally had some direction: We’d live near our nephew, renew my passport and book a trip ASAP, commit to tackling home improvement projects, and create new traditions that were meaningful to us. The work we put in made the future feel like one of possibilities rather than question marks.
I still worry about certain, more traditional family members treating me differently. But the confidence I have in my own vision (plus, the guidance of my therapist) will help me navigate that with more self-compassion. “You can’t stop someone from being judgemental,” Davidman says. “But you have to keep owning your truth.”
As with any decision, there’s sadness and grief about closing a door. That’s normal, too. But this time last year, I couldn’t have imagined I’d be free of the pain of ambivalence.
That thought would have put me into an anxious tailspin last year. But I reminded myself that I was enjoying this right now; there was nothing to miss. This moment, and all the others I hope to have as an auntie, were all that I needed.
https://www.wondermind.com/article/deciding-to-be-childfree/#:~:text=Dr.%20Sanchez%20adds%20that%2C%20in%20her%20experience%2C,holding%20conflicting%20beliefs%20at%20once%2C%20she%20explains
Oriana:
It occurred to me that this decision is very different from the decision to leave the church. One day (I should have noticed the date, but all I remember is that I’d just turned fourteen, so it was spring moist with lilacs), a thought passed through my mind, “This is just another mythology.”And that was it.I couldn’t unthink that thought. There was no going back.
I was tempted to write: A thought BLAZED ini my mind, evoking lightning that would seem appropriate to the life-changing seriousness of the occasion. But actually it was a very quiet thought. It didn’t blaze. It didn’t shout. It didn’t race. Nor did it linger. It felt very ordinary — while, given my strict Catholic background, it was perhaps the most extraordinary and daring thought I ever had.
I certainly didn’t prepare (or read) a page that listed the benefits and disadvantages of being a practicing Catholic. Nor did I compare evidence for with evidence against. There comes a moment when you simply know. Even if you choose to call yourself an agnostic — the most intellectually respectable position — every cell in you body knows. True, the decisive moment may have been prepared by two years of tormenting doubt, but in my case at least that one brief moment decided all. I realize that not just my whole life was on the line, but my whole eternity. That couldn’t stop the “mythology’ thought. Perhaps nothing can stop an insight for which we are fully ready.
I am bringing it up because I remember a woman at a writers’ conference who said the same about having or not having a child. “That decision is too huge to be made consciously,” she said without hesitation. You either want a child at least to some degree, or else you get pregnant by accident; in the pressure cooker of circumstances a clarity will emerge. (Or, as the article suggests, a clarity will come in another way — by asking yourself a certain question, for instance — but that clarity will emerge.)
In retrospect, in my case certain crucial statements played a role. Gloria Steinem, “I couldn’t give birth to myself and also to another human being.” A male friend, father of two, said, “Don’t kid yourself, you wouldn’t be intellectually where you are if you’ve had a child." When I confided to a mother of five that I’d like a quiet, introverted child, she replied, “They turn out as they turn out and you have no control over it.” And the image of a loud, aggressive boy without a single intellectual interest under his macho haircut entered my mind like an alien from another universe. The horror, the horror . . .
Ultimately it was the circumstances more than anything else, the lack of affordable help being the decisive factor. I realized that there is no completely satisfying answer. The pluses and the minuses pretty much cancel out. No matter what the decision, you lose and you gain, gain and lose. There was no way I would not resent carrying around my own unborn self if I had to cut short my education and my already delayed intellectual and creative journey.
Perhaps my greatest surprise was the discovery that I rather liked myself, quiet and introverted, and didn’t want that self to be erased. The most frightening statement was “Motherhood really changes you.” For all my fumbling and stumbling, I rather liked the way I was: solitary, intellectual, unpredictably creative, sometimes funny — my own best entertainer. I was never bored. I often surprised myself. There was no void to be filled. Or to put in in a different way, there was no mental space for an enormously demanding little person. Just a love relationship was almost too overwhelming. Once in a while, even a cat felt like too much.
Did I sometimes fantasize what a child of mine would be like? Of course. And cultural warfare immediately entered into it. I could imagine myself saying clearly, “Don’t ever, ever call me ‘mom’.” To me that was a word that always preceded a demand, and the subtext of that demand was “Erase yourself.”
My dream child would invent an entirely different name for me, just as I invented different names for my parents. And that invented word would be both a caress and a secret affirmation that we belonged to each other, part of a private language. But, as an older friend, a mother of five, kept reminding me, you can never count on that. They turn out as they do with little say from us, and “each one is different.”
All these points are valid, but nothing swayed me like the perfectly humdrum question in a woman’s magazine I leafed through once in a checkout line at a supermarket (I really should have noted the date, but often you don’t realize a turning point until later). The question was simple: “If you couldn’t have a biological child, would you be willing to adopt?” Without a nanosecond of hesitation, I answered NO. And that showed me that the last thing I wanted was a child as child — now, my “own” child, that fantasy of a “little me” — all that lay clearly exposed.
And it’s not really that I don’t like children. I don’t like certain kinds of children. I especially don’t like screamers. But I adore quiet, smart, bright children. The fun we’d have going places, and at bedtime readings (I happen to be a dramatic reader, or, as my partner describes it, a “hamstress”). But there was always that friend’s voice too, the voice of the mother of five (“one for a each different kind of birth control”) It was her voice of experience which said, “They don’t turn out the way you want then to turn out. And there is nothing you can do about it.”
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DO WE HAVE SOME STUDIES ON PARENTAL INFLUENCE?
A new study co-authored by Joshua Jackson, the Saul and Louise Rosenzweig Associate Professor in Personality Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, explores how parents’ personalities — boisterous or reserved, agreeable or cranky, concerned or care-free — can shape the lives of their children, for better or worse.
THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS.
Extraversion is a measure of how outgoing and energetic a person is. Agreeableness refers to being cooperative and getting along with others. Openness relates to creativity and imagination. Conscientious people are organized, deliberate and careful. Neurotic people are generally anxious, worried and nervous.
The study involved nearly 9,400 kids aged 11-17 and their parents who participated in a German survey that has been running since 1984. Researchers considered the so-called “big five” traits psychologists use to describe personality in broad strokes: Extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.
