HURRICANE RIDGE
The glaciers tongue me, cliffs of ice,
pools of polar green.
Across eternal snow, a deer
steps out on the trail.
His antlers hold the flame-blue sky,
his crown of shining branches.
He stares at me without fear,
then climbs straight up,
barely nudges the slippery scree.
How could I know it would be
neither a lover nor a holy sage,
but a deer in a tundra of clouds —
this messenger making me feel
one day I’ll walk forever —
if thirsty, eating snow,
when tired, leaning on the wind.
My shadow lengthening past noon,
I want one wish granted to me:
to hike again along the crest
here on Hurricane Ridge,
and let a deer like that once more
step out before me on the path,
look at me calmly, and walk on.
I’ll follow him.
~ Oriana
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RAY BRADBURY ON INSPIRATION
In a long ago edition of the Paris Review, writer Ray Bradbury responded to a question about a mysterious character, Mr. Electrico, who appeared in "Something Wicked This Way Comes.”
BRADBURY:
Yes, but he was a real man. That was his real name. Circuses and carnivals were always passing through Illinois during my childhood and I was in love with their mystery. One autumn weekend in 1932, when I was twelve years old, the Dill Brothers Combined Shows came to town. One of the performers was Mr. Electrico. He sat in an electric chair. A stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end.
The next day, I had to go the funeral of one of my favorite uncles. Driving back from the graveyard with my family, I looked down the hill toward the shoreline of Lake Michigan and I saw the tents and the flags of the carnival and I said to my father, Stop the car. He said, What do you mean? And I said, I have to get out. My father was furious with me. He expected me to stay with the family to mourn, but I got out of the car anyway and I ran down the hill toward the carnival.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was running away from death, wasn’t I? I was running toward life. And there was Mr. Electrico sitting on the platform out in front of the carnival and I didn’t know what to say. I was scared of making a fool of myself.
I had a magic trick in my pocket, one of those little ball-and-vase tricks—a little container that had a ball in it that you make disappear and reappear—and I got that out and asked, Can you show me how to do this? It was the right thing to do. It made a contact. He knew he was talking to a young magician. He took it, showed me how to do it, gave it back to me, then he looked at my face and said, Would you like to meet those people in that tent over there? Those strange people? And I said, Yes sir, I would. So he led me over there and he hit the tent with his cane and said, Clean up your language! Clean up your language!
He took me in, and the first person I met was the Illustrated Man. Isn’t that wonderful? The Illustrated Man! He called himself the tattooed man, but I changed his name later for my book. I also met the strong man, the fat lady, the trapeze people, the dwarf, and the skeleton. They all became characters.
Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones.
Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.
Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.
When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.
Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury
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God is the ultimate jokester. This is the thesis of Isaac Asimov’s charming short story “Jokester,” about a group of historians of language who, in order to support the hypothesis that God created man out of apes by telling them a joke (he told apes who, up to that moment, were merely exchanging animal signs, the first joke that gave birth to spirit), try to reconstruct this joke, the “mother of all jokes.” (Incidentally, for a member of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this work is superfluous, since we all know what this joke was: “Do not eat from the tree of knowledge!” — the first prohibition that clearly is a joke, a perplexing temptation whose point is not clear.) ~ Slavoy Žižek
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MISHA IOSSEL ON READING BOOKS IN TRANSLATION
People reading books -- novels and stories, specifically -- written in a foreign language, even if the translations are of fairly superb quality, inevitably are understanding and interpreting the latter differently than would, and does, an equally literate someone for whom that language is a mother tongue. Simply put, they are not reading the very same literary texts.
Then again, there are layers and gradations of translation. (The entire process of writing "creatively" is a succession of the iterations of translation, I'd suggest; but that's a separate subject.) I am aware, for instance, that the "me" of my actual (humdrum) life and my hypothetical doppelganger living, say, in newly-renamed Leningrad of one hundred years ago (not much more than that probably, because then, instead of Petersburg, he, that imaginary supposition of an apparition, would have to have been born and lived in the Pale of Settlement, as my grandparents did, and his first language likely would have been Yiddish, as it was in their case), would be reading two different, if parallel, texts of Chekhov stories, for instance. One language, different lives. No two people ever read exactly the same book.
Oriana:
I am tempted to say that each reader reads a different text, but of course there are degrees of difference . . . Another language means another culture, and that's one reason we have the phrase "lost in translation." However, rare as that may be, there are cases where a translation is better than the original.
Or, as Misha puts it with eloquent precision: “One language, different lives. No two people ever read exactly the same book.”
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MISHA ON TRUMP AND PUTIN, ALASKA AND HELSINKI
Anchorage and Helsinki, 7 years apart.
What should it say to us and the rest of the world that every time Trump has a summit with Putin, he ends up looking like a guilty dog or a 5-year-old boy grounded for misbehavior?
Putin owns him. It's that simple.
Oriana:
I can't help but think of David and Goliath, with Trump as Goliath.
Maybe it's harmless, or maybe it's congestive heart syndrome. Trump seems suddenly concerned that he might not go to heaven.
Speaking of heaven . . .
After Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his visit to space, he was received by Nikita Khruschev, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and told him confidentially: “You know, comrade, that up there in the sky, I saw heaven with God and angels — Christianity is right!” Khruschev whispers back to him: “I know, I know, but keep quiet, don’t tell this to anyone!” Next week, Gagarin visited the Vatican and was received by the pope, to whom he confides: “You know, holy father, I was up there in the sky and I saw there is no God or angels …” “I know, I know,” interrupts the pope, “but keep quiet, don’t tell this to anyone!” ~ Slavoy Žižek
Oriana:
Žižek understood the essence of living under a totalitarian regime. If I had to summarize it in one sentence, this would be it: “You think one thing, but you say whatever is expected.”
My favorite joke from the Soviet times is in a different mode.
Question: How come in Poland no one sleeps?
Answer: The enemy never sleeps, and the Party keeps watch.
“The enemy” in this case means the entire population, hostile to the Party. It’s an insider joke — it helps to have grown up surrounded by slogans like “The enemy never sleeps” and “The Party stays alert.”
“The Party” meant only and exclusively the Communist Party, just as the Church meant only the Catholic church. Let me state once more that the Church was a master of propaganda, selling an invisible product, while the Party could hardly put together an effective simple sentence., much less build a workers' paradise.
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WORLD WAR 2 AND THE PLAGUE OF LICE
One of the most terrible foes of German soldiers during World War II was not an enemy on the battlefield, but just a small insect the louse. These insects were on practically every soldier due to the nature of army life that was quite dirty and rough.
Soldiers would regularly go weeks without a wash They slept in muddy holes, wet dugouts and in barracks. Lice loved to live in their filthy uniforms so that they could continue to spread. Soldiers slept much too close together so that as soon as a small group of soldiers had lice, the entire group had the lice.
Lice were not only bothersome and itchy. They also brought virulent diseases, such as typhus. Typhus in turn caused people extreme fever and was able to kill in a matter of days. A lice outbreak sometimes damaged an entire unit more than did enemy guns or shells.
The German army made an effort to counter. They established delousing stations at the front-line. Soldiers were required to strip their clothes off and clean themselves, as well as their uniforms with strong chemicals and/or steam. This however did not hold long time Every time they returned to the fighting line the lice returned also.
And, after all, the battle against lice was like the war itself wearisome, endless, indeterminable. To lots of German soldiers lice were every bit as disturbing and demotivating as the foe across the battlefield. ~ Lucas Williams, Quora
Ralph Wortley:
This was not limited to Germans. It is part of trench warfare. There ae accounts and pictures of Allied soldiers during intermissions in fighting in WWI, and probably in WWII burning out lice by running lighted cigarettes along the seams, and even open flames of matches or lighters.
Todd O:
The Zippo lighter was particularly good for this.
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IT’S DIFFICULT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE TO FIND JOBS
Over the last five years, career platform LinkedIn asked nearly half a million people how they feel about their careers. This year, the results are stark: young people are way more pessimistic than all other age groups.
Looking at the headlines, I can't blame them. I keep reading stories about how hard it is for new college graduates to get their first jobs. Since 2023, job postings for entry-level roles have fallen by more than 35% in the United States, according to some estimates. Data from LinkedIn says 63% of executives surveyed admit that AI will likely take over some tasks that entry-level employees currently handle.
Anecdotally, I see these trends at play with my own kids. My 25-year-old son with a master's degree found it hard to get a job. His girlfriend – who has two master's degrees – is struggling to find a paid job in her field. They are part of the "rejection generation", young adults who send out hundreds of CVs, only to get rejected. It all feels very different than just a few years ago, when my older children were starting their careers.
There are disagreements about how much AI is to blame here, but according to new LinkedIn findings, workers are worried: 41% of professionals say the pace of AI change is taking a toll on their wellbeing.
I wanted to talk about all of this with Aneesh Raman. He's the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn and recently wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the breakdown of the career ladder – and what it means for young people.
He had a lot of practical advice about what skills he thinks young people will need to succeed in the next few years, and why the predictable path for career growth is no longer as predictable. You can read more of our conversation below.
Katty Kay: I keep seeing headlines about this crisis of recent college graduates who are struggling to get entry-level jobs. What's happening and how significant is it?
Aneesh Raman: It is real and it is very significant. Entry-level workers and new grads are dealing with a perfect storm. You have all the uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment and that's affecting hiring, but you also have the beginnings of disruption from AI. That's all leading to unemployment for young people and new graduates being higher than national averages. Gen Z is feeling the most pessimistic about their futures than any other age group that we've surveyed.
But this is a moment where we're going from static career paths to dynamic career paths. It's sort of Charles Dickens's "the best of times and the worst of times", because I really do think if you had to pick a moment to start your career, this is a pretty amazing one. As AI plays out and we go through disruption and the transition to a new economy, at the other end of it will be more options for people as they build careers.
KK: Are there some graduates that are suffering more than others? Ten years ago, we all wanted our kids to do computer science. Should we now be pushing them towards other fields of study?
AR: Computer science was and remains the poster child of the knowledge economy. But the knowledge economy is on the way out and we're entering a new economy. I did a New York Times op-ed last year with our own data on this point: 96% of the average computer software engineer's job is susceptible to being done by AI, either immediately or soon. This doesn't mean the job goes away; it means that what it is to be a computer scientist changes. We start to see employers saying things like, "If you have that computer science degree, do you have a philosophy minor so you can help me think about the ethical implications of what I'm building?"
The predictable path used to be, "I got this degree, now give me that job". That was great if you got the degree, but it was not great if you couldn't afford the degree or if you weren't in a privileged community that gave you a pipeline to get the degree. Now, saying, "I got the degree," doesn't say as much. You've got to say what that means.
I think retail jobs will start to have a lot of value in a way they didn't in the knowledge economy. If you can say you worked a job where you had to show resiliency and adaptability, those are things that employers are looking for. We are individuals with unique experiences, unique energy and unique resilience. That's what we're going to get hired for – and articulating that is something folks can control.
KK: I saw a LinkedIn survey of 3,000 executives [in the US] and 63% of them believe AI will absorb entry-level tasks. So, is Gen Z just going to suffer anyway? Despite whatever good story they tell about themselves, maybe there just aren't going to be those entry-level jobs because corporations are going to give them to AI.
AR: We don't know. But we do know the same percentage in that survey says entry-level employees bring fresh ideas and new thinking that is valuable to business growth. The same generation that's having a tough time landing a first job is also AI-native and is bringing a whole new sense of what businesses should do differently as they try to adapt to this new economy.
When a new type of economy emerges – and this was true when we went from farm work to factory work, or the factory to the office – disruption comes first. We're in that right now. At LinkedIn, we've got data that 70% of the average job will have changed by 2030. We're all going to be in new jobs, even if we don't change jobs. But new types of jobs also get created. Influencer wasn't a job 10 years ago. Data scientist wasn't a job 20 years ago. So, we haven't even started to see that yet, aside from AI jobs.
So, if you're an entry-level worker, yes, right now you're at the whim of companies doing the math of how they should transition. Some companies are going to use old math for the new equation and just think it's all about shrinking. Others will realize we've got to bring these folks in who are going to help us build new business lines and think in different ways.
KK: What would you say to a 22 year old graduating from college who is struggling to find a job – or to their anxious parents?
