FANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEVA
(Leader of a women's climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayeva's husband found and buried the bodies.)
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[Oriana: I have changed Rich’s ‘Elvira Shatayev’ to ‘Shatayeva’, idiomatic in Russian. “Elvira Shatayev” is too offensive to my Slavic ear. Just like “Anna Karenin,” it simply sounds horrible. I was happy to see that in various places the poem is reproduced with "Shatayeva" in the title, not the original abomination. ]
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Oriana: HEROIC STUPIDITY
Though this is a powerful poem, I can’t get over the foolhardiness of mountain climbing under unsafe conditions (and that's any distance above the tree line, in my experience; the higher up, the more dangerous). I know it was being done as a matter of national pride in the Soviet Union, a country that was hell-bent on achieving various "firsts," no matter the cost ("No lives matter"). The tragedy of the Diatlov Pass is the best known similar attempt to hike in the Ural Mountains in winter, never mind the danger of avalanches and hypothermia. Life is simply too fragile as is, and too precious to risk losing it for the sake of a “heroic” climb, just because the mountain "is there." Think also of the grief felt by these women’s loved ones — parents, husbands. The enormity of that entirely avoidable suffering. The fact that the mountain on which the women died was called the Lenin Peak (nearby is the Communism Peak) adds a sad historical dimension as well. Under Communism, no lives matter. Young women’s precious lives lost — to accomplish what?
I tried to find out if any young children became orphans as a result. I couldn’t find any information. I hope not.
Now, we are not surprised when a man’s answer to why he undertook a dangerous climb is “because it [the mountain] was there.” But from women we expect better — if not wisdom, then at least common sense. Women, I used to assume, had more resistance against the siren call of heroic stupidity.
Of course Rich’s poem can be — and arguably should be — read mainly at the metaphoric level. Let’s imagine a goal worth this kind of risk-taking.
Lenin Peak
Where: Pik Lenina, Pamir, Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border
Altitude: 7134 meters (23,406 feet)
When: August 1974
Unlike the group that perished in Buryatia, this group – led by Elvira Shatayeva – was comprised entirely of professional climbers. But the mountain they were trying to conquer was also much taller.
Shatayeva was a professional athlete — one of the most famous climbers in all of USSR. She had set an ambitious task for the group: to conquer the seven-thousander with an all-female group — a feat that had never been attempted until then.
The group ascended on 5 August, reporting their status to base camp, who congratulated the climbers. But it was too early to celebrate.
On the trip back that same evening, the weather deteriorated considerably, forcing the group to set up camp for the night. The following day saw even worse winds, and descending further was simply too dangerous. But Shatayeva reported: “One of our members fell ill. She has been vomiting up her food the entire day.” [Oriana: This can lead to severe dehydration, which in turn can lead to temporary mental confusion.]
Erring on the side of caution, base camp recommended that the group continue on their descent.
On 7 August, a heavy blizzard struck the slope – a much worse occurrence than on land. The snowstorm blew away all of the group’s provisions, including the tents, where two group members are said to have perished. Another in the group had died shortly before the heavy snow hit, having evidently fallen ill as well. The survivors were left with nothing and trapped by snow. There were other groups of climbers in the vicinity, who were rushing to help, but could not make it through.
The last transmission was sent by someone other than Shatayeva, and said the following: “There are two of us left. We are all out of strength. In 15 to 20 minutes we will be no more.”
Looking on the surface, there is little mystery in this tragic case. However, journalist and climber Anatoly Ferapontov, in his book The Ascenders draws attention to certain inconsistencies that arose following inspection of the campsite: “One of the panoramic shots contains a clearly visible rock with a tea kettle placed on it… the blizzard would have blown it away. As for the torn tents – there had been no blizzards in the area strong enough to tear up a fastened tent. It could only have been torn by a person in a state of hysteria.”
Exactly what kind of affliction might have struck the camp – or whether it had indeed caused the first death – remains a mystery. Ferapontov also quotes one of the climbers from a nearby group: “It wasn’t how it happened.”
Nothing further was uncovered from personal testimonies – and it is highly unlikely there ever will be.
https://www.rbth.com/history/330020-russia-dyatlov-pass-mystery-analogues
Oriana:
There is nothing admirable about heroic stupidity. Sailing around the world alone on a raft and similar feats are not my idea of heroism. It’s a about ego, and an adolescent male ego at that. Just because a fourteen-year-old boy thinks something is heroic doesn't make it so. Maybe it's just foolish. And even if successful, has humanity really gained anything from those projects? Do we really need to do a dangerous climb just because the mountain "is there"?
Yes, humans can be heroic and accomplish more than anyone expected. But let’s do some hard thinking before embarking on a dubious if challenging project. Human lives matter. They really do. Those who doubt that are invited to move to North Korea, now that the Soviet Union lost its pioneering role in sacrificing people because why not, women will give birth to new ones (this doesn't work quite so well these days).
Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan
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HITLER’S CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
Let us take a look at Hitler’s childhood home, the home in which he grew up with his father, mother and several siblings and half-siblings. The house was neither lavish, nor was it small, and it wasn’t a happy home.