The survey also included measures of the kids’ lives, including their overall health, grades in school, use of alcohol or cigarettes, the amount of time spent on leisure activities — beyond watching TV or surfing the Internet — and the frequency of family arguments.
The research, led by graduate student Amanda Wright, was published recently in Infant and Child Development. Below, Jackson explained the findings and the impact a parent’s personality can have on their kids.
THE MAJOR FINDINGS
We found that parent personalities have a significant impact on a child’s life, even after taking the child’s personality into account. A child’s personality matters, of course, but parents have a special and important impact on their kids.
For example, kids with extraverted parents tended to have lower grades. Kids with neurotic parents scored relatively low on several measures, including grades, overall health, body mass index (BMI), and time spent on leisure activities.
On the other hand, kids were likely to be healthier if their parents scored high on measures of agreeableness or conscientiousness, and they were more likely to stay active with hobbies if their parents scored high in openness.
We can only speculate why certain personality traits had on impact. We suspect that maybe extraverted parents are less likely to emphasize studying and homework. Maybe they are encouraging their kids to socialize instead of study, or maybe the parents are too busy with their own lives to help with homework. But there’s no way to know for sure from this data set.
In general, kids do particularly well if their parents are extraverted, agreeable, conscientious and open without being neurotic. That’s probably something close to the best-case scenario, but even that combination can have some downsides. As noted, kids with extraverted parents tend to have lower grades.
A child’s own personality definitely makes a big difference. For example, we found that kids tended to have better grades if they were extraverted, agreeable, open and conscientious, but they had worse grades if they were neurotic.
Extraverted kids were more likely to smoke or drink, but being open, conscientious or agreeable had the opposite effect.
There were only a few cases where the personalities of children and parents seemed to work in synergy. It’s clearest with family arguments. Arguments are less common when either parents or children score high on agreeability. When both parents and children are agreeable, arguments dwindle dramatically. Also, we found that the highest grades were achieved by non-neurotic kids who had non-neurotic parents.
There was also some negative synergy. Here’s one interesting example: neurotic kids with neurotic parents tended to have the highest BMIs.
DO KIDS GENERALLY END UP WITH SIMILAR PERSONALITIES AS THEIR PARENTS?
Lots of people eventually have the feeling that they’re growing into their parents. It’s almost proverbial that a woman finds herself becoming like her mother. But at least in terms of research into personality traits, “the connection is not strong. For example, it’s not at all uncommon for extraverted parents to have introverted children and vice versa. At first, that may seem surprising. But if you have siblings, you know that there can be a lot of differences between people who grow up in the same household. One of the reasons I went into personality research is because my sister and I are completely opposite. If we had absorbed our personalities directly from our parents, we’d be much more alike.”
CAN PARENTS USE THAT INFORMATION TO CHANGE THEIR STYLE?
“That question really gets to the heart of a lot of my work. So much of our personality is really beyond our control. If you’re introverted, you can’t suddenly become extraverted. But it is possible to change certain daily behaviors, especially if we’re aware of the consequences. We found that kids are likely to be healthier if their parents are conscientious. That’s very likely because conscientious parents encourage exercise and healthy eating.
It’s a good lesson for everyone. Personalities are largely set, but behaviors can change.”
https://source.washu.edu/2023/03/how-parents-personalities-shape-childrens-lives/
Oriana:
I like that last statement. Don’t think in terms of personalities; think in terms of behaviors. Behaviors can be changed.
As long as I thought of myself as having a “depressive personality,” I felt stuck. Once I redefined depression as a set of behaviors, e.g. brooding about past mistakes, I could choose not to engage in that behavior. It was a life-changing discovery!
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ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS
Atmospheric river storms have wreaked havoc on the West Coast, and are getting bigger. Scientists chase them in the sky to predict where they will strike.
In January 2024, Anna Wilson was sitting aboard a Gulfstream IV jet, observing a deceptively calm-looking sea of white clouds over the northern Pacific Ocean. Through her headphones, Wilson — an atmospheric scientist and extreme weather expert — could hear her colleague give a countdown. At the back of the plane, another colleague dropped slim, cylindrical instruments through a chute, into the brewing storm below them, to measure its strength as it approached the US West Coast.
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A drenching start to the 2024-25 atmospheric river season
The US Pacific Northwest was hit with heavy snow, rain and high winds on 20 November, 2024, brought by a combination of a strong storm, or "bomb cyclone," in combination with an atmospheric river.
Known as "rivers in the sky,” atmospheric rivers are ribbons of water vapor. Each can be several hundreds of kilometers wide, and transport 27 times as much water as the Mississippi River. When they hit the coast and travel upwards, the release masses of snow or rain. In recent seasons, they have become bigger and more frequent in the US and elsewhere around the world.
The US National Weather Service has advised people in northern California and Washington to stay safe in the hazardous weather.
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Research suggests that atmospheric rivers are getting bigger, more frequent and more extreme, due to climate change; and the damage they cause is getting worse.
They are born in warm oceans, as seawater evaporates, rises and moves to cooler latitudes. When the vapor reaches a coast, such as California, it flows up a mountain, cools, and comes down as rain or snow – enough to wash down hillsides causing landslides, and bring torrential rain, floods and deadly avalanches.
On the US West Coast, atmospheric rivers bring the heaviest rains, warmest storms, major floods, extreme coastal winds, and landslides. They can come in groups – known as "families" – with several of them striking a place within days.
The basic questions remain the same for each atmospheric river, says Wilson, a field research manager at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. "Where is it going to make landfall? How strong will it be? How long will it last? And we continue to get better at [answering] that," she says.
The flight Wilson was on in January was part of Atmospheric River Reconnaissance, or AR Recon, a joint project with the US Air Force, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and other partners. Using "hurricane hunter" aircraft normally deployed for observing hurricanes – the NOAA Gulfstream jet, as well as two or more Air Force aircraft – teams of scientists fly over atmospheric rivers, and drop instruments called dropsondes into them.
"Atmospheric rivers are interesting and cool but you can't see them, actually, because it's water vapor," Wilson says. "And they're really close to the surface — they are usually focused on the lowest few kilometers of the atmosphere."
Wilson points out that they tend to travel under cloud cover, which hides them from conventional weather observation tools like satellites. "It's really hard for the satellites to sort of see through that, to what's going on at the near-surface. So the point of flying the aircraft through them is to be able to drop our sensors, and get these foundational meteorological measurements – temperature, air pressure, wind and moisture," she says.
