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CRAZY JANE TALKS WITH THE BISHOP
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'
`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
`A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'
~ William Butler Yeats
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AN OUTBREAK OF HEARTBREAK
‘Crazy Jane’ was ubiquitous in the late 18th century, the archetypal figure of those driven mad by heartbreak. Was the plight of the love sick a performance or a pandemic?
Broadway actress Maude Branscombe as Ophélia in Hamlet, by José Maria Mora, c. 1880.
In 1796, Matthew ‘the Monk’ Lewis published a four-stanza poem telling the tragic tale of his ill-fated heroine, ‘Crazy Jane’. By 1799, Lewis’ words had been put to music and Jane’s story of heartbreak and mental collapse was shared across the country in music halls, assembly rooms and alehouses. On 1 May 1800, the Morning Post reported that, at ‘Mrs Methven’s Masquerade’ in Ranelagh, ‘Lord Pomfret unsexed himself in the character of Crazy Jane’. A few years later, a military fete in Horsham commemorating the victory of Trafalgar featured a ‘Crazy Jane’ among a parade of other popular characters.
Crazy Jane was by no means the only ‘love-mad’ female character popularized in the 18th century’s latter decades. Mourning the death of a lover, or abandoned after an affair gone wrong, this compelling archetype had already proliferated through a number of ‘crazy’ characters, including Maria from Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1767) and Sentimental Journey (1768) and Crazy Kate from William Cowper’s The Task (1785). Perhaps the best-known example of this is Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Pining after Prince Hamlet and mourning the death of her father, Ophelia had served as the original love-mad woman, but during these later years, the image became increasingly common.
A late 18th-century individual might have met Crazy Jane at a masquerade, read of Crazy Kate’s solitude in a periodical, seen a painting of Insane Maria at the Royal Academy of Arts, or watched a rendition of Hamlet with Ophelia taking center-stage. Items including china, watchcases and pillboxes all bore their likenesses: Maria was regularly represented on Wedgwood china and, at one point, a ‘Crazy Jane Hat’ even circulated at London’s fashionable parties.
Each different interpretation of the distraught heroine shared a range of easily recognizable features. With downcast eyes, tear-stained cheeks and shabby dress, she was beautiful and melancholic, weak and unthreatening. Setting was also important: a dreary plain might show humble poverty, a stormy seascape could suggest psychic turbulence, or a bucolic wood her natural affinity with nature.
Part of her popularity was undoubtedly the ways that she appealed to the fashionable trend of sensibility. In the late 18th century, being visibly affected by the suffering of others was a way to demonstrate one’s sensitive virtue: shuddering, trembling, crying or sighing were markers of refinement. While the love-mad woman was by no means a new trope, having forerunners in Renaissance theatre and poetry, her emotional sensitivity now saw her resonate anew.
A bewildered doctor checking the pulse of lovesick young woman, by W. Ward after John Opie, 2 May 1802.
But sensibility fails to explain the scale of interest she provoked. While many scholars have dismissed her as overly sentimental – a pathetic construction of a mild melancholia that acted as a forerunner of the Victorian hysteric of the late 19th century – perhaps there were additional aspects of her character that caught the public imagination in this moment.
As love-mad stories abounded across new forms of media, certain descriptions proved erotic, even dangerous. The earliest iterations of Crazy Jane, for example, alluded to sexual misbehavior: one line of Lewis’ poem, describing Jane’s ill-fated sexual antics with her dishonest lover, Henry, read: ‘He was false, and I undone.’ Successive versions of Jane’s story only made her more transgressive. A chapbook of 1813, published by Sarah Wilkinson, described how Jane’s lover delighted her in a secluded grove, where she enjoyed the ‘seductive power of [Henry’s] tongue.’
The cynical contemporary reader may have rolled their eyes in the face of earlier interpretations that framed Jane as naive and innocent: the character had become far more sexy, dangerous, erotic and exciting. Love’s madness was not just a literary phenomenon. Medical theory in the 18th century posited that women (and occasionally men) were driven insane by disappointment in love. Asylum case notes provide plenty of examples where love’s madness was given as a cause of insanity and, subsequently, of incarceration.
William Black’s Dissertation on Insanity (1810) placed ‘Love’ as the fifth most common cause for admission of patients to London’s Bethlem Hospital; when visiting in 1772, a French tourist, Pierre Jean Grosley, commented that ‘all the people here were here because it was occasioned either by love or religious enthusiasm’; in 1804 the artist Joseph Farington wrote in his diary that ‘a Medical man who attended Bedlam had said that the greatest number of those who were confined were women in love.’
Such sources suggest that love’s madness is a more troubling malady than it first appears – a genuine pathological condition. Madness through love was a very real threat, not just one confined to literature. For those who had experienced the throes of heartbreak first-hand, the more unnerving aspects of a love-mad heroine’s story might have provoked intensely private recollections of brushes with sorrow, or, worse, mental illness. Perhaps, then, the popularity of the trope was more about protection, rather than celebration.
Acquiring an object linked to love’s madness, such as a tea-waiter decorated with Maria’s face, or a chapbook that told Jane’s story, may have proved reassuring. The threat of love’s madness, and its associations with sexuality, morality and illness, was effectively downsized, safely stowed and contained. Buying, using and then putting them away in the safety of one’s home allowed the owner to take control of love’s madness, maybe imbuing these items with strange, almost talismanic properties. And at least the owner of these products was not in as bad a state as the melancholic Maria or wretched Ophelia. At the same time, they served as objects through which the owner might contemplate their own love life, relationships or even mental health.
Be she performed, read or owned, the love-mad woman was evidently many things. While she could serve as a harmless or consoling icon of sentimentality, there is more to her appeal. She might have prompted a titillating frisson due to the more sexualized aspects of her love-mad tale, an eye roll from an incredulous spectator, wistful thoughts about a past lover or a pang of fear about one’s own mental decline. Certainly, iterations of late 18th-century love’s madness could be sweet and saccharine, alluring or provocative, or menacing and marginalized – as succinctly embodied by the beguiling, moralizing and ambiguous figure of Crazy Jane.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/outbreak-heartbreak?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=52b98231ae-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-52b98231ae-1214148&mc_cid=52b98231ae
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”I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.” ~ Boris Pasternak
Himalayan Blue Poppy (my thanks to Violeta)
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“Once
the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings
infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow,
if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it
possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” ~ Rainer
Maria Rilke
*
WHAT OUR FIRST AND LAST WORDS REVEAL ABOUT HOW WE EXPRESS OURSELVES
Mama. I love you. Thank you. Oh wow.
With our earliest utterances and gestures, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as persons ready to participate in social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death’s embrace. Language scientists have thoroughly explored the former, called “first words,” but they’ve paid surprisingly little attention to the latter, called “last words,” and certainly not treated them as part of the same continuum.
It’s easy to assume that people, across cultures and eras, have found first and last words interesting for the same reasons, mainly that we all learn language and we all die. Despite these universal experiences, it turns out that people don’t possess the same expectations about the linguistic behaviors that mark the beginning and end of the signifying self. Across cultures and historical eras, those behaviors are framed in many different ways. This book is, in part, an attempt to capture and explain that range, so that you might situate yourself, where you come from, what you desire.
Such a starting point seems to commit me to aggregating cute stories about the toddler’s first words, mixing them with emblematic stories of wise words from the lips of the dying. But I see quite a few more possibilities.
In fact, our first and last words are culturally significant beyond the anecdotal. They shed light on practices and beliefs about babies, the dying, language itself, and the very nature of existence. As personal, anthropological, and historical accounts show, first words and last words have been connected to a cornucopia of ideas and beliefs, from the sweet to the serious. They tell us that a baby learns to talk when a god helps it or after it eats corn, or that parents eagerly anticipate their baby’s first words, or that a first word should only be the first utterance that has the form of an adult’s, or that it’s always “shit!,” or that it makes for a good tale.
They tell a story about dying as well: that a dying person must have a prayer or a god’s name on their lips when they expire, or that they always tell the truth, or that a person need only say “yes,” or that they should abstain from pain relief so that they can speak lucidly, or that some last words are inevitable—one should not, under any circumstances, greet that dark night in silence—or even that babbling by infants and by the elderly amount to the same language of the spirit world. Or that neither matter at all.
When I surveyed these beliefs, I found a tremendous variety in how the firstness and lastness of these moments get treated. Even their “wordness” is up for debate. I began to see that only certain behaviors undergo cultural transformation. Moreover, only certain transformations occur. All of this variety is bound up in family behavior, parenting, education, medical care, grief, and even the structure of daily life. Here the groups for whom I’ve written this book —families, caregivers, medical professionals, chaplains and social workers, linguistic scholars, and memoirists, among others — will find their needs and experiences reflected.
When you take first and last words together, it immediately becomes obvious that they can both be freighted with more than words usually bear. As the Austrian writer Karl Kraus once wrote, “The closer one looks at a word, the farther away the distance from which the word looks back.” Here this adage seems particularly true.
What is the first word of a baby? It’s an inheritance of the species, bestowed by the community. It’s not the seed of language but its sprout, which has already sought the warm light of interaction. What is the last word of a dying person? It amounts to some final articulation of consciousness (and not just a word, by the way) that passes through a closing window of interaction.
Language at the end of life is so much more than a diminishment. Yes, it’s a debris of language, a rubble of interactive abilities and expressive behaviors. But it also puts on display what has sustained an individual’s language powers from the beginning—even before their first word. And so the circle is complete.
As I explored these topics, many other themes and symmetries became apparent. In cultures where first and last words are associated with existential significance, they activate rituals and other recipes that people bring to bear on encounters with mysterious boundaries. This need coexists with — and sometimes crashes against — that demand of modernity that people apprehend things as they really are, even if courage is required for facing naked truths. When you read this cultural history of first and last words, you’ll see a glimpse of how these two forces have been threaded together over many centuries—and what we have inherited.
Another theme is that people don’t live their own first or last words in a manner that they can reflect on—the self that’s bookended by these moments is unable to directly access them and will not be judged by them. The dead can’t feel embarrassment for what they did or didn’t utter; a baby can, but not in the moment. No matter what linguistic talents you might develop in your lifetime, they’ll begin and end without the you who claims them. This makes first and last words utterly personal but also strangely alien, as much for the person who produces them as for whomever is lucky enough to be entrusted with such weighty existential cargo.
There are also persistent frictions between the private and public dimensions of first and last words: what they mean, and to whom, in which intimate or public spheres, and how the traffic between them runs. One such friction is that the public versions of first and last words, as cultural ideals, can serve as models for behaving in private that may be frustratingly unattainable. There’s an ethic of privacy that surrounds the moments in which first and last words appear, one that’s accompanied by a desire (and sometimes a need) to transform them into memorials, slogans, inputs for artistic and scientific projects, and other public purposes. (It occurs to me to playfully offer that one reason linguistics doesn’t tackle last words is because the scientific discipline must repay a cosmic debt accrued by exposing so many first ones to public view. But it’s probably due to the simple fact that linguists are people, too, wanting to process the loss of loved ones like everyone else. Even linguistic curiosity has its limits.)
Then there’s the way that this public-private tension contrasts with the simple but far more predominant reality that the vast majority of humanity’s first and final articulations of consciousness have been uttered to a void and lost to time—washed away, as the cyborg Roy Batty says at the end of Blade Runner, like tears in rain. Part of me wants to imagine a god of the puckerbrush, whose divinely capacious perception can’t let a single articulation of consciousness slip by, whether they happen in the royal bedroom or the slum. Yet even the notion that these are sacred moments is itself a belief about them—which demonstrates a bit of what’s difficult about holding first and last words at the proper distance to understand better how one might hold them close.
“Last words” has long been a distinct literary genre—a directly quoted utterance that is a “final, self-validating articulation of consciousness in extremis,” according to Karl Guthke, a scholar who wrote the authoritative work on the genre. Realistic and dramatized portrayals of such expressions abound in the media, films, music, literature, and pop culture of modern North America, Europe, and elsewhere. They’ve been collected and published in multiple languages, often as distillations of longer deathbed scenes. (From Guthke’s book I learned that “last words” is a category in the US Library of Congress classification scheme.) Such anthologies reflect prevailing ideas about gender; in European anthologies, the only women are either royalty or religious figures.
Often the real meaning of last words is most available when you appreciate how they’re embedded in private lives. Poignant stories are often treasured by family members, where they are elements of a tool kit for grieving. A woman told me that her Dutch-speaking grandmother inexplicably said, in English, “I go,” before collapsing. Not getting to share last words with someone can be a lasting regret. A man’s dying grandmother wanted to tell him something but her mouth was too dry. “Four times she tried to say it,” he told me, then paused, a bit wistful. “I wish I knew what she wanted to say.” And sometimes people find meaning in a mere semblance of a last word. As a man held his dying wife’s hand, he told her he’d be okay, that he’d meet her again someday, and when she moved her lips soundlessly, as if in response, it seemed to comfort him when he remembered it. She’d heard him; she knew.
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By contrast, first words have the scantest of public lives, real or imagined. Beyond the realm of science and scientists, they appear mainly in narrow cultural niches, like celebrity memoirs (we learn from singer Julie Andrews that her first word was “home”), parenting blogs, and a few sitcoms—Bart Simpson’s first words, upon discovering his parents in bed, became his catchphrase, “Ay caramba!”
