*
THE WOMAN WHO VOWED TO KILL
SEVEN GERMANS
told to my mother by a stranger on the train, 1945
Her husband’s broken body thrust
against the electric fence.
She dressed in black, lit a candle
in church, and swore:
seven Germans, by her own hand.
The days grew. The caw of crows
rang in hoarse, nagging echoes.
One afternoon, a knock on her door:
two German soldiers in retreat,
without food, without sleep.
She let them in.
They slumped down in the chairs.
Frost lilies shrouded the windows.
In the bedroom, a loaded revolver
pressed cold steel into slips and brassieres.
She stared at those frost-red, fear-eaten
young boys’ faces, flecks of snow
on their coats and hair —
then turned toward
the kitchen, and made them tea.
They cupped numb fingers
around the porcelain
and swallowed sips of heat.
A salvo of shooting
ricocheted far-off in the street —
She touched her hand to her mouth.
They nodded and hurried out,
turning into footsteps, then silence.
Sunday in church she lit
two more candles,
two draft-torn hearts of flame.
~ Oriana
*
HOMER’S MESSAGE
inscription on a cup in Ancient Greek
It is one of the oldest evidence of Greek writing, from around 730 BC. It reads “I am the cup of Philion” and you would consider it as rather crude. The inscriptor was not very proficient in writing at that time.
And then comes Homer. Maybe just 30 years later, maybe 50 years later. And he writes two epics, the Iliad with 15,693 verses and the Odyssey with 12,110 verses. Together, almost 800 pages in modern print.
To be sure, Homer used narratives which had been passed on orally over several centuries. But his final compilation was still a huge achievement. And he also added his own words (the result is that description from the bronze age and from the iron age are mixed, sometimes even in the same scene).And both epics are not written in simple prose, they are written in sophisticated hexameters, using colorful language — think of Homer’s famous epithets (rosy-fingered Eos, far-aiming lord Apollo…).
Complexity of composition. The epics are not simple, straightforward narratives. The Iliad is written from at least three perspectives: the view of the Achaeans, the view of the Trojans and the view of the gods and goddesses. The Odyssey is even more complex: with several narrators (including Odysseus and the bard Demodokos) and with several stories, interwoven in a complex way with flashbacks — like a well-written modern novel.
And then the main topic. Hollywood can’t grasp it. Hollywood thinks the Iliad is a heroic story about war — how the good Achaeans fought and finally succeeded in defeating the bad Trojans. Homer, however, is not interested at all how the war ends. The Iliad is finished before the war ends (this comes later, in the Odyssey). Modern readers tend to interpret the Iliad as the story of a battle between two nations. They could not be more wrong. The Trojans are as Greek as the Achaeans. And who wins is finally an arbritrary decision of the gods — it could have been either side.
Also, it is not a story of heroism, as Hollywood likes it. A good guy defeating the bad ones. No, Achilles is not the good guy and Hector is not the bad guy. Also, Homer is not interested how Achilleus is killed — this part of the story is not told at all. Why?
The main topic of the Iliad is different. But it is easy to understand. Just read the very first lines:
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.
[Oriana: In Homeric Greek, the first word of the Iliad is RAGE.]
So, the Iliad is the story about a struggle between two men who are fighting on the same side. And it is not the story of a victorious war, it is the story of total disaster. In end, the Achaeans are not proud winners. In the end, they are many dead corpses which are, worst of all, not even properly buried but eaten by jackals and vultures. The Iliad is the story of a cruel, senseless and catastrophic war which is triggered by a most trivial cause — a woman. Homer writes this several times in the Iliad.
Both in Achaean meetings and Trojan meetings, prudent men are suggesting to stop this senseless war, but they are silenced by autocratic rulers.
Here, psychology (or rather psychiatry) comes into play. It is very hard to find a good character in the Iliad. Maybe Hector, who is not only a fierce fighter but also a caring husband and father. Or old Nestor, who tries to soothe and reconcile. But look at the other ones:
Paris should be the main hero because he was the one who caused all this mess. But he turns out as a weak coward.
Agamemnon is a capable leader, but he is authoritarian and has psychopathic traits. In the Iliad, he is characterized as a lunatic and as an alcoholic. And in the Odyssey, we read of his dishonorable end, not dying heroically in battle, but murdered at the dinner table. [in another version, in the bath]
Priam, his Trojan counterpart, is stubborn. He is willing to risk the total destruction of his kingdom instead of simply handing over this woman. And he does not see how weak his son is.
Achilles has clear signs of bipolar disorder. He has manic phases when he fights and desecrates Hector’s dead body and he has depressive phases when he sits in his tent and refuses to fight.
Ajax the Lesser, albeit a good fighter, rapes the priestess Cassandra right in the temple.
I speak about Odysseus later.
Please imagine how epics were before Homer. There were Mesopotamian and Egyptian epics, but they told stories of kings and heroes, clear-cut with good guys prevailing over bad guys. In the Iliad, you hardly find a good guy. And the bad guys prevail.
We now come to the core of the whole story. Have you wondered why the meetings and assemblies take so much room in the Iliad? Also, the Odyssey has people assemblies at the end.
Imagine the time when Homer finished his epics, maybe 670 BC, maybe 650 BC. In this times, many city-states were already democracies. They had democratic assemblies; at least they had councils of elders. And occasionally the citizens had to get rid of tyrants. But in the bronze age, there were no democratic proceedings. Autocratic kings ruled, like Agamemnon.
In the Iliad, the citizens are always frustrated by the kings. Often, a citizen would give very sound advice in a meeting which is ignored by the rulers. And sometimes, Odysseus is the one who silences them. And the autocratic decisions are always wrong, leading both the Achaeans and the Trojans into disaster. For the audience in the 7th century, this was like a horror story. The Iliad is a narrative about tyrants who ruin their peoples.
You find the same topic in the Odyssey. In the Iliad, Odysseus is Agamemnon’s henchman. He silences and humiliates Thersites although Thersites is giving good advice. In the Odyssey, Odysseus lacks impulse control. After he has beaten Polyphemos, he stupidly cries his name and raises Poseidon’s wrath. He sacrifices his companions to satisfy his sexual lust, several times. He had left Ithaca with 12 ships and many fighters for Troy and he returns empty-handed.
To put it very clearly: Odysseus failed as a king. His mission to Troy was a complete failure. No wonder that Ithaca’s aristocracy did not want him no more. Most modern readers cannot understand it. They think, Odysseus is a hero and poor Odysseus is robbed of his wife and kingdom after he returns home. But he returns home as a loser. “Aristocracy” means “rule of the best”, and he is not the best anymore.
And what does he do after his return? He kills Ithaca’s best men and starts a full-fledged civil war against his own citizens. This war is only stopped by intervention of Zeus and Athena.
When he heard Athena’s words, Odysseus obeyed,
joy in his heart. And then Pallas Athena,
daughter of aegis-bearing Zeus, in shape and form
appearing just like Mentor, had both parties swear
a solemn treaty designed to last forever.
Odysseus, the king, had to learn that he needed acceptance by the people. After all, the Odyssey is the story of an educative experience. Odysseus acts childish and makes one mistake after the other. He would have perished had he not been guided by Athena, the personification of reason. After his return to Ithaca, he has to take over the rule of a beggar; this is part of his education process. He must learn to view the world from the bottom.
But let’s answer the question. We have seen that the Iliad and the Odyssey are great literature, written some 2,700 years ago and still some of the greatest literary works ever achieved.
For the ancient Greeks, the epics were full of wisdom. Plato, Aristotle and other often cited verses from the Iliad or the Odyssey, because every educated Greek knew the epics by heart.
Homer did not just write about human beings and their psychological conditions, he also created myths about gods and goddesses. Homer alludes to myths which were known by his audience. But he also invents new myths. One of the best is the story how Hera puts Zeus to sleep to intervene in the war. We also read that Zeus was not the mighty father of the gods, but Hera was able to argue with him and that Zeus “obeyed” when Hera presented good reason.
His contemporary Hesiod also wrote great literature, but Homer is the father of Greek literature.
I do not raise the Homeric question here, because it simply does not matter. What matters are the epics. ~ Volker Eichener, Quora
Georges Habib:
Hector was the real hero of the lliad, and a tragic one at that. Dealing with a stubborn father, a coward brother, a wannabe conqueror and an overpowered warrior blessed by the gods who abandoned him.
Saer Gardum:
A very interesting and enlightening perspective! Many inspiring points here and, regardless of whether one agrees with all (e.g. one might as well suggest that Odyssey’s narrator tries to spare Odysseus from the blame of his comrades’ loss in its very beginning and put the blame to their own errors, although, from a modern perspective, it’s clearly his fault), it’s an excellent and captivating read, and I find it to be much closer to what I also perceive as the epics’ true essence.
Darrell Ernst:
Something that fascinated me when I first read The Iliad decades ago was the frequent use of variations of the idiom “bit the dust.” Homer used it in exactly the same way, to mean the same thing, as I’d always heard it used in my life and used myself.
Amazing and cool that an idiom can last thousands of years of normal use (as opposed to merely being a literary reference).
Kostas K:
A very interesting interpretation of Iliad, trying to catch substance in depth. I am not learned enough to make judgements, however it is exciting and food for thought.
Christopher Rattray:
Diomedes is the hero. The most pious Greek.
Ioannis-Andreas Vlachos:
Excellent presentation. I agree with you: the two poems are dystopic. And so are all the best modern novels.
Tasos Kotaras:
I have a different idea about Odysseus. Dispute his failures, he was supposed to be wiser than his men. Even in the preamble this is made clear, i.e. that it was his men foolishness that caused them to perish. Of course, the visit to Cyclops's island was just a stupid act driven by mere curiosity of Odysseus himself. He could have avoided this unneeded risk. But otherwise, Odysseus was the one who could possibly bring those fools back home. Still, even a witty person like Odysseus is not omnipotent.
*
THE GLOBAL LEGACY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Debate over the causes and consequences of the French Revolution has never abated. Complex events always have complex interpretations, and if they also have a political and ideological dimension, as is the case here, the difficulties multiply. The historian Albert Soboul began his 1965 account of 1789 as follows: “The Revolution marked the advent of bourgeois capitalist society in the history of France”—adding that it was “the classic model of the bourgeois revolution.” Indeed in the West (and not only in the West), the start of the modern era is generally regarded as coinciding with the French Revolution.
Was it a bourgeois revolution, or a necessary factor in the development of capitalist society? France industrialized much later than Britain, the US, Belgium or even Germany, but earlier than most other countries. So, did the revolution make a difference? Was it inevitable? Did it accelerate change, removing obstacles to capitalism?
If it had not occurred, would there not have been in any case an evolution towards a parliamentary republic—something like the Third Republic and its successors? Could the Orléans dynasty (1830–48) have evolved towards a relatively liberal parliamentary monarchy like the one in Britain? Such speculations can be amusing and interesting but, like much counterfactual history, they cannot be tested.
One should note, in passim, that while the French Revolution has remained a bone of political contention, this is not the case with the English Civil War, where disagreement has largely been confined to historians. The overthrow of Charles I would widely be seen as a “good thing” even if some might be a little perturbed by the execution of a king.
But all ended well, with a monarch on the throne and everyone praying to God to save him or her. In the US, meanwhile, there has always been virtual unanimity on the benefits of independence. The American Civil War has remained a greater source of controversy.
In France, the dispute began almost immediately on whether the French Revolution was a good or a bad thing, or whether it started well and ended poorly. Could it have been better if it had finished in 1791–92, prior to the beginning of the Terror, or in 1795 when the worst of the Terror was over?
Germaine de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, one of the earliest books on the French Revolution, praised 1789–91 but not what happened afterwards. De Staël was the daughter of Jacques Necker, finance minister under Louis XVI.
The modern revisionist view of the French Revolution started in the 1970s. Under the mantle of the Cold War, some French intellectuals with little sense of history described the Revolution as the beginning of “totalitarianism”—a term invented in Italy, first by anti-Fascists such as Giovanni Amendola (1923) and soon adopted, with positive connotations, by pro-Fascists such as the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile.
Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), used it to describe both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia (but not Italian Fascism; nor does she mention Giovanni Gentile). Some historians drew parallels between Georges Danton and Benito Mussolini, or Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin.
Totalitarianism was a trope for revisionist historians leading up to the bicentenary in 1989, which coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union and the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Arno Mayer lamented in The Furies (2000) how “ultraconservative” historians had argued that in addition to being an inexpiable sin, the French Revolution was the ultimate source of all the purgatorial fires of the twentieth century…They read the Jacobin Terror by the light of the Bolshevik Terror…and then went on to include the genocidal racism of the Third Reich.
François Furet’s Penser la Révolution française (1978) attempted to refute the Marxist presentation of the revolution as a bourgeois one. Furet had earlier co-produced a glossy two-volume study of the Revolution, La Révolution française (1965–66), described unkindly but not unjustly by Lynn Hunt as a coffee-table book.