The atmospheric rivers Wilson and her team were monitoring in January were part of a series of 51 atmospheric rivers that hit Washington, Oregon and California between autumn 2023 and spring 2024, 13 more than the previous season. Knowing when and where such a storm will arrive, and how powerful it is, helps people on land prepare for what's coming, and for example, empty the right reservoirs in time. But Wilson and her colleagues' flights, which started in 2016, are also part of a wider scientific effort to better understand atmospheric rivers — including their surprising benefits.
As extreme weather specialists are quick to point out, atmospheric rivers are not necessarily destructive. On the contrary, they can be life-sustaining.
"We need [atmospheric rivers] – without them in the West we have droughts," Wilson says. Up to two-thirds of the West Coast's droughts are brought to an end by the arrival of an atmospheric river – they are known as drought busters.
"There is a beneficial side of atmospheric rivers," agrees Bin Guan, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We tend to highlight the hazardous side but we have to remember that they provide important water supply in dry regions, such as California." Overall, they contribute up to 50% of California's rain and snow.
On the west coast of the US and Canada, atmospheric rivers have been known as the "Pineapple Express" due to their presumed origins near Hawaii.
However, Guan says that name is rarely used amongst experts, since atmospheric rivers are a global phenomenon, and many of the ones hitting the West Coast in fact originate much further away than Hawaii. In October 2017, an unusually long atmospheric river extended roughly 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from Japan to Washington.
In 2019, researchers created a scale to rank atmospheric rivers from one (weak, producing modest rainfall) to five (exceptional, primarily hazardous) to give a more nuanced picture of them.
"The mild ones are considered beneficial for the water supply. Only the very extreme ones are hazardous," says Qian Cao, a hydrologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "So it has both good sides and downsides, it doesn't only lead to bad events here.”
Predicting atmospheric rivers is key to limiting their destructive side, but is difficult, Cao says. For a start, they develop over the ocean, where there are fewer ways of observing them than on land. They then travel thousands of kilometers, and during that journey, can stall, intensify, weaken, get warmer or cooler, and interact with other atmospheric rivers, or remnants of them. Any of these changes will affect their impact, she says.
Strategies such as forecast-informed reservoir operations, which use weather and water forecasting to help water managers decide whether to empty their reservoirs in expectation of massive rainfall, can help cope with them, she says.
"If we can forecast or predict these atmospheric rivers better, if we can predict them more accurately, with longer lead times, then we have more time to make operational decisions, for example, whether we want to release water or save water in the reservoirs," says Cao. Forecasts are most accurate in the short term, for lead times of three to five days, she says, and their accuracy decreases with longer lead times. "Researchers are working very hard to improve forecasts beyond week two," she adds, since having a month or more to prepare would give people on the ground more options.
This is where the AR Recon flights come in, looking inside the sky rivers, where other instruments can't reach.
For Wilson's team, each flight begins with a forecast meeting in the morning, discussing existing forecasts of rain and snow in the US in the coming days. They identify areas of uncertainty that could be improved through more data on the atmospheric river that is bringing the expected rain or snow. They then fly to that atmospheric river, and collect the required data with the dropsondes.
"The purpose of these targeted reconnaissance flights is to fill gaps, when we know the satellites have a difficult time seeing," Wilson says.
Each Gulfstream flight lasts around eight hours – and as Wilson says, one vital bit of practical preparation is to bring your own food. The instruments transmit the data to the team aboard the aircraft, who check it and transmit it to the Global Telecommunications System, a World Meteorological Organization service that collects and distributes global weather-related data. It is then picked up by forecasting models, which use the data together with hundreds of millions of other observations, including from satellites. The now more accurate forecasts, enhanced by the dropsonde data, are shared with reservoir operators and emergency responders.
Studies suggest that the dropsonde data indeed helps improve forecasts, with a recent analysis recommending that future missions involve daily flights and both the Gulfstream jet and Air Force aircraft, to gather as much data as possible. The team are also using other technologies to collect information, as well as working on modeling systems, to further improve forecasts and deepen their understanding of individual storms.
This race to understand atmospheric rivers is especially urgent, researchers say, as studies suggest they are changing, and becoming more frequent – and potentially, becoming more devastating.
Mengqian Lu is an associate professor in hydrometeorology and water resources at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She and her team published a global study in January 2024 projecting their future intensity, frequency and associated rainfall and snowfall around the world. According to their projections, the global frequency of atmospheric rivers could almost double by the end of this century. But what exactly that means on the ground varies from region to region, the study suggests.
"In general, the more frequent and stronger [the atmospheric river], the more frequent and stronger rainfall it brings – but the translation is not one-to-one because the climate system is non-linear, rather chaotic," Lu says.
What seems likely is that as the atmosphere warms with climate change, it will be able to hold increasing levels of moisture. "As a result we expect to see more frequent and stronger atmospheric rivers," she says.
Because of their role in transporting heat as well as moisture, knowing how atmospheric rivers will change as climate continues to warm up is essential for understanding the broader impact of global warming, Lu says. For instance, atmospheric rivers bringing warmth have triggered the melting of ice shelves in West Antarctica.
A growing body of research highlights their impact around the world. In East Asia, they contribute up to 90% of extreme rainfall in the warm seasons, and have caused floods and landslides.
They can affect multiple locations, with several places experiencing disastrous weather at the same time, or in close succession, as atmospheric rivers might bring snow and blizzards to one region, and rain and severe floods to another.
They can also form vicious cycles with other disasters, such as wildfires, causing mudslides in areas scarred by fire where the lack of vegetation makes the soil less absorbent and vulnerable to erosion. They can also drive fast plant growth that turns into fuel for the next fire, leading to an increase in the burned areas the following season, research suggests.
An atmospheric river storm moves into the Santa Ynez Valley in California in January 2024
Back-to-back atmospheric rivers – one after the other, bringing seemingly endless rain – are also becoming more common, studies suggest. From late December 2022 to mid-January 2023, nine atmospheric rivers hit California in a row, resulting in floods, landslides and power outages. As the authors of one study point out, such clusters can mean the drenched soil cannot dry out in between the storms, making flooding more likely.