AR: The first thing is to be pro-you. The story of work, since the first industrial revolution, has been the story of technology at work, not humans at work. We have been training people to be task managers around technology.
We now are going to flip that and put humans at the center of work. You've got to really understand what your unique curiosities are and what drives you. Really start to understand how you're going to get to a place where no one beats you at being you.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20250825-aneesh-raman-young-people-employment-opportunities-katty-kay-interview
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WHAT KINDS OF WORKERS ARE LOSING JOBS TO AI
Artificial intelligence is replacing entry-level workers whose jobs can be performed by generative AI tools like ChatGPT, a rigorous new study finds.
Early-career employees in fields that are most exposed to AI have experienced a 13% drop in employment since 2022, compared to more experienced workers in the same fields and when measured against people in sectors less buffeted by the fast-emerging technology, according to a recent working paper from Stanford economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.
The study adds to the growing body of research suggesting that the spread of generative AI in the workplace is likely to disrupt the job market, especially for younger workers, the report's authors said.
"These large language models are trained on books, articles and written material found on the internet and elsewhere," Brynjolfsson told CBS MoneyWatch. "That's the kind of book learning that a lot of people get at universities before they enter the job market, so there is a lot of overlap with between these LLMs and the knowledge young people have."
The research highlights two fields in particular where AI already appears to be supplanting a significant number of young workers: software engineering and customer service. Between late 2022 and July 2025, entry-level employment in those areas declined by roughly 20%, according to the report, while employment for older workers in the same jobs grew.
Overall, employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed sectors dropped 6% during the study period. By comparison, employment in those areas rose between 6% and 9% for older workers, according to the researchers.
The analysis reveals a similar pattern playing out in the following fields:
Accounting and auditing
Secretarial and administrative work
Computer programming
Sales
Older employees, who generally have navigated the workplace for a longer period of time, are more likely to have picked up the kinds of communication and other "soft" skills that are harder to teach and that employers may be reluctant to replace with AI, the data suggests.
"Older workers have a lot of tacit knowledge because they learn tricks of trade from experience that may never be written down anywhere," Brynjolfsson explained. "They have knowledge that's not in the LLMs, so they're not being replaced as much by them.”
The study is unusually robust given that generative AI technologies are only a few years old, while experts are just starting to systematically dig into the impact on the labor market. The Stanford researchers used data from ADP, which provides payroll processing services to employers with a combined 25 million workers, to track employment changes for full-time workers in occupations that are or more or less exposed to AI. The data included detailed information on workers, including their ages, and precise job titles.
AI doesn't just threaten to take jobs away from workers. As with past cycles of innovation, it will render some jobs extinct while creating others, Brynjolfsson said.
"Tech has always been destroying jobs and creating jobs. There has always been this turnover," he said. "There is a transition over time, and that's what we are seeing now."
Augmented or automated?
For example, in fields like nursing AI is more likely to augment human workers by taking over rote tasks, freeing health care practitioners to spend more time focusing on patients, according to proponents of the technology.
While entry-level employment has fallen in professions that are most exposed to AI, no such such decline has occurred in jobs where employers are looking to use these tools to support and expand what employees do.
"Workers who are using these tools to augment their work are benefiting," Brynjolfsson said. "So there's a rearrangement of the kind of employment in the economy."
Advice for young workers
As of late last year, 23% of employees were using generative AI in their jobs at least once per week, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Workers who can learn to use AI to to help them do their jobs better will be best positioned for success in today's labor market, according to Brynolfsson.
A recent report from AI staffing firm Burtch Works found that starting salaries for entry-level AI workers rose by 12% from 2024 to 2025.
"Young workers who learn how to use AI effectively can be much more productive. But if you are just doing things that AI can already do for you, you won't have as much value-add," Brynjolfsson told CBS MoneyWatch.
"This is the first time we're getting clearer evidence of these kinds of employment effects, but it's probably not the last time," he added. "It's something we need to pay increasing attention to as it evolves and companies learn to take advantage of things that are out there."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-artificial-intelligence-jobs-workers/
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THE HIDDEN MEANINGS IN A 16TH-CENTURY FEMALE NUDE
A rarely-seen drawing of the Three Graces by Raphael reveals the era's ideas about nudity, modesty, shame – and the artist's genius. It's part of an exhibition, Drawing the Italian Renaissance – at The King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace – of drawings from 1450 to 1600, the biggest of its kind ever shown in the UK.
A wandering lobster and a sturdy ostrich feature among the 150 chalk, metalpoint and ink drawings on show at Drawing The Italian Renaissance, at the King's Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Created by Renaissance giants such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, often in preparation for larger painted tableaux, the works are thought to have entered the Royal Collection in the 17th Century under Charles II, several as gifts.
For more than 30 of them, it's their first time ever on public display. Rarely shown due to their fragility, these fascinating drawings – which, at the time, were beginning to be recognized as artworks in their own right – make up the broadest exhibition of Italian drawings from 1450 to 1600 ever shown in the UK.
Rarer still than these animal studies are the drawings of female nudes, outnumbered by a factor of three by an abundance of naked men. "The male body is this absolute focus of creativity," explained Renaissance historian Maya Corry, discussing the exhibition on BBC Radio 4's Front Row in October. "This is a Christian society and it's the male body, not the female body, that's made in God's image."
Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, with his ideal body proportions, is a case in point. It is the male physique, she said, that "comes closest to divine perfection" in those times.
There were practical issues, too. "The artist's workshop would have been a male environment, and in the absence of 'professional models' it would have gone against all societal norms for a woman to undress in front of any man other than her husband," Martin Clayton, the exhibition's curator, tells the BBC. It was male models who would pose for Michelangelo, for example, when he needed a female figure. "This led to misunderstandings and distortions in depictions of the female body.”
Raphael, however, was among the first to buck the trend, sketching female nudes based on real life models. "He was a highly pragmatic artist, who used drawing brilliantly to tackle visual problems, and to work very quickly from first idea to final composition," says Clayton. The drawings "allow us to see the artist's immediate responses to the living figure as they investigated pose, proportion, movement and anatomical detail," he adds. In the case of Raphael, "his simultaneous decisiveness and openness to variations and possibilities is always on display."
Raphael’s The Three Graces (c1517-18), a work in red chalk with evidence of some metalpoint underdrawing, reveals the artist's genius at work. As he moves a single model through three different poses, we witness the meticulous process behind creating the exuberant fresco The Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche, where these three figures will eventually feature, anointing the newlyweds to confer their future happiness.
Unclothed, the complexity of the human body was the ultimate test of a Renaissance artist's talent, while also satisfying the era's passion for science. The women's shapely biceps and quadriceps speak to the same interest in anatomy that we see in Da Vinci's densely annotated The Muscles of the Leg (c1510-11). But there's a softness about the face and abdomen that is missing from the exhibition's depictions of men, such as The Head of a Youth (c1590) with its angular jaw, attributed to Pietro Faccini, or Bartolomeo Passarotti's sinewy St Jerome (c1580).
The feminine ideal
Much like Michelangelo's David, sculpted a decade earlier, Raphael appears to chase an ideal – even when drawing from life. In a letter reportedly written to his friend Baldassare Castiglione in 1514, he expresses the struggle of capturing perfection in real life. "To paint one beautiful woman I would have to see several beauties," he writes. "But since both good judgement and beautiful women are scarce, I make use of a certain idea that comes to mind.”
In Raphael's The Three Graces, "beauty" means hairless, unblemished skin, and breasts and buttocks as perfectly round as the apples the trio clutch in his c1504-1505 treatment of the myth. When Sandro Botticelli made the Graces a feature of his vast tableau Spring, feminine softness was emphasized by flowing hair and diaphanous fabrics, while Pietro Liberi's post-Renaissance rendition of the subject (c1670-80) features the rosy cheeks and marble flesh that we see in works such as Federico Barocci's The Head of the Virgin (c1582), painted a century earlier, and also on display at the King's Gallery..webp)
Federico Barocci's The Head of the Virgin (circa 1582)
The rarity of female painters and patrons in the Renaissance meant that artworks inevitably reflected the male gaze. "Perceptions of gender and women's subordinate role in Renaissance culture played out in images, and especially portraits, with images of men stressing their social, political or professional role and status – the masculine ideal being very much one of forceful mastery," says historian and author Julia Biggs, an expert in Renaissance art history. "By contrast, the women encountered in portraits from this time are portrayed primarily in relation to the traits of ideal (youthful) feminine beauty, virtuousness (modesty, humility, obedience) and motherhood.”
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As deifications of charm, elegance and beauty, the Graces (Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia), daughters of Zeus, reflect a male view in their Renaissance depictions, not just of what a woman should look like, but also of how she should behave. They embody this nebulous concept of grace – closely associated with Raphael – which patrons were keen to attach to their image. It was a term that was bound up with distinction, benevolence and love, while the Graces' circular dance suggests balance and harmony − key principles of the Renaissance aesthetic. As a group, they combine a patriarchal lesson on feminine virtue with, unwittingly perhaps, a celebration of the female form and the sisterhood of female bonding.
Such female nudity contrasted sharply with the modest female dress code of Renaissance Italy. "In public, the majority of women would cover their bodies from just underneath the collarbone down to their ankles, and cover their arms," Biggs explains. Mythological and Biblical scenes gave artists a pretext to disrobe them, and also answered, says Biggs, the desire of male patrons to display "erotic erudition" or perhaps even "pay tribute to their own sexual prowess."
Even when the women are dressed, Drawing the Italian Renaissance reflects the dichotomous roles available to them, from a seductress in Annibale Carracci's The Temptation of St Anthony (c1595) to 13 different Virgin Marys by Michelangelo, Da Vinci and their contemporaries. Yet, the exhibition suggests that we do more than simply stand back and drink in the Renaissance in all its flourishes and flaws. In place of the conventional catalogue is an illustrated sketchbook, and drawing materials are found in the galleries. We are invited to engage with the works through our own creative endeavor – for some an opportunity, perhaps, to redraw their definition of male and female.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241119-the-hidden-meanings-in-a-16th-century-female-nude
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FROM MUSLIM TO ATHEIST
My journey away from Islam didn’t happen overnight. It started quietly, with a single question in a school classroom.
During a Moral Education class, a student asked the teacher: “Is God real?” My reaction was instant disbelief: “How can anyone doubt this?” But the teacher encouraged discussion. By the end of that class, I wasn’t so sure anymore. A tiny crack had formed.
That crack only grew with time. Through school, my questions piled up, but answers never came. Still, I kept my doubts to myself.
Then came college/UG. That’s where things got intense.
In my first year, one of my seniors had an unusual interest in me—he kept trying to convince me to come to the mosque. Because of hostel rules, his attempts were limited to brief moments between classes.
But in my second year, seniors were allowed into hostels. One afternoon, a friend casually asked me to come to his room for some “help.” When I walked in, I found that senior waiting for me. What followed was a half-hour lecture about faith and Allah. I walked back to my room that day with even more resistance than before.
By the third year, it escalated. That same senior showed up in my room with four or five others I didn’t even know. They asked my roommate to leave. For the next half hour, they warned me, pressured me, and tried to intimidate me into obedience.
It wasn’t faith they were giving me—it was fear.
Thankfully, a few months later, COVID hit and the college shut down. In that unexpected silence, away from their pressure, I finally had space to think. With time to reflect, I realized I hadn’t been to a mosque since 2018, and deep inside, I already knew—I no longer believed.
Religion, I came to feel, wasn’t serving the purpose it was meant for. Ideally, it should unite people and spread peace. But too often, it did the opposite. That contradiction became the final push.
I don’t hate religion. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. What I do dislike is the rigidity and hostility I experienced firsthand in the name of faith.
To borrow a line from the movie PK:
There are two types of God: one that created you, and the one that you created.
I stopped believing in both. You can choose which one you want to believe but please don't force your belief on others.
Dobby is free! My recent trip to Kudremukh, Chikmagalur
Thanks for reading
~ Azhar, Quora
Ken Marks:
All organized religions are for profit businesses and designed to control people.
G Shukla
my friend and I also left hinduism, and your journey of leaving islam resonates with me a lot
Ignacio BH GOD OF PUNISHMENT
Growing up in a Catholic household and background, I was very Catholic and religious when I was way younger. But then I started questioning my religion and faith.