Cute sayings by older kids have long entertained family get-togethers and social media lurkers. But first word-iness is little discussed, nor is the first word as a cultural symptom, even though, as linguists assure us, everyone has first words. Yet they’re not attributed to animals and machines; there’s no library classification that pairs them with last ones. A quiz about famous first words would be futile.
Even Guthke, in his encyclopedia of famous last words, discounts the first ones. He wrote that they “belong with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” His ire was provoked by 1988 US Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s reported first words, in Greek, monos mou, or “all by myself,” which foreshadowed Dukakis’s reputation as a technocrat.
What’s going on here? Do we indeed care about entrances, beginnings, the new? The reason, as Guthke saw, isn’t complicated: Most first words lack glamor and drama. There’s nothing to chew on. You can’t really use them to distinguish one kid from another—they’re not monumental. They don’t make history.
But leave it to the language sciences, with their extensive studies of infants acquiring vocabulary and grammar, to produce fascinating insights about groups of first words, such as when they emerge and what they tend to be about. In so doing, they divulge secrets about the lives of young human selves, most reliably if those selves come from wealthy, Anglophone societies. For instance, if the emergence of the signifying self is interesting to you, then you should know that the baby’s first point may be more unambiguous fruit than a signed or uttered first word. There’s also the theory that language evolved in many places, the so-called “polygenetic theory.”
One implication is that there’s no single first first word for the human species to hang its humanity on, but plausibly millions of them. Think about it: our language lives don’t trace back to a single Adam-and-Eve-like word (apple? snake? darn!) but to a bounteous, and probably sloppy, squall. No matter the words themselves, in each of those millions of instances they likely arose through the interactions of caregivers and offspring.
To me, this is only the beginning of a story about why humans notice, remember, record, and memorialize first words. The answer isn’t so simple, for there’s a surprising diversity to what adults make of early language, even though—this is important—virtually all children end up skilled users of their community’s languages. All of this is covered in the first half of this book, which connects every baby’s first word to an expansive evolutionary and cultural legacy, whether that word is signed or spoken, on time or late, noticed or overlooked. First words may not make history, but they’re bound up with it. They also make a human place in it. I propose that over the longer term of language history, people have developed an anxiety about time’s passage and where they fit, an anxiety whose revelatory symptom is a fascination with children’s first words.
And when you look at first and last words together, you catch glimpses of other cultural decisions that shape what we make of our lives with language.
https://lithub.com/what-our-first-and-last-words-reveal-about-the-way-we-express-ourselves/
Oriana:
I don't know my first words, but I happen to know the first complete sentence I ever uttered. I don't remember my exact age at the time, but likely I wasn't yet three years old. An unexpected visitor asked me, "Where is mommy?" I answered, "Mommy is making peepee."
If the beginning is in any way a preview of the end, I hate to think what my last words may be.
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IS THE KILLER BEHIND THE 1982 TYLENOL POISONINGS STILL ON THE LOOSE?
In the early hours of September 29, 1982, two Kane County sheriff’s deputies, Joseph Chavez and Alan Swanson, were on a routine patrol of the Chicago suburb of Elgin Ill. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., they stopped at a 24-hour Howard Johnson’s restaurant where they noticed something odd in the parking lot. Strewn about were two boxes and hundreds of empty capsules. Both the boxes and the capsules were labeled Extra Strength Tylenol. Between them was a sizable pile of white powder.
Detective Chavez picked up some of the powder and examined the capsules. A few of them had been put back together. Because Extra Strength Tylenol was an over-the-counter pain medication, and not a controlled substance, he and his partner decided to blow off this odd discovery and not report it. Several minutes later, Deputy Swanson began violently vomiting and complaining of a headache and dizziness. Soon Chavez was stricken with similar symptoms. They knew something was wrong – though they had no idea what. They decided to have their blood tested later in the day, but the analysis, which tested for common ailments and abnormalities, revealed nothing unusual.
Four hours later, in a nearby suburb, a paramedic named Dave Spung was inside a speeding ambulance frantically trying to save the life of a 12-year-old girl. Mary Kellerman had collapsed shortly after waking up, and no matter what Spung tried the little girl’s body was completely unresponsive. All he knew was that she’d woken up with a cold, and now, as he held the child in his arms with thoughts of his own daughter racing through his mind, he was rapidly running out of time to save her. The ambulance reached the hospital, but at 9:56 a.m. Mary was pronounced dead. It was the worst ambulance call Spung had ever had. He was gutted and could only imagine the suffering of Mary’s horrified family.
No one could understand the cause of Mary’s death. Or that it was to be the first in an episode of horror the entire nation would never forget.
Dr. Thomas Kim’s shift started like any other. Kim was Chief of Critical Care in the emergency room at Northwest Community Hospital in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights. It was midday when paramedics brought in the unconscious and unresponsive 27-year-old postal worker Adam Janus. The paramedics reported that Janus had gone out to buy some medicine for a headache. He returned home and collapsed minutes later on the floor of his home.
Kim and his ER team struggled feverishly to revive Janus, yet nothing the ER doctors tried was working. Kim was mystified as to how this otherwise healthy man had suddenly lapsed into a coma. Was it something he’d eaten or a violent allergic reaction to something? He knew he couldn’t rule out a massive heart attack or brain hemorrhage even though it would be a significant anomaly for someone so young and healthy.
Within two hours, Janus expired, leaving Kim the morbid task of informing his shell-shocked family members who’d gathered at the hospital. They included Janus’ immigrant parents, his younger brother Stanley, Stanley’s wife Theresa, and Theresa’s older brother Wally. The family told Kim they had no clue what triggered the tragedy. One minute Adam was absolutely fine and the next he was out cold. Had he eaten anything unusual? Not that anyone noticed, no. With nothing else to go on, the despondent family left the hospital and returned to Adam’s house to grieve.
Later that day, as Doctor Kim was preparing to go home following what had been a puzzling and difficult shift; he was told that another member of the Janus family was being rushed back to the emergency room. He assumed it was his deceased patient’s father because the old man had complained of chest pains earlier. That would make sense: the shock of his son’s unexplained death had to be extremely stressful. Doctor Kim decided to stick around.
But the news was far worse than he could imagine. At the Janus household, paramedics were grappling with the unthinkable. Upon arrival, they’d found the younger brother, Stanley, out cold on the floor. He’d suddenly collapsed shortly after the family returned home from the hospital. An on-scene paramedic who’d also responded to the first call began shouting: “This is the same thing! This is just like the first one.” The panicked family, including the father, stood by in horror as the paramedics, unable to revive Stanley, frantically prepared him for the trip to the ER. The nightmare that had begun only a few hours earlier now seemed sure to take another one of their beloved family members from them without explanation.
Then, in an instant, the terrible tragedy unfolding in front of them crossed the border into the surreal. As Stanley was placed onto a gurney, his 20-year-old wife, Theresa, fell to the ground next to him.
Theresa arrived at the hospital in a coma. Stanley died shortly thereafter. Doctor Kim was dumbfounded. He had just seen these two young adults a couple hours earlier and they’d been completely fine. Faced now with two dead young people, a third he couldn’t revive, and a family wondering which of them would be next to die, he sprang into action, ordering the remaining family members hospitalized as a precaution. Suspecting botulism, he sent the paramedics back to the Janus house to gather up anything ingestible: food, coffee grounds–whatever anyone might have eaten or drank. He also told the first responders to bring in the contents of the medicine cabinet. To Kim, the most vexing aspect of each case was that no one had exhibited any symptoms prior to collapsing. It was as if they’d all been struck by a kind of invisible lightning.
When the paramedic crew returned once more from the Janus home, Doctor Kim found nothing amiss in what they’d gathered. He had no reason to suspect a Tylenol overdose, and, after spilling out the contents of the recovered bottle, he saw that only a few capsules had been taken. He didn’t suspect poisoning because none of the victims had displayed the usual retching or vomiting symptoms that go along with it. He called the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to see if there’d been any similar cases, but nothing had been reported.
He had the Board of Health send someone to the house to rule out carbon monoxide poisoning. One of the paramedics mentioned that a young girl, Mary Kellerman, had died earlier in the day, and she too had taken Tylenol. But when Kim asked if it had been an overdose, they told him no. He instructed them to bring in the bottle of Tylenol the little girl had used. He knew he was grasping at straws and couldn’t imagine what was the connection, but he was running out of time and desperate for some sort of commonality that could tie these mysterious and violent deaths together. If he figured it out quickly enough, perhaps Theresa could still be saved.
As Kim struggled for an answer, casualties continued to pile up around town. A recent mother in the suburb of Winfield, Mary Reiner, went to her medicine cabinet and–moments later–collapsed into a coma. She had been well enough to go shopping only minutes earlier.
Around 6:30 p.m., Mary McFarland emerged from the ladies room of the Illinois Bell office where she worked in Lombard, which is along the western cusp of the city. McFarland, 31, had complained of a headache a short time earlier. As she crossed the office on her way back to her desk, she suddenly fell to the floor and lapsed into a coma. She was rushed to a nearby hospital.
Doctor Kim received word that a detective who’d been to young Kellerman’s house had, on a hunch, taken the Tylenol bottle from her house. When no one back at the police station seemed interested in it, he decided to keep it in his desk drawer for future use rather than throw it out. That bottle was brought to the ER where Kim examined its contents and found nothing amiss. He began to call poison experts around the country. One of the experts in Colorado said that the four cases sounded like cyanide poisoning.
The idea was both cogent and yet, on some level, completely ludicrous. How could cyanide get into Tylenol and how could the Januses and Kellerman, who’d never met, both ingest it on the same day? Kim decided to send blood and urine samples from Stanley and Theresa to a lab in Highland Park. He confided to a colleague that he hoped no one would review his medical charts on the case because the idea of ordering cyanide testing on two patients was so unprecedented he was concerned he’d end up looking silly. But people were taking Tylenol and dying, and the implications were harrowing: Was there tainted Tylenol out on store shelves? If so, how long did they have to figure it all out before the next person was stricken?
Tragically, not long at all. At around 8 p.m. a 35-year-old airline stewardess, Paula Prince, returned home to Chicago on a flight from Las Vegas. She wasn’t feeling terribly well. She was scheduled to fly out again the following day, so when she learned that the friend she was planning to meet that evening was going to be delayed, she decided to call it a night and head home. Prince stopped along the way at a Walgreens to pick up a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. Once home, she changed into a nightgown, put cold cream on her face and took a couple of capsules. She walked into the hallway and dropped to the floor with a thud. Because she lived alone, no one was there to call for help.
Detectives Chavez and Swanson, who earlier in the day had discovered the box of discarded pills, caught wind of the chatter about the possible connection between the deaths and Tylenol. As soon as they heard it, they told their boss about the bizarre incident along with their unexplained but short-lived symptoms earlier that morning. Investigators were dispatched immediately. By the time they reached the Howard Johnson’s parking lot the boxes were gone, save for a few empty capsules and some white powder.
At around 1 a.m., seven and a half hours after he was supposed to have gone home, Kim received a call at the hospital from the lab saying that high levels of cyanide had been detected in each of the Janus couple’s blood. He immediately called and woke the head of the lab at home, who assured him that the tests were accurate.
Doctor Kim called the Medical Examiner’s office. “I can tell you right now that these people probably died of cyanide. When the medical examiners analyze the Tylenol capsules please have them check for cyanide.” Not long after he hung up, Mary McFarland died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.
It was now terrifyingly clear--yet still widely unknown--that countless numbers of pain relief capsules in houses and on store shelves were ticking time bombs.
When dawn finally arrived, Dr. Robert Stein, the Cook County Medical Examiner, hurriedly called a press conference and announced that cyanide had been detected in Tylenol, and that there was reason to believe the product had been tampered with on a large scale. He called for an immediate halt to its use until further notice. At 9:03 a.m., Mary Reiner, mother of four, was declared dead.
Doctor Kim heard the news flash on his car radio as he returned to work, having briefly gone home to rest and clean up. Six people were dead. Kim still had Theresa to try and save though sadly, her condition was unchanged.
. . .
All three major networks led their news shows that evening with the Tylenol panic. It was a news story unlike any in recent memory. Terrified Americans across the country scoured medicine cabinets and drawers, handling bottles of capsules like volatile explosives. Once the Tylenol was discarded, consumers were still forced to confront the sheer number of packaged products in their homes. Any one of them might be a Trojan horse for deadly poison.
All that day Schumpp and his second-in-command, Edward Cisowski, got reports from their men in the field and desperately tried to figure out who might be responsible for this monstrous crime. There was no apparent motive and little evidence to work with. At the meeting the following morning, an exhausted Schumpp stood up and gave it his best shot.
Maybe it was someone trying to manipulate the price of J&J stock, he told the law enforcement gathering. Or perhaps only one of the victims was a target and the others were killed to cover up the actual murder. It could also be a disgruntled J&J employee looking for revenge.
Whatever the case, every possibility would have to be run down until a clear motive came to light. Typically most poisoners were women, though they nearly always killed people they knew. And other than three of the victims being named Mary and the Janus’ being an extended family, there was nothing linking the victims together.
The Johnson & Johnson reps at the meeting listened as the decision was taken to get all Tylenol products off store shelves and out of people’s medicine cabinets, nationwide and immediately. Despite the massive loss of revenue they faced, J&J agreed and decided to go even further, temporarily halting all production of Tylenol products.