"In the western US, atmospheric rivers account for nearly 90% of the flood damages, totalling more than $1bn (£80m) a year. This number could double or even triple by the end of this century based on climate model projections of changes in atmospheric rivers," Guan says.
Nor do they always carry water vapour alone. In 2021, they drove Saharan dust from Africa to Europe, darkening the snow in the Alps, reducing its reflectiveness, bringing heat, and reducing snow depth by 50%.
Given this global scale and complexity, how can we cope with atmospheric rivers?
Cao says we need to recognize how climate change is altering them, and adopt more sustainable development measures to fight global warming. Early warning systems, public awareness and more accurate and sophisticated forecasts are also crucial in helping us be prepared, she says – as well as understanding which weather patterns and climate conditions help generate atmospheric rivers in the first place.
Meanwhile, it may be at least some comfort to know that hundreds of dropsondes are falling through these mysterious storms each year, collecting data that makes them more predictable.
Wilson says the mission gives her hope, especially the work with responders on land, such as the emergency operations center in California: "It's a really awesome feeling as a scientist to work on something that is so immediately applicable. This is making an impact right now for people on the ground," she says.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240509-how-to-forecast-the-next-atmospheric-river-storms
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FOOD OF THE FUTURE? WHAT YOU COULD BE EATING BY 2050
Scientists have drawn up a list of little-known plants that could be on the menu by 2050.
In the future, you could be breakfasting on false banana or snacking on pandanus tree fruit.
The Ukraine war has highlighted the dangers of relying on a few globally-traded crops.
With 90% of calories coming from just 15 crops, experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London are hunting for ingredients to future-proof our diets.
Climate change is increasing the risk of severe 'food shocks' where crops fail and prices of staples rise rapidly around the world.
Diversifying the food we eat is one of the solutions to alleviating hunger, addressing biodiversity loss, and helping to adapt to climate change, says Kew researcher, Dr Sam Pirinon.
"We know that there are thousands of edible plant species across the world that are consumed by different populations and this is where we can find some of the solutions for these global challenges of the future," he says.
Of more than 7,000 edible plants worldwide, only 417 are widely grown and used for food.
THE PANDANUS
The pandanus (Pandanus tectorius) is a small tree that grows in coastal areas from the Pacific Islands to the Philippines. The leaves are used to flavor sweet and savory dishes across much of Southeast Asia, while the pineapple-like fruit can be eaten raw or cooked.
The tree can tolerate challenging conditions, including drought, strong winds and salt spray, says research fellow at Kew, Dr Marybel Soto Gomez.
"It is a climate resilient and nutritious food that is also delicious," she says. "It would be great to diversify our food portfolio to include food that is culturally appropriate, nutritious, and can be grown in challenging conditions all around the world.”
If the pandanus can be used sustainably, without depleting resources for local people, we should be growing it more widely, she says.
BEANS
Beans, or legumes, are another ''food of the future". They are cheap, high in proteins and B-vitamins, and they are adapted to a wide range of environments from ocean shores to mountain slopes.
There are 20,000 species of legumes in the world, but we use only a handful. It's thought there are hundreds in the wild as yet unknown to scientists.
A legume plant growing in the Temperate House at Kew.
The morama bean (Tylosema esculentum) is a staple in parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, where the beans are boiled with maize or ground to a powder to make porridge or a cocoa-like drink.
Not all legumes are edible, but experts are exploring the properties of different species to see which ones might provide food and nutrients.
Wild Cereals
Cereals, which come from grasses, also have huge diversity, with more than 10,000 species - offering lots of potential for new foods.
Fonio (Digitaria exilis) is a nutritious African cereal used to make couscous, porridge and drinks. Cultivated locally as a crop, the plant can tolerate dry conditions.
Fonio, a grain used in West Africa, is high in iron, calcium and vitamins
False Banana
Enset or "false banana" is a close relative of the banana, but is consumed only in one part of Ethiopia.
The banana-like fruit of the plant is inedible, but the starchy stems and roots can be fermented and used to make porridge and bread..jpg)
Studies suggest the banana-like crop has the potential to feed more than 100 million people in a warming world.
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KEW GARDENS PREPARES FOR TREE LOSS CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE
More than 11,000 native and foreign species currently grow at the world-famous 320-acre site in west London
More than half of Kew Gardens' 11,000 trees could be at risk before the end of the century due to the effects of climate change, its scientists have warned.
These could include English oak, beech, silver birch and holly trees, which they say could be vulnerable to warmer temperatures and longer dry spells.
They say they have already started trying to replace them by planting more species currently found in warmer countries in southern Europe, Asia and Central America.
This means the world-famous site in west London "will certainly look different" by then, one of its curators says.
In a new report, Planting for the Future, researchers say species such as fagres' fir, Iberian alder, cherry hackberry and Montezuma's pine are among those that are likely to withstand our projected climate conditions and could be planted there.
Simon Toomer, curator for living collections at Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew told BBC News that while the gardens would look different in 50-80 years' time, they would remain recognizable:
"I think there will be some really quite novel species that people that associate with glasshouses at the moment.
"You know, there might be a few more palms in the in the landscape where they are drought tolerant, but there will also be a real familiarity.
"And that's because a lot of the species that were planted, you know, even back in Victorian times were plants from around the Mediterranean.”
However, the authors believe that some native species, such as oak and birch, are likely to remain resilient if the seeds are sourced from countries with warmer and drier climates.
RBG Kew scientists have already started this work, making trips to countries such as Romania and Serbia, Mr Toomer said.
The report follows the loss of more than 400 trees Kew Gardens as a result of the drought in 2022. This was in comparison with an average annual loss of about 30 trees.
This prolonged dry spell seen by parts of the UK was the type of event that scientists warn we will experience more often, as the global temperature rises, due to greenhouse emissions.
Scientists at RBG Kew have been using modeling which looks at Kew's weather station data, climate projections, global tree data and details of the current collection, as well as empirical testing. They say the result of this study suggested 54% of trees at Kew could be vulnerable by 2090.
The results of additional modeling were more optimistic, suggesting about a third of Kew's trees would be at risk.
The RBG Kew believes there is an "urgent need" for this type of plan to be adopted nationally across all parks and urban spaces to protect the UK landscapes for the future.