Catholicism is also based on “the fear of God”. It is true, though, that this religion, especially in developed countries like mine, it’s not as pressuring and oppressive like Islam in many countries (and that’s a fact). There are no consequences if you leave your religion and socially being atheist is not only accepted but also the norm, so it’s way easier to just abandon it. Still, even if nobody was forcing me to “be Catholic,“ as I was a very religious person growing up in a very religious family, it was hard for me to run away from that. It was part of my self, of my identity.
But I felt I could not follow a religion that was based on fear and blind obedience. I could not understand how some random priest could give me moral lessons and advice in topics he was not even supposed to experience through his lifetime (sexual relationships, getting married, having kids, amongst others…) I started feeling that my relation with God was actually pretty toxic. I was “loving God” just because I was afraid of doing something wrong so that he would “punish” me. But sometimes I just wanted to do things in a different way. I just wanted to live my life without the restrictions and absurd norms coming from one institution talking “in the name of God.”
Religions are made with a very short sighted view of the world and human nature. Sometimes the boundaries between “the good” and “the bad “ are not that obvious. I felt my religion was more about controlling than about loving, so I just started leaving it progressively until I eventually realized I was not a believer anymore.
Some people say you can just try to “believe in God but not in the religion“, but that’s bullsh*t. I can believe in something, whether I know how to call it or not, but that God was the God created by my former religion, so without my religion, the Christian God goes out of the equation too.
Questioning my faith and my religion was hard, but I much more happy today than I was when I followed a God and a religion based on fear, punishment, guilt and shame.
Yogendra:
Great decision. All organized religions are a farce, just shops where millions earn livelihood by selling delusions to the benighted who far outnumber the enlightened.
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THE MILLENNIAL PARENTING STYLE
“My life, my choice,” said a tiny voice in the dark. They’d been studying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in reception. “Why did you have a child if you don’t want to look after me?” she added, from the cabin bed. She’d been going for an hour and 40 minutes, as she did every night, getting in and out of bed, as I took her back and tucked her in, saying odd, sing-song phrases like “Rest your body!” with rising mania.
I typed “five-year-old sleep regression” into my phone – a term we modern parents use for the disrupted sleep that occurs at different stages of a child’s development. You can find anything you want on your phone, and my search told me there was indeed a sleep regression at five – just as there had been at nine months, 18 months and three years.
If we ever called our 1980s parents to complain about sleep regression they would say, “Sleep regression? Never heard of it. We never had this trouble with you!” At which point we’d whisper: “Well that explains a lot, doesn’t it! You just threw us in a room and slammed the door!” Only we would never say it, because we didn’t really know what they had done and we were still scared of our 1980s parents.
Back in my daughter’s bedroom, I tell myself I’ll do it my way. “Don’t worry baby, I hear you! I know you’re just still awake because you want to be with me!”
A long thread on Mumsnet in June this year discussed “gentle parenting”, a phenomenon that defines the millennial generation and has become a favorite topic of right-wing press throughout the Western world, with its critics predicting societal collapse, as we raise entitled future people unable to cope with hearing the word “no”. Of the 237 comments on the thread, most of them were arguing about what gentle parenting actually is. Some claimed to be raising wonderful humans. For those who said it was failing them, the verdict was, “You’re just not doing it right.”
The difference between the millennial style of parenting and that of our own parents’ generation might be summed up in the image of the supermarket trolley. When I was a child, our Saturdays were spent being dragged along to Sainsbury’s, sitting in the little shelf inside the trolley with our thighs chafing on the bars, then perhaps a sweet at the checkout if we’d been “good”. Today, in many branches of Lidl and Budgens, the child has a miniature trolley of their own, often with a flag attached, and is followed around by parents, congratulated when they choose food for the family table. (They will not be allowed sweets, because what a gentle parent may allow in many other ways, they make up for with their deathly hard lines about sugar.)
Rather like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, gentle parenting puts the child and their feelings at the center of things: an idea that, surprisingly, has only been part of the parenting conversation for the last 25 years. At best, this means that when a child is distraught and having a tantrum, we empathize with their struggle and validate their emotions. This helps the child to understand these feelings and, over time, learn to regulate them – without resorting to the demeaning tools of threat, reward or punishment.
At worst, gentle parenting has turned into an extraordinary test of personal resilience, increasing the anxiety of an already anxious millennial generation. One’s own needs are negated in service of the child’s, and parents are sucked dry with the effort to be empathic and patient – left less like actual mummies and more like the wizened Egyptian ones in the casements of museums.
Sarah Ockwell-Smith is at home in Saffron Walden, Essex. Modest, with a knitted brow, she seems less like the guru of a global movement and more like a woman who needs to set a few things straight. Ockwell-Smith brought gentle parenting into parlance: her books have been translated into 30 languages. “I wrote so many books with ‘gentle’ in the title that I just couldn’t handle it any more,” she says. “If I knew where it would end up, I would have really strictly defined it. People are going on TikTok these days with no training whatsoever and doing things that I find very permissive and weird.”
Born to Generation X, she had her first child in 2003, shortly after the loss of both her parents. It was a traumatic birth. She then read books by Gina Ford, the parenting guru of the late 1990s known for her strict routines and control crying. Ford’s thinking clashed so much with Ockwell-Smith’s maternal instincts that she became depressed.
“Gentle parenting is a form of self-therapy,” she says. “It’s about listening to your instincts, which will impact your relationships with everyone else.” She gives me a long and short definition. Short: raising your children in the way you wish your parents had raised you. Long: understanding, empathy, respect and boundaries, “Which does mean saying no, saying stop, picking them up and not letting them hit their siblings – but not filling it up with punishments and consequences.”
It is still a fringe movement, she insists: “In England, 20 per cent of parents still smack their children. Go on to any high street on a Saturday and look at what parents are doing to kids – shouting, bribing, punishing. The biggest way of raising kids in this country is still Supernanny – look at her Instagram feed and look at mine!”
Clips of Supernanny Jo Frost, with her two-piece suit, notepad and naughty step, have 17.7 million likes on TikTok 20 years after she appeared on TV, in the era of Big Brother and Pimp My Ride. Now working for families privately all over the world and too busy to talk to the New Statesman, she instead sent a 1,240-word manifesto in reply to my questions, written curiously in the third person: “Jo Frost wasn’t trying to squash a child’s spirit,” she says. “She was trying to strengthen it!”
Frost worries about the less authoritative approach to raising children favored by millennials: “We’re seeing the long-term effects of that cultural shift. Emotional intelligence is much higher, therapy is normalized and kids know how to name their feelings, but something else has taken hold. Rising anxiety, emotional fragility, entitlement, anxiety and overthinking.”
Parents, she says, are victims too. “This generation of parents is unsure and confused about how to set limits without guilt. In an era that has become hyper-focused on feelings, too many believe that any correction is shaming, any rule is repression and any consequences are traumatic. They overshare like equals, giving kids too much information and making them grow up too fast. There’s an overexposure to adult concerns, mental health talk and identity questions. Kids worry more and play less!”
Yet if thousands of people are still using Supernanny’s naughty step, they’re not talking about it. “The problem with the naughty step,” Ockwell-Smith points out, “is that it presumes that naughty behavior is a motivational problem – that children have the ability to be good, they’re just choosing consciously not to.”
It is a psychological law that sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite. In an American survey by the Lurie Children’s Foundation conducted in 2024, 73 per cent of millennials said they thought they were doing a better job raising children than their parents had done. In one sense this is entirely natural, something we need to tell ourselves. But an obsession with “what our parents did” defines this generation. So, what did they do? Were they really so tough on us? Why is it that, when we share our parenting problems and our fears of getting it wrong, our parents don’t seem to remember ever worrying at all?
I observed a vignette of my own parents’ struggles last Christmas. My daughter had a chest infection, and antibiotics were sourced out of hours at great effort. The medicine was a very bitter variety, and it came back out again in a fountain of vomit. Concerned that her condition would worsen, with no doctors open for three days, I mixed it with custard: she tried again. As a last resort I suggested she held her nose – that didn’t work either. So we gave up.
Suddenly my mild-mannered father suffered an internal change. “You’re letting her run rings around you!” he boomed. As her hysteria escalated, so did my parents’. They were distressed at what pushovers we were. Above all, they seemed to be physically unable to handle my daughter’s heightened emotion. What did they think we should have done, we asked later – sit on her chest and force it down her throat? My dad said that, in truth, he had no idea.
The story circulated by millennial parents about the “boomers” before them is that they were authoritarian. This generates a laugh from Sue Gerhardt, the pioneering neuroscience writer whose 2004 book Why Love Matters had a great influence on modern parenting theory. Gerhardt had her first child in 1980, when every household owned a copy of Your Baby and Child by the parenting guru Penelope Leach. Leach wrote: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.”
Sounds pretty modern to me.
Gerhardt, now 71, was an active part of the women’s movement in the 1970s: she was involved in consciousness-raising groups (spaces for women to share their personal experiences of oppression and discrimination) and once campaigned for 24-hour nurseries. “We were really keen on egalitarianism, trying to combat our own tendencies to passivity and second-bestness,” she explains. “We were not authoritarian – but we were more focused on ourselves. We weren’t really thinking about the needs of babies in particular. Women have got to work, so what do we do with babies? Stick them in the nursery. It was the science that turned my attention in a different direction.”
Her work popularized huge advances in neuroscience in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed that time spent with babies in the first 1,000 days would influence their mental health for life. The work focused on the concepts of attachment theory and “emotional regulation”, revealing that the development of a child’s orbitofrontal cortex – the part of the brain that manages emotions – was directly dependent on the nature of interaction with their main carer. Our earliest experiences translate into neurological patterns of response that are laid down forever. As Gerhardt wrote in Why Love Matters, “Babies need continuous care from adults who can attune to their states, regulate them, and feed back to them who they are.”
It is not possible to sketch broadly a generation, to say how they parented and how they didn’t, when that parenting is dependent on money, opportunity and a thousand other variables far bigger than family. My parents were northerners – one from a refugee family displaced by the war – who moved to north London in the 1970s, entering a middle-class world. They lived on a single teacher’s salary, which enabled them to buy a flat thanks to special teachers’ mortgages available during Harold Wilson’s second government.
My mother went out to work, while my father was a househusband – highly unusual at the time. Like so many of their generation, they had no input from their parents, because they had moved away; they were young – in their early twenties – and they didn’t have a single night out without us for my entire childhood. We were the center of their world: they look at each other when I complain I am left with the “childcare” all day, a favorite phrase of my generation. I would consider my childhood idyllic. Yet there was smacking, and there was much shouting, and I was often scared of them. There was being “bad” if you were naughty. And we would never have had an apology or an explanation for anything that was said or done.
While boomer parents were anything but distant, Gerhardt agrees that they themselves often struggled with emotional regulation, “which is what is happening when people are hitting and shouting. Science shows that in very early life you must teach some basic skills, like being able to recognize emotions and talk about them as a way of regulating them.” If our parents were raised before neuroscience had illuminated the importance of a balanced stress response on the development of the brain, it was not knowledge they could consciously “parent” with — while we, some might suggest, have gone too far in the other direction.
My generation is trying to heal through raising children. Hot on therapy and faced with knowledge of our own, inner “wounded child”, we project our wounds on to our babies, and parent with an acute connection to what we were.
The word “parenting” only came into popular use in the 1970s. It coincided with the movement of women into the workplace, according to Andrew Bomback of Columbia University, who wrote a cultural history of it in 2023. “Parenting shifted from something you ‘fall into’ naturally, to another job involving work and practice and levels of performance,” he says. “There is much more transparency about the exhaustion level and the mixed bag of parenting these days, but the problem is going through all the material."
There has never been this much parenting content. The generation above us had a different guiding principle. The dominant theme was: trust your instinct, you know a lot more than you think you do. Our parents didn’t agonize. They asked their own parents for advice, and they viewed that generation as experts when we view them skeptically. I mean, there’s even that book in England called The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read!”
Philippa Perry, who wrote the 2019 best-seller, won’t even use the word “parenting”. “I don’t like verbing people. We are relating to people. Children and babies are people. ‘Parenting’ makes the child into a chore.”
In her time as a psychotherapist, Perry has seen a striking number of people cutting off contact with their parents for the perceived wrongs done to them in childhood. “It’s down to a lack of nuance in every area of our lives,” she says. “It’s Instagram therapy: these six things mean your mother was a narcissist. It’s not an individual explanation of somebody’s psyche.”