Revisionism had been preceded by Alfred Cobban, whose 1954 inaugural lecture at University College London was published as The Myth of the French Revolution. Cobban was barely acknowledged by Furet and his colleagues. The main communist, socialist or marxist historians against whom Furet wrote were Georges Lefebvre, author of La Grande Peur de 1789 (1932) and Quatre-vingt-neuf (1939), and above all Albert Soboul, who had written Les Sans-Culottes parisiens en l’An II (1958) and Histoire de la Révolution française (1962). An earlier leftist position had been delineated by Jean Jaurès in Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (1901–07). Jaurès was a moderate socialist leader assassinated in 1914 for his opposition to the impending First World War.
Anti-revolutionary views of the French Revolution have a long lineage, including Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (started in 1809 and published posthumously in 1850), and Hippolyte Taine’s multivolume Origines de la France contemporaine (1875–1893). Members of Chateaubriand’s family had been executed in 1794. Right-wing thinkers denounced what they regarded as the mindless violence of the revolutionary crowd.
Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (1895), largely based on the Italian Scipio Sighele’s La folla delinquente (1891), described how crowds were characterized by impulsivité and an absence de jugement et d’esprit critique commonly noted in such “inferior forms of evolution” as women, savages and children.
Pierre Gaxotte’s reactionary La Révolution française (1928) was described by historian of revolution Crane Brinton in the American Political Science Review as “not history.” Gaxotte’s extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic (but not pro-Nazi—he was a follower of the far-right Charles Maurras, founder of the Action Française) views did not prevent him writing regularly for Le Figaro and being elected in 1953 to the prestigious Académie française, where he fought against the election of women, panicking in 1980 that “if we elected a woman we would end up electing a negro.”
In that year, the first woman to be elected, Marguerite Yourcenar, took her seat. Three years later, the Black poet and former president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor was elected. By then Gaxotte was dead.
Louis XVI’s decision to convene the États Généraux (8 August 1788) launched a century of extraordinary instability in France. The country moved from absolute monarchy, as was still the case in June 1789, to a constitutional monarchy later that year. It then became a republic following the attack on the Tuileries, the royal residence, by the people of Paris on 10 August 1792. This was the beginning of what some have called the Second French Revolution. The radical republic was followed, in 1795, by the rule of the Directoire, a five-member committee. A new constitution was adopted which increased the powers of the more prosperous sectors of society. There was also a religious revival.
The economic history of the Directory, in the words of Denis Woronoff, is a “history of crises,” but as in all crises there were losers and winners. The losers, as always, were the poor. The winners came mainly from those already riches: landlords and wealthy farmers who had managed to accumulate some capital.
At first the new policies (liberal, in the economic sense) caused runaway inflation before the situation stabilized; by 1797, the economy was on the mend. But calm was far from being restored: there were plots from both monarchists and Jacobins. In 1796 came the famous Conspiracy of the Equals led by François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf, a proto-communist. It failed, and Babeuf was guillotined.
There were wars in Europe. By the end of 1798, Allied armies (British, Austrian and Russian) were marching once more against France. At first the French suffered defeats, discrediting the Directory. It was during this period of turmoil that the army, inevitably, became a political force. This was the key factor in the rise of its general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to power.
On November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire) the République bourgeoisie was overthrown in a military coup led by Napoleon, who made himself consul for life in 1802, and emperor in 1804. The republic hadn’t been well entrenched, hence its weakness. An official report in April 1799 had concluded that only eight departments could be considered reliably republican: Creuse, Meurthe, Haute-Saone, Hautes-Pyrenees, Finistère, Jura, Haute-Garonne and Pyrenees-Orientales.
In mid-1793, writes Arno Mayer, “some sixty of France’s eighty-three departments were more or less out of control and a majority of the population in various degrees” was unfavorable to a republic. The French Revolution, though centered on Paris, differed from region to region.
The period of almost continuous wars that had started in 1792 came to a close in 1815 at Waterloo, having been preceded by constant warfare for most of the eighteenth century. The restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1814 was followed by the so-called revolution of 1830, which put the Orléans dynasty in power with Louis-Philippe I, now more democratically known as king of the French, rather than king of France. He was to be the last French king.
Between 1799 and 1847 the French wrote six constitutions, none of which defined where political authority resided, unlike the previous three which had declared that power resided with the nation (1791), “the people” (1793) and “all citizens” (1795).
In 1848 another revolution established a short-lived Second Republic, which led to a coup d’état by Louis Napoleon, who had been elected president. In 1852, following in the footsteps of his uncle, he too became emperor, as Napoleon III. This Second Empire crumbled when it was defeated by the Prussians in the war of 1870.
Out of this defeat the Third Republic was born, threatened by an attempt to establish a radical polity (the Paris Commune). The monarchists were still powerful, but by 1880 the new republic was well established. Only then could one say that the French Revolution was definitively over.
The constant change of regimes signaled that the French Revolution was not an event which could be encapsulated in the few years following the seizure of the Bastille. The best French minds had understood this clearly. In his recollection about 1848, Tocqueville wrote:
'The constitutional monarchy succeeded the Ancient Régime. The Republic succeeded the monarchy. The Empire succeeded the Republic. The Restoration succeeded the Empire. Then came the July Monarchy. After each of these successive transformations people said that the French Revolution, having completed what they presumptuously called its work, was over. T hey said it and believed it. Alas! I had myself hoped it was true during the Restoration and again after the government fell. And now the French Revolution has begun anew, for it remains the same revolution as before. The farther we go, the more obscure its end becomes.'
Albert Laponneraye, a proto-communist journalist and activist, editor of Robespierre’s works, was not wrong when he wrote in the 1830s: “The Revolution is still continuing and will only be concluded when the kings will have exterminated the people or the people will have exterminated the kings.” Laponneraye died in 1849, just as Louis Napoleon was about to consolidate his power.
To write, as some do, that the French Revolution occurred between May 1789, when the king convened the États Généraux, and 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II), when the moderates took over—or else ended on 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire Year VIII), when Bonaparte seized power—is to disregard this century of strife.
At least until 1917, the French Revolution was the revolution. It had embraced universal values in a way that would have been unthinkable in seventeenth-century England, although the American War of Independence had anticipated it in this respect.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense (1776): “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” His letter to George Washington announced a present from “Our very good Friend the Marquis de la Fayette,” namely “the Key of the Bastile [sic],” with a drawing “representing the demolition of that detestible [sic] prison,” and described such gifts as the “first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe.”
The sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence were incorporated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. But it was the French Revolution that became the revolution par excellence. Much to her chagrin, and with some exaggeration, Hannah Arendt wrote: “The sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.”
The French Revolution was, in Immanuel Wallerstein’s words, “a world-historical event.” For Eric Hobsbawm, it was “a landmark” which set the pattern “for all subsequent revolutionary movements,” including socialist and communist ones. It provided a pattern for modern politics more widely, as Lynn Hunt has noted, by creating “parties, ideologies, dictators, mass movements.”
Engels, writing in 1847, took a different position. Objecting to a note of French exceptionalism in a speech by the socialist reformer and historian Louis Blanc, he contrarily observed: “Without intending to deprecate in any manner the heroic efforts of the French Revolution, and the immense gratitude the world owes to the great men of the Republic,” the English Industrial Revolution was far more cosmopolitan, since “England invented the steam-engine; England erected the railway; two things which, we believe, are worth a good many ideas.” Furthermore, “as far as ideas are concerned…let us never forget Milton, the first defender of regicide, Algernon Sydney, Bolingbroke, and Shaftesbury, over their French more brilliant followers.”
Yet there is no doubting the subsequent global popularity of the French Revolution symbolized by the reverence for the French flag in European progressive and nationalist circles. A tricolor was widely adopted, with changing colors, by nationalists in Italy and Germany, but also in Belgium, Hungary and even in distant Mexico. There were hardly any national flags previously. The first was what was later called the Stars and Stripes, created on June 14, 1777 at the Second Continental Congress. It consisted of thirteen stripes and thirteen stars representing the thirteen American colonies.
The French Revolution is celebrated in endless novels, plays and films, and not just in France. Songs connected to the revolution have had a global reach, above all with “La Marseillaise,” which was sang by anarchists accused of taking part in the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886 on their way to the gallows. It was later performed by military bands in Moscow and Petrograd to celebrate the downfall of the tsar. There were other revolutionary songs even more blood-curdling, such as “Ah ça ira” (It will be all right, or Let’s do it).
“La Carmagnole” mocks Louis XVI (as Monsieur Veto) and Marie Antoinette (Madame Veto):
The English Civil War, by comparison, generated very little in terms of popular musical culture. There is “Stand Up Now, Diggers All!” written by Gerrard Winstanley (“But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown”), but few know how to sing it.
The best-known Scottish political song, “The Skye Boat Song,” is about the return of Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the defeat at Culloden. It was written in the late nineteenth century by an Englishman and was far from revolutionary. Most of the best-known American political songs of the nineteenth century come from the Civil War, such as the famous “Battle Hymn of the Republic” based on the music of the abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body.”
Hardly any are connected to the War of Independence, except “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The lyrics of the best-known version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” are apolitical and were originally composed and sung by the English to make fun of disheveled and disorganized colonials. The latter turned it into a song of defiance around 1781.
The English Revolution was not exported. English troops did not try to impose the new system on anyone, though they did undertake a bloody reconquest of Ireland. However, British ideas were exported, or rather imported, by reformers and revolutionaries. Locke was widely read by French intellectuals, such as Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire, in his bestselling Letters on England (1734), wrote admiringly about the British system and English “freedoms.” In 1789 France, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) was regarded as “supportive of constitutional innovation.”
English “freedoms” and “moderation” were often invoked during the debates of August and September 1789, when the rights of citizens were being discussed. Bertrand Barère, president of the National Convention in November–December 1792, believed that the English model of a constitutional monarchy was suitable for France. But by 1794 he was denouncing the English, whom he had come to regard as under the thumbs of despots and bankers, declaring that French was the only republican language.
The global renown of the French Revolution was also enhanced by the formidable role played by French culture and the French language throughout the nineteenth century. America, by contrast, was a distant prospect, which, in the European mind, had barely progressed from “My America, my new-found-land,” as John Donne had intoned in his poem “To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1582).
France made revolutions, but, after the failures of the Napoleonic Wars, never tried to export them; it became a real bourgeois country. Its aristocrats remained ensconced in the bureaucracy and the military, while Britain became a country of bankers and mill owners pretending to be aristocrats.
*
EMAILS REVEAL EPSTEIN CALLED TRUMP A ‘MANIAC’ WITH ‘EARLY DEMENTIA’
Jeffrey Epstein once called President Donald Trump a “maniac” with signs of “early dementia,” newly released emails show.
The sex trafficker, once a close friend of the real estate mogul, had soured on Trump by the time he moved into the White House in 2017, writing at the time that there was “not one decent cell in his body.”
Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show that Epstein frequently bad-mouthed Trump during his first presidential term, including to Thomas Landon Jr., a former New York Times finance reporter.
“No questions Donald's statement was goofy,” he emailed in January 2018, referring to a statement Trump gave in reaction to a Michael Wolff book.
“Early dementia?”
Trump, 79, has faced many questions about his health this year, including his mental capacity.
Epstein’s most potent indictment of Trump came while he corresponded with Kathryn Ruemmler, who was once the principal deputy White House counsel to Barack Obama.
Epstein emailed Ruemmler in December 2018: “You might want to tell your dem friends that treating trump like a mafia don, ignores the fact that he has great dangerous power. Tightening the noose too slowly, risks a very bad situation. Gambino was never the commander in chief there was little Gambino could do as the walls closed in. Not so with this maniac.”
Epstein alleged in a separate email that Trump was not truly close with anyone. That aligns with what the financier once told Wolff in bombshell tapes first published by the Daily Beast last year.
“Donald is close to no one,” Epstein emailed the Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem in 2018. “He talks to many people. He tells each one something different.”
Epstein took his own life in 2019 [some believe it was a homicide] as he awaited trial for sex trafficking. While emails suggest he may have been anti-MAGA in his final years, he was photographed smiling alongside Trump several times in the 1990s and 2000s.
The men’s relationship has been a defining issue hanging over MAGA 2.0. While Trump has deployed troops into blue cities, launched ICE raids in the dead of night, fired federal workers en masse and turned tariffs into a spectator sport, it has been the story of Epstein that refuses to go away.
Trump, 79, has pleaded with his supporters to ease up on their demands that the Epstein files be released. He has described his relationship with Epstein as distant and now irrelevant. Many of his voters disagree.
Democrats and some Republicans, including the one-time MAGA darling Marjorie Taylor Greene, have refused to let the issue of Epstein disappear. New details about Trump and Epstein’s relationship have steadily trickled out, with the latest bombshell arriving on Wednesday morning.
That is when a handful of Epstein emails, released by House Dems who obtained them from Epstein’s estate, alleged that Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with one of his victims.
Another email claimed that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”—a reference to Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited victims as part of his sex trafficking operation. Trump has refused to rule out a pardon for Maxwell when asked this year, and even offered her a sweetheart deal to have her transferred to a minimum-security prison camp with access to pilates and puppies.
Less than four hours after initial emails were released early Wednesday, Republican lawmakers released a trove of private correspondence between Epstein and associates, totaling over 20,000 documents. None of the emails appear to be between him and Trump.