. . . When the meeting ended, Schumpp set up teams of investigators mixing state, local and FBI resources to set up surveillance on all the victims’ houses. His theory was that an anonymous killer might be looking to set up a personal connection to his victims. Surveillance teams were also sent to all of the victim’s funerals.
. . . The authorities were so determined to find the perpetrator that even psychics were given their due. The man was white, they told police. The man was Black. The man was Hispanic. He drove a van, a pickup, a motorcycle. At one point a psychic called in saying he’d had a crystal clear vision of a 46-year-old Japanese woman who was angry at J&J for refusing to hire her. She’d bought a jar of olives at the store before dropping off the poisoned Tylenol, he said. The specificity of his details made his story seem plausible until police asked how he came upon his visions and he told them his magic pen wrote the details out for him whenever he picked it up.
Investigators ruled out any chance that the tainting had occurred in the plants where Tylenol was manufactured, then pored feverishly over a years worth of Chicago newspapers for Tylenol overdose or accidental death stories that might motivate revenge. When nothing turned up, they went through 10 years of murders that occurred on September 29 to see if the date was in any way significant.
Then, on October 6, an unsigned, handwritten letter arrived at the offices of Johnson & Johnson.
Gentlemen:
As you can see, it is easy to place cyanide (both potassium & sodium) into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it is easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that the cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little. And there will be no time to take countermeasures.
If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far I have spent less than fifty dollars and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.
If you want to stop the killing then wire $1,000,000.00 to bank account # 84-49-597 at Continental Illinois Bank Chicago, Ill.
J&J immediately alerted what had now become the Tylenol Task Force. The first thing investigators focused on was the bank account, but rather than the key breakthrough they so badly needed, what they discovered sounded more like a hoax. The account was registered to an heir to the Miller Brewing fortune, Frederick Miller McCahey, who had recently closed a travel agency he owned. The pre-stamped envelope containing the letter was traced to the agency’s Pitney-Bowes stamp machine. They soon learned that McCahey’s former employee Nancy Richardson had an axe to grind with him over a bounced final $511 paycheck.
Hardly the impetus to commit mass murder, yet at the same time, the letter was a confession so not easily ignored either. Nancy and her husband Robert Richardson had had an angry confrontation with McCahey over the check. Agents subsequently learned that the Richardsons had lived in Chicago up until three weeks before the first Tylenol deaths, then left town without explanation. A warrant was issued for their arrest and a nationwide manhunt was launched.
Far from Chicago, nearly three weeks after the mayhem began, an eager, 28-year-old Kansas City homicide detective named David Barton sat down in his living room to watch the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Like most cops, he’d been following the Tylenol case from a distance while attending to local crimes in Kansas City. Neither Chicago police nor the FBI had figured out a motive for the poisonings, nor had they made much progress in terms of a suspect, save for the apparent hoaxster Richardson.
On the set, Rather announced there’d been a new break: a surveillance photo from the Walgreens where Paula Prince bought her poisoned bottle that was taken at the moment of purchase. In one of the aisles in the background there was a bearded man wearing a white lab coat whom police thought might be Robert Richardson. Anyone who recognized him was urged to contact local authorities.
When the surveillance photo came up on the screen, Barton leapt from his seat and began shouting to his daughter: “That’s him, the bastard! That’s him!”
He’d never been more certain of anything in his life. Except Barton had never met a man named Robert Richardson. The man in the photograph, he was sure, was James William Lewis, a former Kansas City grifter and the prime suspect in a gruesome murder and mail fraud scam whom Barton had been after for years. Only now he had a beard. The next day Barton and his colleague Billy Moore were on a plane to Chicago to meet with Tylenol investigators. They brought with them two boxes related to the Kansas City crimes that were so large they had to purchase separate seats for them. Those boxes told a spine-chilling tale.
Back in 1978, four years before the Tylenol murders, Lewis and his wife Leann (alias Nancy Richardson) had lived in Kansas City where they ran a tax preparation service. One of their customers was a 72-year-old bachelor named Raymond West. When the elderly man went missing, West’s close friend Charles Banker, who’d gone to check on him, called the police and suggested that West’s ‘tax man,’ James Lewis, had been spending a lot of time over at West’s house of late and might know West’s whereabouts. When the KCPD followed up on the lead, Lewis told them that West had gone to the Ozarks for three or four days with a girlfriend. But West–a lifelong bachelor–never had a girlfriend, and Banker, the concerned friend, was certain he wouldn’t leave town without telling him first.
[Oriana: what follows is a gruesome description of how Raymond West was killed and dismembered.]
James Lewis, suspected of being the Tylenol-cyanide murderer
There would be no trial. Too much of the evidence against Lewis had been tainted by the bungled arrest to mount a solid case, and Lewis’ high priced lawyers, paid for by Leann’s well-to-do parents, successfully filed dozens of motions to suppress the evidence they had.
Then an odd bolt of serendipity struck. Barely two years later, Barton, the homicide detective, began getting wind of some mail fraud activity going on in the area–petty stuff, mostly $400 or $500 jobs. He discovered that all of the Kansas City victims had some relationship with Lewis & Lewis Tax Service. The Lewises had been stealing personal information from their accounting clients in Kansas City, using it to order credit cards and having those cards sent to mailboxes they’d placed on the road. When the illicit cards would arrive, James Lewis would collect the mail–including the mailbo x itself–and drive off.
Barton began tailing Lewis until one day he witnessed him out on a country road opening a mailbox, pulling out the contents, then throwing the entire mailbox into his trunk. Barton immediately tried to get a warrant issued for Lewis’ arrest, but before the warrant could be served, the Lewises somehow got wind of it and fled. A day or so later, unbeknownst to anyone in Kansas City, they showed up in Chicago, newly minted as Robert and Nancy Richardson.
Coordination among the many agencies involved in the Tylenol investigation had been smooth thus far, though the number of leads they were running down was becoming exhausting. A few arrests were made, but they led nowhere. John Douglas, the legendary FBI behavioral profiler, suspected that the Tylenol perpetrator would be trying to follow the crime investigation from a distance. The best way to do that back then was to read reports in the local Chicago papers, which could only be done from afar in public libraries. The task force created posters and sent them to public libraries across the country.
The more investigators learned about Lewis, the more the pieces began to fit together. Lewis had had a difficult childhood, and, unsurprisingly, a different identity. He was born Theodore Elmer Wilson in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1946. His father left the family before Theodore turned three. Later, he and his sisters were placed in foster care after their mother abandoned them in a motel near Joplin, Missouri. He was eventually adopted by Floyd and Charlotte Lewis, who renamed him James William Lewis. Among other things, James would always remember the nearby mines of Cave Junction, Missouri, where they lived, which he believed were responsible for poisoning the local water. Floyd died when James was 12, and his mother remarried six years later. James reportedly broke his stepfather’s ribs in a fight and threatened his mother with an axe handle.
On October 27th, the Chicago Tribune received a letter from Robert Richardson along with a dossier of alleged proof of McCahey’s crime.
As you have probably guessed, my wife and I have not committed the Chicago area Tylenol murders. We do not go around killing people. We never have and we never shall. Contrary to reports we are not armed unless one means in the anatomical paraplegic sense. We shall never carry weapons no matter how bizarre the police & FBI reports.
Domestically, weapons are for two quite similar types of mentalities:
(1) Criminals &
(2) Police.
We are neither.
Robert Richardson
The game pulley sent to Quantico detected an exact match of James Lewis’ fingerprint. If Barton and the Tylenol team could get him into custody, there was fresh hope he could go down for the West murder as well.
Shortly after Barton returned from Chicago, and days before Thanksgiving, the editor of the Kansas City Star received another letter entitled “A Moral Dilemma.” Its seven pages, this time signed “James Lewis,” included several personal details about Lewis’ life and worldview. “I grew up a southern Missouri hillbilly,” he wrote. “Then life was relatively simple. Values of right and wrong were clear cut black and white. The law was to be obeyed. The sheriff was to be obeyed and respected.”
Lewis avoided any mention of Tylenol in his letter to the Star, though it was clear he was monitoring the case’s developments while on the lam, including the involvement of his old nemesis David Barton. At one point in the letter Lewis crowed, “Reopen the Raymond West case? That sounds like a splendid idea. Why have the police taken so long to come to their senses?”
Finally, on December 13, a librarian at the main branch of the New York City public library spotted a man who matched the description of Lewis. He was in the periodicals section, reading out-of-town newspapers exactly as John Douglas had hypothesized. NYPD detectives swarmed the vicinity and Detective Vincent Piazza raced inside and made the collar. The news spread rapidly, and Leann knew she was next in line for arrest. She called her parents in Missouri, who summoned two prominent Chicago lawyers, Michael Monico and Barry Spevack, to help arrange for Leann’s surrender.
Leann was flown to Chicago and packed into the custody of then-assistant prosecutor Jeremy Margolis. She was briefly held on a charge of using a false social security card. While in custody, she took a lie detector test, which revealed deception in two key responses:
Question 1: “Did you ever return to Chicago after you moved to New York?”
Answer: “No.”
Question 2: “Do you know who put that cyanide in the Tylenol?”
Answer: “No.”
Leann Lewis
James Lewis refused a polygraph. He was held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago for attempted extortion. Incredibly, Leann was released and the charge against her was dropped. James Lewis was the whale they were looking to take down, and a polygraph wasn’t enough to convict Leann of a crime this enormous.
Fahner and Zagel were convinced that James Lewis had committed the Tylenol murders. In all this time he was the only one who’d claimed any responsibility. The difficulty was proving it beyond a reasonable doubt. Now in custody, Lewis was looking at a possible 30 years on the mail fraud charges, but if they could get him another decade for extortion he wouldn’t get out until sometime in his mid-70s, not to mention the distant hope that Lewis might finally be prosecuted for West’s murder and dismemberment. They made the painful but safer decision to get Lewis for extortion.
Lewis’ defense team also suspected he might have done the Tylenol murders, but their job was to keep him out of jail, or rather, get him out of jail as quickly as possible. Although he had confessed to the Tylenol poisonings in the letter, including specifics about the type of cyanide used, and asked for payment of a million dollars, if they could prove that Lewis was simply trying to avenge his wife, perhaps they could duck the extortion rap and get him off on a lesser charge. Monico decided to try something bold. He would concede outright that Lewis wrote the letter and argue that he was not trying to commit a crime but rather to expose McCahey. Furthermore, they would argue, there was no way for him to have received the extortion money even if J&J had paid it.
The Tylenol jury returned a guilty verdict on the extortion charge, and Lewis was sentenced to another 10 years to run consecutively to his mail fraud sentence.
Margolis played along, all the while holding his cards close to the vest lest he tip Lewis off to any of the evidence they had against him in the murder cases. In the end neither man blinked.
Lewis served a total of 13 years in state prison before being released on parole in 1995 and rejoining Leann, who had moved to Massachusetts in the interim. He was arrested again in 2003 and held for the attempted rape of a woman who lived in the same building as he and Leann. But when the victim said she was too afraid to testify, Lewis was released again. One of the enduring mysteries of both the Tylenol and West cases has been trying to understand where Leann fits in. Could she have truly been shielded from it all until well after the fact? Prosecutor Jim Bell, for one, has little doubt.
To the untrained eye, the two crimes couldn’t be any more different. Ray West was murdered in a moment of passion versus seven strangers killed in cold blood with the Tylenol case. One would expect a criminal psychologist, of all people, to focus on what was going through the minds of each killer. Yet in this story of seemingly endless paradoxes, the opposite of one’s expectations is generally the surer bet. According to Richard Walter, arguably the nation’s premier criminal psychologist and a co-founder of the Vidocq Society, a monthly gathering of cold-case experts, the killer could easily have been the same person. And he may have been hiding in plain sight all along.
“There’s a tendency to focus too much on the crime itself, rather than the crime type,” says Walter. “It’s not what the killer thinks, it’s what he does that matters most.” Walter has made a career out of teaching cops what to look for in investigations. To him, both the Tylenol and West cases are clearly the work of a power assertive killer. The alleged rape case of 2003 is yet another example of power assertiveness. The seeming ‘passivity’ of the Tylenol case is merely a different sort of power being asserted. Here, it’s icier and more distant but equally deadly.
Walter points to Lewis’ use of the first person pronoun in his extortion letter as indicative of the sociopathic need of a power assertive killer to brag about his work. “I have spent less than fifty dollars and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle.” He sees Lewis’ ‘helpful’ drawings for Margolis as yet another form of braggadocio, much like O.J. Simpson’s controversial and bizarre book, If I Did It, about the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. This same compulsion may also explain why Lewis welcomed renewed attention to the West case despite the overwhelming evidence against him.
For the first time, it may not be unthinkable that the Tylenol murders would have never happened had Lewis been prosecuted and sentenced for Ray West’s murder. What’s crystal clear is that the poisonings changed the world irrevocably That change is easily tallied in the ubiquity of safety-sealed drug packaging, yet immeasurable in terms of the lasting terror it engendered in the American psyche about our collective vulnerability.
Dr. Thomas Kim’s little-known role in halting the Tylenol crisis was an act of determined professionalism that saved untold numbers of lives, and his willingness to look “silly” remains an unsung, yet extraordinary deed of medical sleuthing and public service.
