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MY MOTHER PRAYS FOR DEATH
She is the poet of dead-ends, old despairs
written in whispers, beads slipping between
her fingers like peas dropping into soup.
In her hands, the rosary is a ring of bones,
yellow as old ivory, hard as living.
Her wooden suitcase holds nothing.
She doesn’t need what she leaves behind:
the empty house, the worthless bed,
the pictures she gathered over the years.
These photos are memories, and memories
belong to someone else: the daughter
who will not speak to her, the husband
who died believing in a God she can’t
imagine, me the foolish son who dreams
somewhere of violins, of snow falling
like soft sand on a prairie, of children
waiting for the sound of a key in a lock.
If her husband and her daughter and I
were there now beside her in her room,
she’d ask, "Why are we born, why do we die?"
She’d say, "If you could answer these questions,
I’d answer all the others." They are easy.
They come from a land of simple faces, of blue
novelty drinks topped with paper umbrellas,
of dinners that are almost never illusions.
Where she comes from, a mother’s screams
last longer than a photograph, longer
than bronze shoes, and everything’s lost
the way a penny’s lost in the dirt at our feet.
Sorrow is the only gift God bestows.
~ John Guzlowski, from Echoes of Tattered Tongues
John Guzlowski’s mother
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THE LIE OF “LITTLE WOMEN”
Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”
“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.
The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshiped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.
But Alcott herself took a more skeptical view of her enterprise. She was reluctant to try her hand at a book for girls, a kind of writing she described later in life as “moral pap for the young.” Working on it meant exploring the minds and desires of youthful females, a dismal prospect. (“Never liked girls or knew many,” she wrote in her diary, “except my sisters.”) While writing Little Women, Alcott gave the fictional Marches the same nickname she used for her own tribe: “the Pathetic Family.” By the final chapter of Jo’s Boys, the second of two novels that followed Little Women, Alcott didn’t try to hide her fatigue with her characters, and with her readers’ insatiable curiosity about them. In a blunt authorial intrusion, she declared that she was tempted to conclude with an earthquake that would engulf Jo’s school “and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no [archaeologist] could ever find a vestige of it.”
The lie of Little Women is a multifaceted one. The book, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls, is loosely inspired by Alcott’s own biography. Like Jo, she was the second of four sisters who grew up in Massachusetts under the watchful eye of an intelligent and forceful mother.
Unlike Jo’s early years—in which her father is absent because, after losing the family fortune, he is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—Alcott’s childhood was blighted by the failure of her religious-fanatic father, Bronson Alcott, to provide for his family. Stark deprivation, rather than the patchy poverty of the book, was a daily reality.
The four sisters, frequently cared for by friends and relatives, were itinerant and often obliged to live apart. Alcott’s sister Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while visiting a poor immigrant family nearby, much as Beth does in the novel. But Lizzie’s death at 22, unlike Beth’s around the same age, followed a protracted, painful decline that some modern biographers attribute to anxiety or anorexia. And while Jo was mandated by convention (and Alcott’s publisher) to pick marriage and children over artistic greatness, Alcott chose the opposite, relishing her newfound wealth and her success as a “literary spinster.”
For the first 80 or so years after Little Women was published, conflict scarcely arose over how to interpret it. Readers adored the book and its two sequels without probing for Alcott’s own feelings about them (curious though her fans were about her life). Not until 1950 did a comprehensive biography appear: Madeleine B. Stern dug into her subject’s fraught family history, and outed the grande dame of girls’ lit as the author (under a pen name) of sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction.
Then, from the 1970s onward, feminist critics began examining Little Women from a new perspective, alert to the inherent discord between text and subtext. As the literary scholar Judith Fetterley argued in her 1979 essay “ ‘Little Women’: Alcott’s Civil War,” the novel is about navigating adolescence to become a graceful little woman, but the story itself pushes back against that frame. The character who continually resists conforming to traditional expectations of demure femininity and domesticity (Jo) is the true heroine, and the character who unfailingly acquiesces (Beth) dies shortly after reaching adulthood.
The blossoming of feminist criticism finally gave Little Women the thoughtful, rigorous analysis it deserved. Exploring the internal tug-of-war between the novel’s progressive instincts and the era’s prevailing constraints revealed a book that was far from pap. And yet Little Women continues to be sidelined in the American canon.
Its reputation as fictional fare for and about girls and women prevents it, even now, from achieving the status of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Many male readers feel, as G. K. Chesterton put it, like “an intruder in that club of girls.”
At the same time, the domestic setting and sermonizing that irked Alcott herself can strike contemporary female readers as bland and restrictive: The book’s popularity shows signs of waning among a younger audience. But the fascination with Little Women endures among writers and filmmakers, as a current surge of adaptations attests. Inspired by the challenge of bridging the gap between Alcott’s life and Alcott’s writing, efforts to renew and expand its power help illuminate complexities in a novel whose literary stature is ripe for reevaluation.
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The wealth of adaptations of Little Women over the past century is proof of its durability, and also its malleability. As Anne Boyd Rioux writes in Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, stage and screen versions of the novel have reflected the eras they were made in. Early ones offered morally and socially wholesome entertainment in the presumed spirit of the original text. During the Great Depression, when audiences were consoled by the idea of simpler times, theatrical performances of Little Women were popular across America. By 1949, when Mervyn LeRoy directed the fourth film adaptation, this one with an all-star cast (Janet Leigh as Meg, June Allyson as Jo, Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor as Amy), consumerism had become a patriotic duty. So the movie’s writers invented a new scene in which the March sisters go on a Christmas spending spree with money from Aunt March.
Rioux’s astute examination of the long life of Little Women in American culture is itself, fittingly enough, very much of its era: She draws particular attention to the problematic paternal shadow looming over Alcott’s enterprise. Rioux, a professor at the University of New Orleans, delves into Alcott’s background, emphasizing that the young Transcendentalist—who grew up in a circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—saw writing as a more practical and less lofty endeavor than her male peers did. As for Bronson Alcott, “the only occupations that did not compromise his principles were teaching and chopping wood,” Rioux writes of the radical education reformer, whom she characterizes as flaky at best and unstable at worst. His family, forbidden to eat animal products or wear anything but linen, often starved and froze in New England’s fierce winters. (At Fruitlands, a utopian community he co-founded in the 1840s, root vegetables were initially outlawed because they grew in the direction of hell.)
For Alcott, who shared her father’s creativity but lacked his zealotry, writing was both a path to realizing her literary ambitions and a means of feeding her family. After publishing a couple of stories in The Atlantic, she met with a colder reception from the magazine’s new editor, James T. Fields, who in 1862 gave her $40 to open a school instead—which she did, although it soon failed.
She returned to writing sensational stories, which she described as “blood and thunder tales,” published in weeklies, some under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, and featuring passionate, assertive female characters who scheme and adventure their way to prosperity. While she didn’t want her father or Emerson to know she was stepping into the literary gutter, she seems to have enjoyed the “lurid style,” and thought it suited her “natural ambition.” The money she earned was also crucial. “I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time and keep the family cozy,” she wrote in her journal.
The irony was that Little Women, which Alcott embarked on with reluctance and wrote with formulaic conventions in mind, turned out to be the book that made her name and her fortune. It’s impossible not to wonder what she might have achieved had she been able to throw off the “chain armor of propriety,” the phrase she used to describe the burden of having “Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life.” The recent BBC/PBS miniseries nods briefly to nonidyllic realities, but mostly doubles down on the domesticity front: Rustic chic pervades the March home, a twee extravaganza of muslin, bouquets of baby’s breath, and homemade jam. If each era gets the Little Women adaptation it deserves, this is Alcott as fall-wedding Pinterest board. But in 1994, Gillian Armstrong, directing the most successful film adaptation to date, took a bolder approach.
Robin Swicord, who wrote the screenplay, created virtually every line of dialogue from scratch, saying that she had imagined what Alcott might have written had she been “freed of the cultural restraints” of her time. The result swerves from the usual homey scene to offer a politically engaged drama in which Marmee (Susan Sarandon) and Jo (Winona Ryder) advocate for women’s suffrage and none of the Marches wears silk, because it’s produced using slavery and child labor. Males are relegated to the margins: The March household is a matriarchy, presided over by a fierce feminist and reformist crusader who emphasizes the importance of education and moral character rather than interior decoration. Swicord even names Marmee Abigail, which was Alcott’s mother’s name.