Included were many mundane conversations. They included Epstein, then a disgraced billionaire, coordinating with his private jet staff to maneuver his takeoff and departure times at Palm Beach International Airport around Trump’s frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago during his first term, which led to airspace restrictions.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/emails-reveal-epstein-called-trump-001241051.html?guccounter=1
*
THE BATTLE OF TWO CONSERVATIVES
“Maybe you won?” Tucker Carlson conceded as he kicked off an interview with the avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Then Carlson’s phrasing turned definitive as he admitted that Fuentes has successfully wrangled ideological control of the modern conservative movement: “You won.”
Released on Oct. 27, the rumored linkup between the warring right-wing podcasters, which had been anticipated for weeks, nevertheless appears to have shocked many on the right. The two had previously been at loggerheads before Monday’s conversation, with Carlson mocking the far-right 27-year-old as a “weird little gay kid in his basement” who claims “the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.” Fuentes has also called out Carlson for saying he only discovered his late father’s work for the CIA after his passing. But the pair finding common cause was inevitable, as the 56-year-old Carlson has been forced to confront Fuentes’ growing influence with young conservatives.
The week before their chat, Carlson was questioned by a young person at a Turning Point USA event in Indiana who echoed Fuentes’ line of attack. “Your dad was in the CIA and I was wondering, does our government even want war to stop?” he asked Carlson, who guest-hosted the event in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing last month.
“Leave my father out of it,” Carlson said, cutting him off. “I’m gonna have to kick your a**, which I could do, by the way, if you bring him up again because he was a wonderful man, whatever he did for a living.” Carlson warning the young man not to “test” him.
Even while filling in for Kirk, who is now seen by many as a conservative martyr, Carlson managed to upset some on the right. “Every single thing about this is the polar opposite of how Charlie Kirk debated people who disagreed with him,” Megan McCain complained of Carlson’s approach. Megyn Kelly, however, defended Carlson, arguing on X that “No one is expecting any of the ppl subbing for Charlie to imitate Charlie.”
Fuentes famously spent years harassing Kirk and his Turning Point staff at similar college campus events before Kirk finally banned the provocateur. With antisemitism as its cornerstone, Fuentes’ so-called Groyper movement seeks to push extremist ideas into the conservative mainstream.
In August, Fuentes taunted Kirk, “I took your baby Turning Point USA, and I f**ked it. We own you, we own TPUSA and we own this movement.”
Even though Kirk’s assassination was meant to serve as a unifying moment for the right, conservatives have quickly squandered any political capital they managed to muster with infighting. After Kirk’s death, Fuentes turned his attention to Kirk’s widow, Erika.
In retrospect, it’s become clear that Kirk’s killing was barely a Band-Aid. For months before the assassination, right-wing media was fracturing. Soon after his death, conservatives devolved into dissension.
So it’s no surprise that, having experienced what it feels like to be on the other side of those trawling the depths of the internet — and with some young conservatives now arguing that President Ronald Reagan was too liberal — Carlson is eager to get on Fuentes’ right side.
“I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever,” Carlson told his audience to flatter his guest. Fuentes’ X account, which reached 500,000 in early 2025 after it was reinstated in May 2024, surpassed one million followers after the interview.
The conversation came at a critical moment for Carlson. Shapiro, head of The Daily Wire, reportedly “had planned to denounce Carlson in a speech” at a Turning Point USA event before Kirk’s killing. Text messages published by podcaster Candace Owens, a former friend of both Shapiro and Kirk, revealed that Kirk, an unapologetic supporter of Israel, was grappling with whether to let Carlson, a virulent critic of the country, speak at TPUSA’s AmericaFest conference in December. (The exchanges were later confirmed as authentic by TPUSA.)
Two days before Kirk’s death, according to the New York Times, top Turning Point donor Robert Shillman, a conservative tech billionaire described as a father figure to Kirk, informed him that he was withdrawing a $2 million pledge to the organization for hosting Carlson. “Just lost another huge Jewish donor,” Kirk wrote. “$2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker.”
Carlson is now scheduled to speak at the conference.
Right-wing media influencers, meanwhile, continue to bicker over what Kirk would do. Others have followed Owens’ lead in releasing private text messages with the deceased podcaster to bolster their claims. “I’m posting two text exchanges with Charlie Kirk where he calls Nick Fuentes ‘vermin’ and insists even my debating him and defeating his arguments nevertheless amplifies him,” Dinesh D’Souza wrote on X. “One can only imagine what Charlie would say about Tucker’s butt-licking interview with Fuentes.”
While none of this GOP infighting is the least bit surprising, it is revealing. Trump’s political strength depends on coalitional unity — at least rhetorically — of a broad “anti-establishment” right. Carlson understands that Fuentes’ mission is Trumpian at its core. But while folding Fuentes into the GOP tent makes sense for short-term peace, it’s a surefire way to impede any successor to Trump.
That’s why Vice President JD Vance is so careful not to ostracize any young Republican, no matter how racist and hateful their text messages may be. He knows that Fuentes is attacking him as a “race traitor” for marrying the daughter of Indian immigrants. That’s why Vance was one of the only prominent GOP politicians who did not send a “Happy Diwali” message; he is acutely aware that even a simple acknowledgment would further inflame the white nationalist crowd. And that’s why Carlson made no mention of Fuentes’ racist attacks against Vance’s family while interviewing him.
So turns the world where nobody can be cancelled.
https://www.salon.com/2025/10/29/tucker-carlsons-crash-out-is-charlie-kirks-legacy/
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THE CENTURIES-OLD ORIGINS OF THE WITCH’S HAT
As Wicked: For Good is released, what are the historic meanings of conical headwear, and how has it evolved – from its origins in the ancient world, the Middle Ages and the Spanish Inquisition, to the empowered Elphaba?
What's the first image you associate with the witch? Might it be the broomstick, which was first linked to sorcery and heresy in 1342 when Irishwoman Lady Alice Kyteler was accused of witchcraft? An investigator, on searching her home, found the offending item, "upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin." Or perhaps it's the cauldron, where potions were brewed in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble" was the witches' now iconic incantation.
Tall pointy hats – otherwise known as capirotes or corozas – were used in history as a tool of persecution
But perhaps the most enduring image of the witch is the conical hat, seen in Frank L Baum's 1900 classic children's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; in 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West's frightening depiction by Margaret Hamilton; in the opening cartoon credits of 1960s sitcom Bewitched; in the Harry Potter films; and of course Cynthia Erivo's portrayal of Elphaba in the Wicked film adaptation, set to defy gravity once again when the concluding installment, Wicked: For Good lands in theaters on 21 November.
Some of the earliest examples of conical hats are majestic, gold, tapered headpieces decorated with astronomical symbols from the Bronze Age, when it was said that the priests who likely wore them had divine knowledge and power. Pointy hats were found on the heads of Chinese mummies from the 4th to 2nd Centuries BC, earning them the modern nickname "The Witches of Subeshi" when their graves were unearthed in 1978.
So just how did the pointy hat become synonymous with the witch? There are a number of theories. Mandatory conical headwear has been used in history as a tool for forced identification and persecution. Those who held a belief or opinion contrary to the orthodox religions, especially Christian doctrine, were labelled heretics and forced to wear the distinctive hat. Jewish men in the 13th Century were forced by the Roman Catholic Church to wear a cone-shaped, horned skullcap called a Judenhut.
During the Spanish Inquisition – which began in 1478 – those accused of heresy, apostasy, blasphemy and witchcraft, among other crimes, were forced to wear tall, tapered caps or hoods called capirotes or corozas as a form of identification. The capirote is still worn as at religious festivals in Spain, particularly in Holy Week. Was this chapter in history a factor in the pointy hat's later emergence as a witch motif? Opinions vary.
Witches' Flight by Francisco Goya (1798) portrays three floating figures in tall, conical hats carrying a man aloft
Several centuries later, artist Francisco Goya appeared to reference the coroza in his painting Witches' Flight (1798) in which three female witches carry a man as they float in the air. The artwork is thought to be a satirical critique of superstition and ignorance. Created during the Enlightenment era, the airborne witches with grotesque features wear high, conical hats – resembling either the Ecclesiastical mitre or perhaps the caroza as worn by heretics – alongside a donkey symbolizing ignorance. Below, two men, considered by some commentators to represent fear and delusion, react to what they perceive as a demonic or supernatural event. Art historians have interpreted the painting – and the coned hats depicted – in various ways.
In the Middle Ages, pointy hats were worn by alewives – medieval beer brewers – whose knowledge of herbology strengthens the connection to cauldrons being used to mix up potions.
"'Wise women', herbalists and old women have been looked on with suspicion in many cultures throughout millennia, so brewsters [female brewers] joined this group… superstitious, uneducated people considered such people to be 'the other'," alcohol expert Jane Peyton tells authors Tara Nurin and Teri Fahrendorf in their book A Woman's Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches, and CEOs.
The earliest known depiction of a witch in a black pointed hat is from 1693
Laura Kounine, senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of Sussex believes that the alewife associations with witchcraft are "a bit of a myth", and that the connection has been created in hindsight. In the 16th Century, she tells the BBC, "Everyone had a cauldron – that's what people were using to cook. Everyone had a broomstick, and everyone wore a hat – not [necessarily] a pointy hat, just any hat. A variety of bonnets and hats would have been worn by all women, depending on their social and marital status.”
Kounine, who lectures on the history of witchcraft, contends that what actually differentiated alleged witches from the rest of the population in the early modern period was the fact that they didn't wear a hat.
"If you look at images from that time, in the really striking ones like Albrecht Dürer's Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (1501–02) or Hans Baldung Grien's The Witches' Sabbath (1510), witches are depicted with no head-covering at all. Their free and wild hair is flowing, which signifies their unbridled passions and that they are the inverse of the moral social order. You would not have had loose hair in the early modern period – that meant you were sexually depraved.”
The invisible world
The earliest known example of the conical hat in tandem with a witch is in Cotton Mather's 1693 book The Wonders of the Invisible World, which depicts a witch riding a broomstick alongside the devil.
In the 17th Century, tall black pointy hats were everywhere – shown here, Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren
However, Kounine is still sceptical that Mather meant to indicate that a pointy hat denotes a witch. "That's just because lots of people were wearing pointy hats at the time. There's nothing significantly witchy about it," she says. Seventeenth-century paintings such as Portrait of Esther Inglis by an unknown artist and Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot by John Michael Wright depict women – neither of them with any connections to witchcraft – simply wearing the fashionably tall, conical hats of their era.
The pointy hat's relationship to witches was a later motif that emerged in artworks and children's fairytales of the mid-to-late 17th Century through to the 18th and 19th Centuries.
It's quite possible that the image of a conical hat, fashionable in the 17th Century, is one that we've latched on to throughout the centuries that lingers today – rather than any explicit connotation of the occult during that era.
As Kounine says, many women donned strobiloid hats throughout history, including the heroines in fairytales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, whose candy-colored headgear was based on the hennin – the tall conical headdress worn from the 1400s by European noblewomen.
So maybe it's the hue of the hat that telegraphs evil then? Kounine agrees, pointing to the 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, where a witch talks to the devil in the form of a black dog named Tom. Throughout history the devil is often said to be dressed in black.
"A lot of it was the fact that the artworks of the time were woodcuts so they had to be in black, but [also] witches were often said to meet in the darkness of night, so there is an association between the dark arts, nighttime and it being hidden", she says. "You don't know who the witch is, under the cloak of darkness. Black becomes the symbol of evil and darkness."
Reclaiming the witch
The modern perception of the witch as a hideous crone is largely indebted to Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Then his children's book about the adventures of Dorothy Gale and her group of misfit tagalongs in Oz was adapted into Technicolor and released as the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. It burned Hamilton's green-skinned, hook-nosed, cackling Wicked Witch of the West into the nightmares of generations of children with each television replay.
However, waves of feminism have emboldened women to reclaim traits and lifestyles previously associated with those accused of witchcraft in history – from strong female solidarity, holistic healing and independence from men to ecofeminist values and sexual autonomy.
A more nuanced understanding of the archetype of the witch has emerged – she is now seen by some as a radical embodiment of the battle against misogyny and patriarchal oppression, as exemplified by the popular epithet emblazoned on everything from Instagram captions to cushions: "we are the daughters of the witches you couldn't burn."
As Kounine puts it: "The witch is now a symbol of self-empowerment, subversion of patriarchy and feminism."
With Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, on which the successful Broadway musical and now duo of feature films are based, The Wicked Witch of the West was given a name – Elphaba – and a backstory that elicits empathy for an outcast who was branded a villain for standing up for those less fortunate. In reclaiming the witch as a misunderstood character and, along with aspirational pop cultural representations such as Bewitched's Samantha and Prue, Piper, Phoebe and Paige Halliwell of the 1990s series Charmed, the conical hat becomes a lot less sinister.
It's also partly thanks to Academy Award-winning Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell, who has reinterpreted the "hideodeous" hat, as Glinda calls it, to better reflect Elphaba's relationship to the Earth. "It is reflective and nostalgic of a silhouette that we recognize, but it is made into its own thing with how it spirals," Tazewell told The Cut.