The FBI still considers Tylenol an open, active case. Despite a nationwide manhunt, thousands of hours of police work and an unsolicited confession from the only enduring suspect, no one has ever been charged for the poisoning that killed Mary Reiner, Paula Prince, Mary McFarland, Adam, Stanley, and Theresa Janus, or a 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman, a singular set of serial murders. James and Leann Lewis are now in their 70s and living in Massachusetts. There is no statute of limitations for the crime of homicide nor for the recurring grief that persists in its wake.
Oriana:
I was relieved to read, in the Wikipedia account, that James "Lewis died on July 9, 2023, at age 76."
Furthermore, "the 1982 incident inspired the pharmaceutical, food, and consumer product industries to develop tamper-resistant packaging, such as induction seals and improved quality control methods. Moreover, product tampering was made a federal crime. The new laws resulted in Stella Nickell's conviction in the Excedrin tampering case, for which she was sentenced to 90 years in prison."
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TRUMP’S GAZA IDEAS
Everyone who claims to be an “expert” on the Middle East is sure about one thing: President Donald Trump’s proposal to move Palestinian Arabs out of Gaza either cannot or should not happen. Of course, the same experts said the same thing about the 2020 Abraham Accords that achieved normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab and Muslim-majority countries. They also predicted that Trump’s moving of the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would set off Armageddon (it did not).
Nevertheless, the experts might be right this time—and at first glance, it’s hard to see how Trump’s idea can be put into effect without massive use of U.S. military force and equally massive expenditure of federal funds. And we already know that the administration has no intention of sending troops to Gaza or investing much, if any, money in the idea.
The end of the fantasy
Even if it doesn’t happen, Trump’s decision to champion the idea is enormously consequential. It decisively changes the conversation about the Middle East in a way that dwarfs the importance of even the most significant pro-Israel policy moves of his first term. Above all else, it means the end of the fantasy about the creation of a Palestinian state.
The international community, Arab and Muslim worlds, and the Palestinians themselves are outraged about the idea of a reconstruction plan for Gaza that would allow any people to leave the Strip. They are not appalled by it because they think it would be bad for Gaza civilians. Say what you like about Trump and his intentions or even those of Israelis and pro-Israel Americans who cheered his words, but it’s clear that it would be good for the Palestinian Arabs who have been stuck there to be given a fresh start somewhere else. And it would make it a lot more likely that the rebuilding of Gaza would not mean the reconstruction of Hamas terror fortifications and tunnels, as opposed to making it more livable or even developing its beachfront property.
It’s a nonstarter because all of these groups are still holding on to the idea that it must be preserved as a bastion of anti-Zionist irredentism. In their minds, Gaza’s only purpose is to serve, along with Judea and Samaria, and some of Jerusalem, as parts of an independent Palestinian state that they still believe must be set up next to Israel.
Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that failed idea. Not the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of two-state solutions dating back to the 1947 U.N. partition plan for the then-British Mandate for Palestine. Not their repeated refusals of peace plans or anything that might compel them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders can be drawn. Not the clear intention of the genocidal Hamas terrorists who ran Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name from 2007 until Oct. 6. 2023 to destroy the Jewish state and its people. And not the fact that the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority and Palestinian public opinion, in general, approve of Hamas and its goals, for which the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, were just the trailer.
Wishing away Palestinian intransigence
None of this prevented the international community, in addition to every American administration until Trump 2.0, from holding onto the belief that a Palestinian state was the way to end the conflict. A Palestinian state was an integral part of the first Trump administration’s “Peace Through Prosperity” Mideast plan, though it was appropriately far less generous than previous offers. And even after Oct. 7, former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were among those who pretended that the last century of Palestinian Arab intransigence was meaningless and no reason to stop pushing for the same idea that had failed time and again.
The centerpiece of this project is its clear assumption that there will never be an independent Palestinian state in Gaza or elsewhere.
The P.A. may rule the internal affairs of Arabs in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). However, the corrupt kleptocracy that continues to subsidize terrorism through its “pay for slay” policy rewarding violent Palestinian terrorists, including those responsible for Oct. 7, has never shown any realistic interest in transitioning to a sovereign entity devoted to creating a peaceful and productive state alongside Israel.
Gaza has been a dagger pointed at Israel ever since it withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from the Strip in the summer of 2005; two years later, P.A. rule (also run by its political party, Fatah) was toppled by Hamas in a bloody coup against its rivals.
Still, it remains an article of faith among the foreign-policy establishment that Israel must be compelled to facilitate the creation of a state—a state whose main purpose will serve, like Gaza under Hamas, as a springboard for Israel’s eventual destruction.
What Trump has done is to serve notice that the United States will no longer regard the facilitating of this destructive concept as a policy goal. On the contrary, he has made it clear that whatever else does or doesn’t happen in the coming years, a different solution has to be found for the Palestinians. The people who cheered the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7 will not be rewarded for this with more pressure on Jerusalem to do something the overwhelming majority of Israelis from right to left oppose as not so much unwise as suicidal.
The ‘nakba’ narrative
There are consequences for generations of intransigence that has hardened into a belief system inextricably linking Palestinian nationalism to unending war on the Jews. Trump is the first American president since the conflict began to explicitly state what those consequences must be.
Since the Jewish people regained sovereignty over their ancient homeland in 1948, the Palestinian Arabs and their foreign enablers held onto the nakba narrative, which holds the creation of modern-day Israel as the great “catastrophe” or “disaster” that must be reversed.
Since the late 1980s, American policymakers have tried to split the difference between the two peoples by pushing for a two-state solution that would, in theory, make everyone happy. But that was just a form of denial about Palestinian intentions for Israel’s destruction that no proof of the folly of the idea could be allowed to disturb.
That’s why Trump’s idea is so painful. Contrary to Palestinian claims, it is not a repeat of the nakba, when Arabs fled the territory of the newborn State of Israel while an even greater number of Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim and Arab world.
It is recognition that the Palestinians must be compelled to give up their ambition to turn back the clock to 1948 or even 1917 (the date of Britain’s Balfour Declaration that declared that empire’s support for the idea of a Jewish National Home). And the only way to conclusively do that is to take away from them even the possibility of more Oct. 7-style attacks through which they hope to isolate and gradually wear down Israelis to the point where they will give up.
THE NOTION OF A TWO-STATE SOLUTION DIED A LONG TIME AGO.
Yet it could have easily been put into effect if only veteran terrorist and P.A. leader Yasser Arafat—newly off his title as chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization with blood on his hands—had said “yes” to the offers of independence and statehood offered him by former President Bill Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But after Arafat answered that peace offer with the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, most Israelis understood that the land for peace schemes they had been sold was nothing more than land for terror. The conversion of Gaza into a terror state and missile launching pad against Israeli civilians after 2005 only confirmed that unhappy truth.
Still, the Palestinians had more opportunities and much international support. Statehood could have happened when President George W. Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even sweeter offer to Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. And the opportunity for Palestinian statehood was always a theoretical possibility during the eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, who did everything he could to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction.
But after Oct. 7 and the war that followed it, it’s safe to say that Palestinian statehood stopped being anything but a tired and meaningless policy concept that had outlived its sell-by date.
What lies ahead for the Palestinians or Gaza? It’s hard to say.
Trump pushed for a ceasefire/hostage release deal that could leave Hamas in power in Gaza. But his statements about the necessity for the removal of much, if not all, of the Palestinian population for the area to be rebuilt shows he doesn’t want that to happen. And as much as he would like for there to be no wars taking place on his watch, it seems unlikely that he would oppose further Israeli efforts to finish off Hamas once it’s clear that the ceasefire will not force its disarming and eviction from power. The era of “daylight” between the United States and Israel is also over.
It’s entirely possible that the Palestinians in Gaza will insist on staying in the same state of limbo that they have chosen for themselves since 1948. They may continue waiting for Israel’s destruction so the descendants of the original refugees can go “home” to a country that never actually existed as a separate Palestinian Arab nation and never will. And it’s equally possible that with or without Hamas leadership, the political culture of the Palestinians is so twisted and intransigent that few will dare to take Trump up on his offer of the resettlement they’ve been denied for all these years for fear of being killed by Hamas operatives or their neighbors.
But there should be no doubt that despite the calumnies heaped upon Trump for having the temerity to discard foreign-policy conventional wisdom, this is the best offer the Palestinians will ever likely get.
There is no rational alternative
They may get the satisfaction of seeing Trump’s idea die for lack of support from anyone but Israel. But the alternative to the problem is for the Palestinian people to remain living in squalor, where they are only considered useful by their leaders, activists, university students and others who exploit the situation, as cannon fodder to wage war against the Jewish state.
What Trump has done is to consign the idea of Palestinian statehood to the ash heap of history, where it belongs. Along with his withdrawal from UNRWA—the U.N. refugee agency that has refused to resettle the Palestinians since 1948 and that helped perpetuate the war on Israel—and his recent defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose “humanitarian” projects similarly helped prop up Palestinian intransigence, Trump has decisively shifted U.S. policy away from fantasy to realism.
American support was always essential for Palestinian statehood. That is finished. His critics may decry this all they want, but the bitter truth they fail to acknowledge is that their alternatives to Trump’s Gaza idea are even more unrealistic and dangerous than his. ~ Jonathan S. Tobin
https://www.jns.org/trump-plan-puts-an-end-to-the-palestinian-state-fantasy/
Gaza before October 7, 2023
Mary:
While I find Trump's idea of a resolution for Gaza to be utterly crass — bulldoze it, clear off all the Palestinians, buy it, like any other piece of Real Estate — and redevelop it as a for profit resort area. It does recognize there can be no real peace if the Palestinians stay there. There is no Two State Solution. Because the Palestinians are absolutely opposed to that — and to ANY "solution" that allows the continued existence of Israel.
Their own existence takes all its meaning from the absolute desire for the destruction of Israel — they are supremely uninterested in coexistence. That is Hamas' position, and there's no real way to separate Hamas — its aims and intents — from “civilian” Palestinians. In fact there is no such group, no such separation. That is an illusion, a fantasy negated by simple observation. Witness the population rejoicing in the streets after the foul attacks of October 7. Witness the lack of any resistance to Hamas. The liberal West is not comfortable with such an assessment, but I am afraid there are no "innocents" in this population — no matter how they posture for the cameras.
This may sound horribly harsh, but the reality is also that there's no place to re-settle them. First, they are not interested because their whole reason for being is the continued effort to destroy Israel. Second, no other country will have them, including the other Islamic countries — because in the past they have sheltered Palestinians who started wars and other bad actions in the states that granted refuge.
Trump of course is no solution. And now we see him acting to throw Zelensky and Ukraine under the Russian bus.
Oriana:
As I remember, during his first term Trump visited North Korea and remarked that it had a lot of desirable seaside real estate. Isn't this what we dream of, a luxury vacation in North Korea or Gaza? The key word is "seaside." Both North Korea and Gaza have access to the sea, which is indeed the best thing about these places. That's also Greenland's greatest asset.
This is indeed too insane to dwell upon. If it weren't so tragic, it would be very funny. Normally, we'd chuckle as we ponder the name "Bibas." But nothing is normal anymore when we consider the horrors of October 7 and the subsequent bombing of Gaza. No words are sufficient to describe all this, and no one seems to have a viable solution. Maybe there is no solution, hard as it is to get used to that idea.
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Misha on THE END OF USAID
The end of USAID will mean boundless misery, despair and death from illnesses and starvation for millions of people in world's poorest countries. But Trump and his minions don't care: quite to the contrary -- for them, the cruelty is the point. Simply put, they are proudly heartless people. And the majority of Americans either have never heard of USAID, don’t know or care what it is -- or oppose all foreign aid as a matter of some crude ayn-randian principle, insisting, against all rational argument, that it takes up a disproportionate amount of the US budget.
Andrew Coyne, a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail, pulls no punches on the incoming US administration:
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbors dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”
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HOW DO OUR BRAINS KNOW WHAT IS REAL?
When did you last hallucinate? “The visionary tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected,” wrote the 19th-century psychologist Sir Francis Galton. Setting aside the vivid, often emotive, cinema of our dreams, we are all more vulnerable to “seeing things” than we might at first suppose.
Around four fifths of people who have recently been bereaved report an encounter with their loved one: most commonly a lively sense of their presence, but some hear, see or speak with them. Up to 60% of people who lose sight in later life see things that aren’t there, sometimes extravagant images such as the “two young men … wearing magnificent cloaks … their hats … trimmed with silver” who appeared in the first reported case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, as this phenomenon is known, before “dissolving” away.
A 20-year-old woman blindfolded for 12 hours saw “cities, skies, kaleidoscopes, lions and sunsets so bright she could ‘barely look at them’”. After losing a limb, most people carry a “constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member”, as Weir Mitchell, the American neurologist who coined the term phantom limb after studying 90 cases from the American civil war, put it. Pilots on long flights, travelers through snowstorms and deserts, prisoners and hostages held in darkness; their restless brains are all prone to see the things of which they’re being deprived.
These examples relate to vision, our dominant sense modality, but other senses can also generate compelling hallucinations: around one in 10 of us will at some point hear a voice that seems to be coming from outside but proves to be self-generated. For one in 100 – excluding people who go to see psychiatrists because of their voices – this happens regularly.