On Sundays, she walks on the seafront at Eastbourne and does her “observations”, as she’s done for 30 years. “What I do see is parents trying very, very hard to be nice beyond their limits,” she says. “I see a woman carrying two scooters, pushing a pushchair with three children and trying to placate them all, rather than putting herself first which might be a better idea. I’m all for feeling with the children – but I’m not for sacrificing myself to the extent that I start resenting them because I’ve not said no to anything. Why would you avoid saying no to a child?”
But people do. Like the home-schooling mother of six in New England whose online brand Extremely Good Parenting compares mothering to farming, “tending to a meaningful life.” Kara Carrero is a deep thinker, writing blogs about the passage of time and human obsolescence – her throat gets dry when she mentions the parts of her approach that are “controversial.” She says we need to avoid using “no” because children aren’t listening like we think they are. “If my daughter is too close to the street I am not about to yell, ‘Don’t go in the street!’ because I don’t want her to just hear the last half of it.” She also thinks showing children alternatives to “no” prepares them for adult life: “They may lose their job, but here are other things they could do.”
Many “mumfluencers” make the mistake of projecting adult understanding on to children’s brains. While some are driven by sharing knowledge, others are making entertainment – like the American mom Olivia Owen who claims to show “the comedy in raising eight children”. Though she uses the term “gentle parenting”, she has invited controversy for filming a tiny tot on the naughty step, or trying to get a one-year-old to say please. She makes more videos to address the inevitable “backlash” and gets up to four million views a time.
For many more, sharing “advice” on parenting is directly connected to mental health. There was a time when parenting blogs only showed absolute perfection, but after the pandemic, social media started to unleash the unspoken, under-reported truth of motherhood, and with it came the old wounds and the childhood traumas.
“Our moms were our first bullies,” says a post on Ambas Life, a Facebook page that covers the subjects of birth trauma and postpartum depression. “So please, don’t try to argue with women like us… We don’t argue for fun. We argue because we had to fight to be heard our entire lives.” Heather Hurt, another Facebook mom, writes: “Some of us are parenting with trauma in our bones… So no, I’m not sorry if I watch too close. That’s not overprotective. That’s called parenting in 2025.”
With the emotive posts comes tremendous pressure. The Facebook page Ausome Life, which is ostensibly there to raise autism awareness, shares a “first person” account of what it feels like to be left alone in a dark room, from the point of view of a baby, to deter new parents from training their child to sleep by themselves.
Three in four millennials go online for parenting advice. Exhausted women see these posts at 3am and feel guilty for wishing the difficult days away. Our increased knowledge of what children need in the first years of their lives is frustrated by the fact that most of us live in households where all adults are required to work. In the absence of working structures that meet our needs, we turn the heat up on ourselves. Then there is the post-hoc analysis of how we handled a moment with our children, and what we might have got wrong. Somehow, overthinking has undermined the very thing that parenting is made of: instinct.
When I was a child, I was given a book by the children’s writer Allan Ahlberg called Bad Bear. It featured a crazy-eyed teddy in a frilly dress riding her scooter into people and stealing their ice creams. The reason I remember the book so well is that my parents called me “Bad Bear” whenever I had a tantrum, which was often. Though the book was published in 1982, it is really a Victorian piece of work. The last page shows the bear asleep. When she’s asleep, says the rhyme, she’s almost good, “Yet still she tries, sometimes it seems, to be a bad bear in her dreams.”
“Good” and “bad”: those are two parenting words from the past. The concept of “bad” behavior is, alongside smacking on the high street, the greatest indicator of the way things have changed between this generation and the last. It is well understood these days that if you tell a child they’re “bad” when they’re having a tantrum, they will very possibly grow up confused and guilty when they have strong feelings. This is one of the tenets of Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, who is probably the most famous practitioner of millennial parenting in the world. Her brand, Good Inside, is predicated on the idea that whatever demons come up between parents and children, it is always from a place of love. If kids are having tantrums, it’s because they’re hurting. Anger is a surface emotion for us all.
Kennedy also describes her work as therapy for children and parents, as parents confront strong unconscious reactions to the way they themselves were raised. There is allowance for parental anger, as long as there is “repair”: if you apologize to your kids for blowing your top, they see that big feelings are OK to have, and that they will pass.
Yet there are aspects of the approach which stretch a parent’s capacity to its limits, as we act as our children’s therapists as well as our own. When my friend restrained her tantruming son, telling him he was a “good kid”, it only made him angrier: “No I’m not!” he screamed.
Kennedy says we should no longer tell children we are proud of them, only that they should be proud of themselves. “When you orientate a child to focus on the impact of her feelings on you instead of the reality of the feelings inside herself, you are wiring a child for co-dependency,” she says. Meanwhile, other kinds of co-dependency emerge, with parents – as Jo Frost says – “oversharing like equals”; or with the father who says “that hurts daddy” rather than “don’t pinch!”
Back on Mumsnet, primary school teachers complain about the legacy of the modern “gentle parenting” style. Discipline is going down the pan, they say, as kids turn everything into an endless negotiation: how will these people cope with the world?
Sarah Ockwell-Smith says that, these days, around 30 per cent of children aged nought to five are “gently parented”. Her once fringe movement is on the rise. Does she have hope for them? “Yes, it’s about raising decent adults, not obedient children. If you are trying to get well-behaved kids you’re going about it the wrong way. Look at girls. We were raised to doubt what we wanted; now we raise girls who know what they want. Which would you rather have? It doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
Day by day, I see another side to it all. Every Friday morning at my daughter’s school, the classroom opens for parents to come and read stories to their kids. Unfortunately this often ends in tears when it comes to the point at which parents have to leave. Last week I noticed that one of the children had adopted the role of class therapist when the difficult moment arrived. She scanned her friends’ faces for emotion. “Do you need to go to the calm corner? No? You’re feeling green?” Green is their emotional thumbs up.
The next day, my daughter had a play date at our flat, and at one point she got upset when things weren’t going her way. She stalked off and left her five-year-old friend alone in a house she’d not visited before. “I’ll just go and check on her,” said the small guest.
When I found them in the kitchen, looking at lollies, talking quietly, I thought: they have no shame about their feelings. Anger is seen as something normal, a wheel we fall upon; it will pass, we can help a friend with it, even when we’re right in the thick of it with them.
It is hard to look at scenes like this and think millennials are doing parenting wrong. I remembered a line from Mumsnet. “Down at the supermarket, it’s not the young people you see losing their shit when things don’t go the way they want.”
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THE ORIGIN OF MALE AND FEMALE SYMBOLS
Interestingly, these circle-like shapes have traveled through a 2000-year journey filled with mythology, astronomy, and even some music notation to get to where they are today.
Out-Of-This-World Inspiration
The earliest versions of the male and female symbols weren’t about people at all, but instead about the planets. Ancient Babylonians linked celestial bodies with gods: Mars with the war god Nergal, Venus with the fertility goddess Ishtar. The Greeks adopted the idea; they gave Mars the name Thouros ("raging") and Venus Phosphoros ("light bringer"). Each planet also got a corresponding metal—iron for Mars (tough) and copper for Venus (soft).
Over time, scholars developed shorthand marks for these planets and metals. The symbol ♂ came from an abbreviation of the Greek name for Mars; the symbol ♀ from the name for Venus. 
Light-bringing Phosphoros, i.e. Venus
In the 18th century, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus gave these symbols a new meaning. He used ♂ and ♀ in plant classification, using Mars for the male parent, and Venus for the female. He did this simply because it saved him space in his notes. Other scientists followed suit, and the symbols hopped from botany to zoology to human biology.
The Shape Shift
By the mid-1800s, another set of sex symbols entered the scene. In 1845, New York physician Pliny Earle made his own tweaks while mapping out a family tree of people with color blindness. He used triangles and squares for males and circles for females instead of the classic ♂ and ♀.
It’s believed Earle did this because the printing press didn’t have the Mars and Venus symbols in its type set. According to one colleague, the physician borrowed shapes from music notation; the circles looked suspiciously like whole notes.
American geneticists adopted the new style. Squares, triangles, and circles were cleaner, easier to reproduce, and better for marking different genetic traits. By the early 20th century, they had replaced the classical symbols in most scientific pedigrees.
These seemingly simple symbols carry a surprising amount of history in their small forms. So the next time you see ♂, ♀, or any of the newer variants, remember: you’re not just looking at a gender or sex marker. You’re looking at the condensed history of human curiosity.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/male-female-symbol-origins?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE ATOM BOMB MARKERS IN OUR BODIES
Above-ground nuclear tests in the 1950s changed the composition of the atmosphere
It is 80 years since the first nuclear weapon test – codenamed Trinity – detonated above the desert in New Mexico. Today the hidden legacy of nuclear bomb tests can still be found in our cells – and is proving surprisingly useful to scientists.
It's in your teeth. Your eyes and your brain too. Scientists call it the "bomb spike" (or "bomb pulse") – and for more than half a century its signature has been present inside the human body.
On 16 July 1945, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear weapon, known as the Trinity test, in New Mexico. The 18.6kt explosion lit up the sky and sent a blast of searing heat across the desert as a fireball lofted high into the sky. In the days that followed, white flakes and dust rained down on areas downwind. A now de-classified report from the time warned that radioactive particles spread over an area of more than 2,700sq miles (6,993sq km). And this test was just the start of the atomic era.
In the 1950s, there were so many nuclear bomb explosions above ground that they transformed the chemical make-up of the atmosphere – altering the carbon composition of life on Earth ever since, along with oceans, sediments, stalactites and more.
Unlike the direct radioactive fallout from the explosions, the bomb spike is not harmful. In fact, it's proven surprisingly helpful for scientists in recent years. Some have even gone so far as to describe it as the "mushroom cloud's silver lining".
Why? Evidence of the pulse is so ubiquitous that it can, among many other insights, tell forensic scientists when a person was born (or died), provide discoveries about the age of neurons in our brains, reveal the origin of poached wildlife, determine red wine vintage and even unlock the true age of centuries-old sharks.
And now it may also help to define a new geological era. In July 2023, a group of earth scientists recommended that its presence in a Canadian lake – along with other human-made markers from the mid-20th Century – should represent the official start of the Anthropocene.
So, what exactly is the bomb spike, and what can it reveal about us and the world?
Before the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty obligated signatory nations to test nuclear bombs underground, governments exploded hundreds of atomic weapons out in the open air. More than 500 of these blasts – mainly conducted by the US and Russia – spewed their contents into the atmosphere.
It's well-established that these tests spread radioactive material far and wide, harming humans and wildlife and rendering whole regions uninhabitable. Perhaps lesser known outside the scientific laboratory is that the bombs also reacted with natural nitrogen to form new isotopes – particularly carbon-14.
By the 1960s, overground bomb testing had produced almost twice the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere compared with previous levels. First the isotope entered water, sediments and vegetation, and then it passed along the food chain to humans. It has even reached organisms in the deepest ocean trench.
"In essence, every carbon pool on Earth which was in exchange with atmospheric CO2 since the late 1950s has been labeled by bomb carbon-14," writes Walter Kutschera of the University of Vienna, who published a review of the scientific applications of the spike in the journal Radiocarbon in 2022.
Back in the mid-20th Century, scientists noted the carbon-14 spike when atmospheric testing stopped, but it took decades for them to realize that the elevated levels might be useful. From the 1950s onwards, they had been using carbon-14 to date paleolithic remains or ancient texts, but that was based on its radioactive decay – known as radiocarbon dating. The isotope is unstable: it decays slowly into nitrogen with a half-life of 5,730 years. So, when a Neanderthal died, for instance, the quantity of carbon-14 in their bones and teeth would have started to gradually decline. Measure the extent of the decline, and you have a Neanderthal date of death.
Radiocarbon dating, however, tends to be limited to samples that are more than 300 years old, because of the isotope's slow decay rate. Any younger, and it hasn't decayed enough for an accurate date. Muddying recent dating further is humanity's introduction of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution – the so-called Suess effect.
Around the turn of the century, however, researchers realized that the bomb spike could help them use carbon-14 in a different way – and crucially it allows for dating within the past 70-80 years.
Ever since the peak in the 1950s, levels of the isotope in nature (and human beings) have gradually declined. Scientists can therefore analyze the proportions of carbon-14 in any organic substance that has exchanged atmospheric carbon since the tests, and specify the window in which it formed, down to a resolution of one to two years.