As Wicked reexamines the wicked-witch trope, it can be greatly credited with softening the scariness of the conical hat. After all, as Kounine contends, there's nothing inherently horrifying about it. It's just an object open to interpretation that we imbue with meaning through centuries of mythology passed down through art and stories – and the meanings of these myths change over time.
Some contemporary pagans see the hat as a conductor of energy, while children still clamor for it during the spooky season. In fact, the witch's hat was Google's most popular Halloween costume in 2021 – before Wicked mania set in. Just as woodcuts, portraiture and fairytales have influenced the modern material culture of the conical hat, so too will today's iteration inform future generations' understanding.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251119-the-5000-year-old-origins-of-the-witchs-hat
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NUREMBERG (THE MOVIE) — A TRIAL WITHOUT TENSION
Holocaust movies have long had a firm place in American cinema. It’s no wonder since they naturally lead to stories with clear lines of good and evil — giving strong moral lessons that reinforce values Americans hold dear such as freedom and equality.
From “Schindler’s List” (1993) to “Life Is Beautiful” (1997), “The Pianist” (2002), “Son of Saul” (2015) and “The Zone of Interest” (2023), the genre has remained constant. The past couple of years have been no different, with films ranging from Lionsgate and Kingdom Story Company’s “White Bird” to Angel Studios’ “Bonhoeffer” and “Truth & Treason,” to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” and smaller indie faith-based films like “Triumph of the Heart.” Even many movies not directly about the Holocaust — such as “The Brutalist” and “Guns & Moses” — deal with its legacy.
“Nuremberg” tries to claim a spot in this lineup, with an impressive cast, stoic moral gravity, and strong lessons for the present day. But while the pieces are there, the sloppiness of the execution betrays the increasing fragility of the secular religion it tries to reinforce.
Based on the 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, “Nuremberg” follows U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek) as he carries out an assignment to investigate and monitor the mental status of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and other high-ranking Nazis in preparation for and during the Nuremberg trials. As the trials begin, Kelley becomes locked in a dramatic psychological showdown with Göring, trying to prevent him from using the proceedings to restore the Nazi image on the world stage.
The film boasts an impressive cast. Malek believably plays a brilliant man who is simultaneously cocky and insecure, but guided by strong moral intuitions. Crowe is convincing as a charming, charismatic man capable of both great evil and great vulnerability. The supporting ensemble fills out the cast nicely. Michael Shannon yells and grinds his teeth entertainingly through his many speeches. Richard E. Grant is delightfully charming. And John Slattery brings a relaxed gravitas to every scene.
The film treats its subject matter with a grave, stoic reverence that feels refreshingly old-fashioned in its approach to historical drama. Serious people speak seriously about the serious matters they face — whether it’s the Holocaust, the stakes of the trial or the nature of evil. The lighting and camerawork are consciously dramatic yet restrained, allowing the story and events to speak for themselves. And the events are fascinating, from the political intrigue behind forming the trials to the growing frenemyship between Kelley and Göring.
But the film never figures out exactly which of these threads it wants to follow. Is it about the relationship between Kelley and Göring? The trials themselves? The nature of evil and whether the Nazis were unique or not unique? Is it trying to educate viewers about Holocaust history, or say something new about it? The movie jumps back and forth between Kelley and Göring’s scenes and ones following the legal development of the trial, with neither thread given room to breathe or develop beyond surface-level treatment.
Take Kelley and Göring. “Nuremberg” sets up their story as a cat-and-mouse psychological chess match in which each man tries to gain the other’s trust while gaining the upper hand. As they attempt to outmaneuver — and understand — each other, their mutual respect grows. Yet the film shows almost no actual back-and-forth manipulation, no truly deep conversations, and the final confrontation does not even take place between them; Kelley simply sits on the sidelines watching.
We are told that Kelley emerges with deep insight into the Nazis from his time with Göring. But I couldn’t tell you what that insight was. His final statement on American radio — that the Nazis are narcissists who want power — is exactly what he said about Göring within seconds of meeting him. So what was the point of the rest of their conversations? As Göring said, the inkblot tests told him nothing.
This makes film’s presentation feel extremely — for lack of a better word — basic. When a story is well-executed making the filmmaking invisible can work, but when it’s not, it feels boring. The lighting and camerawork fall into extremely standard shot/reverse-shot patterns. The dialogue is all text, no subtext. Every other line is a speech about why the Nazis are bad, offering the insight of an average second-grade textbook. And every joke feels like a relic from the 1990s.
What does get time to breathe? Anything reminding us of how bad the Nazis were. The film devotes long stretches to documentary footage of concentration camps. [Oriana: I found those stretches relatively short, which struck me as the best strategy.] It gives generous time to a soldier describing how his family was victimized by the Nazis. And it ends with Kelley trying in vain to warn the American public that what happened in Nazi Germany could happen here. [Oriana: He's accused of trying to "smear" his own country.]
This makes “Nuremberg” feel more like a sermon than a movie. It is less concerned with providing insight than with repeatedly hammering home the “right” lesson.
This makes sense. As many have noted, as Western culture has become more secular, it has developed new cultural scripts and symbols for defining good and evil. British historian Alec Ryrie pointed out in an article in First Things that Hitler has become the modern world’s reference point for moral meaning:
“We still believe that Jesus is good—but not with the fervor and conviction with which we believe that Nazism is evil… The swastika packs a far greater punch. … Play or joke with that, and you make yourself a monster.”
Culture critic Jonathan Pageau has made a similar point: Hitler functions as our modern-day devil.
“Not only is Hitler the devil,” Pageau argues, “he’s worse than the devil. If I call you a devil, you might get annoyed. But if I call you Hitler, you might punch me.”
Hitler is conceived as “the worst thing that humanity has ever imagined,” he added.
World War II and the evil of Nazism became the fundamental myth of the modern West. How do you know what evil is? It resembles anything associated with Hitler: Totalitarianism, racism and bigotry. How do you know what good is? It resembles whatever opposed him: Freedom, tolerance and equality. Religion can be good if it supports these things, but bad if it hinders them.
We see this laid out in the conversation chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) has with the pope when he tries to convince him to support the Nuremberg trials. Jackson wants the pope’s moral authority to give the trials legitimacy. But the pope refuses. He asks Jackson if he’s religious. Jackson says no. The pope asks what he believes in. Jackson says he believes in man and the institutions man builds. The pope points out that Jackson is willing to circumvent those very institutions to get what he wants, and so he declines. Jackson reminds the pope that he stood by when the Jews needed him and essentially blackmails him by threatening that history will remember the Catholic Church that way. The pope then agrees to support the trials.
Here we see the establishment of secular humanism — the concept of “human rights” rather than Christianity — as the dominant religion of our age. And it happened because Christianity failed to stop Hitler, but a coalition of Allied forces, united not by faith but by their opposition to Nazism, succeeded.
But it is a fragile religion, built on mythologizing humanity as avatars of good and evil in a way real humans cannot sustain. As Pageau points out, making Hitler the devil is untenable because “the devil is the incarnation of everything evil in the world. Hitler is a very particular manifestation of that evil in a very particular place. And so there’s no way he can play that role forever.”
Comedian Trevor Noah similarly notes in his book “Born a Crime” that Hitler is the incarnation of evil only in the Western world. In places like Africa —where Noah is from — there are figures considered far worse.
“In Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa, he's just another strongman from the history books,” he added.
And, of course, we see this myth breaking apart. From rising left- and right-wing antisemitism to a proliferation of “post-liberal” ideologies — including Christian nationalism — a thousand alternatives to the modern liberal order are emerging. All wildly different, but united in rejecting the “postwar consensus.”
“Nuremberg” ends with Kelley desperately warning Americans that they are every bit as capable of becoming new Nazis as the Germans were. Essentially, he warns them of their vulnerability to the devil. The film seems almost desperate for us to fear the potential Nazis in our midst.
But even here, we see hints of why this mythologizing is collapsing. We have had hundreds of Kelleys every year since the Nazis became moral archetypes — voices warning that “those people,” the ones we happen to disagree with, are Nazis. Eventually, the label loses its meaning, or people begin to suspect that maybe the Nazis weren’t uniquely evil after all.
“Nuremberg” wants to reaffirm the secular mythology of the post–World War II West — one it rightly sees as a bulwark against both modern and ancient evils. But its bland and lackluster execution feels almost eerily appropriate as that ideology begins to collapse under its own weight. Hopefully, the next cultural religion is not far worse.
https://religionunplugged.com/news/review-trial-without-tension-nuremberg-fumbles-its-own-case
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NUREMBERG: RUSSELL CROWE IS TOP NOTCH AS AN ON-TRIAL GÖRING BUT RAMI MALEK DISAPPOINTS
Here is a movie promising the juiciest of real-life stories from history. Before the Nazi war-crime trials at Nuremberg that started in November 1945, an obscure US army psychiatrist called Dr Douglas Kelley was ordered to interview the prisoners, chief among whom was Hermann Göring. This was supposedly to establish their fitness for trial, but was really intended to gain inside information as to how they would conduct their defense. Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans.
But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley: an eye-rolling, enigmatic-smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers. Leo Woodall plays the American army translator Howie Triest, Michael Shannon is the US chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson and Richard E Grant is British Tory MP David Maxwell-Fyfe who (for all that his postwar career as home secretary was notorious for the homophobic persecution, which helped drive Alan Turing to his grave), is actually shown to be crucial in cross-examining the Nazis. All of these actors do their best, but the figure of Kelley himself is a ridiculous cartoon.
Granted, the real Kelley does seem to have been a mercurial figure who made no secret of wanting to write a book about the trial, which he hoped would be his ticket to glory. But the film also wants to make him a conventionally decent hero, and can’t really accommodate much (or any) plausible nuance. Malek’s Kelley is a bag of actorly tricks, speckled with twitchy mannerisms; he doesn’t look all that different from the Bond villain Malek once played.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/14/nuremberg-review-russell-crowe-is-top-notch-as-an-on-trial-goring-but-rami-malek-lets-side-down
Oriana:
Speaking of wanting to write a book, there is a line delivered by Goering that I find absolutely brilliant. Goering says something to Kelley that practically destroys the would-be author: “I am the book. You are a footnote.”
This is not a statement that Kelley can ever forget. He carries this destructive description of himself for the remainder of his life — a life he ultimately cuts short himself. After all, who wants to read a long footnote? Unless you are a master of footnotes, the way Nabokov is in Pale Fire, being called a footnote is an ultimate dismissal. Since you don’t matter, since your life doesn’t matter, why carry on, dear footnote/person whose moment of glory was conversing with a man who was once second only to Hitler.
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Here is another review:
The title refers to the city where representatives of four Allied nations that teamed up to defeat Nazi Germany gathered to try its leaders. Concepts of international law and rules of war had been evolving for thousands of years by then. But the concept of “crimes against humanity” hadn’t been codified.
Nor had the idea that a nation needn’t have signed a treaty to be bound by international practices. That framing of Nuremberg was controversial. There was large Allied faction that thought the Nazi leadership (and perhaps Nazis further down the ranks as well) should just be put against a wall and shot. That’s what usually happened to leaders of countries defeated in a war. It would’ve been faster and cheaper than a globally broadcast trial, and the architects of the first mechanized genocide wouldn’t have been able to twist media coverage of the event (including radio broadcasts) to spread their ideas.
“Nuremberg” is based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a nonfiction book by Jack El-Hai about the relationship between Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the highest-ranking surviving Nazi at Nuremberg, and American psychiatrist Jack Kelley (Rami Malek), who was brought to Nuremberg to evaluate imprisoned Nazi leaders and determine if they were fit to stand trial.
As Smithsonian Magazine put it, Kelley wanted to “dissect evil” by determining “whether members of the Nazi high command shared a psychiatric condition that led them to commit unspeakable atrocities, the Holocaust chief among them.” Kelley got involved because there was an idealistic postwar push to make sure the men whose orders caused millions of deaths were held responsible for their actions. But his motives weren’t pure: he also figured he’d get a bestselling book out of the experience.
(oops, I lost the reference; apologies)
from ROGER EBERT.COM
The movie begins with Göring’s arrest and gets us into the story by following the efforts of Supreme Court associate justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) to convince President Harry Truman’s administration to try the Nazis. We get details about the Nuremberg prison and the courtroom; the then-recent history of Nuremberg, Germany and Europe; and the incremental escalation of crimes against state-decreed enemies. But the strange relationship between Kelley and Göring forms the spine of the story. Both actors are exceptional.
Crowe shows us why he’s one of the last great movie stars as well as a brilliant performer, settling into the high-powered character actor phase of his career as if it were a ratty old Barcalounger with a drink holder in each armrest. Like Gene Hackman in his greatest ’80s and ’90s performances, Crowe has such a regular-guy energy that on those rare occasions when Göring is thwarted or disappointed and we get a glimpse of his capacity for overwhelming violence, it somehow comes as an unsetting surprise within the context of the scene, even though we know the man’s a killer.