Richard Barley, a director at RBG Kew said the "succession plan" drawn up was a "broad call to diversify the plants we select for our landscapes”.
"By focusing on resilience and adaptability we hope to show it is possible to mitigate the severe impacts of climate change in both urban spaces and gardens such as Kew.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3g9404p30po
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THE ST. BRICE DAY MASSACRE
The sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred the Unready paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of England. Three years later a sum variously recorded as £16,000 or £22,000 was given. In 1002 they were back: this time they got £34,000. No one could say that Æthelred didn’t try bribery first.
But what then? The answer, it seems, was butchery. On St Brice’s Day, 13 November 1002, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says Æthelred ‘ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain’. His motive? ‘The king had been informed that they would treacherously deprive him, and then all his councillors, of life, and possess this kingdom afterwards’, as the chronicle notes. ‘Without any opposition’, one version adds, although Æthelred’s reputation for indolence suggests his capacity to oppose anything was limited.
Who precisely was targeted? Probably settlers. A charter of 1004 refers to those attacked as ‘the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle [weeds] among the wheat’. Mass graves have been found in Oxford and Dorset.
However many died, the massacre did not work. The Vikings returned in greater force; in 1007 Æthelred had to pay them £36,000. Within months of his death in 1016 they seized England itself.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/st-brices-day-massacre?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=98856456a9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-98856456a9-1214148&mc_cid=98856456a9
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PARACELSUS: REVOLUTIONARY OR MYSTIC?
Portrait of Paracelsus, copy of a lost original by Quentin Massys, c.1528-30
Thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst luxuriated in a massive budget for the dramatized documentary he shot in occupied Prague during the autumn of 1942. Commissioned to celebrate the long history of Germanic culture, its central character was a 16th-century demagogue, a revisionary doctor who toured the country inciting enthusiastic crowds to dispense with conventional practices and adopt his own inspiring visions for a utopian future.
The starring role was played by Werner Krauss, a fine actor but also a fervent Nazi supporter. Bearing only a loose relationship to historical fact, the plot revolved around attempts to ward off an infectious plague – or, metaphorically, to cleanse society of undesirable parasites. A clear piece of propaganda, Pabst’s Paracelsus was a box-office flop, although – in contrast with Krauss – the director managed to salvage his reputation after the Third Reich collapsed.
Becoming Paracelsus
The real Paracelsus (c.1493-1541) was, indeed, an unorthodox and controversial physician, a confrontational iconoclast only later glorified for introducing modern medical techniques. Depending on which artist you believe, he may (or may not) have been fat, but he certainly had a substantial name: Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Ironically, the original Theophrastus had been the immediate successor of Aristotle, one of the ancient Greek authorities the Renaissance radical was determined to overthrow.
Refashioned as Paracelsus, he excelled at rhetorical oratory, winning popular acclaim by using vernacular language to lambast the tortuous prose of conventional experts. Recalling Martin Luther’s flamboyant gesture, on St John’s Day (24 June) 1527 he threw a collection of canonical books onto a public bonfire. ‘I tell you’, he ranted to a scholarly audience, ‘one hair on my neck knows more than all you authors, and my shoe-buckles contain more wisdom than both Galen and Avicenna.’ In one fell swoop, Paracelsus had dismissed two of Europe’s reigning medical authorities.
Consistency was not his strong point: this showman who publicly consigned books to the flames was himself a prodigious author. Openly contemptuous of scholarly learning – ‘not even a dog-killer can learn his trade from books’ – he wrote copiously about the importance of abandoning libraries to learn from the great ‘Book of Nature’. Only a small proportion of his output was published during his lifetime, but his ideas spread rapidly and 50 years after his death the first collection of his works ran to ten volumes. Another favorite theme was to boast about his humble origins and plebeian influences – ‘I have not been ashamed to learn from tramps, butchers and barbers’ – even though he had benefited from a sound education as a child and gained a doctorate in medicine from the University of Ferrara.
As a young man, Paracelsus travelled around Europe for several years before falling into a pattern of behavior that repeated itself for the rest of his life. Wherever he temporarily took up residence, he baited his fellow academics by donning an alchemist’s leather apron to lecture in German rather than Latin, as well as deliberately insulting recognized experts, vociferously condemning orthodox treatments and acquiring a reputation for drunkenness and gluttony. As a consequence, every time he established himself as a professor or physician – first at Basel, then at Nuremberg and elsewhere – he rapidly antagonized his colleagues and was forced to move on.
Chemical cure
According to the views of the time, each individual body is characterized by its own finely tuned balance of four different humors that affect behavior as well as appearance: sickness results not from invasion by germs, but from an internal humoral imbalance. Doctors therefore emphasized the importance of restoring a patient’s natural equilibrium. In the absence of antibiotics or anesthetics, they proceeded cautiously, their most frequent interventions being to let blood or smell urine.
Paracelsus, in contrast, taught that external agents could produce specific disorders. For example, gout – one of the period’s more common maladies – was routinely attributed to a surplus of humoral fluid, but Paracelsus regarded it as a dietary disease. Bragging about the low incidence of gout in his native Switzerland (according to his characteristically overblown rhetoric, the country was ‘superior to … all Western and Eastern Europe’), he suggested that salts in the water supply were coagulating inside the joints to produce painful nodules resembling gallstones or dental tartar.
Paracelsus’ main innovation was to prescribe chemical treatments. Although that might sound like a precursor of modern medicine, it was rooted in ancient alchemical lore. Alchemists deliberately couched their precepts in arcane mystical terms, both to protect their techniques from being copied and to preserve their aura of esoteric superiority; as a result, many of Paracelsus’ ideas defy easy interpretation. Fundamentally, he maintained that there are three primary idealized principles corresponding to different aspects of existence. Confusingly, the members of this ‘tria prima’ are referred to as salt, sulphur and mercury, which, although different from the physical substances carrying the same labels, can imbue metals and minerals with therapeutic or poisonous qualities.
Paracelsus is frequently celebrated as the ‘father of toxicology’ because he recognized the principle that the same substance can have either deleterious or beneficial effects, depending on the quantity imbibed – or, as he put it: ‘Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.’ Some of his other recommendations are preserved in modern medical practices, although these are often picked out selectively to give him more credit than he merits. Thus he insisted that wounds should be kept clean rather than covered in cow dung or feathers, and he provided recipes for various liniments and skin balms. After studying syphilis, he concluded that it could be inherited or acquired through contact, and his prescription of mercury was still being used in the 20th century. Often said to have introduced opium into Europe, he also suggested that iron was beneficial for blood and endorsed drinking water from mineral springs.