Focusing on the Marches as more than just daughters, sisters, and wives, Armstrong’s Little Women also foregrounds its characters’ creative talents—their plays, their newspaper, Jo’s writing, Amy’s art—without sacrificing the aspects that readers have come to love, not least the have-it-all denouement that Alcott fiercely, and by now famously, resisted delivering in its most treacly form: Chafing at the pressure to marry Jo off, she made sure to flout readers’ desperate desire to see Jo end up with Laurie. Alcott instead paired her with the older, far less glamorous Professor Bhaer—a subversive step beyond which a late-20th-century director and audience plainly weren’t ready to go, aware though Armstrong surely was that the author herself had yearned to leave Jo single.
However the latest adapters proceed, they have already found—as have directors and writers before them—that the reality of Alcott’s life adds a liberating, complicating dimension to the story of Little Women. For her, literary success came with suppressing her creative instincts. “What would my own good father think of me if I set folks to doing the things I have a longing to see my people do?” she confided to a friend about her fictional characters. At the same time, that literary success gave her a personal freedom she couldn’t afford to give her characters—at least not those in the March family. Writing as A. M. Barnard, she empowered her adult heroines in ways her little women could only dream of.
But dream they did. Jo’s creativity, her nonconformism, and especially her anger—that energy constantly undercuts the sanctimony Alcott dreaded in a genre that she, without blood and thunder, found ways to sabotage in Little Women. Her ambivalence emboldened her to unsettle conventions as she explored women’s place in the home and in the world—wrestling with the claims of realism and sentimentality, the appeal of tradition and reform, the pull of nostalgia and ambition. Her restless spirit is contagious. The more Alcott’s admirers seek to update her novel, drawing on her life as context, the more they expose what her classic actually contains.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-lie-of-little-women?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
However . . .
IS LITTLE WOMEN A LIE?
In her article “The Lie of Little Women“, Sophie Gilbert suggests that a knowledge of Louisa May Alcott’s biography is necessary to unlocking the truth behind the author’s most famous work. Readings of Little Women in which the Marches are viewed as an ideal family conforming to certain standards of morality and certain social and gender conventions are simply false.
Probe a little deeper and you’ll uncover that Alcott’s family suffered because her father could not provide and that Alcott herself flouted gender roles by choosing to write rather than marry. And, oh yeah, she really hated Little Women, which she called “moral pap for the young.” From this we are to gather that Little Women does not portray an ideal family at all and that movie makers might be on the right track if they were to try to tell the story Alcott really wanted to tell. For instance, what about a film that cuts Prof. Bhaer altogether, leaving Jo to blissful singlehood?
Gilbert’s stance is an intriguing once since I had thought Roland Barthes had effectively declared the death of the author in 1967. In other words, literary criticism in the past decades has largely adhered to the idea that the biography of an author and authorial intention do not matter; the text speaks to readers by itself. I mostly subscribe to this view myself and think that, even if Little Women is autobiographical in nature, we might run into trouble if we try to force too many parallels. Is Mr. March a bad father simply because Alcott’s was? Is the story less idyllic because we know that the Alcotts’ poverty was far worse than the Marches’? If someone can point to the text to make an argument for these things, I may be swayed. But I will only view Mr. March as a failure if the book itself–and not Bronson Alcott–suggests it.
Likewise, I view Louisa May Alcott’s hatred of Little Women as irrelevant. She does need to like what she wrote for it to be a masterpiece. Her characterization is phenomenal, lifting the story up from mere “moral pap” and making it seem real. Her characters are not saints, but beautiful, flawed women struggling to do their best. If wanting to do better and be a good person is moral pap, then bring it on. But her story is never didactic and her characters (especially Jo) chafe against convention too much for it ever to seem like the author is forcing a lesson upon her readers; the lessons are simply part of life.
All that is to say that I believe that the text itself actually supports a certain subversive reading (something Gilbert also later mentions in her article). We do not really need Alcott’s biography to “prove” that there is what we might now call a certain feminist undertone. Mr. March is far less present in the story than Marmee, giving us a picture of a matriarchal household full of girls encouraged to pursue their passions, not just marry well and keep house. They put on plays (Meg dreams of being an actress), write and publish their own newspaper, and all participate in Amy’s artistic endeavors. They are interesting, intelligent girls with their own interiorities, not simply models upon which morals of proper submission are draped.
So is Little Women a lie? Absolutely not. As Gilbert admits herself, the text has always been more than what it may appear to be on the surface. Alcott never leads her characters docilely into proper submissive roles; not one of them becomes a saintly model woman or wife. Their frustrations, their anger, their deceptions, and their tears all leap off the page. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy want so much out of life. And it’s not simply to be used as case examples for proper female behavior.
https://pagesunbound.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/is-little-women-a-lie/
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MISSING REBOUND: YOUTH DRUG USE DEFIES EXPECTATIONS, CONTINUES HISTORIC DECLINE
After declining significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, substance use among adolescents has continued declining, based on results from the annual Monitoring the Future Survey. The survey found adolescents reporting much less use of alcohol, nicotine vaping, and cannabis. This trend is unprecedented.
Adolescent drug use continued to drop in 2024, building on and extending the historically large decreases that occurred during the pandemic onset in 2020.
“I expected adolescent drug use would rebound at least partially after the large declines that took place during the pandemic onset in 2020, which were among the largest ever recorded,” said Richard Miech, team lead of the Monitoring the Future study at U-M’s Institute for Social Research.
“Many experts in the field had anticipated that drug use would resurge as the pandemic receded and social distancing restrictions were lifted. As it turns out, the declines have not only lasted but have dropped further.”
Miech is a principal investigator of the Monitoring the Future Study, which annually surveys eighth, 10th and 12th grade students across the United States.
The number of students who abstained from drug use reached record levels in 2024, with abstention defined as no past 30-day use of alcohol, marijuana or nicotine cigarettes or e-cigarettes.
The percentage of students who abstained from the use of these drugs in 2024 was 67% in 12th grade (compared to 53% in 2017 when it was first measured), 80% in 10th grade (compared to 69% in 2017) and 90% in eighth grade (compared to 87% in 2017). The increases in abstention from 2023 to 2024 were statistically significant in the 12th and 10th grades.
Declines in drug use in 2024 were evident across alcohol, marijuana and nicotine vaping, which are the three most common forms of substance use by adolescents:
For alcohol, significant decreases in 12th and 10th grades continued a long-standing decline that began in the late 1990s. In 2024, 42% of 12th graders reported using alcohol in the past 12 months, a substantial drop from 75% in 1997. Among 10th graders, the percentage fell to 26% from 65% in 1997; among eighth graders, it dropped to 13% from 46% in 1997.
For marijuana, decreases in use among students are a more recent development. In all three grades, the percentage who used marijuana in the past 12 months hovered within a tight window of just a few percentage points in the 20 years from 2000 to 2020. In 2021, the first year surveyed after the pandemic onset, substantial declines in marijuana use took place in all three grades. In 12th and 10th grades, these declines have since continued, and past 12-month use levels in 2024 were the lowest in the past three decades, at 26% and 16%, respectively. In eighth grade, the percentage in 2024 was 7%, the same for the past four years after dropping from a pre-pandemic level of 11% in 2020.
For nicotine vaping, the 2024 declines continue a 180-degree turn centered around the pandemic onset. Before the pandemic, use levels surged from 2017 to 2019 and then held steady in 2020 (before the pandemic onset). Large declines took place during the pandemic, and these declines have since continued to the point where the 2024 levels for the past 12 months of nicotine vaping are close to where they started in 2017, the first year that questions on nicotine vaping were included on the survey. Specifically, past 12-month use was 21% in 12th grade (compared to 35% in 2020 and 19% in 2017), 15% in 10th grade (compared to 31% in 2020 and 16% in 2017) and 10% in eighth grade (compared to 17% in 2020 and 10% in 2017).
The continued declines in adolescent drug use since the pandemic raise important policy and research questions. They suggest that a delay in drug use initiation during adolescence could potentially lower substance use trajectories over a lifetime, Miech says.