Malek communicates Kelley’s internal struggles largely through his reactions during conversations and when he’s watching the trial unfold. The actor’s excellence as a screen listener is foregrounded in scenes where Kelley tries to bond with Göring by providing a rapt audience for his monologues and anecdotes, and serving as a courier for correspondence between Göring and his family, which is in hiding.
Malek plays the character as a smart, charming, confident guy who’s a bit of a heel, but doesn’t quite realize how much of a heel he is. He does this without overemphasizing Kelley’s earlier obliviousness or late-stage anger and shame.
Ethically, Kelley is shaky from scene one. He’s got one eye on history and another on his personal fortunes. We clock him as slippery from his introductory sequence, which sees him doing sleight-of-hand magic to fascinate a beautiful young woman on the train to Germany.
Kelley’s stance that doctor-patient confidentiality should apply even in a military prison was not that firm to start with, and it crumbles when he’s asked to personally provide accounts of each session with Göring, so that Jackson can have an advantage when the Nazi boss is on the witness stand.
Göring corrupts Kelley further by flattering him into thinking that his empathetic brilliance is what caused Göring to divulge personal secrets. It’s actually a textbook example of a charming monster playing a questioner as deftly as Richard Strauss conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during the war (and as deftly as the Nazis played Strauss). There’s an early moment where Göring, who says he doesn’t understand English, slips up, but subtly enough that only Kelley notices. Kelley is proud of himself for seeing through Göring, but later we wonder if Göring is so slick that he performed the slip-up with enough precision that it would fool everyone but Kelley.
Vanderbilt, whose breakthrough assignment was the adapted script for David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” once again shows his ability to lighten grim subject matter with sardonic humor without seeming disrespectful. Steven Spielberg does this in all of his historical dramas, including “Schindler’s List,” as did Stanley Kubrick. Sometimes the sheer absurdity of a horrible situation demands a bit of humor so as not to come across as dishonest or tediously preachy. There are several chilling early scenes where Göring regards the psychiatrist with an expression that truly does seem disarmed and trusting, but is more akin to a skilled butcher looking at a cow and imagining dotted lines on a cut chart.
Göring and Kelley’s interactions stand for different ways of thinking about war, genocide, international law, and the ethics of psychiatry, as well the more generalized responsibility to make correct moral decisions even under threat of death. Their scenes also show the allure of eloquent but savage men, who rise to positions of influence by knowing how to manipulate people and can apply the skill to any situation, including a session with a prison psychiatrist.
Göring also has aspects of Satan as con artist, breaching his target’s moral defenses by going off on funny tangents, and wallowing in whataboutism. When Kelley confronts Göring in his cell about his claim not to know that prisoners were being executed, he changes the subject with, “You think American bullets and bombs might kill [civilian] people? You vaporize 150,000 Japanese at the touch of a button, and you presume to stand in judgment of me for war crimes?”
Putting sense in the mouth of the devil is a risky move. But the way Göring reels in everyone, even a man whose job is understanding psychology, shows how dictators and their minions seize power from people who fancy themselves too smart to get played. “Nuremberg” confirms why, even after the trial, it was easy to draw new generations to fascism, the very thing that the Nuremberg architects hoped the public exposure and punishment of the Nazis would prevent. The many callouts to non-German war crimes—such as the Allied carpet bombing of German cities—are defensible here because the movie is a rhetorical Trojan Horse of sorts, smuggling barbed observations about contemporary evil and the possibility of holding it to account into a mainstream, big-budget period piece.
At two hours and twenty minutes, the movie can’t deal with every issue it raises (such as the fragility of the psychiatrist’s confidentiality oath). The trial feels too brief after so much buildup. Much else gets skipped. The crusading justice Jackson is etched in fair detail, thanks partly to Shannon’s ability to make you feel as if you know exactly who the man is even if you hadn’t heard his name before (the kind of guy whose sense of humor is real, but on a delay timer).
Other important characters get sketches instead of full portraits, such as the British counsel David Maxwell Fife (Richard E. Grant), who both complicates and helps Jackson’s cause; Nuremberg commandant Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), who is reduced to the sort of character John Slattery often plays (unsentimental, cynical, funny); and the 21 other Nazi defendants, including Rudolph Hess (Andreas Pietschmann), the deputy Führer who flew a stolen plane to Scotland in 1941, spent the next four years locked in the Tower of London, tried to wriggle out of punishment at Nuremberg by faking amnesia, and sat next to Göring during the trial.
But altogether, it’s a solid film of kind that used to be more common: an earnest, unpretentious Oscar Movie that wants to be seen by everyone, and consequently doesn’t try to be too complex or arty. It wants to educate and inspire as well as entertain, and isn’t shy about that ambition. And it’s very effective at making a case for specific contemporary outcomes while seeming as if it’s just showing you a dramatization of history.
At one point, a character tells us that it “happened here” because “the people made it happen, because they didn’t stand up until it was too late.” He’s talking about Germany, among other places.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/nuremberg-russell-crowe-film-review-2025
Oriana:
I hope I can get away with quoting more of what has been written about this unusual movie which concentrates not on Nazi atrocities, an extremely familiar territory, but rather on the charisma of the man who was second only to Hitler. Now, I could never understand the charisma of Hitler, with his clownish, overdone gestures and speeches, but I was instantly drawn to the charisma of "fat Hermann," who was very popular with the German public.
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~ You get more zingers than you’d expect in Nuremberg, which dramatizes the trial of Nazi commander Hermann Göring. Stretches of it, in fact, are paced like we’re chasing the downfall of crafty mobsters rather than the architects of the unthinkable. Various high-ranking members of the party are introduced with the zap-pow of newspaper headlines, technicolor recreations, and salacious details. Robert Ley was captured in his pajamas, didn’t you know?
It makes sense, in part, for the story being told here. Yet Nuremberg can ultimately only justify its Hollywood sheen for so long. The film’s written and directed by James Vanderbilt, behind the screenplays for both David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston Murder Mystery comedies, and he draws here mostly from Jack El-Hai’s 2013 non-fiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.
The Nazi in question is Göring (Russell Crowe). The psychiatrist is Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), brought in to ensure the imprisoned Nazi high command don’t kill themselves before they can stand trial. Kelley has a bigger picture in mind: if he can “dissect evil”— slap a label on the psychological dysfunction that drives these men to barbarity — then he’ll have a bestseller on his hands.
Crowe and Malek are well cast for this kind of dance. The former is a battering ram of an onscreen presence, mixed here with an unnerving sense of comfort in his surroundings – at one point, we see him lounging on his prison cell mattress like he’s expecting to be hand-fed grapes. Malek, meanwhile, can do a slippier, quieter charm, a smile with a thousand lines of code doing the analysis behind it.
And while it’s a little much to follow the line, “who’s bigger than the president?” with a comedy smash cut to the Vatican, the form at least fits the function: the Allies have freshly won the war, and while there are whispers of what’s gone on in the so-called “labor camps”, these men all wear the thrill of victory on their breasts.
But, while lawyers Robert H Jackson (Michael Shannon) and David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E Grant) postulate about righteous justice, all while Brian Tyler’s score rallies them onward, you’re quietly waiting for the curtain to draw back and the mouth of hell itself to be revealed.
When it does, Vanderbilt presents it starkly and truthfully, in the same way Stanley Kramer did in 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, by showing the audience real footage captured by American and British soldiers after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. For a few moments, everything stills. All we hear is the whir of the projector. All we see is the horror. Kelley’s pristine world, built out of the lies he swallowed so he could sit across from Göring each day and talk to him like an associate (or maybe even a friend), collapses in an instant.
And yet, the film doesn’t follow where he goes. Soon enough, we’re back in safe, old Hollywood world, with a declaration nearly to camera that we “might as well go finish the war.”
Nuremberg’s closing titles reveal how much Kelley was truly affected by the trials, in his fears that all these promises that only the rule of the law can break the terrible cycles of history were for naught, or that the perpetrators of genocide and slaughter possess some unique quality unseen in their fellow man.
What should represent the soul of this film is merely its coda. While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/nuremberg-review-russell-crowe-hermann-goring-b2865128.html
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Let’s turn now to a historical account:
HOW A PSYCHIATRIST AT NUREMBERG GOT INSIDE GOERING’S MIND
Assigned to evaluate the Third Reich’s top leaders, ahead of the Nuremberg Trials, American Douglas Kelley probed how ordinary men could commit extraordinary evil.
Douglas Kelley and Hermann Göring
When the Allies prepared to put Nazi Germany’s top leaders on trial at Nuremberg after World War II, the U.S. Army tapped a young psychiatrist, Captain Douglas McGlashan Kelley, for an extraordinary assignment. Kelley’s task was to assess and preserve the mental stability of the captured Nazi elite—men like Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess—as they awaited judgment for war crimes that had shaken the world.
Kelley, who had been overseeing psychiatric services for thousands of G.I.s, was surprised by the order. He had “no experience with war criminals,” writes Jack El-Hai in his 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. Nor did he have experience with addiction withdrawal, an issue Göring, in particular, was struggling with. [In Göring's case it was morphine, which he started using after an injury. But a movie shouldn't pull into too many directions, and I'm glad this issue hardly even emerged in the movie. By the way, Hitler was definitely a drug addict.]
But Kelley quickly recognized the opportunity. Rather than just look after the prisoners, he envisioned a far more ambitious project: probing deep into the Nazi mind, looking for an explanation of how anyone could commit the heinous deeds these men were accused of. Were the Nazi leaders somehow different from the rest of humanity?
His conclusions would make him one of the most controversial figures in the history of psychiatry—and later play a role in a shocking personal tragedy.
Kelley Called Nuremberg a 'Psychiatrist’s Playground’
Kelley reported for duty in Mondorf-les-Bains, a small resort town in Luxembourg, in August 1945, the same month he turned 33. The Americans had established a top-secret interrogation center there and converted a one-time hotel into a prison (nicknamed "Camp Ashcan") for captured Nazis. Among its occupants were Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had briefly become Germany’s head of state after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and Hermann Göring, Hitler’s longtime second-in-command, who would have succeeded Hitler had the two not had a falling out in the final days of the war.
In preparation for their war crimes trial, the Army soon transferred Göring and other Nazi leaders to a prison in the bomb-flattened city of Nuremberg, Germany. Kelley moved with them, responsible for interviewing and producing mental evaluations of 22 prisoners prior to trial.
“He began to study them as subjects, as a biologist might scrutinize animals confined in laboratory cages,” El-Hai writes. For Kelley, the prison was “a psychiatrist’s playground.”
‘Like King Kong Meeting Godzilla’
With Hitler and several of his key subordinates either dead by suicide or rumored to have escaped to South America or elsewhere, Göring was the most famous Nazi in captivity. He was also the one Kelley spent the most time with, keeping copious notes on their conversations.
The two men shared several common traits, El-Hai says. Both could be charming and cleverly manipulative. Both also had narcissistic tendencies, in El-Hai’s view, along with outsize egos.
In Göring’s case, that included a conviction that while he might be executed for his crimes, German history would exonerate—and lionize—him. “In 50 or 60 years, there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany,” he told Kelley. “Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”
El-Hai says that he and Kelley’s son, Douglas Jr., a major source for the book, used to joke that “Kelley meeting Göring was like King Kong meeting Godzilla.”
After months of interviewing and administering Rorschach inkblot tests to Göring and his fellow Nazis, El-Hai wrote, Kelley had concluded that “none of the top Nazi prisoners, except [Robert] Ley, who had experienced traumatic brain injury, showed any signs of mental illness or personality traits that would label him insane.”
As to Göring specifically, El-Hai writes, Kelley “was astonished that such a clearly intelligent and cultured man so blatantly lacked a moral compass and empathy for others.”
Göring: Trial, Conviction, Suicide
Göring and 21 other Nazis went on trial before the International Military Tribunal in November 1945 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
About two months into the nearly year-long trial, Kelley left Nuremberg and returned to Chattanooga, Tennessee. He said he wanted to get home to his wife, resume his civilian career and start work on a book based on his experiences. He recalled in it that Göring “wept unashamedly when I left Nuremberg for the States.”
Göring spent hours on the witness stand, offering a spirited, often defiant defense of both his own behavior and Nazism in general, The New York Times reported. But his wartime record spoke for itself. He was found guilty on all four of the charges against him: conspiracy to wage war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. They rejected his request for a firing squad.
As El-Hai tells the story, hours before the scheduled execution, Göring slipped a small glass capsule filled with potassium cyanide into his mouth and crushed it with his teeth, most likely dying within seconds. In a note he left behind, he claimed he’d had the cyanide the entire time he was in prison and managed to conceal it despite repeated searches of his cell.
News of Göring’s suicide took Kelley by surprise. But in the aftermath, Kelley expressed a controversial admiration for his decision to take matters into his own hands, calling the suicide “a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch.”
The Allies had another finishing touch in mind—reportedly transporting Göring’s corpse to the former concentration camp at Dachau for cremation in one of its infamous ovens.
Kelley Ends His Life as Göring Did
Kelley had returned to a busy civilian life, at various times practicing psychiatry, running a psychiatric hospital, teaching, lecturing and working on his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, published in 1947. His public statements often focused on his experiences at Nuremberg and his conclusion that Nazis weren’t all that different from other people.