The Doctrine of Signatures
Like many self-professed revolutionaries, Paracelsus was less radical than he claimed. In particular, he endorsed an ancient religious philosophy known as ‘the doctrine of signatures’, which maintained that God had coded the natural world with symbols so that it could be interpreted for human benefit. Plants that resembled parts of the body could be used therapeutically: ‘Nature marks each growth … according to its curative benefit’, he declared.
A physician examines a urine sample in Von der frantzösischen Kranckheit (About the French Diseases), 1553.
St John’s Wort, for instance, was recommended for dermatological complaints, because its leaves are punctured with little holes like the pores of the skin, while the large growths of tree fungi were prescribed for tumors. Some vernacular names of plants still convey their herbal significance, such as eyebright (euphrasia), traditionally used for soothing conjunctivitis because the flowers look like blue eyes. Even some Latinized Linnean labels carry this cultural memory, including toothwort (dentaria) and lungwort (pulmonaria); conversely, orchitis – inflammation of the testicles – gained its name from the shape of orchid roots, which were used to treat venereal diseases and improve potency.
Regarded superficially, the doctrine of signatures can be made to sound ridiculous. Taken more seriously, it expressed a profound faith in a universe imbued with God’s intentions. Philosophically, it played on the close interaction of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the view that the very small has similar characteristics to the larger structure in which it is embedded. Thus the human body was often said to be the microcosm of the universe, while Isaac Newton professed that the dimensions of King Solomon’s temple as deduced from biblical sources would guide him towards God’s blueprint for the macrocosm of creation.
Look for yourself
Paracelsus stressed that a successful physician must lead a virtuous life and pray for God’s guidance in searching out divine signs in the world. Close observation was of paramount importance, whether deciphering the symbolic language of the plants or tracking the course of an illness. ‘The patients are your text book, the sickbed is your study’, he admonished his rivals.
Just two years after Paracelsus died Andreas Vesalius – the most famous anatomist of the Renaissance – delivered the same message through his extraordinary drawings. Until then, students had learnt about the human body by listening to professors as they read aloud from books perpetuating ideas that were more than 1,000 years old. Like Paracelsus, Vesalius insisted that for physicians of the future, the way forward lay in looking for themselves and learning from their experience.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/great-debates/paracelsus-revolutionary-or-mystic?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=07101bc3bb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-07101bc3bb-1214148&mc_cid=07101bc3bb
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SURPRISING FINDINGS ON COVID AND CANCER
Viruses don’t often come with silver linings, and infections don’t generally lead to positive health effects. But during the pandemic, some doctors anecdotally began noticing that some people with cancer who got very sick with COVID-19 saw their tumors shrink or grow more slowly.
“We didn’t know if it was real, because these patients were so sick,” says Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern University. “Was it because the immune system was so triggered by COVID-19 that it also started to kill cancer cells? What was it?”
Bharat and his team decided conduct a study to find out if the seeming “benefit” of COVID-19 for these cancer patients could teach them anything about a potential new way to fight cancer—or if it was simply a red herring. They published their findings Nov. 15 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Using a combination of human cells and animal models, Bharat and his team found that in the presence of SARS-CoV-2, immune cells called monocytes act differently than they normally do. Typically, monocytes, as part of the immune system, cruise the bloodstream and alert other immune cells to the presence of foreign cells or pathogens; some monocytes can attract cancer-killing immune cells to tumors, but others aren't as effective in doing so. That's because in some cases, cancer cells can co-opt monocytes —“like a demon summoning forces,” says Bharat—and form an immune wall protecting the tumor from being discovered and attacked by additional immune defenses.
But during a COVID-19 infection, SARS-CoV-2 attaches itself to these monocytes, and by doing so reverts them back to doing their original job: defending the body against cancer. “They look the same, and are still recruited to the tumor sites, but instead of protecting the cancer cells, they start to bring specific natural killer cells—which are the body’s main cells that kill cancer—to these tumor sites,” says Bharat. “So where before the cancer was brainwashing the monocytes into protecting the cancer, the virus now helps them to attack cancer.”
It’s a potentially powerful turnabout that—if confirmed by human studies—could represent a new way to control cancer. By analyzing the receptor on the monocytes that the COVID-19 virus attached to, Bharat found a compound that currently isn’t used to treat any disease but is a close mimic of the COVID-19 virus in the way that it binds to the monocyte to induce the cell’s transformation into a cancer-fighting cell. “We can use a drug to cause the same effect that the RNA of the COVID-19 virus was doing,” he says. “By manipulating that pathway through the drug, we might be able to help patients with many different types of cancers, particularly those with stage 4 cancers.”
In animal tests, the compound—called muramyl dipeptide (MDP)—reduced tumors by 60% to 70% in mice with human cancers including breast, colon, lung, and melanoma.
More studies are needed to confirm whether the cells have the same cancer-fighting effect in people, but there are promising hints. These transformed, cancer-flagging monocytes, called inducible non-classical monocytes, are rare compared to other types of monocytes, but tend to proliferate when inflammation occurs, such as during a COVID-19 infection.
Transplant surgeons have previously identified them in people who have had lung and spleen transplants, and Bharat is conducting additional research to understand why the transplant process and COVID-19 infections—both of which activate the immune system—trigger the specific change in the monocytes.
Interestingly, the transformation doesn’t occur with all RNA-based viruses. Bharat tested influenza and parainfluenza, which are also RNA viruses, and failed to see the same population of cancer-fighting monocytes emerge.
Another intriguing part of the equation, says Bharat, is that this pathway is independent of the T cell immune treatments that are becoming a big part of cancer therapy now, in which doctors boost the population of T cells that can recognize and attack cancer cells. They can be effective, but generally only work for a while, since cancers quickly find ways to circumvent the T cells and become resistant to the therapies.