Such a delay, he says, may prevent youth from associating with drug-using peer groups that encourage continued use and may forestall biological processes that contribute to the development of addiction.
https://news.umich.edu/missing-rebound-youth-drug-use-defies-expectations-continues-historic-decline/
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WHO COULD COME TO POWER AFTER PUTIN
I have a feeling that after Putin, we’ll see someone young — in his late 40s or 50s, like we saw Gorbachev who came after the long era of Brezhnev.
Yes, I know that Gorbachev didn’t come immediately after Brezhnev — first, there was Andropov, and then Chernenko. But both of them were leaders very briefly (both are rumored to have been assassinated).
In fact, 4 of the last General Secretaries of Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union are on that photo above — Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Chernenko, and Andropov (left to right). It was made on Nov.7, 1981 — a year before Brezhnev caught a cold on November 7 parade and died 5 days after.
So, in case of Putin’s departure, there may be temporarily no official leader — Russia’s prime-minister Mikhail Mishustin is the person who is supposed to become the head of state until a new president is elected.
And then it will depend on who will de facto become the major force in the country — will it be the FSB? The military? Ukrainian occupational army? The council of revolutionary forces?
And this will obviously depend on how Putin will depart. One thing if this happens in case of his natural death, another if it’s assassination — and a completely different story if Putin gets deposed and arrested.
All of these things are possible.
Some are more probable than others. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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Russia started dying about 10 years ago.
You can see it in Russian movies: Russians began to make films about the last war — not about the present, not about the future.
They don’t call the last war WWII, they call it, “The great patriotic war” and for them it started in 1941 and ended in 1945. An average Russian doesn’t know — and doesn’t want to know — about Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and how Hitler and Stalin were occupying Poland and Europe one country after the other, at the same time.
Selective historical memory – the chronic disease of Putinism.
You can’t talk about the USSR occupying Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
You can’t talk about Finnish war of 1939–1940.
You can’t talk about USSR’s war crimes in WWII.
You can’t talk bad about Stalin, about repressions that affected millions of Russians.
You can't talk about Khrushchev.
You can't talk about the 1990s.
Stuck in the past, with no future – and even the past is fake, it’s edited, it’s a forged simulation. Putin is driving Russia into a non-existing oblivion.
Life will always win over death. It’s the law of nature. ~ Ecom SEO Strategist, Quora
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WOULD RUSSIAN TROOPS STAY LOYAL TO PUTIN IN CASE OF A COUP?
No one knows whether the regular Russian army units would remain loyal to Putin during a coup attempt — neither Putin, nor the commanders of the soldiers know (and ultimately, it’s these low level commanders that make the decisions, not the guys at the top).
It all depends on the situation at the moment of the coup, what will be the trigger and who will be the leaders.
During ‘Wagner’ mutiny in June 2023, things happened so fast, regular units of the Russian army didn’t even have time to react — before it was already over.
The open mutiny, announced by the chief of ‘Wagner’ Yevgeny Prigozhin, lasted less than 24 hours — but the events that led to it lasted months.
One thing we know is that no army commander or general stood openly in support of Putin in these 24 hours.
Even the seasoned Russian propagandists Solovyov and Skabeeva were silent.
The chief of Russian propaganda troops Margarita Simonyan remained completely mute all the time — she later stated that she was “offline” (of course, it was a lie).
Regular Russian troops didn’t try to stop Prigozhin or stand in a way.
Since then, of course, the FSB would have done some work, trying to ensure that in an event of a coup the army would support Putin. But there are no guarantees.
We all saw what happened in Syria when rebels attacked Bashar Assad’s army — the soldiers simply laid their weapons, changed into civilian clothes and left.
And now that the Russian army has these 2 examples at the back of their minds, I’m not so sure they would be trying to protect Putin at the cost of their lives. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
infravioletlight:
Arch-tyrants have a nasty habit of surviving a long time.
Brian Watt
I suspect regular units would wait to see which way the wind was blowing. For frontline units, going home alive might be a great motivator.
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COULD THE RUSSO-UKRAINE WAR END IN EARLY 2025?
Bringing the war to the territory of Russia is Ukraine’s best leverage. We all remember Prigozhin’s “Justice March” towards Moscow — and how no one stood in their way, no one tried to protect Putin.
The Russians lost 38,000 personnel, killed and wounded, fighting against the Ukrainians in the Kursk region of Russia.
After 5 months, the Russians still cannot squeeze the Ukrainian troops out of Russia.
Russia has brought 10,000 North Koreans to fight in the Kursk region. They are reportedly useless on the battlefield, but expensive to maintain, because they are getting all the best equipment that even Russians don’t get. They get preferential treatment and better food in Russian hospitals. It’s actually hilarious to hear how Russians are whining about North Koreans being treated like masters, while Russian soldiers are being treated like serfs!
Russians are bombing their own towns in Russia while trying to evict the Ukrainian troops.
When asked “How long before the Kursk region is liberated?”, Putin answered that he doesn’t know. He really doesn’t.
Ukraine keeps hitting headquarters of Russia’s General Staff in Donbas, occupied Crimea, and in Russian border regions, liquidating top commanders in decapitation strikes. This creates havoc among Russian troops, leaving them without leadership. This is starting to remind what the IDF did to Hezbollah. (I wonder if Russians use pagers.)
The ammunition depots are also getting hit, and so are transportation hubs — especially when large groups of troops and bundles of equipment are being moved.
Ukrainian sea drones (unmanned speed boats) are now equipped with air defense guns and already downed 2 helicopters over the Black Sea. This severely limits Russia’s ability to attack sea drones, schools of which are hunting for Russian ships.
Ukrainians now have the ability to target various Russian navy targets, which could make Ukraine able to effectively impose a blockade of Russian Black Sea ports — 1/3 of Russian oil is transported from there. If Russia can longer do it, this will be a strong hit against Russia’s ability to finance the war.
In the Mediterranean Sea, a Russian ship transporting 2 giant cranes to Vladivostok port, suffered 3 explosions and sank. This means the Russians can’t increase volumes of goods transported to and from China — and Vladivostok port is already being suffocated by giant queues of wagons and ships, waiting for loading and unloading.
Ukraine is hitting Russia with 1000s of targeted strikes at vital military logistics, slowing it down to a snail pace — while Russia is attempting, for the 3rd year, to destroy the Ukrainian power grid and freeze Ukrainian civilians, hoping to incite civil unrest.
If Ukrainians can maintain and increase the pressure on Russian military logistics and continue liquidating Russia’s command bunkers (which they obviously learned to locate), while increasing the number of long-distance drones, wreaking havoc deep in Russia’s rear, this puts the Russian troops in a very precarious position they never found themselves before.
Death used to be reserved to unnamed poverty-stricken Russians, enticed by “giant” USD $2,400 monthly wages — but now death is hunting top Russian officers and generals in secure bunkers.
There is one particular bunker, destroying which could trigger processes that I discussed in the answer about the new leader after Putin.
If Ukrainians could hit this bunker, the chances to end this invasion in the first half of the year would be 100%. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Bengt Persson:
Don’t forget that the Russian “shadow fleet” has made itself extremely unpopular in the Baltic Sea, through the continued sabotages of undersea cables.
It may result in limitations on how Russia can use the fleet, despite “free sea treaties”, Consequences may include reduced “unlawful” oil export from Russia.
Elena Gold:
As of now, Finnish navy ships are de facto blockading sea passages from St. Petersburg into the Baltics. They detain and gather all tankers between Tallin and Helsinki to see if they're violating sanctions.
This began after the detention of the Eagle S tanker. Now another tanker has been caught.
Chris Murphy:
The way Russia targets civilians reminds me of one of the flaws that Nazi Germany committed during the Battle of Britain, hitting civilian targets instead of military targets.
During the first phase of the Battle of Britain the British were on the back foot. The Germans were hitting military outposts, airports, factories, and shipping. This made the Royal Air Force hard-pressed. (This is not to say the RAF didn’t have some advantages). However, when the German air force switched to targeting civilian targets it helped relieve some of the pressure on the RAF, which helped them build up their strength. The attacks on civilians also had the opposite effect from breaking the morale of the British; instead it just made them hate the Germans even more. Although the Germans still hit military targets, they were effectively wasting ammunition, manpower, and time hitting targets that didn’t matter.