“Without Hitler, these people are not abnormal, not pervert[ed], not geniuses,” he told the Nashville Tennessean. “They are like any aggressive, smart, ambitious, ruthless businessman.”
Not everyone agreed with Kelley’s diagnosis. Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist who briefly served alongside him at Nuremberg, took a different view. Gilbert had stayed through the trials and written a popular book about them, Nuremberg Diary.
Unlike Kelley, Gilbert maintained that Nazis were indeed a breed apart. Göring, he concluded, was an “aggressive psychopath.” Both Kelley and Gilbert have since been faulted for trying to explain the “Nazi mind” from such a small sample size.
Kelley transitioned from psychiatry into criminology, becoming a go-to consultant for police departments in California, where his family was now living, and a star witness in headline-making criminal cases. When the director Nicholas Ray wanted an expert on juvenile delinquency to review the script for his 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, he chose Kelley for the job. Kelley also began appearing on a local TV program called “Science in Action.”
From all appearances, Kelley had found professional success. But his home life in Berkeley was another story. He drank heavily, fought with his wife and behaved tyrannically toward his son, says El-Hai.
On New Year’s Day 1958, apparently after a fight with his wife, Kelley stormed off to his upstairs study, then emerged to announce that he was about to take cyanide and would be dead in 30 seconds. After putting something in his mouth and swallowing, El-Hai writes, he collapsed “like a slackened marionette.” Witnessing the event were Kelley’s wife, father and 10-year-old son. Kelley was dead on arrival at a Berkeley hospital.
'He Must Have Just Cracked'
The irony of Kelley dying the same way as his most famous patient was lost on no one. Some early accounts even suggested he might have snuck the poison home from Nuremberg, although evidence soon emerged that it came from a U.S.-based chemical supply house.
Friends and associates struggled to understand his decision, with many newspaper headlines deeming it a mystery. “He must have just cracked—boom, like that,” Berkeley’s police chief, a close friend of Kelley’s, told a reporter. Others blamed overwork or a stomach ailment.
At least one newspaper noted another irony: His January 6 episode of “Science in Action” was supposed to have been devoted to “the science of happiness.”
Whatever Kelley’s motivation, El-Hai writes, “the cyanide was a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide…. It is no coincidence that cyanide, a poisonous agent with a uniquely dramatic effect on the body, was their selected means of escape.”
The two men—very different in many ways, surprisingly similar in others—would now be forever entwined in history.
https://www.history.com/articles/nuremberg-psychiatrist-douglas-kelley-nazis-goring
Oriana:
All I want to say is: Yes. A big YES. This movie must not be missed. Russell Crowe’s performance alone is worth rushing to see it.
A confession: I can’t explain why, but I kept tearing up all throughout the movie. Not sobbing, just tearing up. It was one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen many wartime movies), thanks mainly to Crowe’s stunning performance as Goering, but . . . I can’t really explain why the movie had such a strong emotional effect on me.
One thing that didn’t seem to fit was the absence of any question about Goering’s childhood. Right after the war, psychiatry was very dominated by Freud’s dogma that early childhood determined one’s personality and destiny. Not that the movie should spend any considerable time delving into Goering’s childhood, but a flashback vignette or two, if charged with sufficient meaning, would have been a welcome addition.
A brief flashback to Kelley's childhood would also have helped me understand Kelley's suicide, at last partly. I can see how Goering's example was an important factor, an example of an action by a powerful alpha-male and a father figure who retained control to the end. But that can't be a complete explanation. I craved a deeper insight into both men.
And yet I couldn’t help feeling that the movie wasn’t as good as it could have been. The young American psychiatrist was hardly the right person to be a counterpart to the powerful Goering. I wanted a more mature man with moral wisdom and a powerful presence. But then no movie can be perfect, and there is only so much that can be done within the typical time frame of a movie. And besides, the movie tried to be reasonably faithful to history. Needless to say, no counterpart of Goering existed among American military psychiatrists.
But these are relatively minor grumbles. Again, “Nuremberg” is not to be missed. No matter how many WW2 movies we may have seen, we need to experience the charisma of a moral monster and ponder, again and again, the mystery of evil.
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TIM SNYDER: BREAK-UP OF THE STATE
How does a country burst? To answer this questions, it helps to see matters as do the president and the vice-president: from inside a grift bubble.
As I traveled around the United States these last few weeks — Columbus, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, DC, Boston, Chicago — I tried to explain that I worry more about the disintegration of the United States than about a regime change in which Donald Trump exercises autocratic power from coast to coast.
The effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.
This end of the United States is possible, in part, because our president and vice-president think that it is impossible. Because they are inside a grift bubble, they push for authoritarianism in their own interest, without reckoning with the possibility that their actions can wreck the country. For them, America is a limitless passive resource.
Your perspective is probably different than theirs. To help us understand this risk, it helps to try to see the world from inside a grift bubble.
Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.
Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.
The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.
You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.
You do not grasp that your grift actually depends upon something larger, something better, which it is sapping, weakening, bringing to ruin.
You have fooled the world, and so you think that you understand it. Indeed, as a grifter, you become contemptuous of how other people make their living and live their lives. And yet your knowledge is actually limited. You know things that those outside the grift bubble do not know; but they also know things that you do not know.
You can take away what belongs to people without knowing how they achieved or attained it. The guy who cheats the farmer at the county fair does not know how to farm. The guy who profits from curated crypto scams does not understand the world economy.
Trump and Vance imagine, because it has worked thus far, that they can grift endlessly. They do not understand that their grift depends upon what I will unashamedly call the honest labor and decent convictions of millions of Americans. Were there not Americans who actually worked and cared and tried to live right, there would be nothing and no one to grift.
In an instructive article that he wrote in 1990, the American novelist David Foster Wallace said that cynicism is a form of naïveté. When you dismiss everything, you feel like you can do anything; but then you don’t believe in some things that are real: like love, or law, or patriotism. For you, such things are just tools of the trade, manipulable handles, just the way to enlarge the grift. That they have some other sense, that they are the building blocks of some other reality — this you do not see. And in that way you are naïve.
Trump and Vance are indeed naïve, in the precise way that corresponds to their cynicism. They think that the United States will continue to exist, for their sake, no matter what they do. From inside the grift bubble, they see only grift, and think they see the whole country. As the bubble grows bigger, they confuse their own profit with the well-being of the whole.
The fact that Trump and Vance do not believe in real things such as love and law and patriotism makes them strong in one way; it makes them weak in another. They cannot foresee the larger consequences, because they do not understand how the world works or how a country is constructed. And as they break things, their naïveté prevents them from seeing what is happening, and indeed forces them to snarl harder — I suspect that this is why, in some social media thing somewhere, the vice-president lashed out at me on this very point.
And so here we are. The bigger the grift bubble grows, the less healthy material remains beyond it. It sucks away what it productive. As personal connections become the basis of business, the economy slows. It sucks away what is ethical. As corruption comes to seem normal, citizens lose trust in one another. As basic institutions are scorned and destroyed, people cease to believe in the law. The material which builds a nation — moral, institutional, economic — starts to give way.
I am worried about the disintegration of the republic for other reasons, of course. The goal of this administration seems to be to show that government does not work. The appointment of utter incompetents to positions of high authority, the firings of qualified civil servants, and the elimination of crucial agencies — all this will likely bring epidemics and terror attacks and other disasters.
At some point amidst the federal dysfunction the states will have to take on more responsibilities. But why then should their citizens pay taxes to a useless — but oppressive — federal government? ICE provoke people who live in cities; that does not mean that cities will concede. The threat to use soldiers against cities will likely create rifts inside the armed forces and the federal government more broadly. We are not so far away, I fear, from some branches of the federal government turning against other branches of the federal government.
Trump also seems to be contemplating a war against Venezuela (or whomever) to distract attention from his activities inside the grift bubble. But any land war, which is what it would take to generate such a distraction, will be difficult and unpredictable. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are unfathomably ignorant about modern warfare. Such a move could lead not just to a lot of pointless death but to unpredictable chaos.
All of these factors are connected with the grift bubble. Indeed, they prove its existence. Some of these actions, like the destruction of government agencies, are meant to make grifting easier. Others are designed to generate cover for profiteering and corruption. None of these policies, not one, was made with an eye to something outside the grift bubble. Such actions only make sense to people who are inside the grift and confuse their own position with reality.
The president and vice-president do not know the history of people like themselves, or that of other republics that were needlessly brought down by men of their particular sort. They think that the magic of words will always save them, that there will always be a next grift, that no crisis is so great that it cannot be turned to personal profit. This is true right up until the moment when it is not.
The republic can break, but it need not. Those who work against the grifters, who reinforce the reality beyond the bubble, are doing right. They are not only holding back authoritarianism, but giving the republic a chance. They may be acting from love, or from law, because they know that these things are real. And so they should also know, in acting thus, that they are the patriots. ~ "Thinking about..." <snyder@substack.com>
~ Tim Snyder, November 16, 2025
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UNDERWATER KELP FORESTS OFF THE COAST OF CALIFORNIA
Wondrous kelp beds harbor a complex ecosystem that’s teeming with life, cleaning the water and the atmosphere, and bringing new hope for the future
Every year, on a late summer night, Eva Pagaling joins a group of fellow Chumash paddlers who climb into a tomol, a handcrafted wood-plank canoe, for an eight-to-ten-hour voyage from the California mainland. They head for the largest of the Channel Islands, an archipelago sometimes called the Galápagos of North America due to its stunning biodiversity. The island appears on maps as Santa Cruz; the Chumash call it Limuw.
Pagaling, who is now 35, has been taking part in the annual journey since she was 10. As the youngest daughter of a master canoe builder, she grew up hearing oral histories and learning songs about her Indigenous group, among the first people to inhabit the California coast at least 13,000 years ago, but she emphasized that this annual tradition is more than ceremonial. “This isn’t a replica of a tomol,” she said. “We aren’t just descendants of the Chumash; this isn’t just a re-enactment of our journey. This is who we are and what we are doing right now.”
But one thing that has changed over the generations is the condition of the channel waters. For millennia, the Chumash and other Indigenous people sustained themselves in part by spear hunting in kelp forests teeming with fish. “We still catch halibut, tuna and rockfish,” said Pagaling, who is a Chumash tribal marine consultant as well as a trained rescue diver. “But these marine ecosystems are not as healthy as when our ancestors were eating the fish.”
Pagaling is the board president of the nonprofit Ocean Origins, and she collaborates with marine scientists to restore one of the planet’s most precious resources: the kelp forests that once grew thick and wide in tidal corridors up and down the Pacific Coast.
In the 1830s, Charles Darwin was amazed by the kelp ecosystems he found flourishing in the Pacific waters around the Galápagos. “I can only compare these great aquatic forests ... with the terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions,” he wrote in his journal. “Yet, if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of the kelp.”
Kelp is an umbrella term for 30 types of algae that grow along nearly a third of the world’s coastlines—in Maine and Long Island, in the United Kingdom and Norway, in Tasmania and southern Africa, in Argentina and Japan. With a global coverage of more than two million square miles, kelp takes up roughly the same space as the Amazon rainforest. But few places in recorded history have had more abundant kelp forests than the 840 miles along California’s coastline.
Over the past few hundred years, that changed. First came the 18th-century fur traders, who trapped the sea otters of Monterey Bay, natural predators of the purple urchins that feast on kelp stalks, stems and blades. By the early 20th century, otter populations were hunted to near extinction. Kelp beds were consumed until they turned into desolate underwater areas known as urchin barrens. Fish populations disappeared with the kelp.
Then came the rise of the automobile. In 1921, California created the world’s first tidelands oil and gas leasing program, attracting energy producers that drilled hundreds of offshore oil wells across the Santa Barbara Channel. Oil platforms rose up from the sea. Oil leaks became common, along with the bubbling up of ocean floor tars. On January 28, 1969, one of the Union Oil Company’s main offshore platforms had a blowout, the largest in U.S. history at the time. As many as 4.2 million gallons of crude oil poured into the sea, killing thousands of seabirds, seals and sea lions, and also destroying the kelp forests.
The drilling didn’t stop, but mass protests and the burgeoning environmental movement pushed the federal government to set aside certain tidal waters as nature reserves. In 1980, the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary began protecting endangered species and sensitive habitats in nearly 1,500 square miles of ocean waters around the five northern Channel Islands. Yet the channel waters by Santa Barbara’s mainland remained open to drilling and industrial uses.
In recent years, the most destructive culprit has been climate change. From 2013 to 2016, the entire Pacific coast was hit with unprecedented El Niño events, when differentials in global winds and air temperatures set off superstorms. In 2015 alone, 16 tropical cyclones roiled the central Pacific hurricane basin, with rising water temperatures whacking kelp ecosystems out of balance. Nick Bond, climatologist for the state of Washington, called this marine heat wave “The Blob,” after the 1958 B-movie. Some kelp beds lingered in remnants, while others disappeared almost entirely, replaced by piles of purple urchins.
It’s like seeing a forest that’s been clear-cut,” said marine conservationist Norah Eddy, the associate director of oceans programs for the Nature Conservancy in California. “It’s that shocking.”