The virus-induced changes in the monocytes, in contrast, aren’t dependent on T cells. Bharat tested the approach in mice genetically bred to lack T cells and still saw a strong effect on tumors in these animals from the monocytes. That means that the monocytes may help shore up the body's response to immunotherapy—and its ability to fight tumors. Much more research is needed before the finding leads to any treatments. But "this approach could potentially be used to promote regression,” he says.
https://time.com/7176558/covid-19-virus-cancer-monocytes/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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SECRETS OF GOOD SLEEP
Even though we spend roughly a third of our lives doing it, sleep doesn’t always come easily. More than one in three adults in the U.S. don’t get enough sleep, so there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with getting a solid night’s shuteye from time to time or battled with daytime sleepiness.
We asked sleep docs for the one sleep tip that’s changed their lives. Some might surprise you.
Create a “wind-up” routine
Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and author of the book Sharing the Covers: Every Couple's Guide to Better Sleep, credits establishing a consistent morning, or “wind-up,” routine, with significantly improving her sleep.
“While many experts focus on the importance of having a ‘wind down’ before bed, I've found that how you start your day is just as crucial for setting up a successful night of sleep,” says Troxel.
Our bodies and brains function best when we follow a regular daily routine, and that starts with a regular wake-up time. “When you wake is the primary cue for setting the biological clock and ensuring exposure to morning light, both essential for regulating circadian rhythms,” says Troxel. “Even after a bad night of sleep, sticking to a consistent wake-up time helps correct sleep patterns by boosting sleep ‘drive’ for the following night.”
Troxel’s typical wind-up routine includes waking up at 6:30 a.m. daily (though she sleeps in until 7 a.m. on weekends) and taking a cold shower for one to three minutes. “I find that the experience of the cold shower, brutal as it may be, is short-lived and helps to ‘wash away’ the night, especially if I had a not-so-great night of sleep,” says Troxel. “There is also a psychological benefit, as I tell myself, —‘That was probably the hardest thing I'll do all day. And it's not even 7 a.m.!’” If a cold shower seems too aggressive, Troxel says splashing your face with cold water can have a similar invigorating effect.
Exile your phone from your bedroom overnight
Jay Olson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto who researches circadian rhythms and sleep, is going to tell you something you already know but hopes it will give you that extra nudge to, you know, do it: “Studies show that keeping the phone out of the bedroom can improve sleep quality and well-being,” he says. “Even if it feels like you are sleeping through them, every phone buzz is still processed by your brain and can pull you out of deep sleep.” Olson has been following his own advice for years and “swears by it.”
It works on several levels: banishing your phone eliminates light exposure from your screen right before bed, removes sleep-disturbing notifications and screen light-ups, and takes away the temptation to scroll, says Olson.
Try a body scan
Dr. Ankur Bindal, a psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist in San Diego, sees meditation as “a powerful tool” for improving sleep by calming the body and mind before bed. “On a physiological level, meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps slow your heart rate and regulate breathing—both crucial for preparing the body for restful sleep,” says Bindal. The practice also stimulates the production of the sleep hormone melatonin and lowers cortisol levels, reducing stress. “Together, these effects promote deeper, more restorative sleep by encouraging the brain's natural theta wave activity, which is associated with relaxation and sleep.”
He practices a “body scan” meditation at bedtime. Focus on various parts of your body from head to toe; you’ll notice areas where you’re holding tension, which you can then release. “Dimming the lights and settling into a quiet environment can further promote relaxation,” he says. When Bindal does his full body scan at night, he also practices progressive muscle relaxation—tensing and releasing muscles throughout the body—to help ease him into sleep.
Go outside first thing in the morning
Maj. Allison Brager, sleep domain lead of the U.S. Army’s Health and Holistic Fitness System, shares that sleep disorders are pervasive in the Army. Even as a sleep expert, she deals with sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome herself. “If sleep is compromised, all mental faculties, including your mood, suffer greatly until adequate sleep is achieved,” she says.
One of the easiest ways to help recover from a bad night of sleep is light exposure, she says. That’s because our sleep system “resets” in the morning through early morning light exposure, Brager says, so try to get outside for some sunshine as soon as you wake up for a spark of energy to start your day, even if you haven’t had the best night of sleep.
If you’re feeling up to it, Brager advises taking this one step farther by going on a walk. “Moderate exercise promotes wakefulness, increases blood flow, and is not so strenuous that you’ll want to sleep immediately after,” she says. “Take advantage of its wake-promoting benefits as well as health-promoting benefits.”
Start journaling
Journaling before bed is another way to clear your mind by organizing your thoughts and feelings, creating a sense of calm before you settle down for the night. It’s a way to “ process emotions and thoughts from the day: slowing down repetitive thoughts and clearing the mind, reducing stress, and promoting relaxation to prepare you for restful sleep,” Bindal says.
This doesn’t have to be an elaborate exercise. To get started, simply write down a few things you’re grateful for, jot down your most memorable experience of the day, or share some reflections on what’s going on in your life in a few sentences before you call it a night. If you are struggling to make the habit stick, here’s how to create a lasting journaling routine.
Listen to a relaxing sleep podcast
Craig Harris Richard, a professor at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va., researches methods that help people to relax and sleep. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is one of the best, he’s found.
The research-backed practice involves listening to gentle voices at bedtime; they help distract and relax the brain into a quicker state of sleep. Many relaxation podcasts incorporate ASMR with a soft spoken host speaking directly to you. “Multiple published studies have consistently reported that people respond to ASMR stimuli with increased relaxation, decreased heart rates, decreased blood pressure, decreased stress, and an increased ability to fall asleep more easily,” says Harris Richard.
While you listen, keep your room dark, your eyes closed, and stay focused on the story, voice, and sounds from the podcast. “The topics of these relaxation podcasts vary, so you can choose the type of content you prefer to fall asleep to,” says Harris Richard. Meditations, bedtime stories, fiction, or “fascinating stories from history” are some of the available options. To find a soothing podcast, search for “ASMR,” “relaxing,” or “relaxing stories,” he suggests.
https://time.com/7175972/sleep-doctors-best-advice/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202
Oriana:
I continue to be surprised that the term POSITIVE EMOTIONS is rarely mentioned. And, barring extreme circumstances, we are by no means helpless when it comes to experiencing positive emotions. We can induce them by invoking a favorite landscape or memory.
As for hte ASMR video, I hated it. I detest crackling sounds and fake fingernails. But relaxing cat videos are always welcome.