Looking at what Russia is doing now it isn’t hard to see some parallels. The Russians regularly hit civilian targets that do not matter to the conflict. They hit things like children’s hospitals and homes that are far behind the front lines. Although the attacks on the power grids might somewhat hinder military production and make civilians suffer, it isn’t such a serious blow.
This is especially true since a lot of the military equipment Ukraine uses is either brought in from allies or in places that are harder for the Russians to hit. So a lot of the Russian strikes on these civilian targets are just wastes of ammunition, time, and their limited reserves. Sure, some of the attacks are using unguided munitions, but many are guided munitions, such as the attack that hit a school in Kherson on October 7th. It just seems like a mixture of military incompetence and cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
The Ukrainians have shown time and again they will not be cowed by Putin’s barbarism.
Elena Gold:
Russians always announce it was a “military target” — some “NATO troops headquarters” etc., regardless what was hit. I think Putin does it because he believes that only by causing civilian unrest that he can win in Ukraine. His goal is to break Ukrainians’ resolve to resist.
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PUTIN DESPERATE TO REVERSE RUSSIA’S DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS
Russia’s birth rate declined tremendously and Putin is trying to do something to make Russians produce kids.
The problem is that Putin keeps killing Russian men by throwing them into the meat grinder of his war in Ukraine — Putin hoped that acquiring Ukraine would compensate for any losses, but now it’s obvious he’s not getting the whole of Ukraine, as he hoped.
Prices in Russia keep rising, inflation is nearing 30% (the government says it’s 9%), the government’s “wealth fund” dropped to 4–6 trillion rubles (USD $40–60 billion), and now this money is being placed into failing state-linked banks as “deposits”, to save them from bankruptcy.
Next step — this cash will be exchanged into shares of these banks, to add liquidity. So, instead of 4 trillion ruble, there will be worthless shares sitting in the Russian “wealth fund” (there are already some worthless shares of Russian companies in that fund, on the balance).
The next step — all people’s deposits in the banks will be turned into shares of the banks. With the ban on selling them for 12–18 months (which could be extended).
Russians have over 50 trillion ruble in the banks (USD $500 billion), which the government can confiscate in this way.
60–70% of newly built apartments stand unsold in Moscow and St. Petersburg and it appears there are already insurance scams started among developers — new buildings with unsold apartment suddenly catch fires.
Developers’ business loan rates hit 30–45%.
People struggle to get home loans approved, as the interest rate is close to 30% annually (the base rate by Russia’s central bank is 21%). About 70% of home loan applications are denied.
Russians simply don’t feel like having kids in such a situation. Everything is so uncertain.
The father of the family might just get mobilized to the war, and the woman doesn’t want to be left alone with small kids. And kids cost a lot of money as well, while disposable incomes are shrinking.
Moreover, a lot of young Russians with skills and education keep quietly emigrating — they leave “for a holiday” and never come back.
And no amount of Putin’s calls to have kids can change it. Even ending the war won’t dramatically change it.
Putin hurt Russia irreparably. ~Elena Gold, Quora
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MEN AND POST-PARTUM DEPRESSION
Most of us are aware that postpartum depression is a common challenge for new mothers and has a negative impact on both mothers and their infants. But many people don’t realize that fathers also face an increased risk of depression surrounding the birth of their child.
The baseline rate of depression among men living in developed nations is around 5 percent. However, this figure doubles to more than 10 percent during the perinatal period, which includes pregnancy and the first postnatal year.
For comparison, the rate of perinatal depression in women is around 25 percent. The risk for parents peaks three to six months after birth, with rates climbing to around 25 percent for fathers and 40 percent for mothers.
Rates of paternal depression vary considerably across developed nations but are notably higher in the United States. As one of the only high-income countries without state-supported paternity leave, it is natural to wonder whether this could be a contributing factor.
Similar to maternal depression, depression in fathers is associated with a host of negative outcomes in children. A number of studies have shown that children with depressed fathers tend to do worse socially and academically, and they tend to have more behavioral and psychological problems. There are at least three possible explanations for this association.
The first is that children of depressed fathers inherit a tendency to have poor mental health from their fathers and this leads to psychological and behavioral problems, which in turn jeopardize social and academic performance. Twin studies have established that depression is significantly heritable (passed from parent to child genetically), so this is a plausible explanation for the association. These studies show that both genetics and the environment have an impact on the likelihood of depression and that they have comparable influences.
A second possible explanation is that depression has a negative impact on how fathers interact with their children and that this in turn has a negative impact on the child’s development. Indeed, depressed fathers tend to show less paternal warmth and sensitivity, as well as increased hostility and disengagement with their children. Finally, paternal depression is associated with lower marital quality, and this could have a negative impact on maternal caregiving, with downstream consequences for the child.
Why do men become more vulnerable to depression as they transition to fatherhood? Stress is a well-known precipitant of depression. For many men, especially for those who are unemployed or living in poverty, the birth of a child causes an increase in economic stress. This may be why both low income and unemployment are risk factors for paternal depression. In my interviews with fathers from the Atlanta area, I asked them if they felt pressure to provide economically for their children. “On a scale of 0 to 100 percent,” one father said, “100 percent.” Another commented, “All the pressure. Just all the fucking pressure, if I can curse. All of it, all of it.” This was a common sentiment among most of the fathers I spoke with.
Another source of stress is not knowing how to take care of an infant. My brother told me that when he and his wife drove home from the hospital with their first child, they placed him on the floor and then looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” First-time fathers and fathers who judge themselves as low in parental efficacy are at increased risk of depression, studies show, probably because they feel unprepared and overwhelmed by the task in front of them. No one magically knows how to be a parent. We all have to learn. In traditional societies, children and adolescents are surrounded by younger children, and they often help with their care. This is good preparation for parenthood.
For contrast, as the last-born child in my family, I had no exposure to younger siblings and never interacted with an infant for more than a few seconds until I had my own at age 40. Our society often separates older children from younger children and infants, limiting opportunities for adolescents and young adults to gain the experience and knowledge needed to feel more prepared as new parents.
Yet another source of stress is work-family conflict, also a risk factor for paternal depression. As American mothers have become more involved in working outside the home, fathers have become more involved in direct caregiving. However, this has not been without some strain, as fathers also report more difficulty with work-family balance than in the past. As one father I interviewed put it, “A challenge has been to put the family first yet make sure that work is there at a high enough level that I’m going to succeed, and sometimes that means you gotta put family second, and that’s been a hard concept for me to deal with.”
Fathers with less social support are also more likely to experience depression. As I discuss at length in “Father Nature,” humans are naturally cooperative breeders. This means that mothers typically receive help from a variety of others in raising their offspring. Raising children without help is probably something that most humans are psychologically ill-equipped for. Everyone needs a break from child care. It is stressful for couples, not to mention single parents, to raise children all on their own without any assistance. This support may be particularly important during emergencies. My in-laws live near us, and their availability to pick up a sick child from school and tend to them in a pinch has helped us preserve stability in our careers, as well as our sanity.
Fathers are also more likely to become depressed when they have a bad marriage, and many fathers report decreases in relationship quality after the birth of a child. Forty-three percent of the fathers I interviewed for my book indicated that having a child had a negative impact on their relationship with their partner. A common theme in these interviews was that the attention and affection fathers had previously received from their partner shifted to the child after the birth.
One 53-year-old immigrant father explained that after having children, their child became the center of his partner’s attention. “I feel it, personally. I feel less care, care about me,” he said. A 59-year-old accountant and father of two described this attentional shift similarly: “So that first year, I mean, she really doted on me, but then my daughter was born . . . the focus for her became the kids . . . in a lot of ways, I am looking forward to him going off to college.” Another father described an asymmetry between him and his wife: “In my heart I still think . . . that’s [your spouse] the most . . . close person to you. But for my wife . . . she didn’t think the same . . . kids are more important than me and it’s the difference I think.”