In 2015, the Northern Chumash Tribal Council submitted a nomination to the federal government for its own marine protected area. In November 2024, it became official. The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary now begins at the tip of the Channel Islands and stretches north over 116 miles of shore, more than 13 percent of California’s coastline. More than 4,500 square miles of tidal waters are now protected from offshore oil drilling, pollution, industrial development, overfishing and habitat destruction.
Urchin remains pile up in the water near Palos Verdes after the spiny creatures—relatives of sea stars and sand dollars—ran out of kelp to eat. 
Terry Herzik usually earns his living fishing for urchins, a culinary delicacy. Here, he smashes them instead to help restore Palos Verdes’ kelp forests
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/underwaer-forests-return-life-coast-california-might-be-good-news-entire-planet-180987639/?is_pocket=1&utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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HAVE WE VASTLY UNDERESTIMATED THE TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE ON EARTH?
A new way of estimating rural populations has found that we may be undercounting people who live in these areas, potentially inflating the global population beyond the official count of 8.2 billion – but not everyone agrees
Population estimates in rural areas of China may be incorrect
Our estimates of rural populations have systematically underestimated the actual number of people living in these regions by at least half, researchers have claimed – with potentially huge impacts on global population levels and planning for public services. However, the findings are disputed by demographers, who say any such underestimates are unlikely to alter national or global head counts.
Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics.
To investigate, they used data on 307 dam projects in 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia and Poland, all completed between 1980 and 2010, taking the number of people reported as resettled in each case as the population in that area prior to displacement. They then cross-checked these numbers against five major population datasets that break down areas into a grid of squares and estimate the number of people living in each square to arrive at totals.
Láng-Ritter and his colleagues found what they say are clear discrepancies. According to their analysis, the most accurate estimates undercounted the real number of people by 53 per cent on average, while the worst was 84 per cent out. “We were very surprised to see how large this underrepresentation is,” he says.
While the official UN estimate for the global population is around 8.2 billion, Láng-Ritter says their analysis shows it is probably much higher, though declined to give a specific figure. “We can say that nowadays, population estimates are likely conservative accounting, and we have reason to believe there are significantly more than these 8 billion people,” he says.
The team suggests these counting errors occur because census data in rural areas is often incomplete or unreliable and population estimation methods have historically been designed for best accuracy in urban areas. Correcting these systematic biases is important to ensure rural communities avoid inequalities, the researchers suggest. This could be done by improving censuses in such areas and recalibrating population models.
If rural population estimates are way off, that could have massive ramifications for the delivery of government services and planning, says Láng-Ritter. “The impacts may be quite huge, because these datasets are used for very many different kinds of actions,” he explains. This includes planning transport infrastructure, building healthcare facilities and risk reduction efforts in natural disasters and epidemics.
But not everyone is convinced by the new estimates. “The study suggests that regional population counts of where people are living within countries have been estimated incorrectly, though it is less clear that this would necessarily imply that national estimates of the country are wrong,” says Martin Kolk at Stockholm University, Sweden.
Andrew Tatem at the University of Southampton, UK, oversees WorldPop, one of the datasets that the study suggests was undercounting populations by 53 per cent. He says that grid-level population estimates are based on combining higher-level census estimates with satellite data and modeling, and that the quality of satellite imagery before 2010 is known to make such estimates inaccurate. “The further you go back in time, the more those problems come about,” he says. “I think that’s something that’s well understood.”
Láng-Ritter thinks that data quality is still an issue, hence the need for new methods. “It is very unlikely that the data has improved so dramatically within 2010-2020 that the issues we identified are fully solved,” he says.
Stuart Gietel-Basten at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology points out that the majority of the team’s data comes from China and other parts of Asia, and may not be globally applicable. “I think it’s a very big jump to state that there is a great undercount in places like Finland, Australia, Sweden, etc., and other places with very sophisticated registration systems, based on one or two data points.”
Láng-Ritter acknowledges this limitation, but stands by the work. “Since the countries that we looked at are so different, and also the rural areas that we investigated have very different properties, we’re quite confident that it gives a representative sample for the whole globe.”
Despite some reservations, Gietel-Basten agrees with Láng-Ritter on one point. “I certainly agree with the conclusions that we should both invest more in data collection in rural areas as well as coming up with more innovative ways of counting people,” he says.
But the idea that the official world population should swell by a few billion “is not realistic,” says Gietel-Basten. Tatem also requires much more convincing. “If we really are undercounting by that massive amount, it’s a massive news story and goes against all the years of thousands of other datasets,” he says.
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THE RESTAURANT IN MARSEILLE WHICH SERVES GOURMET FOOD FOR ONE EURO
Behind the ornate facade of Marseille restaurant Le République, lunch service is in full swing. Smoked mullet with sea fennel butter arrives as a starter, invoking the salty history of France's second city. Hay-smoked cheese with rice flour follows, singing with flavor from the surrounding Provençal countryside. Tourists and locals savor organic ingredients prepared by Michelin-starred chef Sébastien Richard.
But Le République is a gourmet restaurant with a few big differences. First, the staff include a recently released prisoner. Second, around 40% of diners will pay just €1 for their three-course feast. And, finally, several diners have never set foot inside a restaurant before.
Le République is a restaurant solidaire – one of around 10 in Marseille – run as a social enterprise in aid of community solidarity. Other examples include L'Après M, a former McDonald's taken over by its redundant staff when the franchise closed. The team purchased the premises and reopened it as a social enterprise, serving gourmet burgers created by a three-star Michelin chef served to the beat of Algerian rap, while operating a free food-delivery service of healthy takeout for people in need.
Marseille's newest restaurant solidaire is Chaleur, which opened in June 2025. When I visited, it was packed with patrons enjoying chilled cucumber soup adorned with clams, figs and roasted pumpkin seeds. A blowout lunch with wine costs around €25 (£21; $29). But if a patron explains that they're in a penurious position, they can enjoy the exact same menu for a tariff suspendu – a "suspended rate" – of just €8 (£6.90; $9.29). Across Marseille, prices vary by philosophy. Some, like Le République, partner with charities to subsidize €1 meals, while others, like Chaleur, operate on trust.
Chaleur's popularity begs an obvious question: with food this tasty, why not make a profit?
"Benevolence is a selfish way of saying that I want to be fulfilled in what I do," says Chaleur co-founder Raphaël Raynard. "What enriches us is knowing our work is contributing to creating connections and helping people." The team regularly serves espressos to homeless neighbors and recently donated 300 meals to a workers' strike.
Chaleur's co-founder Nausicaa Roux believes Marseille's status as a "lighthouse city" is key to understanding the popularity of restaurants solidaires. Around 2,600 years of migration – including Greeks settlers in classical times to Iberian Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and Armenians in the 20th Century – has made Marseille one of France's most diverse and religiously tolerant cities.
"As a result, there's a real way of living together that I don't think exists in Paris or London," Roux said. "Folks feel duty bound to help the one in five Marseillais who are born abroad. "There is an openness not found in other cities in France.”
These emigres didn't arrive empty handed. They carried ingredients like orange blossom water from the Middle East, which is used to make Marseille's iconic navette biscuits. Dates entered Europe via the Vieux Port, the city's ancient harbor, and probably tomatoes and bananas too.
The dynamic city dialect includes words in Amazigh, Occitan and Italian, with phrases blending together like a linguistic bouillabaisse, the local fish stew made from imported saffron and regional seafood. Marseille is, quite literally, a global melting pot.
Thanks to Marseille's culinary history, food is Marseille's most powerful social tool. Few districts need it more than La Cabucelle, the city's former soap-making area, located high above the Vieux Port. Here, incomes hover around €975 (£849; $1131) per month – some €500 less than the Marseille average – and there's no youth center or social space. That's why Léna Cardo opened her restaurant-daycare-social space Le Réfectoire, which started serving organic meals in April 2024.
Le Réfectoire's large, white-washed interior is a restaurant, library, nursery and information exchange rolled into one. "Every Monday, we have a history teacher," says Cardo. "She voluntarily gives up her time to teach French history to a dozen mums." Every Tuesday, a counselor offers employment advice for free. "We can be a place for a parent to learn French or a young adult to find a job."
However, what keeps customers coming back is Le Réfectoire's sublime food. Daily specials cost around €12, with recent offerings including a sea bream fillet on a bed of Provençal potatoes and tabbouleh topped with a goat's cheese galette. On Wednesdays, local chefs originally hailing from countries like Congo and Morocco take turns in the kitchen and share the revenue. Any excess profit is funnelled into local socio-cultural activities.
Travelers are slowly discovering La Cabucelle, with its Moorish facades and Armenian churches. Everyday bar Monday, an epic Marché aux Puces (flea market) bustles with antiques, home clearance treasures and vintage Olympique de Marseille football jerseys. Cardo hopes they will book Le Réfectoire when they come. "If you're buying something here," she says, "you give money for activities to people who need them."
The walk from La Cabucelle to Marseille's rejuvenated docklands feels like a veritable world tour. E-scooters flit like barracudas through streets serving Tunisian lablabi soup and Comoran breadfruit crisps. An influencer could hook 1,000 followers with snapshots of Laotian spring rolls and staircases painted in colorful rainbows. In the docks themselves, ferries make nightly runs to Tangier, Tunis and Algiers, while container ships arrive from around the world.
Back at Le République, chefs are preparing evening starters like leek vinaigrette with a Parmesan biscuit and grated bottarga [cured fish roe]. Aside from serving €1 meals to diners in need of nutritious cuisine, the restaurant's central theme is "insertion professionnelle" – helping marginalized people back into work.
"[We've employed] people with autism, single mothers who haven't been able to work for 20 years, people who can't read," says Sylvain Martin, who co-founded the restaurant with chef Sébastien Richard. "We have had so many profiles that I can't list them all!”
Some staff have come to Le République from Baumettes Prison, Marseille's toughest jail, where the last person in the Western world to be executed by guillotine took place in 1977. The prison is now home to Marseille's most curious restaurant solidaire, Les Beaux Mets, which translates as "the beautiful dishes" and is a play on the maximum security penitentiary's name. The fine-dining restaurant, open for lunch only, was created by the godfather of Marseille cuisine, Gérald Passedat (also the brains behind the L'Après M's gourmet burger) after learning that former offenders tended to return to crime in the absence of meaningful work.
"Taking people from Baumettes is one of the hardest insertions we have," admits Martin. "They say yes to anything until the judge is confident enough to release them." He says that some ex-prisoners fail to show up for work but the ones that apply themselves are "very, very motivated", having learnt teamwork and timekeeping skills behind bars. The prison confirmed that 75% of inmates who trained at the prison restaurant achieved employment or training upon release, thanks in large part to Le République.
The evening service at Le République ends with a turmeric-golden poached pear topped with tongue-numbing Sichuan pepper. There's an unspoken question at the caisse (counter): how can anyone enjoy a €1 dinner?
"We have signed agreements with 100 charities who can book a meal at the price," explains Martin. All patrons receive their bill discreetly after dining together, ensuring dignity for those paying a reduced tariff.
And what if a diner games the system to bag a discount meal?
"If you are selfish enough to cheat, then do it," says Martin. "It's your problem every morning in front of the mirror.”
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ASTEROID CRATER IN CHINA
Because of Earth’s weathering climate and shifting tectonics, impact craters regularly disappear from the Earth’s geologic record.
Scientists in China found an impact crater that formed during the current epoch, and at 900 meters wide it’s three times larger than the previous record holder.
The impact likely occurred less than 10,000 years ago and was caused by a 30-meter-wide asteroid traveling at roughly 45,000 miles per hour.
When it comes to impact craters, the rest of the solar system is an open book. Take a glimpse at the surface of other rocky bodies, such as Mars or Mercury, and you’ll find a rich tableau of past astronomical trauma across billions of years.
Earth, on the other hand, is a much harder read, due to its erosion-driving climate and rumbling plate tectonics. While some of Earth’s biggest blow ups can still be identified—its ancient run-in with its protoplanet sibling, Theia, and the dino-killer Chicxulub being prime examples—they still require serious effort, and lesser impacts from Earth’s early days have been long lost to the tides of history.
Today, Earth’s atmosphere helps burn up many would-be impacts before they do devastating damage. But the Holocene (our current geologic epoch) still contains more than a few serious impacts, with the largest being a 300-meter Macha crater in Russia—that is, until now. A new study published by a team of Chinese scientists in the journal Matter and Radiation at Extremes details the discovery of a new impact crater located in Guangdong Province in southern China, which at 900 meters is three times larger than the Macha crater.
“This discovery shows that the scale of impacts of small extraterrestrial objects on the Earth in the Holocene is far greater than previously recorded,” Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Shanghai’s Ming Chen, the lead author of the study, said in a press statement.
Despite being discovered in a region known for heavy rain, monsoons, and high humidity—typically not an environment conducive to geologic preservation—the crater appeared clearly defined. Therefore, scientists could confirm that it was, in fact, a meteorite strike and not a cometary one (which would leave behind a much larger crater).