Hitler's childhood home in Branau, Austria
Hitler was born to a young, sensitive and sweet-natured mother. Bit of a mouse-like creature, withdrawn, shy, kind-hearted…
and her husband, who was a brutal disciplinarian 23 years older than her. Klara was small, slender and artistic.
[It's interesting to ponder Hitler as an interesting mix of his dissimilar parents. At least there is no doubt as to which parent Adolf loved.]
[Oriana: Alois was the one who changed his last name to Hitler from Schicklgrubber. Some have joked that this was a world tragedy, since "Heil Schicklgrubber!" just wouldn't have worked.]
Alois was an unpleasant man. He had been married before, had an out-of-wedlock daughter and was a bit of a womanizer, albeit one who saw women primarily as objects, not as human beings. So much as giving a “wrong look” could get you beaten in the Hitler household — Klara, Adolf, and all the other children would receive frequent beatings.
Alois Hitler had nine children, none of whom grew up to be homicidal maniacs or dictators, except for one… you could say that, as awful as his father was, Adolf Hitler was still very much the black sheep of the family. Hard to top that.
When Adolf Hitler was 14, in 1903, his father died at 65. He wasn’t sad, as he hated his father, the man he had to watch every day beating up either him, his siblings or his beloved mother. That last one hurt him most — he was devoted to Klara, and loved her to pieces. Her death, shortly after Hitler turned 19, broke him. The last remaining shreds of his humanity were then bled out of him in the trenches of WWI.
~ Jean-Marie Valheur, Quora
David Krauswell:
Hitler certainly still had his humanity to an extent: he loved animals and children, he loved Eva Braun, and despite his maniacal hatred for the Jews he did have a fondness for those that did something for him, such as the Jewish doctor who tried to save his mother’s life and mitigated her pain as she was dying from breast cancer. We want to think of such brutal persons as space aliens, something that is not anything of this world and thus can be considered as outside human experience. But the frightening reality is that Hitler was very much human, meaning that you could be walking past his ideological twins every day or be seated at dinner with them or even know them intimately with the only difference being that they are not in any position of power to put their thoughts into practice. It is up to us, then, to guard against that ever happening again.
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'THE WHOLE CITY WAS IN LOVE WITH HER': THE 'IT GIRL' STYLE WARS OF RENAISSANCE ITALY
Isabella d'Este detail
More than five centuries ago, a small number of style icons used flamboyant, luxurious looks to give them influence and power during a turbulent period of Italian history.
Renaissance Italy was home to some of the most famous and influential artists who ever lived. Less well known, but arguably as influential in their day, were a number of supremely stylish women whose politically savvy fashion choices were often used as an elegant form of soft power during a particularly tumultuous period of Italian history.Dubbed "The Renaissance It Girls," in reference to 1920s film stars such as Clara Bow by Darnell-Jamal Lisby, curator of Renaissance to Runway: The Enduring Italian Houses at The Cleveland Museum of Art, these women continue to influence designers into the 21st Century.
The ethereal Simonetta Vespucci was Florence's 15th-Century It Girl. "The whole city was in love with her. Every girl wanted to be her, every guy wanted to have her. She was the epitome of what Florentine beauty was at the time with her long blond locks and supple skin," says Lisby.
Simonetta Vespucci was a muse to artists including Botticelli; she may have inspired his The Birth of Venus
Her married status didn't stop brothers Giuliano and Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici fighting over her affections and she was muse to many artists, including Sandro Botticelli. Some even think she was the inspiration for Venus in The Birth of Venus, although as this was painted in around 1485, almost 10 years after her tragically early death at the age of 22 in 1476, it would have been an idealized image of her. But as Botticelli was so infatuated with her that he requested to be buried at her feet after his death, it is quite possible that he had indeed held her image in his mind all those years.
The style icons that followed in her wake came of age during the Italian Wars, a series of violent conflicts fought largely by Spain and France for control of Italy that raged from 1494-1559. Fashion was frequently used as a diplomatic tool, and Isabella d'Este, wife of Francesco II Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua was particularly skilled in these arts.
A renowned art patron and collector, Isabella was one of the most famous women in Renaissance Italy. Her innovative style choices saw her reputation as a trendsetter spread throughout Europe, however fashion for her was far from a frivolous pastime. Referred to as "Machiavelli in skirts," by an early 20th-Century historian, a somewhat misogynistic phrase that nevertheless emphasizes the level of her influence, her stylistic choices were "deeply embedded in strategies of statecraft," says historian Sarah Cockram, who has written widely on Isabella.
Renaissance style wars
Communicating political allegiance via clothing was well understood in Renaissance Italy but could often be a risky business. When Isabella's brother-in-law, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, sent her a luxuriant fabric embroidered with a Sforza motif in 1492 she immediately had a gown made of it to show off her affiliation to him while in Milan. However, when seven years later the King of France ejected Ludovico from Milan and Isabella's relationship to him called into question her loyalty to France, she sought to assure the French ambassador, via her envoy in Venice, that should he visit her he would find her dressed head-to-toe in French fleur-de-lys.