How do our minds and brains conspire to create these deceptive experiences? Studies of deliberate imagery – where subjects are told to “visualize an apple in your mind’s eye” – and of hallucination show that they are cut from the same cloth: both involve activity in sensory regions of the brain. This can be strikingly similar to the activity that occurs when we perceive the real world around us. Such similarities, between brain activity during imagination and while actually perceiving, have a profound implication: that perception itself is a kind of imaginative act.
The notion is an ancient one, but has been given a new lease of life by the idea, from psychology, that prediction is integral to perception, and by evidence from neuroscience that our experience depends absolutely on the work of our sugar- and oxygen-hungry brains. In other words, perception is far more dependent on prior knowledge – painstakingly created internal models of the world – than we usually take it to be.
The contemporary expert Anil Seth puts it nicely: “We tend to think of perception as occurring outside-in, but it mostly occurs inside-out.” One hundred and fifty years earlier, the French historian and psychologist Hippolyte Taine wrote presciently in the same vein: “External perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we should call external perception true hallucination.”
If perception is a kind of true hallucination, a potential problem looms: how can we distinguish what we imagine from what we perceive? The examples above show that we don’t always succeed; we can mistake our imaginings for reality, usually transiently, but sometimes, in psychosis for example, more persistently.
The opposite also occurs: in the “Perky effect”, people fail to detect that objects they are imagining are being shown to them for real. Mostly, though, we get things right. Some rules of thumb are helpful – high levels of vividness and detail, effortlessness and consistency with context suggest that we’re looking at the real world – but not always.
Daydreams can be effortless and vivid; hunting for a destination in thick fog can be effortful and the resulting experience indistinct. Somehow, though, the brain weighs up the odds, and generally gets the right answer.
How does it achieve this? Research in AI provides some interesting clues. In “generative adversarial” models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the “generative” bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the “adversary” does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model.
The generative model constantly ups its game to masquerade as the real McCoy; the adversary keeps honing its connoisseurship to distinguish the authentic from the fake. Something similar happens in the brain. The “adversary” in the human brain, charged with reality checking, keeps watch from our huge frontal lobes: Area 10, in particular, at the tip of the frontal cortex, becomes active in tasks requiring us to decide whether items were seen or imagined. It is smaller and less active in people with psychosis than in healthy people, especially so in people with psychosis who hallucinate.
It is fascinating that the apex of our highly evolved frontal lobes should be charged with the vital “metacognitive” task of distinguishing the imagined from the real. But that doesn’t mean those same imaginings can’t be rich sources of insight into the world around us. The chemist Friedrich Kekulé famously described the circular structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of snakes, one of which “seized its own tail … As if by a flash of lightning I awoke … I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis.” A dream assisted Dmitri Mendeleyev in the formulation of the periodic table. Einstein imagined how the universe would appear to someone traveling on a beam of light.
The author Malcolm Bradbury said: “All writers hear voices. You wake up in the morning with the voices … and try and trap them before they run away.”
Overlapping processes in our dynamic brains enable us to perceive, to imagine and to fashion anew. We need to know which is which, but as Kekulé advised: “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/10/the-big-idea-how-do-our-brains-know-whats-real
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JOKES ABOUT STALIN
Jokes about Stalin were told, but only in private to people whom you thought could be trusted. I had a Russian language teacher whose roommate told a joke to him and their other two flatmates. One of the other flatmates betrayed him to the authorities. The guy who told the joke died in the gulag; my teacher and the other flatmate were sent to the gulag as well, for failure to report him. My teacher lived long enough to be drafted in WW2 and was taken prisoner by the Germans at the battle of Kerch. At the end of the war, he avoided forced repatriation (which, as a Soviet POW, would have been a virtual death sentence) by lying to the Americans that he was Polish. He eventually made it Canada, where he taught Russian to Canadian soldiers and diplomats.
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IS THE END OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE FINALLY IN SIGHT?
Once Russia's initial push to subjugate Ukraine failed in the first weeks of its full-scale invasion, a widespread view prevailed for two years or more: There's no end in sight.
That has changed in recent months for several reasons, with factors ranging from the situation on the battlefield and shifts in public opinion to the election of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who returns to the White House on January 20 and has repeatedly said he would put paid to the biggest armed conflict in Europe since World War II within a day or two.
So, will Russia's war against Ukraine end in 2025?
If an end means a durable peace deal, the answer is no, many analysts say – in part because Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn't want it, regardless of what he claims, unless it leaves Moscow with a degree of dominance over Ukraine that is unacceptable to Kyiv and its backers abroad.
Ukrainian soldier in a trench
Experts say Putin wants Russia to pose a persistent threat to Ukraine and a challenge to the West, which he casts as the aggressor in a civilizational confrontation.
Ukrainians, meanwhile, don't want a peace deal if it means formally handing territory to Russia and giving up hope of holding Russia to account for its crimes against the country and its people.
"I think we're very, very far from an end to the war," said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
There are plenty of pitfalls that could stem from a cease-fire, including the risk that Russia could use it as a chance to regroup and attack again unless effective deterrents and protections for Ukraine are in place.
An even bigger obstacle is the need for serious, effective security guarantees for Ukraine.
Russia is dead set against Ukraine joining NATO: One of the demands Moscow put forward as a way to avert the full-scale invasion was a binding assurance that Kyiv would never become a member. And analysts say the Kremlin is also almost certain to bristle at any arrangement it can cast as the virtual equivalent of membership in the Western military alliance.
A major focus of discussion in recent weeks has been the prospect of sending Western troops into Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire. But there are disagreements about this in Europe, and Russia would not be happy with it.
"The Russian economy right now is only functioning because of the war. The Russian political system is now built around the war. It excuses and explains the level of centralization, the level of repression, the level of ideological control, which are going to be things that the Kremlin will be very loathe, if able at all, to countenance pivoting away from," he told RFE/RL. "Even if Russia were to pivot towards a cease-fire, I think it would find itself seeking to maintain the level of confrontation that it currently has with Ukraine, but [also] with the West more broadly.”
An agreement may not come to pass in 2025. But if talks are held and a deal is done, analysts warn, Western nations must be careful to avoid congratulating themselves and considering the matter closed.
Bakhmut before and after
"Europe's response to any cease-fire agreement will be critically important — both for Ukraine and for themselves," Ruth Deyermond, senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, said in written comments to RFE/RL.
"With many countries dealing with political turmoil at home (often stoked by Russia), they may be tempted to treat this as an end to the conflict and an opportunity to reset relations with Russia. That would be an enormous mistake," she wrote. "Russia will continue to pose the most serious and immediate conventional and non-conventional threat to European security.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/war-talks-peace-russia-ukraine/33258279.html
Oriana:
It’s striking how the prompt end of this war has been predicted since the very beginning. But it keeps dragging on, and the most daring current forecast is “by the end of 2025.”
The pessimistic forecast is “as long as Putin is in power.” After all, it’s his war, and his ego (paradoxically inseparable from his inferiority complex) knows no limits. There are also those who seriously think that Russia, in contrast to Ukraine, can wage this war forever.
Putin has the best doctors, but let’s not forget that he is mortal. There are continued rumors that he is suffering from a life-threatening illness. An oncologist and a laryngologist are always near him.
He is of course terrified of a coup. He travels in an armored train. He won’t fly because an airplane can be shot down. He won't eat any food except what has been prepared by his trusted cook (and apparently he also employs a "taster").
For whatever it's worth, he's not a happy man. Millions pray for his speedy death. By contrast, Zelensky has been compared with Churchill.
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TRUMP IS RULING OVER THE FIRST POTEMKIN CONGRESS
The Capitol building has become little more than a Potemkin village, where MAGA Republicans playact as legislators.
House and Senate Republicans are arguing over budget strategy, while the Trump administration makes clear it is ready to ignore Congress.
The House Republicans and their Senate counterparts are at odds over the best legislative strategy for carrying out President Donald Trump’s agenda. The drama showcases congressional Republicans’ determination to pretend that things in Washington are business as usual. But the intraparty squabble comes as the new administration has shown little interest in following whatever spending plan Congress eventually passes.
At the heart of the debate between the two chambers, which began back in December, is how to use a process that lets spending bills bypass a filibuster in the Senate. The House is following Trump’s desire for “one big, beautiful bill” that funds his immigration, defense and energy policies, and also extends a slew of tax cuts from 2017, which are due to expire at the end of the year. But Senate Republicans believe it makes more sense to split those bills in two, giving Trump an early win while leaving the heavy lift of taxes for later in the year.
But bluster and discord on Capitol Hill are normal. What’s going on at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, on the other hand, is very much not. While Republicans on Capitol Hill argue, the Trump administration has opted to see how much control over federal spending it can seize from Congress.
At issue is whether the president can hold back, or “impound,” funds that Congress has appropriated. The administration, led by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, thinks a 1974 law prohibiting impoundment is unconstitutional. But rather than confront that legislation head on, the White House has danced around it, claiming that any pauses in funding are only temporary freezes to allow for their review.
The most overt move came two weeks ago when OMB issued a government-wide funding halt, arguably to allow agencies to hunt out grants and loans that went against Trump’s early executive orders attacking diversity and other “woke” priorities. But despite the memo’s swift recission, administration officials at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies have continued to hold back funding. NBC News reported Tuesday that an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency specifically told her team to “freeze funding for grant programs going back several years” in defiance of numerous court orders to lift any hold on appropriated funds.
Five Treasury secretaries warned, in an op-ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday, of the danger to democracy that comes from having the executive branch “make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not.”
But then you have FEMA’s acting head posting on X that he was shutting off any payments to migrant housing in New York even as he acknowledged that Congress had approved the spending. It is a direct rejection of lawmakers' constitutional role in determining the country’s priorities.
What we’re seeing play out on the Hill then is little more than a grotesque pantomime of a legislature. Republicans who have long promised spending cuts and then balked when asked for specifics will now be able to simply pretend to do their jobs while letting Trump and Musk’s cronies get their hands dirty. If their own constituents are eventually hurt in the process, lawmakers will be able to shake their heads sympathetically while passing the buck. It’s a short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating position — if you want Americans’ vote for their representative or senator to have any meaning beyond a popularity contest, that is.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-republicans-congress-budget-rcna191681
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THE EARTH’S MOST BEAUTIFUL AND DEADLY VOLCANOS
More than 1,500 ground-rumbling, lava-spewing — and stunning — volcanoes dot the planet, changing their surroundings and renewing resources as they go.
At any given moment, about 20 volcanoes are erupting. Some wipe out nearby cities, like Italy’s Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii in A.D. 79, and others erupt in desolate regions, like the farthest ends of Siberia. But not all volcanoes are towering, rock- and ash-spewing behemoths like Vesuvius; some are long, lava-effusing fissures on the ground, and many lie dormant, no longer trembling or exuding any debris at all.
Building a mountain
Volcanoes form around vents on the Earth’s surface that tap into pools of magma gathering beneath. As lava pours out of the openings, it cools and hardens, forming a rocky cone that grows with each bout of activity. The most common formations are recognizable, steeply conical mounds called stratovolcanoes. Low and broad versions, known as shield volcanoes, build slowly from fluid lava flows that travel longer distances before hardening. When pressure from gases and magma builds and volcanoes erupt, they can produce more than lava. The most deadly result is a pyroclastic flow, a mixture of superheated gas and rocks that can travel at 725 kilometers per hour. Volcanic material can mix with water, snow or ice to form lahars, speeding mudflows that are also highly destructive.
Eruptions can leave small recesses, or craters, on the summit or sides of a volcano. A powerful blast can empty a magma chamber, collapsing the ground and leaving behind a huge crater, or caldera. When the danger ends, though, the minerals that were brought to the surface can help sustain new vegetation and growth. Active volcanoes represent the endless and mysterious reserves of Earth’s power.
“I’m always disappointed when I’m on a mountain that isn’t a volcano,” says John Eichelberger of the US Geological Survey, who has studied volcanoes for almost 40 years. “It’s just a big hunk of rock.”
Vesuvius
https://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/features/the-worlds-most-beautiful-and-deadly-volcanoes/
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SPEAKING ABOUT VOLCANOES . . .
Fifty years ago, the academic profession wrote King Arthur off, decreeing that he never lived. They excluded him from history books and labelled those who disagreed as cranks and amateurs.
However, a new generation of experts, using modern technology to decode ancient manuscripts, suggests Arthur was in fact an historical person who lived in the sixth century.
He fought his battles against other North Britons, many in Rheged, the predecessor of Cumbria, and he died at Castesteads in Cumbria, a place known at the time as Camlann.
The new analysis suggests the legendary hero fought 12 battles, to get food for his starving people, during the famine caused by an Icelandic volcanic eruption.
Much of the world went dark in 536 AD, leading a Byzantine historian to note “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.” He also wrote that it seemed like the sun was constantly in eclipse; and that during this time, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”
King Arthur tapestry (perhaps)
Steve OBrien:
He certainly would not have spoken Old English. The earliest reference to Arthur is in the Gododdin, but this is only a passing reference praising a Brythonic* warrior who was brave ‘but he was no Arthur.’
Arthur is probably an accretion of several Romano-British warlords who fought the incoming Anglo Saxons.
*Brythonic = refers to the Southern group of Celtic languages
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SOLAR FARMS CAN INCREASE BIRD DIVERSITY
yellowhammer
A new study has found well-managed solar farms can make an important contribution to nature as well as "provide relief from the effects of agricultural intensification".