And that includes you and me. If you were born in the 1950s, your tissues will have accumulated more carbon-14 than a 1980s child, but levels are only now approaching the pre-atomic state.
Forensic analysis
One of the earliest uses of the bomb spike was to assist crime investigators seeking to identify the age of unidentified human remains. Forensic scientists have found that they can measure bomb carbon-14 in teeth, bones, hair or even the lens of the eye to help them estimate how old a person was, or when they died, according to Eden Centaine Johnstone-Belford of Monash University and Soren Blau of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia.
In a 2019 review, Centaine Johnstone-Belford and Blau cite multiple examples where the bomb spike has informed police enquiries. For example, in 2010 investigators used it to confirm a body found in a northern Italian lake had been dumped there by the killer the previous year.
The pair also point out that knowing the time since death can be "a vital determination in human rights abuse cases such as war crimes, genocide and extrajudicial killings". In 2004, for example, bomb spike dating of hair samples from a mass grave in Ukraine allowed investigators to identify a Nazi war crime that occurred between 1941 and 1952.
The bomb spike's multiple uses
WINE VINTAGE: In 2011, researchers from the University of Adelaide showed that bomb carbon-14 in grapes and other compounds could accurately date wine.
ELEPHANT ORIGINS: Bomb spike analysis of a haul of poached tusks showed the elephants had died in the previous three years, which helped explain population declines.
SHARK AGE: Greenland sharks are staggeringly old, but it took a carbon-14 analysis of their eye lens to reveal a true age: 400 years.
The bomb spike has also unlocked new scientific discoveries, revealing new insights about the cells in our bodies and brains. In 2005, the biologist Kirsty Spalding of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and colleagues showed that it was possible to date the relative ages of our cells by analyzing bomb carbon-14 within their DNA. Across several subsequent studies, she has used the technique to answer whether certain cells in our bodies have been around since birth, or whether they are continually replaced.
For example, in 2008 Spalding and colleagues showed that the body continually replaces fat cells called adipocytes as the cells die. The number of these fat cells, she found, stays constant across adulthood – which promises new ways to tackle obesity. "Understanding that this is a dynamic process opens up new avenues of therapy, which may include manipulating the birth or death rate of fat cells, in combination with exercise and diet, to help reduce the number of fat cells in obesity," she says.
In 2013, Spalding and colleagues also used the bomb spike to look at the turnover of brain cells. For many years, researchers assumed that the number of neurons was fixed in childhood, and indeed her earlier research had suggested that was the case in regions like the cortex. However, by using carbon-14 to date neurons within the hippocampus, she and her team confirmed that new neurons may be produced there throughout adult life.
Corroborated by other research, the possible existence of "adult neurogenesis" has proven to be one of the most important neuroscience discoveries of the past 20 years. While the science is far from settled, it has suggested new avenues for medical strategies that might prevent neuron loss via disease, or even increase the generation of new neurons.
Dawn of a new age
Finally, the bomb spike was recently nominated as one of several markers that could help to officially recognize the dawn of the Anthropocene – the new geological era defined by human activity.
Not long after the idea of the Anthropocene was floated, geologists began to discuss how to define its location on Earth with a so-called "golden spike" – a rock, ice core or layer of sediment where a new era begins in the stratigraphic record. Every major geological period has one. The beginning of the Holocene is marked by a particular ice core from the center of Greenland. The base of the Jurassic begins in the Austrian Alps, at Kuhjoch pass in the Karwendel Mountains, where the smooth-shelled Psiloceras ammonite makes a first appearance. And one of the oldest golden spikes on Earth can be found in the Flinders Mountains of Australia, marking the start of the Ediacaran more than 600 million years ago – a period when the climate was periodically plunging into a "Snowball Earth.”
Over the years, various signatures of human activity have been explored as possibilities to mark the Anthropocene's dawn: it could have been the rise in methane caused by early farming thousands of years ago (seen in ice cores), evidence of early lead pollution from mining and smelting 3,000 years ago, or the rise in fossil fuel byproducts during the Industrial Revolution.
However, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) – part of the organization charged with making the decision – recommended the 1950s, when the carbon-14 bomb spike entered the geological record, along with other nuclear markers such as plutonium fallout and isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, as well as man-made deposits like spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs), a type of fly ash produced by burning coal at high temperatures.
Not everyone agreed that selecting the 1950s was a good idea – indeed, one member of the group recently resigned in protest, arguing that profound human impacts began much earlier. However, the Working Group propose that the mid-20th Century marks a clear, recognizable point in geological strata when humanity made its presence in nature truly and fully known right across the globe. It also coincides, they say, with the "great acceleration" when our impact on the planet exploded through exponential rises in greenhouse emissions, water and land use, ocean acidification, fisheries exploitation, tropical forest loss, and more.
And the bomb spike will also last a long time, allowing geologists to see it in tens of thousands of years. "The radiocarbon signal will be detectable for about 60,000 years and is a fairly routine analysis," says geologist Colin Waters of the University of Leicester, who chairs the AWG.
The AWG [Anthropocene Working Group] studied 12 candidate locations that could host the official golden spike, including a cave in Italy where the bomb pulse and the other markers are encased in stalactites, an archaeological excavation in Vienna, a patch of peatland near the border of the Czech Republic and Poland, and a coral reef off the north-east coast of Australia.
In July 2023, they recommended a (perhaps soon-to-be infamous) "winner": Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada. A core from the muddy lake sediments, featuring carbon-14, a particularly abrupt plutonium marker, and other man-made signatures, was removed to be kept at a safe location.
The proposal, however, has since become bogged down in scientific bureaucracy and in March 2024 the International Commision on Stratigraphy's Subcommision on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected proposals for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of geological time.)
If the lake core ever does become the official designation, it technically means that we too will hold one of the markers of the Anthropocene's dawn in our cells. Future generations won't, because the elevated carbon-14 has almost returned to previous levels. Therefore if tomorrow's archaeologists happen to study our preserved bodily remains, it might tell them about a unique point in history – a time of nuclear bombs, a great acceleration, and the century when humans began to have an impact on nature unlike any before.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230808-atomic-bomb-spike-carbon-radioactive-body-anthropocene
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THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH
I spent a week in Finland eating trees, swimming naked, and ordering room service in pursuit of its famous contentment. I wish I could unlearn the country’s secret.
The day I arrived in Finland to learn how to be happy, I thought about the ladder. Humans have many ways to assess their own happiness, but the Cantril Ladder may be the most influential, even if you’ve never heard of it. It goes like this:
Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
This single, carefully calibrated inquiry is how the World Happiness Report—the annual, much-covered study run by academics at Oxford University, among others—ranks every country in the world on professed happiness. Around 1,000 people from each country, across a spread of representative demographics, by phone or in person, contribute to the study each year. And lately, each year, there is the same result.
In 2025, while the U.S. slid to an all-time low of 24th out of all the world’s nations in life satisfaction, Finland again reigned supreme. The nation has held the top spot for the past eight years running. Finns were happier during the peak COVID years, even, than Americans have ever been.
And why would we be happy? Things haven’t been so great, have they? You know it, I know it. In both the U.K., where I live, and in the U.S., life in recent years has not, let us say, inspired a huge amount of joie de vivre. There are a bunch of reasons for this, and I imagine you can think of 10 right now without me having to list them. The atmosphere, in many places, is decidedly sour.
That’s probably why, whenever the World Happiness Report comes out, the media around the globe pore over it. But what has changed in the past few years is that Finland has begun to try to capitalize on this accolade. In 2023 and 2024, the tourist board, Visit Finland, invited 14 non-Finns to come to the country and undertake a “Happiness Masterclass.” Helsinki’s airport is covered in signage that reads, “Welcome to your happy place.”
It’s good PR. Who doesn’t want to be happy? I had several questions, though. I lived in Sweden for two years, a country that also ranks highly on the World Happiness Report. I had an idea of why that might be, reasons like a strong history of social welfare, a sensible approach to work-life balance, and high national prosperity. But that is true of all the Nordic countries, more or less.
What were the Finns doing over there that meant that, unlike Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, they were taking the top spot every single year, and by a statistically significant margin? And what were they doing that might, as Visit Finland was claiming, constitute “a skill that can be learned” by the rest of us? Was this all just marketing guff, or was it possible that a holiday in Finland could teach you how to be happy?
So I asked Finland to put its money where its mouth is. To make me happier, the Finnish way. The pros at Visit Finland gamely accepted, and off I went. Five days later, I had indeed internalized some lessons about happiness—some of which I now wish I could unlearn.
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When I arrived in Finland, I reckon I’d have put myself at about a solid 7 on the famous ladder. Life’s pretty good, all things considered. But Finns’ average score was 7.736, more than a full point higher than the average in either the U.K. or the U.S. I knew I could—and must—go higher.
I left the conspicuously peaceful Helsinki airport, which is decked out in blond wood and pumps birdsong into the toilets, and met my taxi driver outside in a cold drizzle.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said in a monotone.
On the drive into town, I asked him whether he thinks Finnish people are happy. He laughed for quite a long time. “Do your work first, then see what you think,” he said.
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As we neared the hotel where I would be staying, he pointed out a digital display on the side of a building that shows a regularly updating count of the population of Finland. Finland is a small country—just over 5.5 million people live here. That is half the population of London, where I live. But the country itself is relatively big: about as big as Germany, which has 15 times as many people in it. A full 10 percent of the area of Finland is lakes, and a whopping 75 percent is forest.
Even in Helsinki itself, you are never very far away from real wilderness. I ate dinner that night at a restaurant on the 15th floor of a high-rise in a busy central district, and even from that vantage, most of what you can see out in the middle distance is woodland. Although 85 percent of Finns live in an urban area, urban area is a relative term here. Nature is always a stone’s throw away, which seems as good a reason as any to feel upbeat.
Before the World Happiness Report catapulted Finland into the global spotlight, there used to be some other, less celebratory stereotypes of Finns. When I lived in Sweden, people alluded in an offhand kind of way to the belief that Finnish people were once thought of as drunk hicks.
There was indeed a man fully asleep over his glass of beer at the bar I went to after dinner, but whilst I am admittedly from a nation with a deeply messed up relationship with alcohol, that doesn’t seem so unusual to me. They’ve also shed that label in recent years.
Another long-standing Finnish stereotype is still going strong, though. I got the impression from Swedish people that the general feeling is that Finns are just … kind of strange. They don’t speak much, like to be alone, and march to the beat of their own drum. As a Swedish friend rather uncharitably put it: “You know when you meet a guy who’s quiet, but you get a gut feeling he’s into some truly disgusting stuff that he would never talk about?”
At the bar that first night, I sat down with a group of friends in their 30s and asked them, too, why Finnish people were happy. Again, they all laughed.
“This is the worst question,” one said, “because I don’t think Finnish people are so happy.”
“For six months of the year it’s dark, so it doesn’t make sense,” her friend added. “And the suicide rate is very high.”
It is true that in the 1990s, Finland had some of the highest suicide rates in the world. But the number of suicides (or, as the WHR refers to them, “deaths of despair”) in Finland has been falling dramatically, and has been for some time.
The dark, too, I already suspected was a red herring. When I lived in Sweden, the fact that you endure so many months of short days perversely made me happier, because when the summer months came, I was able to truly appreciate them. You walk down the street thinking things like Everyone and everything is so beautiful to a degree that surely wouldn’t be possible if the sun shone all year round. But I decided not to Finn-splain their own country to these strangers whose drinks I had interrupted, and left them to it.
The following morning, I did the first activity Visit Finland had planned in order to educate me in the ways of Finnish happiness: a sea swim and a sauna. I’m very familiar with sauna culture. Back in Sweden, my then-boyfriend was a member of our local sauna club, and I used to go with him sometimes. It was a pleasant enough thing to do, but in my heart of hearts, I never fell in love with it. I would sit in that pine-scented room feeling the sweat trickle from areas of my body I wasn’t aware could sweat and think: What is the point of this? People talked vaguely about health benefits and detoxing, but it all felt ill-defined.