The tell-tale sign of an impact crater lies in what’s called “planar deformation features,” microscopic signatures embedded in quartz grains that geologists have identified as indicators of an impact event.
“On the Earth, the formation of planar deformation features in quartz is only from the intense shockwaves generated by celestial body impacts, and its formation pressure ranges from 10 to 35 gigapascals, which is a shock effect that cannot be produced by any geological process of the Earth itself,” Chen said in a press statement.
According to the researchers, the Jinlin impact played out something like this: Less than 10,000 years ago or so, a 30-meter wide asteroid traveling around 20 kilometers per second (roughly 45,000 miles per hour) smacked right into a granite hillside. The impact sent granite weathered soil into the air that eventually came to rest around the crater rim. In the north of the rim, where weathered rock was more scarce, the meteorite even dug into the granite bedrock.
Future studies will be needed to precisely date the impact, but by comparing the chemical weathering rate of granite in the rainy, hilly region of Guangdong Province (at about 0.038mm per year) with the size of granite fragments found at the site, scientists suggest that this explosive drama likely took place in early-to-mid Holocene (i.e. less than 10,000 years ago).
The Jinlin impact crater joins a small list (relatively speaking) of only 200 or so confirmed impact craters, though Earth has been pummeled thousands and thousands of times throughout its 4.6-billion-year lifespan. Whether known or unknown, all of these impacts have helped form the planet we all call home.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a69448063/jinlin-crater/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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FINDING THE WRECK OF THE ENDURANCE
During an expedition to search for a famed shipwreck, researchers discovered something unexpected: striking geometric patterns on the floor of Antarctica’s western Weddell Sea created by fish.
The seafloor had once been obscured beneath a thick ice shelf, but that changed in July 2017 when the massive A68 iceberg calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf. The iceberg measured 2,239 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) — about the size of Delaware.
Seizing an opportunity to study the previously hidden seafloor, researchers organized the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 with two goals in mind: exploring the biology of the western Weddell Sea and searching for the wreckage of the HMS Endurance, which became trapped and ultimately ripped apart by ice in 1915.
Researchers set sail in January 2019 for a 49-day expedition aboard the South African polar research vessel SA Agulhas II. Ironically, the expedition experienced extreme sea ice conditions similar to what Endurance faced more than a century earlier, preventing the team from conducting a search for the wreck.
“The sea ice in particular was a challenge as at the time there was a bottleneck and a build of sea ice around that area — we were heading directly towards this, playing chicken with icebergs as we went,” said Dr. Michelle Taylor, senior lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the UK’s University of Essex. Taylor is the coauthor of a new study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers about what the expedition uncovered.
Despite not finding the wreckage, the expedition captured invaluable underwater footage of marine life that inhabits the frigid depths of the Weddell Sea. The research vessel’s remotely operated underwater vehicle, nicknamed Lassie, spied a series of nests arranged in distinct shapes sprawling across the seafloor.
“Over a thousand maintained nests within the areas studied goes to show that exploration of our world is still underway, with constant new findings,” lead study author Russ Connelly, postgraduate researcher in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex, said in an email.
The discovery showcases the diversity of life that exists in a place experiencing rapid climate change — which is why scientists are petitioning for the Weddell Sea’s fragile ecosystem to be protected by law.
(The HMS Endurance shipwreck was ultimately discovered during a 2022 expedition.)
A geometric neighborhood
As Lassie passed over the Weddell seafloor, large dimples appeared in the sand. The round spots seemed neat compared with their surroundings, clear of the layers of decomposing plankton spotted elsewhere on the seafloor. “This was the first time we have seen this area of seafloor, so there is always a realm of mystery to be expected,” Connelly said.
When scientists looked at the video footage that Lassie took, they noticed fish and fish larvae within the dimples. A closer look revealed the fish to be a species of rockcod called Lindbergichthys nudifrons, otherwise known as the yellowfin notie. The fish are found from the Antarctic Peninsula to South Georgia in the Atlantic section of the Southern Ocean, Connelly said.
“These species are extremophiles; they thrive in high-pressure and cold-water environments,” Connelly said. “They build small, circular nests in the fine sediment, and then the males guard the eggs for around 4 months. Their main threat comes from predators on the seafloor, like brittle stars and predatory worms, which try to eat the eggs.”
“Over a thousand maintained nests within the areas studied goes to show that exploration of our world is still underway, with constant new findings,” lead study author Russ Connelly, postgraduate researcher in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex, said in an email.
The fish are likely protecting against ribbon worms, or Parborlasia corrugata, a type of nemertean, observed living in the vicinity.
The ribbon worms detect chemical signals from their environment to find food.
“(The clusters) could create a confusing sensory environment for the nemertean, making it more difficult to detect and target a single nest, a crucial adaptive strategy during the long incubation period (for the eggs),” the authors wrote in the study.
Meanwhile, the isolated nests on the outskirts of the fish communities are thought to belong to larger, stronger members of the species capable of defending their own nests.
The discovery showcases the diversity of life that exists in a place experiencing rapid climate change — which is why scientists are petitioning for the Weddell Sea’s fragile ecosystem to be protected by law.
(The HMS Endurance shipwreck was ultimately discovered during a 2022 expedition.)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/29/science/antarctica-weddell-sea-fish-nests
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BERBERINE, CINNAMON, GREEN TEA MAY MIMIC OZEMPIC’S WEIGHT-LOSS EFFECT
Researchers are studying natural alternatives that can mimic the effects of GLP-1 injections like Ozempic.
Natural alternatives may be important due to cost and accessibility of GLP-1 injections, potential side effects, and individual focus on more natural healthcare.
There are some natural ingredients, such as caffeine, protein, and green tea that may help boost your metabolism.
In recent years, GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Mounjaro have helped transform the way experts treat type 2 diabetes and manage weight. However, they have also offered new insights into the power of our own gut hormones.
These insights include the understanding that signals from the gut to the brain suppress the appetite and help to control blood sugar levels.
This has led researchers to dive further into drug-free alternatives that may trigger the same things.
Researchers from Heliopolis University in Cairo, Egypt, recently published a review of the existing evidence in the journal Toxicology Reports, assessing how the natural hormone that is produced in the gut, called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) might be affected by natural compounds from diet.
This is the same hormone targeted by GLP-1 drugs. At this time, experts have identified no natural compounds found that can exactly replicate the effects of GLP-1 injections.
However, early research suggests that certain foods and the timing of meals may be useful in regulating GLP-1 hormone activity in the body, and thus potentially “rewiring” hunger and satiety cues.
Why are natural alternatives to GLP-1 injections important?
The researchers who conducted this review noted that one of the reasons they are searching for natural alternatives to the GLP-1 injections is because of cost and accessibility.
Many people who may benefit from these injections may not be able to afford them. Natural alternatives may prove to be more accessible and less expensive.
Another reason this research is important is because of the potential adverse effects of the GLP-1 injections. While these injections are generally well tolerated, there are certain gastrointestinal side effects that may occur, such as vomiting, diarrhea, and nausea.
These side effects may cause some people to not take the medications as prescribed.
Some people may also believe that natural remedies are better suited to a more holistic view of their health. This may mean they would be more likely to choose them over conventional medicines.
The researchers also note that searching for natural alternatives to GLP-1 injections is not about giving up on medications that have been successful.
“It’s about increasing treatment options and personalizing it to each patient’s preferences and needs,” the researchers wrote.
Can ginger, green tea, berberine mimic the effect of GLP-1 drugs?
The review notes that the natural compounds preliminary research is focusing on as potentially mimicking the effects of GLP-1 drugs include cinnamon, wheat, ginger, fermented green tea, and berberine.
All of these compounds could modulate GLP-1 secretion and expression, research cited in the review has suggested.
Mir Ali, MD, a bariatric surgeon and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center noted that there are caveats to natural alternatives to GLP-1 injections. He told Medical News Today:
“Natural ingredients may help boost metabolism. However, it is a mild effect. These [compounds] should not be considered an alternative to the GLP-1 medications like Ozempic.”
Ali advised people to keep in mind that the naturally occurring ingredients may help with weight management to a mild degree, but only if combined with proper nutrition and exercise. There is no substitute for a healthy diet and lifestyle whether someone is using natural ingredients or taking the GLP-1 medications.
That being said, there is some evidence that certain natural substances like caffeine, green tea extract, capsaicin — found in chilli peppers — and berberine may boost metabolism to an extent, Ali allowed.
According to him, these natural ingredients work in different ways, “either by stimulating the central nervous system to boost metabolism (caffeine), promote fat burning (green tea extract, capsaicin), or activating other enzymes (berberine).”
How to boost metabolism naturally
Recent research has found that certain foods may have an effect on diet-induced thermogenesis, which can help boost resting metabolism.
Foods that may have this effect include:
protein from foods such as lean meats, beans, nuts, and Greek yogurt
unrefined carbohydrates from sources such as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains
green tea
caffeine
Speaking to MNT, Ali emphasized that this effect is minor in comparison to the GLP-1 medications and it is important to modify your diet and lifestyle to experience consistent weight loss results.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/berberine-cinnamon-green-tea-may-mimic-ozempics-weight-loss-effect#How-to-boost-metabolism-naturally
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BERBERINE AND ASTAXANTHIN
Berberine and astaxanthin can synergize, particularly for improving lipid profiles and metabolic syndrome, as they activate different but complementary pathways in the body that reinforce each other's benefits. This combination is being studied as a nutraceutical strategy to improve conditions like high cholesterol and impaired blood sugar control.
How they work together
Metabolic pathway activation: Berberine activates AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a key enzyme for regulating metabolism. Astaxanthin can act as a PPARα agonist, another important factor in metabolic regulation.
[PPARα, or peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha, is a protein that acts as a transcription factor regulating genes involved in fatty acid metabolism. It is activated by natural ligands like fatty acids and synthetic drugs called fibrates. Its primary functions include increasing fatty acid oxidation, reducing triglyceride levels, and raising HDL cholesterol, making it a key target for treating lipid metabolic diseases. PPARα is a master regulator of lipid metabolism, especially in the liver, heart, and muscle.]
Reinforcing effects: Because AMPK and PPARα agonists complement each other, their combined use in this case is expected to be more effective than either alone for addressing metabolic syndrome.
Clinical evidence: Studies suggest that combining berberine and astaxanthin, along with other supplements like red yeast rice and CoQ10, can lower LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while increasing HDL cholesterol.
The phytochemical berberine, a constituent of certain herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine, has long been in use in China as a well-documented therapy for type 2 diabetes. Mechanistic studies demonstrates that, like metformin, it activates AMP-activated kinase (AMPK); this is thought to be the chief basis of its utility in diabetes.
Unlike metformin, however, berberine upregulates the hepatic expression of LDL receptors, through a mechanism that is complementary to that of statins or red yeast rice (RYR); whereas statins increase transcription of the gene coding for LDL receptors, berberine increases the half-life of LDL receptor mRNA.
PPAR-alpha primarily regulates genes involved in lipid metabolism, energy homeostasis, and inflammation.
Oriana:
Berberine is the “miracle” supplement that does wonders for your lipid profile. This effect seems more reliable than lowering of blood glucose, though I still hope that people whose blood sugar doesn’t respond to berberine (just as some people don’t respond to metformin) are an exception, or, in some cases at least, should experiment with increasing the dose.
There are also reports of people who use both metformin and berberine to get the desired effect on blood sugar. A diet less rich in carbohydrates but richer in fiber should also be considered. Instead of "let them eat cake," the modern equivalent might be: "Let them eat salad."
(At the same time, it should be remembered that excess protein is turned into glucose; only fatty acids can’t be transformed into glucose. So, beware not only of excess carbs, but also of excess protein.)
~ Astaxanthin, a xanthophyll carotenoid, is the most abundant carotenoid in marine organisms and is one of the most powerful natural compounds with remarkable antioxidant activity. Carotenoids have gained special interest during the last decades, due to their strong antioxidant, repairing, antiproliferative, anti-inflammatory, and potential antiaging effects. They can be used to prevent oxidative stress-related diseases and chronic inflammation. ~
Astaxanthin is one of the most powerful carotenoids available. For greatest benefit, take it together with berberine.
Berberine also synergizes with amlodipine (a calcium-channel blocker prescribed for lowering blood pressure). If you are not taking amlodipine, consider taking magnesium supplements; magnesium is a natural calcium-channel blocker. Caution: amlodipine and magnesium should be taken at different times during the day.
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ending on beauty: (or if not beauty, then hard-won insight)
THE SECOND COMING
If Jesus came back,
he wouldn’t be crucified —
just drugged on the mental ward
with the other schizophrenics
claiming to be Jesus —
then released to wander
and preach in the streets
to the passing traffic.
If he healed the blind and the lame,
he’d be arrested by the FDA.
What if Jesus reappeared
in modern Israel?
Would he be interrogated
as a terrorist suspect,
or as a Jew for Jesus?
He’d speak a dead language,
a dry scraping whisper
in extinct olive groves.
If he preached universal love,
he'd be drafted in the army.
No, someone so brilliant
would know there is no coming back.
There are no Second Comings.
We belong to the moment
that never comes back.
Never, never, never, never.
~ Oriana
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