The report, from the RSPB and the University of Cambridge, was published on Wednesday in the journal Bird Study and looked at two types of solar farms in the East Anglian Fens.
Scientists found that solar farms had a greater number of species and individual birds per hectare than the surrounding arable land.
It added that farms which had been managed with a mix of habitats, had not cut back grass and maintained hedgerows, had nearly three times the number of birds present compared with arable land nearby.
Dr Catherine Waite, researcher at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study, said: "With the combined climate and biodiversity crises, using land efficiently is crucial.
"Our study shows that if you manage solar energy production in a certain way, not only are you providing clean energy but benefiting biodiversity.”
The energy industry expects to see more plans for large scale solar farms
The findings showed well-managed solar farms in arable-dominated areas could provide biodiversity benefits as part of mixed-use landscapes.
It suggested solar farms did not pose a threat to national food security, especially when built on low or moderate grade agricultural land.
The RSPB called for a "strategic and spatial approach to planning for renewable energy" to ensure solar farms were built in low areas of risk for nature, adding that the current land use framework consultation is an "important step forward".
corn buntingIt said farmland species such as corn bunting, linnet and yellowhammer have seen their populations dwindle and finding ways to help them is critical for their long-term survival.
Dr Joshua Copping, conservation scientist at the RSPB and lead author of the study, said: "The results of this study suggest that solar farms managed well for nature could make an important contribution and could provide relief from the effects of agricultural intensification.”
Solar farms would take up less area than currently occupied by golf courses, according to the government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l049zkvezo
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WHAT IF WE ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE
From the discovery of exoplanets to the sheer vastness of the cosmos, we have good reasons to suspect that humanity is not alone in the Universe.
Still, we’ve yet to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, raising the possibility that we are a singular rarity in an otherwise barren cosmos.
If that’s true, it presents humanity with both a philosophical problem and opportunity. he idea that we might have cosmic neighbors has captivated the human imagination for decades. It’s not just sci-fi enthusiasts who ponder the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) — the general public seems to lean strongly toward the belief that we’re not alone.
Columbia University Professor David Kipping often finds that, when discussing astronomy and the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe, people almost universally insist, “Surely we can’t be the only ones!” And who can blame them? With billions of galaxies, each teeming with stars and planets, the odds of life existing only here, on this pale blue dot, seem impossibly slim.
Many scientists and media personalities reinforce this idea, turning the conversation from “if” life exists to “when” we’ll find it and “what” it might look like. In this atmosphere of excitement and speculation, the anticipation of meeting another intelligent species feels almost inevitable — unless, of course, you believe the aliens are already here.
The “crowded Universe scenario” has a way of pulling at our intuition, echoing some of the simplest yet most profound philosophical ideas. Occam’s razor nudges us toward the notion that “life out there” is the easiest explanation — it just feels right.
The principle of mediocrity chimes in, reminding us that our little corner of existence is probably not all that unique. And the Copernican principle gives a knowing nudge, sweeping away humanity’s old, self-centered fantasy of cosmic importance.
To believe we’re alone in this vast, wild expanse feels not only improbable but strangely outdated, like clinging to some universal map where Earth is still at the center.
Perhaps it’s this same wonder that Carl Sagan so beautifully captured in his novel Contact, a tale imagining humanity’s first encounter with intelligent life beyond Earth. “All those billions of worlds going to waste, lifeless, barren?” he asks. “Intelligent beings growing up only in this obscure corner of an incomprehensibly vast Universe?”
The film adaptation, if anything, sharpened the sentiment: “The Universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
But this belief in cosmic neighbors isn’t just about intuition — it’s grounded in science that sparks both curiosity and awe. With the discovery of exoplanets, we’ve learned that our galaxy overflows with diversity: Billions of planets orbit stars in the so-called habitable zone, where conditions might support liquid water.
Once, Earth’s oceans seemed unique; now, hidden seas on moons like Europa and Enceladus suggest that watery worlds may not be so rare after all. On Earth, life has proven to be remarkably resilient, thriving in boiling volcanic vents, acidic lakes, and even radioactive wastelands — extremes that stretch the imagination of where life could exist. Alien organisms might evolve in entirely different ways, shaped by biochemistries we can’t yet conceive.
And while the silence of the cosmos might seem deafening, it’s worth remembering that our search has barely begun. In cosmic terms, we’ve only just learned to listen, with future technologies poised to open entirely new windows into the Universe.
Statistically, the odds seem undeniable: With trillions of stars and untold planets, how could life not emerge elsewhere? Even the discovery of a humble microbe on a distant world would be revolutionary, reminding us that Earth’s story is but one chapter in the Universe’s endless possibilities.
However, these thrilling reasons for scientific excitement shouldn’t distract us from a sobering truth: This is still a leap of faith. The question of whether we are alone remains one of science’s greatest enigmas.
As Professor David Kipping aptly points out, the data paints a tantalizing picture — just as compatible with a Universe brimming with life as it is with one where we stand solitary under the stars.
To insist there must be life out there, he reminds us, is to trade evidence for optimism. The most honest answer to this cosmic mystery is a simple, awe-filled: “We don’t know.”
Why might we be alone? The answer begins with life’s improbable beginnings. Abiogenesis — the process by which life sparks from non-life — may be so unlikely that Earth represents a singular triumph in an otherwise barren cosmos. Even under ideal conditions, life doesn’t simply spring forth; no experiment has succeeded in replicating it.
Earth’s unique circumstances — a stabilizing Moon, plate tectonics, and precisely the right chemical mix — might be one in a trillion. Evolution adds yet another filter: While microbial life could be common, the leap to intelligent beings may require an almost comical series of accidents and near-catastrophes.
If our evolution is a cosmic lottery, the Universe might be full of unclaimed tickets. For all its billions of stars and planets, the cosmos might remain overwhelmingly empty of thinking, dreaming life.
And even if other civilizations exist, we may be forever separated by the vastness of space and time. Our attempts to listen to the stars have met only with haunting silence. Civilizations might arise and vanish like sparks, flickering out long before their signals could traverse the galactic void. The distances are staggering — light itself takes millennia to cross the nearest stars — and our technology for interstellar travel is more fiction than fact.
To make matters worse, the Universe’s accelerating expansion drags galaxies further apart, locking us into a kind of cosmic isolation. In the grandest sense, we might be effectively alone — adrift in a magnificent yet uncaring sea of stars, waving a signal no one will ever see.
Despite all our searching and knocking on cosmic doors, we may be utterly alone — effectively or actually — and for now, that’s the reality we inhabit. Futurist John Michael Godier observed that true solitude in the Universe can never be proven; we could discover alien life and know we’re not alone, but we’ll never confirm that we are, trapped as we are within the observable Universe’s shimmering bubble.
What if, after centuries, our telescopes find no alien biospheres, no technosignatures, just an unbroken cosmic silence? As Arthur C. Clarke said, either we’re alone or we’re not, and both are terrifying. To make sense of this profound solitude, philosophy might just hold the key.
Homeless in infinity
At first glance, the idea of cosmic solitude feels distant, buried beneath the noise of our overpopulated and chaotic lives. Who has time to dwell on universal loneliness while grappling with earthly troubles? Yet, this silence looms in the background of our collective psyche, a shadowy “what if” that quietly gnaws at us.
If reflective self-consciousness is unique — or tragically rare — in an empty cosmos, the implications are staggering, shaping our identity with a mix of awe, anxiety, and alienation.
On one hand, this solitude feels like the ultimate cosmic compliment. Imagine: Earth as the crown jewel of existence, the one magical place where the Universe perceives itself. If we are alone, our existence transcends probability; it’s a miracle that defies imagination. As astrophysicist Howard Smith puts it, we become rare, precious, and cosmically significant. We are singularities — impossible odds made real.
But this extraordinary uniqueness comes with a haunting loneliness. In a Universe so vast and dark, we would be the sole voice in an eternal void, singing to no audience, pondering whether our reality is even real. This isn’t just unsettling — it’s profoundly disorienting, forcing us to wrestle with the paradox of being both cosmic unicorns and solitary wanderers.
Some philosophers trace humanity’s cosmic loneliness back to the moment we were unceremoniously dethroned by the Copernican revolution.
Philosopher Avi Sagi likens it to a cosmic eviction notice: One day, Earth was the Universe’s cozy, central hearth, and the next, we were lost within an infinite wilderness. Martin Buber captured this existential displacement as “being homeless in infinity.” Stripped of a story where the cosmos revolved around us, we found ourselves unanchored, isolated, and dwarfed by limitless horizons.
As if to twist the knife, each scientific breakthrough only deepened our sense of alienation. Discovering the Universe’s sheer scale — its billions of galaxies and unthinkable distances — didn’t bring answers; it emphasized the improbable nature of our reflective awareness on this small, rocky planet. Carl Sagan’s famous musings in Pale Blue Dot summed it up: Earth, a “lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” shines like a faint ember in a sea of silent, indifferent stars.
It’s a bittersweet paradox: We are stardust, built from the same elements as the galaxies, yet we feel exiled from them. The Copernican revolution left a scar on the human psyche, severing us from the anthropocentric warmth of old. Now, we are suspended between nostalgia for a Universe that cared and the chilling beauty of one that doesn’t.
Avi Sagi points out that the Copernican revolution did more than shift our cosmic understanding; it exiled humanity into an existential loneliness that Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus grappled with long before we began straining to hear the Universe’s whispers. While most of us are familiar with everyday loneliness — miscommunication, shallow connections, or the ache of isolation — the existentialists dug deeper, unearthing a profound cosmic solitude, a disconnection seemingly stitched into the very fabric of existence.
Nietzsche, heralding the death of God, envisioned a Universe stripped of divine purpose — a vast, untethered expanse where humanity drifted without anchor. For him, the void wasn’t merely empty; it was a cold, relentless reminder that the cosmos had ceased to be our home. Only the bravest, he believed, could confront this frigid indifference and forge meaning from the abyss.
Camus, writing amid Fermi’s “Great Silence,” likened this loneliness to a cosmic cry swallowed by an unyielding quiet. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he described humanity as strangers in an unanswering Universe, caught in the painful chasm between our hunger for meaning and the world’s silent refusal. Sartre, meanwhile, saw the Universe as a brute, meaningless expanse. He argued that humanity is both free and imprisoned — isolated beings who fill existence with roles and distractions, yet remain adrift. Even among others, Sartre warned, we are existential castaways, forever marooned.
But even Sartre, with his stark view of relationships, admitted that without others, we’d collapse into sheer nothingness. Loneliness, at its heart, isn’t merely the absence of people — it’s the aching hollow left by the lack of meaningful, intimate connection.
Humanity, as the lone inhabitant of a seemingly empty cosmic neighborhood, feels this absence acutely. We learn who we are through others; they hold up a mirror to our existence. Imagine, for a moment, being the only person on Earth. No comparisons, no dialogue—just your voice, echoing endlessly into the silence. How would your sense of self survive?
Sure, Earth teems with magnificent life, but animals and plants don’t return our reflective gaze. Discovering bacteria on Mars might excite scientists, but it wouldn’t ease this deeper longing. True solace lies in finding another consciousness — someone to share, challenge, and uncover the mysteries of existence with. In our wildest dreams, another civilization might hold answers we’ve yet to even fathom. Could they reveal something we’ve missed about the Universe’s meaning? Or perhaps, about our own?
For much of human history, we didn’t see ourselves as alone. We filled the cosmos with gods, monsters, and mythical beings — companions to banish the terrifying emptiness. Even today, for many, the void is softened by theology, populated with angels, demons, or spirits.
Philosopher John McGraw notes that when humans endure prolonged isolation, they often conjure faces and figures to stave off solitude. Perhaps our modern science fiction, with its imagined aliens and sentient machines, serves the same purpose — a way to fill the silence with something resembling connection.
Science fiction’s thought experiments delve into this need for “others.” Per Schelde argues that aliens and AIs are modern echoes of ancient trolls, elves, and ogres. These beings thrived in a time when untamed forests and mysterious landscapes inspired wonder. Now, with nature “tamed,” space has become the new wilderness — its uncharted galaxies brimming with imagined monsters and otherworldly entities.
Philosophically, definitions rely on contrast — on the presence of an “other” to reflect and define us. In our current condition, bereft of a reflective consciousness to mirror us, science fiction may serve as a means to transcend our anthropocentric view. Aliens and AIs challenge the boundaries of human existence, forcing us to reconsider what it means to be human.
As philosopher Mark Rowlands suggests, their stark otherness becomes a mirror: When we stare at aliens or machines, we’re really looking at ourselves. Films like Blade Runner and Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence don’t just explore replicants and robots — they probe the essence of humanity.
This yearning for an “other” might also explain our obsession with AI. Could our pursuit of general AI — capable of mirroring human thought — be a subconscious response to the terrifying possibility that we are utterly alone?
Perhaps these creations are not just technological marvels but a collective attempt to share the burden of our cosmic solitude, to find company in the vast, vacant Universe — even if we have to build it ourselves.
What makes the emptiness bearable
So, here’s the rather unremarkable sci-fi thought experiment posed: Humanity, after 500 years of searching, concludes that the Universe is resolutely neighbor-free. No thrilling alien encounters, no grand galactic conversations. Just us, and maybe a few Martian microbes. What then? And what about now, as we reckon with our present cosmic solitude? For guidance, we return to the existentialists, those daring explorers of loneliness who wrestled with isolation like no others.