Still, in pursuit of one more step on the happiness ladder, I would give it another shot. I went to a sea-pool and sauna complex right in Helsinki’s main harbor, a minute’s walk from their Supreme Court building. The Baltic Sea is, perhaps needless to say, not warm. That wasn’t stopping a healthy crowd of Finns from spending their Saturday morning getting in it. It nearly stopped me, as I watched a grown man whimpering with each step, but in the name of research I dutifully threw my body in the water and dragged it out again, pink and raw as a plucked chicken. I suppose I did feel happy to be in the sauna, surrounded by strangers in elfin little felted sauna hats and not much else, because it meant I was no longer in the sea.
Visit Finland’s happiness program also put heavy emphasis on what is supposedly a key element in a typical Finnish lifestyle: the forest. Wilderness hasn’t formed a very large part of my life, as a person born and raised in one of the biggest cities in the world. My dad likes to say that the only time he ever felt ashamed of my brother and me when we were children was when he would take us to visit some friend who lived in the countryside and we would point at mud and shriek in horror.
But if I could shake off my city shackles and learn to embrace the mud, perhaps I could inch up that ladder a few decimal places. I knew that I would be staying for one night in what was billed as a remote, off-grid, sustainable cabin overlooking the Baltic, but what I did not understand is that, in Finland, all of that can be true and you can still be a mere 15-minute drive from central Helsinki.
This, my tour guide said, was what made her happy, and makes so many of her countrymen feel the same. “It is very normal for Finns to go into nature to load up, you could say,” she said as she gathered up a handful of leaves called “frog’s stomach,” which tasted of peas. “When you walk in nature, you’re in the present moment; it’s easier to get to that happy mode.” It did feel good. There is a deep peace in picking a leaf off a tree and eating it. I would not have said I was someone who needed time in nature to be happy, but it can’t be denied that now that I was there in it, and really thinking about it, it did bring a sense of contentment.
Being less driven to be productive
But it wasn’t just that it was pleasant to be outside. On this walk, something clicked for me. It was nice to be doing something that had no specific purpose. What was the point in eating a leaf off a tree? There wasn’t one, particularly. It was just nice to do. In a society where it isn’t quite so drivingly necessary to prove your worth and make money to spend on supporting yourself, you’re more allowed to just eat off the tree. You’re more allowed to just go for a walk, dip your body in the cold sea for a minute or two, sit in a sweaty wooden box. Everything around Finns gives them permission to do this—rather than implies that this is an unproductive use of your extremely limited, exchangeable-for-goods-and-services time.
On a walking tour of Helsinki, I got a chance to do some people-watching of these now-dressed, supposedly happy Finns. Many were tall and good-looking, many were blond, pops of pastel color were common in people’s outfits, and as it happened, many of the men were wearing extraordinarily ugly angler-type sunglasses. But you can, of course, tell very little about how happy people are by looking at them. Hotness is no measure of happiness, at least if celebrities are to be believed.
Quietness is certainly a defining feature of Finns, though. Walking down Helsinki center’s yellow-terraced streets, you don’t hear raised voices. It is not uncommon to find yourself in a conversation with long periods of silence, which in London someone would be rushing to fill. My tour guide, Kathrin, a woman in her early 30s from Luxembourg who has been living here for 10 years, said that once you get used to the quiet, it’s a precious thing. “It’s OK to be an introvert in Finland,” she said as we walked past people having their coffees outside on café tables and park benches alone in the sunshine.
Kathrin is endearingly besotted with her adopted country and spoke about it with the reverence of a convert. Some more things I heard from her that contribute to people in Finland being happy included: sauna culture discouraging fatphobia; emphasis on design—that means even very basic, cheap things are beautiful and robust; and, of course, nature. A feeling of security also plays into it, she told me. Many Finnish people I would meet in the coming days would describe themselves as feeling “safe,” by which they didn’t just mean safe from something like street crime, which is what I would mean if I used the word. There is a long-running culture of preparedness here for … well, whatever might be coming next.
Finland has one of the largest reservist armies in the world, and an underground latticework of everything-proof bunkers beneath Helsinki big enough to house 900,000 people, well over the actual population of Helsinki, in an emergency. The entire country is subjected to an air-raid siren test on the first Monday of every month at 12 p.m. They might share an enormous land border with a country currently waging an aggressive land war, but they won’t be caught unawares, which brings a peace of mind. “People have a really deep sense of understanding that they will be looked after,” Kathrin said.
And there are Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson’s iconic little white creatures, the Moomins. Everyone loves the Moomins.
All of which sound like great reasons to be happy to me. So why weren’t Finnish people owning up to being happy when I asked them? I dropped in at the art gallery Amos Rex (Finland’s arts and culture funding is substantial, by the way), and asked Helena, a warm older woman who works as a guide at the gallery, why people had been laughing at my question.
“I think it’s because of the melancholy nature of us. We’re not easygoing,” she said.
Finnish people are not typically very exuberantly joyful in their affect. Puzzle solved, I thought: It’s perfectly possible to be satisfied with your life and also present yourself in a muted, introverted manner in response to a really quite personal question from a strange journalist. Helena thought it might go deeper than that, though, to some core ways in which Finnish people understand their own happiness.
“The reasons why we are the happiest people, things like very little corruption, trusting in the government and the powers that be, trusting in the police, paying high taxes but believing that the taxes are used for our benefit, for our free education and subsidized health care—all of these things, if you’re a Finn and live in Finland, you don’t necessarily realize how happy they make you. But when you go abroad and come back, then you see it. So I think the happiness is sort of surreptitious. It’s like an undercurrent in our lives.”
She mentioned, too, that it is deeply un-Finnish to boast about anything: “You don’t show wealth here, because it’s a no-no. You mustn’t show that you’re wealthy.”
Now that I thought about it, I had seen nobody in Finland so far who I would have described as dressing “flashy,” or driving a souped-up vehicle, or swinging an overtly expensive handbag. Conspicuous consumption is not the done thing.
“And it’s the same with happiness?” I asked.
“Exactly,” said Helen. “There is a poem about it, something like: ‘The one who has got happiness must hide it.’ Keep it to yourself, don’t boast about it. Don’t jinx it. But we know we’ve got it.”
She didn’t actually wink at me, but she may as well have. It’s not that Finnish people aren’t proud of the distinction of being the happiest nation. It’s that self-satisfied pride in anything is a distinctly un-Finnish thing to express.
Perhaps it’s easier for non-Finns to openly celebrate what there is to love about the country. I went to a winery called Ainoa a little way outside Lahti, a midsize Finnish city a couple of hours north of Helsinki that also happens to be home to the largest population of seagulls in the world. There, I met a couple called David and Paola, who waxed lyrical about the produce available in Finland’s cold climate (i.e., not grapes), which led them to start an award-winning berry-wine business. David and Paola have been here since 2005. He’s from Massachusetts, she’s from Ecuador, and they have raised their children here.
Before the winery, David was working as an engineer for a company with operations in Finland, and he remembers getting in trouble: “I had a few times when I was actually told by my boss to take more time off.” (Employees in Finland, even high up in a company, will punch in and punch out each day.) “He said, ‘The computer can’t bank that many hours for you, so you have to cut back because you’re breaking our system.’ ”
To hear David tell it, Finnish happiness has nothing to do with how jolly they may or may not be as a people. “It has less to do with how ‘ha ha, smiling, happy’ people are, and more to do with: There’s less reason to be unhappy in Finland than any place else. You can think about all the things that can make people unhappy, and Finland has less of them,” he said. He talked about how his children are safe from gun violence, the sacredness of personal time, the knowledge that if he and Paola became sick, or couldn’t pay the mortgage, or lost their house, there would be a social safety net there to catch them. “Everyone takes care of everyone else, to some extent,” he said.
Given all this, I expected David to tell me frankly that, no, it’s not possible to “learn to be happy” like a Finnish person, because it’s about what society offers you. That’s not what he said. “It’s also about an acceptance of what you’ve got, and being grateful for it,” he told me. You absolutely could learn.
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Just as the annual hoo-ha around the World Happiness Report encourages Finnish people to consciously identify good things about their lives, things that have become as background as the air they breathe, I was finding that the air I breathe at home is more polluted than I had thought. That I could, in fact, be happier. Going to Finland doesn’t so much teach you how to be happy as it does open your eyes to the various ways in which your life and the lives of most people where you come from are lacking.
One of the last things I was invited to do was attend a birdhouse-making workshop with the Visit Finland employees. I suppose the point of this was that it is good for the soul to make things with your hands, away from the tyranny of screens and so on. I can’t say I found it relaxing, because for some reason the building of the birdhouses was presented as a race, and so my final product looked somewhat like shit, shrapneled with nails hammered well beyond the point at which it was clear they were not going to go into the wood.
But what depressed me about my birdhouse wasn’t that it was crappy, but that it implied the existence of a bucolic idyll I would be taking it home to, one that did not exist. I looked at my poorly constructed birdhouse and imagined a bruiser of a London pigeon trying to muscle its large, grimy body inside the entrance hole, which was no bigger than a watch face. And as I sat on the flight home with the birdhouse in the bin overhead, I heard the voice of that pigeon mocking me: “Who do you think you are? Where do you think you live? Coo,” etc.
Things did just seem better in Finland on every conceivable level than they were at home. I was having, by any measure, a very nice time in Finland. It is nice to stay in a hotel suite positioned right out over a lake, with its own personal sauna, as I did at a resort called Lehmonkärki in Finland’s Lakeland area. It is nice to have fresh local juice delivered to your room in Moomin-branded jugs while you lie on a bed someone else made, wearing a towelling robe and watching slop Netflix television like You. It is nice to compile your own lightly maniacal feast at a hotel breakfast buffet. These things will make you happy. But you can’t take them home with you.
My life is pretty good, as lives go. I’ve been able to stay in the same rental apartment for three years, long by London standards. I have a job I like, a partner, friends, family, relatively good health. But I am also often tense and harried by a thousand little frictions that exist at home that just … don’t, in Finland. It can feel like life in the U.K., and as I understand it in the U.S. too, is overarched by the sense that, far from existing to support you, the state is out to punish you for any tiny infraction. Want to have a child? Pay most of your salary for their care. Need medical attention? Good luck. Can’t afford a home? Live on the street.
My life assessment of 7 was under threat. I felt myself slipping down that ladder fractionally for every air mile I traveled further away from Finland and back to the U.K.
Shortly after I got home, I took a cramped and overpriced train up to Oxford, where the data scientists behind the World Happiness Report work. There, I met Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, a professor at Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College and expert in what makes life worth living. I felt I had got to the bottom of why Finnish people were happy, but now I wanted to, bluntly, know whether we were all doomed never to be as happy as our friends in the Nordics.
The World Happiness Report takes that single ladder question about life satisfaction as the basis for its rankings, but its work doesn’t stop there. Other questions asked on the Gallup World Poll feed into their final report each year, and each year they take a different theme to dive into deeply. This year, it was “sharing and caring.” One of the survey questions that caught de Neve’s eye was about how many of a person’s lunches and dinners were shared during the course of a week.
“That may sound frivolous to most people, but it’s hyperpredictive of your life satisfaction and the extent to which you have social ties, or reframed: social isolation,” he said. There’s being alone because you have no time to see anybody and have lost connection to those around you, live in a busy anonymous city, or have been sucked into living mostly online. And then there’s the solitude that Finnish people are talking about: nourishing, chosen time to yourself. And once again, here was something I hadn’t realized my life lacked. I eat the majority of my meals alone.
There are, of course, many, many reasons why countries like the U.K. and the U.S. are slipping down the happiness rankings, many of them the societal support ones that the Finns are proudly getting right. But the sharing of meals element speaks to something not often talked about in terms of life satisfaction in these countries, de Neve told me: It’s about polarization. “One of the reasons why sharing meals is so important, and why the drop, especially in the United States, is so frightening, is because it’s over these physical face-to-face interactions that we test our views of the world,” he said. “By chatting, we moderate our views. The drop in community and coming together face to face is partially underpinning the fact that we’re no longer moderating our views.”
But I didn’t want to admit defeat. I wanted to take home what little I could. And there were things I could put in a suitcase. One of the items I bought in the Moomin gift shop was a felting kit for making a Moomin out of wool, because it was heavily discounted and I, un-Finnishly, love buying stuff I don’t need. One evening, I sat down with the kit. I don’t know if you’ve ever needle felted anything before, but it takes ages. You poke a serrated needle in and out of wool tufts hundreds and hundreds of times until they compress into the shape you’re aiming at.