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“WILL POWER” AND LOSING WEIGHT
There is a view that we’re less in control of our own destinies than most of us imagine. ‘We tend to place far too much emphasis on our own executive capacity to direct our own actions,’ says Giles Yeo, professor of genetics at Cambridge University.
In reality, we’re all largely at the mercy of our genes and environment. ‘Some people do find it more difficult to say no to food. But you don’t find it more difficult because of some internal moral failing or lack of will. You find it difficult because of underlying causes in the biological system.
’ When it comes to overeating, it helps to understand how appetite works. Dr Yeo conceptualizes appetite as a triangle. There are three sides to it: hunger, fullness, and reward, all governed by different parts of the brain. If you’re full, you cease to be hungry – at least until someone offers you an extremely rewarding item of food, such as chocolate or cheese. If you’re extremely hungry, the most basic item of food will taste delicious to you. If you pull on one corner, you change the overall shape of the triangle. Dr Yeo stresses that this happens in the brain, not the belly. ‘
All of the 1,000-plus genes that we have identified that influence your body weight act within the brain, and all of them act on the appetite triangle,’ he says. ‘Some of the genes make you feel hungrier. Other genes make you feel less full for the same amount of food. Other genes tackle the reward element, which means you either need more or less food or different types of food to give you that same rewarding feeling.’
Each of us will experience hunger and fullness differently. This is where Ozempic, Wegovy and the new class of obesity drugs known as semaglutides come in. ‘They’re not really weight-loss drugs at all,’ wrote Albert Fox Cain in an article for Business Insider. ‘They’re something far more powerful and surreal: injectable willpower.’
What semaglutides actually do, explains Dr Yeo, is ‘smack the fullness side of the appetite triangle really hard’. Generally, those of us who don’t habitually overeat aren’t spending our lives white-knuckling it – our urges simply aren’t that strong.
Still, semaglutides remain rather blunt instruments – and their effects on our reward pathways are still not fully understood. Moreover, our genes are only part of the story. Humans have always had this spectrum of genetic dispositions... but we haven’t always been obese. ‘What has changed is the environment,’ says Dr Yeo. ‘I’m a geneticist, but I end up talking about the environment all the time because your genes interact with the environment. The environment has revealed our genetic susceptibility to obesity.’
MATTER OVER MIND
In his recent bestseller, Ultra-Processed People, the doctor, author and presenter Chris van Tulleken argues forcefully it’s a change in the food environment – namely the invention and mass-marketing of cheap, addictive, ultra-processed foods – that’s really what’s behind the rise of obesity over the past 50 years, not some mass societal collapse of self-control.
‘Whenever anyone tries to study “willpower” it turns out to be very hard to nail down,’ Dr van Tulleken explains. ‘I would define it as a collision between motivation and opportunity, in other words nearly purely about your environment and nothing to do with your character.
’ For most people, the availability of foods that support healthy weight loss is low. ‘They can’t afford it and it’s not marketed to them,’ he says. ‘So even when motivation is extremely high, weight loss is nearly impossible for the most affected people. “Low willpower” turns out to be a proxy for “poverty”.’
According to the Food Foundation, the poorest 20% of UK households would need to spend 50% of their disposable income on food to meet the cost of the government’s recommended healthy diet. The richest 20% only need to spend 11%. Fast food outlets and billboard ads tend to proliferate in poorer areas. Some poor people will have the genetic advantages to survive this. Many will not.
Of course, it’s not just food companies that are jangling our reward centers at every available opportunity. I first started hearing the term ‘dopamine’ in the tech world circa 2015. In her recent book, Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke, a leading addiction expert based at Stanford University compared the smartphone to a ‘hypodermic needle’ and argued internet pornography, gambling sites, TikTok, clickbait, the lot of it, is all engineered to create habits and addictions.
The critic Ted Gioia recently coined the term ‘dopamine culture’ to decry a wider turn away from enlightenment and entertainment to addiction. Think of the way Netflix is constantly feeding you more shows or Instagram pumps out more Reels. It’s where the money is.
Williams studies dopamine for a living and he’s in no doubt that a great deal of companies are doing this quite deliberately. ‘With most of these problems – gambling, compulsive shopping, drug addiction – the underlying mechanisms and pathways that drive them are very similar, if not the same. I would be very surprised if these companies don’t have good scientists who understand catecholamine pathways, the neurobiology of addiction, and so on.’
Dr Yeo stresses that the surest way to change behavior is to change your environment. A large part of that is political: both Dr Yeo and Dr van Tulleken are in favor of much tighter regulations on food companies. However, as Dr Yeo says, ‘The environment you can control tends to be your household.’ If you buy a packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers you have to make 22 decisions not to eat each one. If you don’t purchase the packet in the first place, that’s one decision.
The more decisions you have to make – the more you rely on your so-called willpower – the more that you’re setting yourself up to fail.
This may still leave you with the feeling that change is essentially impossible. Ben Bidwell, a human potential coach with the app Arvra, believes we can change – just as long as you don’t rely on willpower alone. He subscribes to the idea of willpower as a muscle: ‘It gets tired.’
What you can do, however, is to tell a better story about yourself, a more honest story, one that takes account of the person you are but also the person you might become. ‘Look at the kind of person you want to be,’ he says. ‘What kind of behaviors does a healthy man possess? Does he drink alcohol three times a week? Does he walk up the stairs or use the lift? Does he have a cupboard full of sweets? Does he buy fresh natural foods?’
He then attempts to lock-in that fresh identity by means of ‘easy wins’. His advice is to start small. ‘Let’s say your intention is to read 20 pages a day and you’re not doing it. Just set the intention to read one page a day. You will definitely do that. And once you’ve done one, it doesn’t seem so hard reading a bit more. It’s the same with the gym. Tell yourself you’re going to do some squats and anything else is a bonus. That’s not so hard.
(Oriana: I confess that somehow I lost the link. But here is another interesting article related to the topic of controlling how much we eat: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/hidden-rules-weight-loss)
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Ending on beauty:
WHEN THE MOON IS IN SPRUCE
When the moon is in spruce,
words fall into the time before sound.
Wind blows away bird song.
A tongue of stone
moves slowly through the evening.
~ Sutton Breiding
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