Solitude, they remind us, isn’t purely a burden. It holds a strange, haunting beauty. If we learn to make peace with this universal silence, as eerie as it first feels, it can reveal a deeper sense of belonging — a cosmic intimacy. Emptiness doesn’t have to end in alienation.
Camus saw this in The Myth of Sisyphus: By embracing the strangeness of both ourselves and the Universe, we discover an odd closeness. Mind and cosmos become, as he wrote, brothers in mystery, bathing in the same unknowable silence.
Even Sisyphus, eternally rolling his stone, found a way to make a home in homelessness. In a Universe stripped of masters, the myriad voices of Earth rise to fill the quiet. Each atom of his stone, each flake of the mountain, becomes its own world — rich, strange, and enough.
Facing cosmic loneliness head-on might be our most empowering choice. If we are truly alone — no reflective, self-conscious extraterrestrial companions as far as we can tell — it’s time to stop waiting and embrace this Universe as ours. Constantly yearning for other life forms or hoping for redemption from this solitude risks avoiding responsibility.
Would a bustling galactic neighborhood really make our existence more meaningful?
Philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that even a role in some grand cosmic enterprise might fail to give us what we truly seek. In the end, with or without the fireworks of “others,” we are the naked human, standing in an unfathomable Universe, with no one to make choices for us.
This stark reality isn’t a burden — it’s a call to embrace the beauty and wonder around us. Whether or not other life exists, the cosmos is our home.
This is an invitation to reclaim the Universe — not as a home we’ve lost, but one we’ve yet to fully inhabit. Nietzsche envisioned our cosmic loneliness as a chance to transform Earth into a home worthy of the fully human and superhuman. Carl Sagan’s Contact echoes this: “It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it.” Our task begins with supreme reverence for Earth’s uniqueness, deeper humility, and a compassionate duty to protect this fragile, miraculous world.
The rarity of life — and especially self-reflective consciousness — makes Earth a dazzling gem in the cosmic void, deserving unparalleled respect. This realization needn’t fill us with dread but rather a profound sense of awe and responsibility. If we are truly alone, we’re not just one of the Universe’s many expressions of life; we are its singular voice, its sole witness. Our minds and hearts would be the Universe’s precious instruments, perceiving its beauty and mystery.
Astronomer David Kipping captures this poignantly: “Lost in the dark, a singular candle holding back the empty void of thoughtlessness, what a responsibility it is then to be alive.” Picture this: Earth, a steadfast flame, flickering alone in a sea of barren worlds. “You could travel for a billion light-years,” Kipping notes, “and see nothing but lifeless planets.” If that’s true, then every single one of us is a part of something spectacular — uniquely irreplaceable.
Every one of us — and all of us together. Perhaps being alone together is the key to discovering true human solidarity. Borrowing from Camus one final time, when we accept the possibility of a quiet, vacant Universe, we stop looking up and start looking around. We see the brothers and sisters who share this cosmic solitude, and in that recognition, we find the seeds of compassion — a strange and profound form of love.
Embracing life as the only necessary good, we can expand our love for existence to all that lives. Overwhelmed by the same strangeness, we realize that we, fated to share this silent cosmos, must create a home on Earth, rooted in solidarity and care. As the alien in Contact beautifully puts it: “In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” In this shared connection, we transform cosmic emptiness into purpose, meaning, and love.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-if-were-alone-the-philosophical-paradox-of-a-lifeless-cosmos/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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A RESPONSE TO RICHARD FRIEDMAN’S THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD
~ In this bold and illuminating new work, Richard Elliott Friedman probes a chain of mysteries that concern the presence or absence of God. He begins with a fresh, insightful reading of the Hebrew Bible, revealing the profound mystery and significance of the disappearance of God there. Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God — and the growing up of humankind — so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge? Friedman then investigates this phenomenon's place in the formation of Judaism and Christianity.
But this is not only the study of an ancient concept. Friedman turns to the forms this feeling of the disappearance of God has taken in recent times. Here, too, he focuses on a mystery: an eerie connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, who each independently developed the idea of the death of God.
Friedman then relates all of this to a contemporary spiritual and moral ambivalence. He notes the current interest in linking discoveries in modern physics and astronomy to God and creation, reflecting a yearning for concrete answers in an age of divine hiddenness. And here the focus is on another mystery, intriguing parallels between Big Bang cosmology and the mysticism of the Kabbalah, which points to a territory in which religion and science are complementary rather than antagonistic.
This inspiring work is grounded in learned research. It is a brilliantly original exploration of the Bible that also shows how the Bible is much more than "ancient history." In the Bible the hiding of the face of God is a literary and theological development, but in the twentieth century it is a spiritual crisis, and Friedman aims to apply solutions to this quandary. Moving through rich and provocative examinations of world literature, history, theology, and physics, The Disappearance of God is as readable and exciting as a good detective story, with a conclusion that offers real hope in a time of spiritual longing. ~ Goodreads
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IS “GOLIATH SYNDROME” THE EQUIVALENT OF “RESTING BITCH FACE”?
By now you're probably familiar with the popular term "resting bitch face" (RBF)—the unintentional scowl a person may make at rest, leading others to falsely believe that they're mean or "bitchy." Researchers Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth have even identified the facial features contributing to these judgments, including “one side of the lip pulled back slightly, [and] the eyes squinting a little.” As a result of these facial features, others are likely to project hostility onto the person with RBF, leading them to act "bitchy" in response, producing an escalation of negative social interactions. Though some men have been labeled as having RBF, it's a descriptor most often applied to women, like Kristen Stewart and Aubrey Plaza, among others.
Feminists often point out that the concept of RBF is a product of sexism and the unrealistic pressure on women to always look happy, and they highlight the lack of an equivalent phenomenon afflicting men. While those critics may be technically correct as it relates to facial expressions, my work as a psychologist has revealed an analogous phenomenon that does afflict men disproportionally, subjecting them to unprovoked negativity. It's something we might call "Goliath syndrome.”
Goliath syndrome is when a person's large physical presence—in the form of height, weight, muscle mass, or other physical features—evokes a reflexive feeling of intimidation in others, irrespective of the individual's actions, words, or intentions. The unprovoked reaction to a Goliath figure—usually in the form of fear, but sometimes in the form of dislike or even aggression (physical or verbal)—may be the result of unconscious evolutionary factors, or what Freudian-style therapists call "transference" (i.e., projecting onto someone the traits of another that he or she reminds you of—like when your professor reminds you of your father and you respond to him as if he was).
For those who don't remember their Bible stories, the tale of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) details a battle between the Israelites and their enemies, the Philistines. Goliath was the Philistines' greatest warrior and was described as "a giant" in the following terms:
His height was six cubits and a span [about 9' 9"]. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze ... and a bronze javelin was slung on his back (17:4) ... Whenever the Israelites saw the man, they all fled from him in great fear (17:24)."
In the story, all of the Israelites were deathly afraid of Goliath, except for the young (and much smaller) David, who, armed with only a slingshot, kills the dreaded giant, winning the Israelites the battle. Despite his ignominious defeat at the hands of David, Goliath has come to represent a larger-than-life man who embodies unrefined, brutish, violent characteristics.
Although physical size is the most salient feature of Goliath syndrome, I've found that the intensity of the effect can be magnified by the presence of additional hypermasculine traits, like a deep voice, proliferation of body hair, asymmetrical facial features, and overtly masculine attire (e.g., athletic clothing or biker gear). And, while the effect may be distinct from RBF in that it occurs independent of one's facial expression, the consequences of Goliath syndrome, in my experience, are largely the same.
Similar to the women I know with RBF, men with Goliath syndrome often feel harshly judged by others before they say or do anything. The people with whom they interact, especially women, project onto them mean attitudes and aggressive or nefarious intentions. These projections often produce a vicious cycle, whereby the other person may initially speak to them in an accusatory tone or by taking a protective action (e.g., clutching their purse tightly), to which the Goliath figure may respond by making a defensive statement, perhaps in a deep voice. If the interaction escalates, bystanders are likely to side with the smaller person (especially if it's a woman), even if they don't know how the conversation started, because we have a natural tendency to assume that the smaller person in a conflict is likely to be the victim.
In my clinical work, Goliath figures often complain of being perpetually misunderstood, even by people who know them well. Family members seem to brace before any interaction, subtly giving off vibes that they expect a conflict to ensue, even in the midst of a calm conversation. And if, by chance, the Goliath figure does express even the slightest bit of displeasure, that displeasure seems magnified in the perception of others, evoking within them a fight-or-flight response.
Goliath figures often report to me that strangers are likely to avoid eye contact with them, and that women sometimes accuse them ogling them when they're simply looking in their general direction. When the Goliath figure is in a public situation among men—at a club or a sporting event—other men often look to boost their self-image (and sometimes impress a woman or friends) by acting tough toward the Goliath figure. This, again, leads to a series of escalations that the Goliath figure didn't ask for and doesn't seek but has to deal with nonetheless.
In a similar way that women with RBF are victims of sexism, I would argue that men with Goliath syndrome are also victims of a form of sexism, as the actions of large men are more likely to be misinterpreted as aggressive than those of large women. On a related note, Warren Farrell, author of the book The Boy Crisis, recently wrote in the Kansas City Star that boys and men are the victims of countless cultural biases, but in the feminist age in which we live, these infractions are often minimized, ignored, or invalidated. Though sexism toward men may take different forms and have different consequences than it does toward women, its effects are not only damaging (especially to many of my Goliath patients) but has the potential to significantly shape their social, cultural, and political beliefs.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-cube/202411/is-goliath-syndrome-the-male-equivalent-of-rbf
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WHAT IF PARASITES BECAME EXTINCT?
Tapeworms weaken their victims but typically don’t kill them.
What if the world’s parasites suddenly went extinct? Given how much work we’ve put into combating malaria-carrying mosquitoes and horrifying Guinea worms, it sounds like a reason for celebration. But think twice: Actually, losing these much-despised mooches, bloodsuckers and freeloaders could have disastrous consequences for the environment and human health.
A parasite, in essence, is any organism that makes its living off another organism (think bed bugs, leeches, vampire fish and even mistletoe). These freeloaders have been rather successful: up to half of Earth's 7.7 million known species are parasitic, and this lifestyle has evolved independently hundreds of times. But in a 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers warn that climate change could drive up to one-third of Earth's parasite species to extinction by the year 2070.
That kind of mass die-off could spell ecological disaster. "One thing we've learned about parasites in the past decade is that they're a huge and important part of ecosystems that we've really neglected for years," says Colin Carlson, a graduate student studying global change biology at the University of California at Berkeley and lead author on the study.
Carlson had experience researching how climate change is driving the current spate of species die-offs. But four years ago, he saw the potential to look into a lesser known group: parasites. "There has been a lot of work that's been done in the late couple of decades focused on understanding why big mammals go extinct, or how crops respond to climate change," Carlson says, "but there's a lot of types of animals and plants that we don't know a lot about.”
He formed a team to find out more about how parasite species could feel the heat in the coming decades. The team based their predictions for this research on a "deceptively simple model" from a landmark 2004 study in the journal Nature, which connected species extinction rates to how much of their habitat they're expected to lose. "The problem is, we don't know very much about where parasites live," Carlson says.
The key to answering that question lay in the Smithsonian-run National Parasite Collection, a 125-year-old accumulation that contains more than 20 million parasite specimens from thousands of species dating back to the early 1800s—a massive yet still relatively small slice of global parasite diversity. Carlson knew that the collection, which has specimens primarily from North America but represents every continent, could serve as a historical database from which to figure out estimates of geographic ranges for specific parasites.
So he reached out to the curator of the collection, research zoologist Anna Phillips, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The first step was to sort through a lot of old paper records. "Since this is such an old collection, many of these still used a precise locality written out, such as 'this stream at this crossing of this highway, 10 miles down east of this town,'" Phillips says. "While that's very helpful, usually today we prefer to have GPS coordinates.”
Her team of researchers digitzed tens of thousands of specimens and their locations in an online database, creating what Carlson calls the biggest parasite record of its kind. Using this immense resource, researchers could then use computer models to predict what would happen to more than 450 different parasite species when climate change altered their habitats, based on how their ranges have changed over the past two centuries.
Their conclusion: Even under the most optimistic scenarios, roughly 10 percent of parasite species will go extinct by 2070. In the most dire version of events, fully one-third of all parasites could vanish.
This kind of die-off would have myriad unfortunate consequences. Consider that parasites play an important role in regulating the populations of their hosts and the balance of the overall ecosystem. First, they kill off some organisms and make others vulnerable to predators. For example, when infected with nematode Trichostrongylus tenuis, the red grouse bird emits more scent that helps predators find and eat it more easily, thus serving to control the bird’s population.
Parasites can also have more indirect effects. Periwinkle snails infected with the trematode species Cryptocotylelingua, for instance, eat significantly less algae along their Atlantic coast homes, because the parasite weakens their digestive tracts. Their small appetites make more algae available for other species to consume. And there are millions of undiscovered parasite species, whose ecological niches we can only guess at.
"It's hard to predict what their impact on the ecosystem will be if we don't know about it yet," says Phillips. "That's one of the things that's scariest about these model predictions ... it creates a much more urgent feeling about the recognizing the diversity that's out there.”