I had budgeted maybe an hour to do this bit of crafting, and it was clearly going to take more like seven. And at first, I was annoyed. Then I felt ridiculous. Time efficiency was not the purpose of making a felt Moomin. It was something to be done purely for the enjoyment of doing it. Yes, I had a lot of other things to do. But to my surprise, my “inner Finn” spoke: This is worth doing for no other reason than that it is nice to do. So do it.
For lack of anywhere else to put it, I set my birdhouse up on the balcony. A few days later, I was sitting out there when a tiny bird, maybe a European robin, appeared. I have no idea whether the bird was using the birdhouse, but I hadn’t known robins lived where I do. And I really looked at that little bird, listened to its chirping, let my eyes follow it to the particular section of the foliage of the tree that stands behind my flat, which it kept flitting back to.
I will never be Finnish, nor, in all likelihood, live in Finland. I can’t step out of my front door and languidly pluck leaves off trees as I drink in the peace of a silent forest. But I can pay attention to what I do have around me. The tree behind my flat has been there all along. The birds too.
https://slate.com/life/2025/08/travel-finland-happiest-country-united-states.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HOW PETS IMPROVE YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM
Since they first emigrated from Central Europe to North America in the 18th Century, the Amish have become known for their unique lifestyle. Today they are reliant on the same practices of dairy cattle farming and horse-borne transportation that were followed by their ancestors for centuries.
The Amish have gripped the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters, documentary makers and sociologists for decades. But in the past 10 years, their way of life has become of increasing interest to the medical world too, as they seem to defy one particularly concerning modern trend. While rates of immune-related conditions which begin in childhood, such as asthma, eczema and allergies, have soared since the 1960s, this has not been the case for the Amish.
The reason for this is revealing insights into how our immune systems operate – and the profound ways that the animals in our lives are affecting them.
A diverse community
To try and understand why the Amish have lower rates of certain immune conditions, a group of scientists spent time back in 2012 with an Amish community in the state of Indiana, and with another farming community known as the Hutterites, in South Dakota. In both cases, they took blood samples from 30 children and studied their immune systems in detail.
There are many similarities between the two groups. Like the Amish, the Hutterites also live off the land, have European ancestry, have minimal exposure to air pollution and follow a diet which is low in processed foods. However, their rates of asthma and childhood allergies are between four and six times higher than among the Amish.
One difference between the two communities is that while the Hutterites have fully embraced industrialized farming technologies, the Amish have not, meaning that from a young age, they live in close contact with animals and the plethora of microbes that they carry.
"If you look at an aerial drone photographs of Amish settlements, and compare them with Hutterite communities, the Amish are living on the farm with the animals, whereas the Hutterites live in little hamlets, and the farm could be a few miles away," says Fergus Shanahan, professor emeritus of medicine at University College Cork, Ireland.
In 2016, a team of scientists from the US and Germany published a now-landmark study concluding that Amish children have a lower risk of allergies because of the way their environments shape their immune systems. In particular, the researchers found that the Amish children in their study had more finely tuned so-called regulatory T cells than those from Hutterite backgrounds. These cells help to dampen down unusual immune responses.
Living in close contact with animals may help to train the immune system by exposing it to a wide variety of microbes
When the researchers scanned dust samples collected from the homes of Amish and Hutterite children for signs of bacteria, they found clear evidence that Amish children were being exposed to more microbes, likely from the animals that they lived among.
Around the world, other scientists have been making similar findings. A group of immunologists reported that children growing up on Alpine farms, where cows typically sleep in close proximity to their owners, seemed to be protected against asthma, hayfever and eczema. Other research has found that a child's allergy risk at ages seven to nine seems to decrease proportionally with the number of pets which were present in the home in their early years of life, dubbed the "mini-farm effect".
"It's not a universal cure-all, and every time I give a lecture on this, someone goes, 'Well I grew up on a farm and I've got allergies', but we know that if you grow up physically interacting with farm animals, you have about a 50% reduction in your likelihood of developing asthma or allergies," says Jack Gilbert, a professor at the University of California San Diego who was involved in the Amish study, and also cofounded the American Gut Project – a citizen science project studying how our lifestyles affect our microbiomes. "Even if you just grow up with a dog in your home, you have a 13-14% reduction in risk," he says.
A new study published in January 2025 found that having a dog at home could help to prevent eczema in some children who are genetically prone to the condition. In an analysis of almost 280,000 people, researchers found that for those with a known risk factor for eczema – a particular variant of a gene involved in immune cell function and inflammation known as interleiukin-7 receptor (IL-7R) – they were less likely to develop the condition if they had lived with a family dog in their first two years of life.
Laboratory tests confirmed that molecular signals from dogs can suppress skin inflammation. However, the researchers warned that introducing a dog may not help with existing eczema and could even make symptoms worse.
Protective pets
Since the Amish study was first published, the potentially protective effect of interacting with animals during childhood has been the subject of much fascination, with the New York Times even publishing an article asking whether pets are the new "probiotic."
So what's going on? Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the tactile nature of humans and our fondness for stroking and fondling our pets, when we live with animals, microbes from their fur and paws have been shown to end up on our skin – at least temporarily.
This has led to suggestions that the "microbiome" could be colonized by bugs from our pets. This is the collection of vast colonies of microbes that live on our skin, in our mouths and most notably in the gut, which hosts a significant concentration of our body's immune cells.
According to Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease professor at the University of Wisconsin in the US, this concept has attracted interest from the pet food industry. The idea would be to develop products marketed as promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria in cats and dogs, which might then be transferred to their owners, she says.
"That angle has been an attractive one for people to fund, because for most of us, it's the human condition that we're interested in," says Safdar. "So what role can the animal play in that?" she asks.
Safdar says she is considering running a study which would involve collecting fecal samples from both pets and their human owners when they come for repeated veterinary appointments to see if their guts become more microbially similar with time. She also wants to see if she can identify similar bacterial species which could confer health benefits.
It’s thought that our ancestors lived in close contact with animals, and this may be necessary for developing a healthy immune system
However, others feel that the idea of dog or cat or any other kind of non-human animal microbes being incorporated into our microbiomes is dubious. "There's zero evidence of that whatsoever," says Gilbert. "We don't really find long-term accumulation of dog bacteria on our skin, in our mouth, or in our guts. They don't really stick around.”
In response to this, Safdar says that she still feels the study is very much worthwhile, stating she feels it is plausible that gut microbes can be transferred from pets to their owners and vice versa. "It's worth studying and hasn't been closely looked at yet," she says.
Gilbert believes that pets are playing a different, yet equally vital role. His theory is that because our distant ancestors domesticated various species, our immune systems have evolved to be stimulated by the microbes that they carry. These microbes do not reside with us permanently, but our immune cells recognize the familiar signals as they pass through, which then keeps the immune system developing in the right way.
"Over many millennia, the human immune system got used to seeing dog, horse and cow bacteria," says Gilbert. "And so when it sees those things, it triggers beneficial immune development. It knows what to do," he says.
Studies have also shown that humans who live in the same household as a pet end up with gut microbiomes which are more like each other, and Gilbert suggests that the animal is likely acting as a vehicle to help transfer human microbes between its owners. At the same time, regular exposure to the pet's own microbes will also be stimulating their immune systems to stay more active and better manage the bacterial populations in their own gut and skin microbiomes, keeping pathogens out and stimulating the growth of useful bacteria.
Ancient microbes
This is all good news for animal lovers, with research continuing to suggest that living with pets across our life course can be good for our immune system.
After reading the study on the Amish and the Hutterites, Shanahan was inspired to conduct his own research on Irish travelers, a marginalized population who typically live in confined spaces amongst multiple animals – from dogs and cats to ferrets and horses.
Shanahan sequenced their gut microbiomes and compared them with Irish people living more modern lifestyles today, as well as microbiomes sequenced from indigenous populations in Fiji, Madagascar, Mongolia, Peru and Tanzania who still live a lifestyle akin to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. He discovered that the microbiome of Irish travelers was more similar to the indigenous groups. He said that their microbiome also bore similarities to that of humans from the pre-industrialized world, which other scientific groups have been able to study by collecting ancient fecal samples preserved in caves.
"The Irish travelers have retained an ancient microbiome," says Shanahan. "It's far more similar to what you see from tribes in Tanzania who still live like hunter-gatherers or the Mongolian horseman who live in yurts, close to their animals.”
Shanahan believes that this may explain the low rates of autoimmune diseases in Irish traveler populations: conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, multiple sclerosis and other diseases, which like asthma and allergies, have become increasingly common in recent decades.
"This isn't to say that their health is good," says Shanahan. "Irish travelers are dying much earlier than the settled community. But they're dying from things like alcoholism, suicide and accidents, driven by poverty and marginalization and their culture being eroded. But go to an Irish rheumatologist and ask if they've ever seen a traveler with systemic lupus [an autoimmune condition], they've never seen it."
Now researchers are looking to see whether introducing animals back into our lives in various ways can be beneficial for our health across the life course. Researchers at the University of Arizona in the US have explored whether rehoming unwanted dogs with older adults could help to improve their physical and mental health by boosting their immune systems. And results from an Italian research group which created an educational farm where children from homes with no pets could regularly pet horses under supervision suggested that the children's gut microbiomes started to produce more beneficial metabolites.
Gilbert says it's plausible that this could be a means of improving childhood immunity. "If you're exposed to more types of bacteria, you are going to stimulate your immune system in more variable ways, which may then improve its ability to manage the microbes on your skin and in your gut," he says. "But you're not being colonized by animal bacteria, that's not happening.”
Researchers point out that having pets throughout your life can also facilitate more microbial interactions with your immune system in other ways. For example, having a dog makes you more likely to go for regular walks, notes Liam O'Mahoney, professor of immunology at APC Microbiome Ireland, a microbiome-dedicated research center at University College Cork.''
"If you have a pet, you get out and about in the environment and go for walks in the park," says O'Mahoney. "And by doing that, you're also being exposed to microbes from the park, the soil, everywhere which can all be useful.”
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COFFEE COULD ADD YEARS TO YOUR LIFE
According to a newly published study, regularly sipping on the caffeinated beverage could add years to your life.
In December, researchers from the University of Coimbra in Portugal published a study titled "Impact of coffee intake on human aging: Epidemiology and cellular mechanisms" in the journal Ageing Research Reviews, showcasing how coffee can help reduce all-cause mortality.
"Coffee intake attenuates the major causes of mortality, dampening cardiovascular-, cerebrovascular-, cancer- and respiratory diseases-associated mortality, as well as some of the major causes of functional deterioration in the elderly such as loss of memory, depression, and frailty," the authors explain in their introduction. In fact, its review found that moderate consumption of coffee corresponds to an "average increase in healthspan of 1.8 years of lifetime.
The team noted that the "inverse associations" between coffee intake and mortality with the lowest risk corresponded to about three cups per day. However, they added, it's difficult to nail down a specific number as the meta-analysis used research with self-reported data from participants, meaning people could have skewed the numbers on their actual consumption levels.
Still, it's a good benchmark, as the researchers found "discrete benefits afforded by the consumption of one cup of coffee a day, maximal benefits afforded by three cups a day, followed by a waning of the benefits with increasing doses of coffee consumed daily." And best of all, the benefits were seen in both men and women. It even found that the consumption of decaffeinated coffee was associated with a lower risk of death, "although the strength of this conclusion is limited by the fewer number of individuals consuming decaffeinated coffee."
“We know that the world’s population is aging faster than ever, which is why it’s increasingly important to explore dietary interventions which may allow people to not only live longer but also healthier lives," neuroscientist Rodrigo Cunha, the lead author of the study, shared in a statement. "Traditional clinical recommendations have at times overlooked coffee’s role in healthy aging, but with a strong research base around how regular consumption can potentially reduce some of the most chronic diseases facing society, it is likely time to re-evaluate these."
And here's one more tidbit to pull out of your pocket if you ever need to defend your coffee consumption: Cunha and his team found that while the idea of well-being is subjective, healthy adults who participated in the studies used in this meta-analysis reported a "heightened mood status and improved behavior upon intake of coffee or caffeine."