Fathers also experience hormonal changes that may contribute to depression. Among involved fathers, testosterone levels decrease across the transition to fatherhood, and low levels of testosterone are known to be a risk factor for depression in men. Testosterone replacement therapy, one study found, may also alleviate depressive symptoms in men with low testosterone levels. So the natural decline in testosterone with fatherhood may render men more vulnerable to depression. It may also decrease libido, which, combined with the typically reduced libido of his postpartum partner, means less sex in the relationship.
Fathers who feel their infant has a difficult temperament are also more likely to be depressed. We might surmise that depressed fathers are simply more irritable and react more negatively to infant crying and fussing. However, it is also possible that some infants come into the world with objectively difficult temperaments that pose special challenges to their parents’ mental health. I had one such infant. There is great variation in the amount of crying that infants do. Especially during the first three months of life, many infants cry inconsolably and for many hours every day, particularly in the evening when mom or dad gets home from work.
This “baby witching hour” is understandably frustrating to well-intentioned parents. You are trying your very hardest to do whatever it is your infant needs to be calmed, but to no avail — and the crying persists. And you begin to feel helpless and to wonder if you are a bad parent. I remember my infant son crying — actually more like screaming — throughout the night. I remember what it did to my sleep, my mood, my work. I had nights where I thought, This is hell on earth. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that difficult infants are more likely to have depressed parents.
One very strong predictor of paternal postnatal depression is maternal depression. This could be because maternal depression negatively impacts relationship quality, which in turn makes paternal depression more likely. Or it could be that maternal depression severely disrupts the stability of the family system, and fathers find that instability stressful.
In other words, dads know that children need a warm and attentive mother and when that is missing, they realize the threat to the whole family: mother, father, and children. While maternal depression may pose a risk for paternal depression, other fathers may respond by attempting to compensate for deficits in maternal sensitivity. Sensitive fathers can ameliorate the negative impact that maternal depression has on their children.
Finally, one of the strongest predictors of paternal perinatal depression is having had a mental illness diagnosis previously in life, prior to the pregnancy. From this perspective, paternal depression can often be viewed as recurrence of a mental illness that is triggered by the stress of becoming a first-time parent.
Given all these stressors, one might ask why so many men decide to become fathers, often repeatedly after they understand what they are getting themselves into. Even after a long sleepless night with a colicky baby, faced with the prospect of struggling through the workday, deep down most parents realize that they are immersed in one of life’s most meaningful endeavors — raising the next generation of our family and species — and that this will ultimately lead to life satisfaction and fulfillment.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-are-men-more-vulnerable-to-depression-in-fatherhood/
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WHEN BIRDS MIGRATED TO THE MOON
From the ancient Greeks to the 17th century, a terrestrial phenomenon baffled scientists: Where did the birds go in winter?
As winter approached in Europe, numerous species of bird flew away somewhere or just vanished. No one knew where they went.
Unlike the stars, the moon is close enough for people to envision traveling there. My favorite method of space travel was devised by French writer Savignien de Cyrano de Bergerac. In his satirical work “A Voyage to the Moon,” published in 1657, he used impeccable logic. Observing that every morning as the Sun rises, dew is drawn upwards in the process of evaporation, he decided to take advantage of this:
~ I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me; upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found my self above the middle Region of the Air. ~
Once aloft, navigating wasn’t as easy as he had imagined: Instead of carrying him straight upwards to the moon, he found himself moving further away from it. He was forced to break some of the glass vials, in which he collected the dew for this enterprise, to descend again.
On Cyrano’s next attempt, it was tiers of fireworks — a staged rocket — that propelled him to the moon. This time he met there a little old Spanish man, who had arrived in an equally fantastical manner. Apparently someone got to the moon before Cyrano. How, and why?
The story of the Spaniard is not just about travel to the moon, but also about a terrestrial phenomenon that was one of the great scientific mysteries from the ancient Greeks to the 17th century: Where did the birds go in winter? This was an annual event: As the winter approached in Europe, numerous species of bird flew away somewhere or just vanished. 
In the 4th century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle had two theories about this. He postulated that they hibernated during the winter as other animals did. Swallows, for example, encased themselves in little balls of clay and sank out of sight to the bottom of swamps. His other idea was that the missing species transformed themselves into the birds that did stick around for the winter, and changed back when summer came.
The little old man in de Bergerac’s tale was an imagined Spanish soldier called Domingo Gonsales, and he was the hero of another story. In 1638, just a couple of decades before Cyrano’s “A Voyage to the Moon” became available, the English cleric Francis Godwin published “The Man in the Moone,” a fictional account of Gonsales’ lunar adventure. In the book, Gonsales trained 25 swans to pull an ‘engine’ he had made. One day, he took a jaunt in his swan carriage which happened to coincide with the time birds were accustomed to disappear, as it seemed, from Earth.
Gonsales was about to find out the answer to the mystery. To his surprise, the swans flew upwards, until they reached what we would think of as orbit and became weightless. French scientist Blaise Pascal’s experiments demonstrating the lack of atmosphere in space had not yet filtered through to Godwin, as both birds and man breathed as usual. In 12 days they reached the Moon, where he found other migrating terrestrial birds, such as swallows, nightingales, and woodcocks. When the swans started to show signs of agitation, he divined that they were ready to return to Earth; and so he harnessed them again and sailed home in nine days, gravitational pull on his side.
This was a ripping yarn for sure, but some thought it was a plausible alternative to Aristotle’s theories, especially as there was a Biblical passage that seemed to allude to it. In the King James translation, it goes:
~ Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle [dove] and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming (Jeremiah 8:7). ~
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In 1684, an anonymous professor, most likely renegade physicist Charles Morton, published a pamphlet entitled “An Enquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of that Scripture.” An interesting character, Morton took the revolutionary approach of teaching in English rather than Latin, was arrested for this, and forced to flee to America. As well as writing one of America’s most widely used physics textbooks before Isaac Newton turned everything upside down with calculus and universal gravitation, Morton wrote about alchemy and astrology. It seems he’d read Godwin’s tale of the lunar swan vehicle. In the pamphlet, he advanced a scientific argument that birds really did winter on the moon. And if birds could do it, then surely humans, though unwinged, could follow.
Morton rejected Aristotle’s widely accepted hibernation theory, and pointed out a major flaw in the theory that the birds simply migrated to another place on Earth: No one in Europe knew where they went. They literally disappeared. He argued that returning birds, like woodcocks, appeared to drop suddenly from the sky over ships at sea.
Their round trip to the moon took one month each way, taking the distance to the moon and the length of their absence into account. There was no atmospheric resistance to impede their flight (so he had taken on board that much of Pascal’s conclusions) and the journey between the worlds was aided by lack of gravity. They slept for much of it, living off their body fat. It was all logical enough, in its own way.
There were many factors that led to the recognition that birds migrate to other continents rather than the moon, but one which is pretty astonishing came about in 1882 in Mecklenburg, Germany. Someone shot a white stork, and when it fell, they saw that the stork had survived a previous attempt on its life. There was a spear embedded in its neck. Intrigued, the hunters took it to the nearby University of Rostock, where the spear was identified as “Central African.” The stork had, therefore, flown about 3,000 miles pierced with a two-and-a-half foot iron-tipped spear. It became known as the Pfeilstorch (arrow-stork). It was taxidermied and is in the University of Rostock’s zoological collection, where you can see it today.
In October 1895, an amateur astronomer in Beirut, using a 12-inch refracting telescope, watched 50 to 60 birds in groups of two or three fly south past the disc of the moon as it hung low on the horizon over a period of a few hours. He was clearly mesmerized by the spectacle. It’s likely that these were white storks, flocks of which fly over Lebanon in autumn on their way south. Charles Morton, had he access to a telescope, would probably have interpreted this as further evidence of lunar migration.
When humans finally got to the moon in the 1960s, it was on staged rockets much more sophisticated than Cyrano’s firework-propelled lunar vehicle imagined over 300 years earlier. By this time, we already knew that the moon had no atmosphere. The birds of Earth would have been unable to fly.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-birds-migrated-to-the-moon?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PSYCHIC
There is a hidden cause behind a fun little demonstration of an ostensibly paranormal experience that I often include in public talks on anomalistic psychology, especially when I have a reasonably large audience. I explain to my audience that an important part of proper skepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you may be wrong. In that spirit, I tell the audience that I would like to do a little experiment with them to see just how psychic they are. I tell them that I am going to try to telepathically send a simple message from my mind to theirs. “I’m thinking of a number between one and ten,” I say. “Not three, because that’s too obvious. I want you to make a mental note of the first number that comes into your mind now!”