In the future, she and Carlson hope to do further analysis using this new database at finer scales, to predict how certain parasites will fare in different regions under climate change. They expect that, like many organisms, parasite species that are better able to migrate and adapt to new habitats will do better than those that are more tied to certain places.
But even if the parasites emerge successful, those possible geographical shifts present troubling prospects for humans. Parasites can certainly be harmful to people, as in the case of mosquitoes that transmit Zika, malaria or dengue fever. But in this case, the devil you know may be better than the one you don't.
Parasites and their hosts have often evolved together over many years to maintain a delicate balance. After all, parasites usually have little interest in killing their hosts, Phillips explains, since that would mean losing their homes and sources of nutrients. That’s why tapeworms are rarely fatal to the people who get them; the worms have evolved to travel to your gut and feed on the food you ingest, but they rarely siphon off enough calories to actually kill you.
But when a known parasite goes extinct, it creates new open niches in an ecosystem for other invasive species of parasites to exploit. That can create opportunities for new encounters between parasites and hosts that aren't familiar with each other, and haven’t yet developed that non-lethal relationship. In 2014, for instance, a tapeworm species foreign to humans was found in a man’s brain in China, leading to seizures and inflammation of the brain.
"I find that to be equally terrifying to the idea of the extinctions [alone]," Phillips says.
Kevin Lafferty, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has extensively studied parasites and biodiversity, says the study raises important questions about our attitudes toward parasites as they face increasing risks of being wiped out. "In many cases, we have an affinity for the species or can place a human value on it," Lafferty said by email. "This motivation is less likely for parasites."
"The field of conservation biology has moved to view species neutrally when considering the need for protection," Lafferty added, "and this view requires that parasites be protected alongside their hosts.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-world-s-parasites-are-going-extinct-here-s-why-that-s-a-bad-thing?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE ASTEROID THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS CREATED THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST
Fossilized pollen and leaves reveal that the meteorite that caused the extinction of nonavian dinosaurs also reshaped South America’s plant communities to yield the planet’s largest rain forest.
Dinosaur and fossil aficionados are intimately familiar with the meteorite strike that drove Tyrannosaurus rex and all nonavian dinosaurs to extinction around 66 million years ago. But it is often overlooked that the impact also wiped out entire ecosystems. A new study shows how those casualties, in turn, led to another particularly profound evolutionary outcome: the emergence of the Amazon rain forest of South America, the most spectacularly diverse environment on the planet. Yet the Amazon’s bounty of tropical species and habitats now face their own existential threat because of unprecedented destruction from human activity, including land clearing for agriculture.
The new study, published in Science, analyzed tens of thousands of plant fossils and represents “a fundamental advance in knowledge,” says Peter Wilf, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the research. “The authors demonstrate that the dinosaur extinction was also a massive reset event for neotropical ecosystems, putting their evolution on an entirely new path leading directly to the extraordinary, diverse, spectacular and gravely threatened rain forests in the region today.”
These insights, Wilf adds, “provide new impetus for the conservation of the living evolutionary heritage in the tropics that supports human life, along with millions of living species.”
Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobiologist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-lead author of the study, agrees that the meteorite’s evolutionary and ecological effects hold implications for today’s rapid, human-caused destruction of the Amazon rain forest and other key habitats across the planet. “We can relate this to nowadays,” he says, “because we’re also transforming landscapes, and that lasts forever—or at least a very long time.”
Amazon rainforest and a deforested area
Carlos Jaramillo, a paleobiologist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-lead author of the study, agrees that the meteorite’s evolutionary and ecological effects hold implications for today’s rapid, human-caused destruction of the Amazon rain forest and other key habitats across the planet. “We can relate this to nowadays,” he says, “because we’re also transforming landscapes, and that lasts forever—or at least a very long time.”
Modern-day rain forests are integral to life on Earth. The Amazon, in particular, plays a crucial role in regulating the planet’s freshwater cycle and climate. Yet Western European and North American paleontologists have paid little attention to tropical forests, focusing instead on temperate latitudes. Many academic and amateur fossil hunters have also tended to write off warm, wet locales as a lost cause for finds because they have assumed that conditions there would prevent organic materials from being preserved long enough to fossilize. “It’s this combination of factors that has led us to this absence of much data in the tropics,” says Bonnie Jacobs, a paleobiologist at Southern Methodist University, who co-authored a contextualizing essay that was published with the new study in Science.
Scientists already knew that the effects of the meteorite collision and its aftermath—at least in temperate zones—varied with local conditions and distance from the Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. New Zealand forests, for example, escaped relatively unscathed. But researchers have had no idea how the event changed the tropical rain forests of Africa or, until now, those of South America.
Along with most of his co-authors, Jaramillo is from Colombia and specifically wanted to investigate the origins of his home country’s tropical forests. The new study, which he conceptualized as an undergraduate student, represents nearly 12 years of effort. “It took us a long time,” he says, “because we had to start from zero.”
Whole trees are almost never preserved in the fossil record, so Jaramillo and his colleagues turned to fossilized pollen and leaves for insights. Pollen preserves well over time and is widespread in the fossil record. Like leaves, it differs morphologically among species, which helps researchers determine what types of plants lived in an ancient habitat.
Jaramillo and his colleagues searched 53 sites across Colombia for rocks that formed during the Late Cretaceous period, just before the meteorite strike, and others that formed during 10 million subsequent years, in the Paleogene period. From these rocks, the team amassed and analyzed around 50,000 fossil pollen grains and 6,000 fossil leaves to characterize the types of plants that made them. Recent separate findings indicate that plant leaves receiving more light have a higher density of veins, as well as a higher ratio of a naturally occurring isotope called carbon 13. The researchers studied those features among the collected fossils to piece together the structure of the region’s past forests.
Their findings paint a picture of a sudden, cataclysmic annihilation of life after the impact—but also of a phoenix-like rebirth in the millions of years afterward. Prior to the meteorite, the authors determined, South America’s forests featured many conifers and a brightly lit open canopy supporting a lush understory of ferns. Dinosaurs likely played key roles in maintaining these Cretaceous forests by knocking down trees and clearing out vegetation, among other things.
Within moments of the Chicxulub meteorite’s impact, however, this ecosystem was irrevocably altered. Fires, which likely burned for several years, engulfed South America’s southerly forests. Along with many of the animals they supported, a total of 45 percent of the continent’s tropical plant species disappeared, according to the authors’ calculations.
It took six million years for the forests to return to the level of diversity they had before the meteorite, and the species that slowly grew back were completely different than what came before.
Legumes—plants that form symbiotic relationships with bacteria that allow them to fix nitrogen from the air—were the first to appear, and they enriched the formerly nutrient-poor soil. This influx of nitrogen, along with phosphorus from the meteorite’s ash, enabled other flowering plants to thrive alongside the legumes and to displace conifers. As flowering species competed for light, they formed dense canopies of leaves and created the layered Amazon rain forest we know today, which is characterized by a blanket of productivity up top and a dark understory at the bottom.
Regan Dunn, a paleoecologist at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new study, agrees that its findings are not only key for revealing the past but also for putting current anthropogenic threats into perspective. She particularly notes the authors’ calculation that 45 percent of plant species went extinct following the meteorite collision, because “current estimates suggest that at least this many plant species will be globally threatened in the Amazon basin in the next 30 years from human activities alone.”
“The question remains: How will human impact change the composition and function of Amazonian forests forever?” Dunn says.
The new findings show how extensive mass extinction events can alter “the course of everything,” Jacobs says. Today we are in the midst of another such event, she adds, but this one is driven by a single species—and there is no place far from the metaphorical impact crater “because humans are ubiquitous.”
Yet unlike past mass extinction events, Jacobs says, this time “we are not powerless to stop it.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs-created-the-amazon-rain-forest
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LITHIUM’S POTENTIAL TO PROMOTE HEALTHY AGING AND REDUCE THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
A 2024 published review concluded that trace levels of lithium in drinking water may reduce dementia risks. This corroborates previous findings showing how low-dose lithium can help promote whole-body healthy aging.
In animal models, lithium has been shown to extend lifespan—by as much as 46% in one study.
A 2024 review of observational studies concluded that trace lithium levels in drinking water may reduce the incidence and mortality rates associated with dementia.
In one clinical study, a daily dose of 300 mcg of lithium decreased cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, compared to a placebo.
Trace amounts or microdoses of lithium may play a role in promoting healthy aging.
LITHIUM BENEFITS
For centuries, people have made pilgrimages to lithium-rich mineral springs, believing that drinking and bathing in the water had a positive effect on mood and overall health.
In the mid-20th century, researchers discovered that high doses of lithium could effectively treat bipolar disorder and certain forms of depression.
While higher doses of lithium are used as prescription treatments for bipolar and psychiatric illnesses, multiple studies suggest that trace amounts of lithium in drinking water may be associated with body-wide health benefits.
A recent review of preclinical and clinical studies suggests that low-dose lithium may support cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, metabolic, and cognitive functions in aging individuals. One research group reported striking findings: long-term intake of trace amounts of lithium from drinking water was associated with reduced risk of all-cause mortality.
In addition, several aspects of mental and physical health have been found to be better in areas where the water supply naturally contains trace amounts of lithium.
A review of recent preclinical and clinical literature suggests that lithium can have beneficial effects on mechanisms related to:
Metabolic diseases like diabetes,
Death due to cardiovascular disease,
Death due to Alzheimer’s disease, and
Death due to any cause.
Scientists have estimated that at low doses of just 1,000 mcg (or 1 mg) daily, lithium plays crucial roles in human biology. Many scientists working in this field now believe that low-dose lithium supports multiple body systems and aspects of health, especially for those at risk of dementia.
A recent systematic review of five observational studies examined the association between trace levels of lithium in drinking water and risk of dementia. The findings suggest that the presence of trace lithium levels in drinking water, at concentrations between 2 mcg to 56 mcg per liter, is associated with a lower risk of dementia incidence and mortality.
How Lithium Works
Preclinical studies have revealed mechanisms through which lithium may provide wide-ranging health benefits.
Its most important effect appears to be on an enzyme known as GSK-3 (glycogen synthase kinase-3).
Increased GSK-3 activity is linked to metabolic disorders (diabetes), neurological (Alzheimer’s) and mood disorders, as well as some cancers. Drugs and nutrients that inhibit activity of GSK-3 have the potential to help prevent these conditions.
Scientists investigating methods to reduce GSK-3 activity discovered that lithium is among the most effective GSK-3 inhibitors.
Other ways that lithium may counter mechanisms of aging and disease include:
Enhancing transport of nutrients into brain cells
Activating autophagy (cellular house-keeping)
Preventing abnormal accumulations of the proteins tau and beta-amyloid, which are associated with neurodegeneration
Increasing brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a signaling molecule that protects brain cells and supports their function
Helping to maintain longer telomeres (protective caps on the ends of chromosomes tied to increased longevity)
Protecting against threats to brain function, including glutamate toxicity
Augmenting immune cell function, and
Inducing stem cell growth.
Lithium administration has also been shown to extend lifespan in roundworms and fruit flies. In one study, lithium increased the lifespan of worms by an astonishing 46%.
Human Trials of Lithium
To date, most lithium trials in humans have focused on potential brain-health benefits. In subjects with both mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, lithium has improved cognitive performance and stabilized disease progression.
A randomized controlled trial showed the potential of microdose lithium.
In this study, a daily dose of just 300 mcg of lithium was given to Alzheimer’s patients for 15 months. While a placebo group continued to show deterioration in mental function, those receiving lithium stabilized throughout the course of the study.
In a placebo-controlled trial, 45 patients with mild cognitive impairment who were given lithium daily in high doses of 150 mg, 300 mg, 450 mg, or 600 mg for a year had significantly improved cognitive performance and attention on tasks, compared to those who took a placebo. Cerebrospinal fluid levels of hyperphosphorylated tau—an abnormal protein that serves as a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease—were reduced in participants taking lithium.
In a later randomized controlled trial by this same research group, older adults with mild cognitive impairment received one of the four doses of lithium mentioned above, or placebo for two years; after completing the study, participants were followed for an additional two years. The placebo group continued to suffer cognitive and functional declines, while those receiving lithium remained stable over the entire study.
Another meta-analysis of eight clinical studies compared efficacy and tolerability of high-dose lithium treatment with the newer class of monoclonal antibody Alzheimer’s drugs. This study found that lithium treatment may be safer than available monoclonal antibody medications.
Summary
Low-dose lithium has considerable promise for lowering rates of cardiovascular disease, cognitive disorders, metabolic disease, and death from any cause.
In a clinical trial, microdose lithium stabilized cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, preventing the expected decline in mental abilities.
A growing number of scientists believe that a small amount of daily lithium can help promote healthy aging, cognitive wellness, and more.
https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2025/3/lithium-promoting-healthy-aging
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Ending on beauty:
CRAZY JANE AND JACK THE JOURNEYMAN
I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone,
For love is but a skein unwound
Between the dark and dawn.
A lonely ghost the ghost is
That to God shall come;
I - love's skein upon the ground,
My body in the tomb -
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother's womb.
But were I left to lie alone
In an empty bed,
The skein so bound us ghost to ghost
When he turned his head
passing on the road that night,
Mine must walk when dead.
~ William Butler Yeats, 1932
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