So, yes, it's great that coffee can help you live longer, but it's also nice to know that it could help you live happier years.
https://www.foodandwine.com/daily-coffee-consumption-prolongs-lifespan-8768290
An AI summary:
Multiple studies suggest that moderate coffee drinking is associated with a longer lifespan and a lower risk of early death, with benefits observed for ground, instant, and decaffeinated varieties. While it's not definitive proof, the consistency of these findings across large observational studies indicates that coffee's biologically active compounds, not just caffeine, likely contribute to these positive health effects by reducing inflammation and improving metabolic function. For optimal benefits, enjoying 2-3 cups of black coffee daily without excessive sugar or cream is recommended.
Oriana:
Instead of sugar, I recommend allulose or xylitol. These sweeteners have various health benefits of their own. Instead of cream, I recommend goat milk. Delicious!
As for caffeine, it is a strong antioxidant, more potent than Vitamin C. Of course cafeine should not be abused, e.g. relied upon instead of rest. As with practically everything, moderation is key.
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COFFEE AND MICROBIOME
Known for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, coffee has long been touted for its many health benefits. In fact, thousands of compounds are packed into every cup, helping to improve mental alertness, reduce inflammation, support heart health, and even ease post-workout pain. A recent study published in Nature Microbiology reveals a new benefit of coffee: It supports the growth of beneficial gut bacteria.
The researchers found that coffee drinkers had high levels of one specific bacteria strain, L. asaccharolyticus. The results suggest that drinking coffee can have a positive effect on your gut by helping the growth of good bacteria — an exciting win for coffee drinkers.
“It turns out that the microbiome in the gut is probably way more important than we even ever expected,” says Michael Caplan, MD, clinical professor at the University of Chicago and chief scientific officer at Endeavor Health. He explains that the beneficial bacteria in our gut are essential to our overall health, and having a diverse microbiome is crucial. A healthy gut can help prevent traveler’s diarrhea, antibiotic-induced diarrhea, and may even play a role in managing obesity, heart disease, and chemotherapy outcomes, according to Caplan.
Our gut also houses the majority of our immune cells, making it vital to protect and maintain its strength. A healthy gut also supports digestion, reduces inflammation, and influences our thoughts. Have you ever felt nervous and noticed your gut starting to feel uneasy? Our gut and brain are closely intertwined.
Dr. Chaplan points out that it’s actually not only the caffeine that boosts the beneficial bacteria, as even drinking decaf coffee has a positive effect on our gut. The key contributors are likely the polyphenols, including chlorogenic acid and quinic acid, found in coffee, which help boost the growth of this beneficial bacteria. Science suggests that polyphenols act like prebiotics. They feed and encourage the growth of beneficial gut bacteria.
As with any new discovery, further research is needed, especially when it comes to the potential of L. asaccharolyticus. Dr. Chaplan explains that this bacteria strain has only been identified in the past five years, so we don’t yet fully understand how it contributes to health benefits. Could it help reduce mortality or improve outcomes in heart disease or cancer? More research is needed to understand how this bacteria could contribute to reducing disease and improving health.
“It’s very safe to have one or two cups of coffee a day, and that would be enough to stimulate your intestinal flora to be poised to help you improve your long-term health,” says Dr. Caplan. This aligns with FDA recommendations, which keep caffeine intake to no more than 400 milligrams a day or about four cups of brewed coffee.
And good news for those who love a little splash of milk or sprinkle of sugar in their coffee, the study showed that these additions don’t affect the gut health benefits.
This new research is exciting news for coffee drinkers, as coffee has yet to be linked to improved gut health. But don’t forget about other foods and drinks that can also support a healthy gut, such as yogurt, kefir, kimchi and sauerkraut, and kombucha.
https://www.foodandwine.com/coffee-gut-health-benefits-11693595#&bytes=1
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FOODS THAT HELP YOU SLEEP
Most of us know going to bed on a full stomach can affect our sleep. Changing what we eat and the time of day we eat certain foods can help us sleep better.
We've all woken up the morning after a large, late night meal feeling tired out. The extra energy required to digest big portions of rich food can eat into our kip, leading to a disturbed night's sleep.
Thankfully, there are also ways we can try to improve our sleep through our diet by avoiding certain foods and drinks known to keep us awake, such as those containing caffeine. But can we also eat other foods – particularly before we go to bed – to boost the quality of our sleep further?
Food or diet?
Several studies have narrowed in on certain suppers that could improve our sleep. Some small trials have found that tart cherry juice, for example, can help people sleep better, and others find that eating kiwifruit before bed is beneficial. There's also some research showing that warm milk can help us sleep. It is thought the high levels of tryptophan – from which the "sleep hormone" melatonin is synthesized by the body – in milk may help to induce sleep onset.
Melatonin regulates our sleep/ wake cycle. Our bodies produce more of it later in the day, when it starts to get dark. But we can also get melatonin directly from foods, including eggs, fish, nuts and seeds.
Numerous studies have found that eating melatonin-rich foods can improve sleep quality, and help us sleep for longer. But there's also a lot of research to suggest that any one particular food or drink is not enough to improve sleep – and it's our overall diet that matters.
"You can't eat poorly all day long and think that it's enough to have a glass of tart cherry juice before bedtime," says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition in New York.
This is because extracting the nutrients from food that the body can use to produce neurochemicals that promote sleep doesn't happen within a couple of hours, she says.Instead, it's what we eat throughout the day that can improve sleep quality.
What type of diet best promotes sleep?
Research shows that the most beneficial diet for sleep seems to be a plant-based diet that includes lots of whole grains, dairy and lean proteins including fish, says Erica Jansen, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan.
In her 2021 study looking at the relationship between sleep and diet, Jansen found that people who started eating more fruit and vegetables every day over a period of three months can dramatically improve their sleep.
More than 1,000 participants were tasked with increasing their daily intake of fruit and vegetables. This increase was to tease apart the two-way relationship between sleep and diet that besets research in this area – population studies could show people with healthier diets have better sleep, but there's always the chance they make better choices with food because they're better rested.
Jansen found that women were more than twice as likely to experience an improvement in insomnia symptoms after eating an extra three or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day.
One reason for this is that fruit and vegetables (along with meat, dairy, nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes) are generally high in the essential amino acid tryptophan.
In a 2024 study in Spain, more than 11,000 students were asked about their sleep habits and diet. It found that the quartile that consumed the least tryptophan on a daily basis had significantly worse sleep outcomes. The researcher conclude that low tryptophan intake was linked to a higher risk of short sleep duration and greater risk of insomnia. Eating foods containing more tryptophan may improve sleep quality, they suggest.
The reason tryptophan is important, Jansen says, is because it's a precursor of serotonin, which then gets converted into melatonin.
"If the body doesn't have tryptophan, or direct sources of melatonin from food, the levels of melatonin produced by the body will be reduced," she says.
But it isn't just as simple as eating tryptophan-rich foods, she adds. It needs to be eaten with a high-fiber carbohydrate, such as whole grain or legumes. This allows it to be digested properly and make its way to the brain, from where it can improve sleep.
There are many other ways that a plant-rich diet may improve sleep, too. Diets high in plant foods are known to reduce inflammation in the body, for example, and some research suggests that lower levels of inflammation are associated with better sleep quality.
In her research, St-Onge has found that improved sleep is associated with foods high in fiber, which plays a crucial role in bacterial fermentation in our gut. Studies shows that there are numerous possible beneficial mechanisms that can explain why a healthy gut can improve sleep, via the gut-brain axis.
There are also animal studies showing a connection between improved sleep and intake of the beneficial plant compounds polyphenols. However, St-Onge says, it's difficult to evaluate this in human studies because databases showing the polyphenol content of different food – which would be used to measure how much a person consumes – can't be entirely accurate.
This is because the amount of polyphenols in food varies from crop to crop, year to year, depending on soil type, weather conditions and farming processes. This is the same for the amount of melatonin in plant-based foods, which also may differ depending on how and where it was grown.
How helpful is magnesium?
Magnesium is another nutrient found in plant-rich diets that may be conducive to a good night sleep. This is because it can help to reduce the stress hormone cortisol, which calms the nervous system.
It's recommended most adults over 30 consume around 420mg of magnesium per day. It can be found in many foods, including green leafy vegetables, such as spinach, as well as legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains.
However, many people are lacking this nutrient. Experts say this is partly because of the Western diet (low in plants, high in ultra-processed foods), and partly because intensive farming practices reduce the amount of magnesium in the soil crops grow in.
In her 2024 study, Heather Hausenblas, a professor of exercise science at Jacksonville University in Florida in the US, tested the effects of increased magnesium intake on people who reported being poor sleepers.
For two weeks, they took magnesium supplements one hour before bed while during another two week period they took a placebo pill. Their sleep was measured through a body-worn tracker and they also reported on how well they felt they'd slept.
Hausenblas found that the participants' deep and REM sleep improved more when they took magnesium, compared to taking the placebo. She suspects this effect would last longer than two weeks, but she can't say for certain.
However, while she says a good quality magnesium supplement could help people sleep better, Hausenblas says it isn't a cure-all.
"Just taking this before bed won't cure you of all sleep issues if don't get outside and exercise, eat lots of ultra-processed food and if you don't have a consistent sleep-wake cycle," she says.
Another reason why magnesium could improve sleep is because of its potential benefits to mental health. Research has found that poor sleep and depression, for example, are closely connected.
One study from 2017 found that a daily magnesium supplement led to a significant improvement in depression and anxiety, regardless of the person's age, gender or the severity of their depression.
More widely, research also shows that a diet high in fruit and vegetables can improve symptoms of depression.
Can how we eat have an effect?
While researchers agree that one carefully selected supper isn't enough to save us from a night of bad sleep, there may be something we can do about the timing of our meals throughout the day.
"One of the most important things before sleep is to stop eating a few hours before bed, especially not having the biggest bulk of calories before bed," says Jansen.
There is a small body of research suggesting that having meals earlier in the day, starting with breakfast, is associated with better sleep quality. Research suggests that eating your last meal closer to bedtime can increase the time it takes you to fall asleep.
This may be partially because it makes it easier for us to associate eating with the daytime, and nighttime with sleeping, says Jansen.
"When you have a clearer separation between day and night, the brain has an easier time recognizing that it's time for sleep," she says. "The brain starts fresh every morning, and light exposure early in the morning is important for resetting our body clock."
"Eating time cues are another way of telling our body what time it is," Jansen says. "The body feels functions best when we're doing the same things at the same time every day."
And when you do eat breakfast, bear in mind that one study found that eating a dairy-rich breakfast in bright daylight may be more beneficial to sleep than eating it in a dimly lit room. This is because, researchers say, eating in the daylight allows our bodies to produce more melatonin, the hormone that helps us sleep at night.
However, St-Onge says, scientists haven't produced any definitive answers yet on whether melatonin we might obtain from plants influences the melatonin our bodies produce, and how this might influence our sleep.
"Also, is our metabolism impacted by what we eat? This could be relevant for sleep. We need to dig further into those mechanisms," she says.
Jansen agrees that this is a difficult area of research, with several unanswered questions, including the amount of melatonin we need in our diets for it to have an effect on sleep.
"It's difficult to study whether light is a bigger influence on melatonin than diet, or if they work together," she says.
Optimizing our diet for sleep
It seems that a plant-rich diet is the most beneficial for sleep, for numerous reasons – and that eating at consistent times throughout the day – for those who can – may also help.
But our diet doesn't exist in a vacuum, and researchers stress that our sleep is also influenced by how much we move in the day, our mental health, and our exposure to light and darkness.
Also, St-Onge says, it's important to distinguish between poor sleep, and a sleep disorder, such as insomnia or sleep apnea.
"If you have a sleep disorder, you need to get tested and treated," says St-Onge. "Part of the treatment plan could be improving your diet, but some people will need something in addition to that."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-the-best-foods-to-help-you-sleep-better
Oriana:
What helped my sleep more than anything (excluding a lot of physical activity) has been sleep gummies and CBD oil. From “very common,” insomnia has now become very uncommon.
What I also find helpful is positive emotions. Just going over the good things, counting my blessing, cultivating gratitude — these are sleep-friendly activities.
Eating while it's still daytime may also be good advice. Research seems to indicate that it's not only what we eat, but also when we eat, that affects how well we sleep.
I do take melatonin for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits. Melatonin from supplements doesn't seem to affect my sleep. But I am thrilled that I respond to CBD oil.
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Ending on beauty:
“The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world.”
~ Czesław Miłosz
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