I then explain that, with such a large audience, we would expect around 10 percent of them to guess the number correctly just by chance, so we should only get ecstatically excited if considerably more than 10 percent of the audience get it right. I then, apparently somewhat nervously, ask, “Did anybody think of the number seven? If you did, raise your hand.” With a large audience, I can, in fact, be very confident that around a third of them will put up their hand.
Feigning surprise, I will try another, slightly more complicated example. “This time I’m thinking of a two-digit number between one and fifty. They are both odd digits and they are not the same. So, it could be fifteen — one and five, both odd digits, not the same — but it could not be eleven — both odd digits but they are the same. What is the first number that fits that description that comes into your mind now?”
I then ask, as if expecting no one to have got it right this time, “Did anyone think of the number thirty-seven?” Once again, about a third of the audience will put up their hand. I will then add, “Did anyone think of thirty-five?” About a further quarter of the audience will raise their hand. “Sorry, that was my fault,” I explain. “I thought of thirty-five first and then I changed my mind.”
What is going on here? Any audience members who believe in ESP may well think that it has just been demonstrated. More skeptical members may be at a loss to explain what they have seen (and possibly directly experienced). Is it possible that I had simply conspired with all those members of the audience who got it right by telling them in advance to raise their hands in response to my questions? That would seem unlikely. Was it just a coincidence that so many more people guessed correctly than would be expected on the basis of chance alone? Again, possible but extremely unlikely.
The actual explanation is a phenomenon that psychologists refer to as population stereotypes. For most people faced with this task, when they are asked to make a mental note of the first number that comes into their head, they assume this is pretty much a random process. Therefore, they expect the frequencies of response to be more or less equal across the range of response options. In fact, this is not what happens. Responses tend to cluster in reliable and predictable ways, especially with large audiences.
In the first example, about a third of people will choose seven regardless of whatever number I may be thinking of (especially as I have ruled out three as a valid response, which otherwise would also be a popular choice). In the second example, about a third will pick 37 and about a further quarter will choose 35. Note that in neither example do the response rates approach 100 percent, but that is not a problem as people do not expect telepathy to be 100 percent reliable.
There are several other examples of population stereotypes that could be used to fool (at least some of) the unwary that you possess amazing telepathic powers. Tell them your telepathic target is two simple geometric forms, one inside the other. Around 60 percent will choose circle and triangle. Tell them you are thinking of a simple line drawing. Around 10 to 12 percent will draw a little house. It makes for a fun demonstration of the fact that not everything that looks like paranormal actually is. But would anyone ever seriously try to pass off such a demonstration as really involving telepathy?
The answer is yes. For example, in the mid-1990s Uri Geller took part in a TV program called Beyond Belief, presented by David Frost, in which, it was claimed, various paranormal phenomena would be demonstrated live for the millions of viewers at home. I was one of those viewers. Uri demonstrated his alleged telepathic powers by supposedly transmitting a message to viewers. Uri had chosen one of four symbols that were presented at the bottom of the screen in the following order: square, star, circle, cross.
As the camera slowly zoomed in on his face, Uri said: “I’m visualizing the symbol in my mind . . . and you people at home, millions of you, I’m actually communicating now with millions of people, maybe eleven, twelve, thirteen million people. Here goes. I’m transmitting it to you. I’m visualizing it. Open up your minds. Try to see it. Try to feel it. I’m really strongly passing it to you! One more time . . . okay.” By this point, the upper half of Uri’s face pretty much filled the screen, with the four symbols still displayed across the bottom of the screen. Viewers were instructed to phone in using one of four different numbers to indicate their guess at Uri’s choice of symbol. Over 70,000 viewers did so.
My days of believing that Uri really did possess amazing psychic abilities were long gone by this stage, and I was therefore watching from the perspective of an informed skeptic. It was pretty easy to come up with nonparanormal explanations for all of the demonstrations featured in the program. With respect to this particular demonstration, I was rather pleased with myself for not only stating in advance what Uri’s telepathic target would be but for also correctly stating the order of popularity of the remaining symbols.
It was very lucky for Uri that he chose to “telepathically” transmit the star symbol. It was by far the most popular choice of the viewers, with 47 percent of them indicating that this was the symbol that they had “received.” The second most popular was the circle, with 32 percent of the “votes,” followed by the cross (12 percent) and the square (10 percent). If the guesses were completely random, we would expect about 25 percent for each option, so 47 percent choosing the same symbol as Uri is a massively statistically significant outcome. The probability that almost half of the callers chose this symbol just by chance is astronomically low. So, was this really strong evidence of Uri’s psychic powers?
Readers who are familiar with common techniques used to test for ESP will have recognized that the four symbols used in Uri’s demonstration are taken from the five symbols used on Zener cards (the missing symbol is three wavy lines). The cards are named after the person who designed them, perceptual psychologist Karl Zener. A full deck consists of twenty-five cards, five of each design. In a test of telepathy, a “sender” would take each card from a shuffled deck in turn and attempt to telepathically transmit the image on the card to a “receiver.” The receiver would record their guess of which card the sender was looking at. By chance alone, we would expect around five of the receiver’s guesses to be correct. If the receiver scores significantly more than five, this might be taken as evidence of ESP.
However, it has been known for over eight decades that people are more likely to guess certain symbols compared to others. Back in 1939, Frederick Lund asked 596 people to each generate a random sequence of five symbols from the Zener set. By far the most popular symbol was — you’ve guessed it — the star, accounting for 32 percent of the responses compared to the 20 percent that would be expected by chance alone. So, as I said, it really was lucky for Uri that he chose the star as his telepathic target (assuming that it was just luck).
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-psychology-of-the-psychic/
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STEPHEN HAWKIN’S “ETERNAL” VOICE
While Stephen Hawking’s ashes were being interred during a memorial service at Westminster Cathedral in 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) beamed into space an original piece of music by the Greek composer Vangelis that featured Hawking’s voice. The Cebreros station outside of Madrid broadcast the transmission toward the nearest black hole to Earth.
In a press release, ESA’s director of science, Gunther Hasinger, is quoted as saying, “It is fascinating and at the same time moving to imagine that Stephen Hawking’s voice together with the music by Vangelis will reach the black hole in about 3500 years, where it will be frozen in by the event horizon.”
The move was meant to honor Hawking’s primary contribution to astrophysics, his theory that thermal radiation is spontaneously emitted by black holes due to the steady conversion of quantum vacuum fluctuations into pairs of particles, one of which escapes at infinity while the other is trapped inside the black hole. Hawking radiation, and the related issue of whether information that falls into a black hole is lost or is somehow recoverable from the radiation, was a profound concept that still engenders controversy among theoretical physicists. Interestingly, Hasinger’s comments take for granted that the voice made of information, from the voice synthesizer Hawking had used to communicate for more than 30 years, was simply “Stephen Hawking’s voice.”
vox ex machina
Upon his death, many notices in the press made more of Hawking’s voice than of Hawking radiation, suggesting he was famous in public for a persona that merged both. Reuters reported that Hawking’s synthesized voice “was his tool and his trademark,” describing it as a “robotic drawl that somehow enhanced the profound impact of the cosmological secrets he revealed.”
Even an obituary for Hawking in Nature by longtime colleague Martin Rees referred to “the androidal accent that became his trademark” and also speculated that Hawking’s field of cosmology was part of what made his life story resonate with a worldwide public — that “the concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos grabbed people’s imagination.”
Certainly the publishers of Hawking’s popular account of the universe, “A Brief History of Time,” must have thought so, as they chose to feature a photograph of a demure-looking Hawking sitting in his wheelchair in front of a night sky full of stars on the front cover of the first U.S. edition of the book. Even if only figuratively, Hawking was one of the world’s most famous living cyborgs, moving and speaking by electromechanical means because his flesh-and-blood body could not, traveling the universe in his mind.
Hawking, who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), lost his ability to speak after a trip to Switzerland in 1985 when pneumonia forced doctors to put him on a ventilator and, after being transferred back to the UK, performed a tracheotomy to help him breathe. After recovering from the near-fatal pneumonia, Hawking initially used a spelling card to communicate, indicating letters with a lift of his eyebrows, an interim solution with obvious constraints.
Hawking’s first voice synthesizer used an iteration of “Perfect Paul,” a synthesized voice created by MIT research scientist Dennis Klatt, and was run on an Apple II computer with modifications that made the system more mobile. It allowed Hawking to communicate at a rate of 15 spoken words per minute using a hand clicker to select words from a separate software program that displayed them on a screen. ALS is a degenerative nerve disease that affects muscle control, so Hawking’s need for an apparatus that allowed him to write was arguably much more critical than the voice synthesis component, but voice synthesis allowed Hawking an additional modality of communication.
Hawking’s public “voice” is certainly created differently than one from a human body’s vocal system, but even this voice generated from electricity, signal-processing algorithms, circuitry, software code, and the distant echo of the body of Dennis Klatt — Perfect Paul was synthesized from Klatt’s recordings of himself — became unique in its specific instantiation for Stephen Hawking, even in how it sounded. The synthesized voice became “his” through his body’s intimate interactions with and through it. Although the voice itself, as an electronic technology, lacked most of the expressive capabilities of a body’s, Hawking was known to use its affordances and constraints as expressions of his personality.
He gave his lectures by sending saved text to the speech synthesizer one sentence at a time, but he stated that he did “try out the lecture, and polish it, before I give it,” a statement implying that he was practicing for a performance that included revisions to the way that the lecture sounded to him as much as to its content.
Even though it was the standard voice on equipment used by many people, it sounded unique as used by Hawking as an individual, to the point that he wouldn’t upgrade his equipment because it would have meant changing the sound of his voice. In this example of cyborg collaboration, the machine became an extension of Hawking’s body, but one as prone to aging and breakdown as our biological bodies are. Far from transhumanist dreams, Hawking’s example shows the experience of being human is a thoroughly embodied one.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/stephen-hawkings-eternal-voice/
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A GAME-CHANGING TREATMENT FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA?
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is poised to regulate a "potential first-in-class antipsychotic", known as KarXT, said Medscape.
About one in 300 people worldwide are affected by schizophrenia, but for decades treatment options have been both static and limited. If the FDA approves the twice-daily pill on Thursday, as it is "widely expected" to do, it will be "the first truly novel treatment" for schizophrenia in more than 70 years, said the Financial Times. The decision on the experimental treatment could "pave the way for its rollout in global markets.”
What is schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is a "long-term mental health condition" which causes a wide range of symptoms, according to the NHS. Often described as "a type of psychosis", its effects mean the patient may not be able to "distinguish their own thoughts and ideas from reality". Symptoms usually emerge in adolescence and can include hallucinations, delusions and social isolation.
The disorder is thought to result from "genetic predisposition", and can be exacerbated by environmental factors such as stress or drug use, said the FT. The worst flare-ups can cause "psychotic breakdowns that last for weeks.”
Schizophrenia does not generally cause people to be violent, but sufferers are highly stigmatized and "frequently pushed to the fringes of society". They are also "vastly overrepresented" in the unemployed, homeless and prison populations in the US.
Steve Paul, a neuroscientist who developed the precursor to KarXT, has called the disease the "cancer of psychiatry" because of the sheer damage it does to sufferers, including potentially reducing their life expectancy by almost 30 years compared to the average.
What are the treatment options?
Schizophrenia is usually treated with a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, community support, and antipsychotic medication. The development of antipsychotics in the 1950s was a "milestone" in schizophrenia management, said The Lancet. The hypothesis was that schizophrenia was caused by hyperactive dopamine, so medications that blocked dopamine such as chlorpromazine and, later, clozapine, were “groundbreaking".
But these treatments come with "extensive side-effects", from listlessness to movement disorders and heart disease. That contributes to "underprescribing" by doctors, as well as reluctance of patients to keep taking them. Non-adherence rates are incredibly high: about 75% of patients are thought to discontinue treatment. About a third of people with schizophrenia are resistant to conventional antipsychotic treatment.
The current "pharmaceutical arsenal is limited". Clinical trials for new medications are expensive and, in the case of psychiatric drugs, are difficult to assess due to "strong placebo effects". The result? A "steady loss of enthusiasm and investment" in new treatments.
How does KarXT differ?
KarXT essentially combines an experimental drug for Alzheimer's (xanomeline) with another drug (trospium) which suppresses side-effects associated with antipsychotics.
Developed by Karuna Therapeutics, now part of Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), it works by targeting receptors in the brain that modulate dopamine release, rather than blocking it directly.
Results of its latest trial, published in January, showed that it significantly reduced acute psychotic symptoms. "You get the high levels of efficacy that you anticipated with the [antipsychotics], however, you don't get the consequences that comes with it," Carlos Dortrait, SVP and general manager of US immunology and neuroscience at BMS, told BioSpace.
"I'm very optimistic and hopeful that [KarXT] will be a breakthrough medication," said Jeffrey Conn, scientific co-founder of Karuna Therapeutics and now professor emeritus of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee.
Are there any downsides?
KarXT "does not have a spotless profile", said BioSpace. There are potential cardiovascular risks, including hypertension, and the long-term efficacy is still unclear. Trials so far have been short-term, and participants were predominantly African American males. Pricing is also a challenge: KarXT could cost up to $20,000 a year, which may limit access.
Factors such as poverty, housing, and social stigma also play a significant role in outcomes for people with schizophrenia.
"How much can new therapeutics solve this crisis when you have an underfunded mental health system with an inadequate workforce and a chaotic melange of services?" said Ken Duckworth, chief medical officer of the non-profit organization National Alliance on Mental Illness. "It's a piece of the puzzle but it's not a panacea.”
https://theweek.com/health/the-game-changing-treatment-for-schizophrenia
Oriana:
This is the first antipsychotic drug in thirty years. Let’s hope it’s less stupefying than the older antipsychotics.
Interesting that the outrageous price of the new drug was cited, followed by the mention of poverty as a factor in schizophrenia.
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ARE PEOPLE WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA MORE RELIGIOUS?
Some evidence suggests that people living with schizophrenia may identify with a religion or hold strong religious beliefs.
In a 2017 study, researchers examined 100 people with schizophrenia. Of those, 99%, or all but one, reported believing in God. About 60% reported attending religious services one or more times a week. Additionally, 56% reported participating in private religious ceremonies or rituals on their own at home.
About two-thirds of the people scored high marks in a religiosity assessment, indicating strong religious beliefs or feelings. The researchers suggest that those living with schizophrenia and strong religious connections may find comfort in religious beliefs and experience a higher quality of life.
Another, earlier study from 2014 suggests that limited data supports the claim that stronger religious beliefs may aid in treatment-seeking behavior and improved outcomes for those with schizophrenia.
Conversely, according to 2019 research, strong religious beliefs may increase the risk of religious delusions. Religious delusions may be more difficult to treat due to the strong conviction in the belief of the delusion.
How common are religious delusions in schizophrenia?
Some evidence suggests that religious delusions are common in people living with schizophrenia. Estimates of these delusions in those who experience delusions range from one-fifth to two-thirds.
Religious delusions may also occur more frequently in people following a Christian faith compared to other religions.
Religious delusions are a unique type of delusion and not specific to any type of psychosis. However, they may share some features with other delusion types, such as delusions of guilt or delusions of grandeur [“It’s my task to save the world”].
The underlying cause of religious delusions in schizophrenia is unclear. It may involve several aspects including:
strength of personal religious beliefs
social and cultural expectations and pressures
genetic factors
In any case, understanding the role of religion, religious beliefs, and spirituality may play an important role in treating those with religious delusions from schizophrenia.
Some people living with schizophrenia experience religious delusions. These people may believe they have a special connection to God or a higher purpose than others. This can contribute to problems with treatment, treatment avoidance, and overall negative outlook.
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JAYNES’ VIEW OF SCHIZOPHRENIA
Julian Jaynes believed that schizophrenia is essentially a "re-emergence" of the "bicameral mind," a primitive state of consciousness where individuals experienced internal voices as external commands from gods, which he theorized most humans once had before developing full self-awareness; essentially seeing schizophrenia as a window into a past evolutionary stage of the human mind where the distinction between internal thoughts and external voices was not as developed as in modern humans.
Loss of integration of the two hemispheres
He suggests that individuals with schizophrenia experience a breakdown of the integration between these brain hemispheres, leading to a resurgence of the bicameral state where they hear hallucinations as external voices, similar to how ancient people might have experienced their “gods".
Loss of identity
Jaynes also argues that people with schizophrenia feel a loss of personal identity due to hallucinated voices taking the place of their internal monologue. As support for Jaynes's argument, these command hallucinations are little different from the commands from gods that feature prominently in ancient stories. (~ AI generated)
FROM THE JULIAN JAYNES SOCIETY
MOST OF US spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience.
We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us.
It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind.
At least that is a provocative if oversimplified and exaggerated way of introducing an hypothesis that has been obvious in earlier parts of this essay. For it has been quite apparent that the views presented here suggest a new conception for that most common and resistant of mental illnesses, schizophrenia. This suggestion is that, like the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapters, schizophrenia, at least in part, is a vestige of bicamerality, a partial relapse to the bicameral mind.
The Evidence in History
Let us begin with a glance, a mere side-glance, at the earliest history of this disease. If our hypothesis is correct, there should first of all be no evidence of individuals set apart as insane prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And this is true, even though it makes an extremely weak case, since the evidence is so indirect.
But in the sculptures, literature, murals, and other artifacts of the great bicameral civilizations, there is never any depiction or mention of a kind of behavior which marked an individual out as different from others in the way in which insanity does. Idiocy, yes, but madness, no. There is, for example, no idea of insanity in the Iliad. I am emphasizing individuals set apart from others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic.
Secondly, we should expect on the basis of the above hypothesis that when insanity is first referred to in the conscious period, it is referred to in definitely bicameral terms. And this makes a much stronger case. In the Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity “a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men.”
And this passage preludes one of the most beautiful and soaring passages in all the Dialogues in which four types of insanity are distinguished: prophetic madness due to Apollo, ritual madness due to Dionysus, the poetic madness “of those who are possessed by the Muses, which taking hold of the delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awaken lyrical and all other numbers, ” — and, finally, erotic madness due to Eros and Aphrodite. Even the word for prophetic, mantike, and the word for psychotically mad, manike, were for the young Plato the same word, the letter t being for him “only a modern and tasteless insertion. “ The point I am trying to make here is that there is no doubt whatever of the early association of forms of what we call schizophrenia with the phenomena that we have come to call bicameral.
This correspondence is also brought out in another ancient Greek word for insanity, paranoia, which, coming from para + nous, literally meant having another mind alongside one’s own, descriptive both of the hallucinatory state of schizophrenia and of what we have described as the bicameral mind. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with the modern and etymologically incorrect usage of this term, with its quite different meaning of persecutory delusions, which is of nineteenth-century origin.
Paranoia, as the ancient general term for insanity, lasted along with the other vestiges of bicamerality described in the previous chapter, and then linguistically died with them about the second century A.D.
But even in Plato’s own time, a time of war, famine, and plague, the four divine insanities were gradually shifting into the realm of the wise man’s poetry and the plain man’s superstition. The sickness aspect of schizophrenia comes to the fore. In later dialogues, the elderly Plato is more skeptical, referring to what we call schizophrenia as a perpetual dreaming in which some men believe “that they are gods, and others that they can fly,” in which case the family of those so afflicted should keep them at home under penalty of a fine.
The insane are now to be shunned. Even in the exotic farces of Aristophanes, stones are thrown at them to keep them away.
What we now call schizophrenia, then, begins in human history as a relationship to the divine, and only around 400 B.C. comes to be regarded as the incapacitating illness we know today. This development is difficult to understand apart from the theory of a change in mentality which this essay is about.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/book/ooc/en/schizophrenia/
Oriana:
Jaynes seems to assume that the two brain hemispheres were not closely interconnected in our ancestors, and would likewise be expected to be more “separate” in schizophrenics, who are prone to experience “bicameral” phenomena such as hearing voices. Studies have indeed shown that the corpus callosum, the bundle of white matter connecting the two hemispheres, is smaller in schizophrenic (it is also smaller in Alzheimer’s patients). 
“The decreases in corpus callosal size in schizophrenia varied directly with length of illness, perhaps indicative of a progressive process. The patient-control differences in callosal size and shape are consistent with a hypothesis of decreased connectivity between the left and the right hemispheres in schizophrenia”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10785578/
Oriana:
Another feature of schizophrenia is sleep disturbances — indeed, it’s sleep problems that may be the earliest symptoms. Without sufficient sleep, the brain can’t function in an optimal way. Memory is especially affected.
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COFFEE MAY INCREASE LIFESPAN BY ALMOST TWO YEARS, ON AVERAGE
A new review of the existing literature conducted by researchers at the University of Coimbra in Portugal says that drinking coffee regularly may add an average of 1.8 years of healthy living to a person’s life.
The review was funded by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), the collective nonprofit organization set up by companies from the coffee industry, including illycaffè, JDE Peet’s, Lavazza, Nestlé, Paulig, and Tchibo.
It was recently published in the journal Ageing Research Reviews.
In this review, researchers analyzed the findings of more than 50 previous studies examining how coffee might impact a person’s lifespan.
“Coffee is the most widely consumed beverage after water, which should justify a detailed understanding on its impact [on] health,” Rodrigo Cunha, PhD, principal investigator in the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology and professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and lead author of this study, told Medical News Today.
“Moderate intake of coffee was found to decrease the incidence of several chronic diseases,” Cunha told us.
“Since age is [a] major risk factor for the development of several chronic diseases, it made sense to inquire if the benefit of coffee intake was due to its ability to decrease the aging process,” he noted.
Upon analysis, Cunha and his team calculated that people who regularly consume coffee could potentially add an average of 1.8 years of healthy living to their lives.
“Aging of the world’s population may well be a trap if people leave longer but with more diseases and poorer quality of life,” Cunha said. “Thus the quest should be to increase health span rather than lifespan.”
Cunha explained that the molecular constituents of coffee affect mechanisms that are linked to aging processes, helping to slow them down.
“Chlorogenic acids are antioxidants that can attenuate the chemical deterioration of our cells and allow for better cell recovery after exposure to noxious stimuli,” he explained.
In parallel, caffeine reduces the activation of receptors signaling stress and/or danger prompting a reorganization of resources for optimal and more constant function, thus preserving the quality of our cells despite recurrent challenges,” added Cunha.
Nevertheless, “there is a long road ahead to understand who will benefit the most from coffee intake and what types of coffee and what types of patterns of coffee intake afford the maximal benefits,” he pointed out.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/coffee-may-help-prolong-lifespan-by-almost-2-years-on-average#Regular-coffee-drinking-adds-about-1-8-years-of-healthy-living
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UNEXPECTED BENEFITS OF ACETAMINOPHEN (TYLENOL)
Acetaminophen has antioxidant properties that can help protect against oxidative stress and inflammation:
Scavenges reactive oxygen species
Acetaminophen can scavenge reactive oxygen species, such as peroxynitrite, which can oxidize proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids.
Reduces lipid peroxidation
Acetaminophen can reduce lipid peroxidation and lower cytoplasmic levels of peroxides.
Inhibits quinolinic acid
Acetaminophen can inhibit quinolinic acid, a neurotoxic metabolite that may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases.
Protects dopaminergic neurons
Acetaminophen can protect dopaminergic neurons from oxidative damage caused by 6-hydroxydopamine or excessive dopamine levels.
Reduces neuronal apoptosis
Acetaminophen can reduce neuronal apoptosis by reducing the inflammatory transcription factor NF-kappaB.
Protects against cognitive impairment
Acetaminophen may protect against cognitive impairment caused by lipopolysaccharide (LPS).
Protects against liver aging
Chronic treatment with acetaminophen can protect against liver aging by targeting oxidative stress and inflammation.
~ an AI OVERVIEW
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Ending on beauty:
DEEP RED GLASS
Hours shrouded in black and dove
secrets of Tuesday
buried in the rain
River windows in sepia
and silver cascading
from April’s naked arms
~ Sutton Breiding
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