Her reputation as a sophisticated arbiter of taste was also frequently leveraged for political influence, with gift-giving used to win the favor of those above her, and induce a desire to serve her needs in those below. Isabella's perfumed gloves seem to have been a particularly potent source of influence, with the Queen of France desperate to obtain a pair. "What you want, if you're going to survive the Italian Wars, is to be positively on the mind of the King of France and what's more intimate than being on the Queen of France's hand?" says Cockram.
Isabella's development of a signature look comprising black velvet, gold knots, bejeweled headdress, rubies and pearls, which can be seen in her 1536 Titian portrait, also served a political purpose. Versions of it were adapted by her ladies-in-waiting and family members as a means of showing fealty. The highly original headdress known as a zazara, a cross between a hairpiece and a hat made from a combination of real hair, fake hair, silk and gold threads, was particularly closely associated with her, and she could bestow favor by allowing others to wear it. "You see lots of portraits of women wearing less fancy versions of it," says Cockram.
This c 1536 Titian portrait of Isabella d'Este displayed her signature look of black velvet and bejeweled headdress
Isabella's influential status looked like it might be under threat when her brother Alfonso married the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, whose wealth, as the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, vastly eclipsed her own. Lucrezia owned a single dress that cost more than 20,000 ducats (the price of a palace on Venice's Grand Canal) and a beretta worth 10,000, their combined value alone coming to more than Isabella's entire dowry.
When she arrived at her new husband's home for the first time in 1502, she came trailing no fewer than 1,700 courtiers and wore a magnificent velvet gown of gold bouclé with a turquoise taffeta lining.
Alfonso and Isabella had sent spies to report back on Lucrezia's style and deportment prior to the wedding so they were aware of her fabulous riches and jewels. As a result, "during the wedding ceremony Isabella and her best friend, her sister-in-law the Duchess of Urbino, are desperate to make sure they have the right look and that they're not going to let the side down," says Cockram.
"They don't have a lot of money in Mantua compared to other places so she really needs to do things that are high impact but relatively low cost," explains Cockram. She uses networks and agents to source her the best things, but when things were really tough and she'd had to pawn her jewels to support the state, "she'd take a religious vow and say she had to dress modestly for a few months."
Lucrezia Borgia, the vastly wealthy illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, was a rival to Isabelle d'Este
It must have been something of a relief when Lucrezia died in 1519, but for all her wealth Cockram doesn't think Lucrezia ever surpassed Isabella in the style stakes. "Part of the reason Isabella eclipses Lucrezia is because of the visual sources Isabella creates such as the Titian portrait. There's also a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci that is widely circulated. Her reputation is diffused through culture as well as political action and gift-giving."
A flamboyant legacy
Perhaps Isabella's closest rival was Eleonora di Toledo, a Spanish Princess and daughter of the Viceroy of Naples, who emerged as the pre-eminent soft-power dresser in the 1530s. Against a political backdrop of Medici expansion and Spain's global dominance, which had seen the end of Florence as a republic, Pope Clement VII had orchestrated Eleonora's marriage to Cosimo I de Medici in 1539.
When Eleonora first arrived in Florence, she was said to have brought vast amounts of Spanish brocade with her and, perhaps unsurprisingly, was resented by the Florentines for her foreign style and use of the Spanish language. However, over time she strategically merged Spanish and Italian fashions in order to win favor and promote the Florentine state.
In a portrait by Bronzino (c 1545) she appears with her son Giovanni in an elaborate gown with a high bodice and elegant gold partlet covering her neckline. Although the style is Spanish, the luxuriant fabric with its distinctive pomegranate design is Florentine. After a decline in the early 16th Century, the Florentine textile industry had bounced back thanks to Cosimo I's protectionist attitude, and Eleanora's portrait can be seen as a powerful symbol of the political and economic rebirth of Florence.
Eleonora's dedication to her adopted city seems to have eventually won over the Florentines and many noble women began emulating her style. Another portrait by Bronzino shows a woman "clearly influenced by Eleonora wearing a very black, ruched sleeved dress in the Spanish style with a hairnet and partlet," says Lisby.
She also popularized the zimarra, a loose gown inspired by an informal style of Spanish coat. "Initially it was supposed to be private indoor-wear, but she wore it in public and that became part of the Florentine fashion," says Lisby.
While the flamboyant nature of Renaissance style hardly makes for everyday wear, many contemporary designers and celebrities are clearly influenced by the aesthetic for red carpet events and performance. Lisby points to Alessandro Michele's designs for Gucci as an example of Eleonora's direct influence, notably a spectacular green silk dress with embroidered partlet from the autumn-winter 2016 collection. When it comes to Simonetta, Isabella and Lucrezia, "you can feel that there's a mood board somewhere with their image," Lisby says – the caps in Maxmara's Resort 2025 collection remind him of Isabella's famous turban.
They're likely on the mood board for many a celebrity stylist too. Chappell Roan's ensembles often reference the Renaissance era and her make-up artist Andrew Dahling told In-Style magazine that he wanted her to look and feel like Renaissance royalty at the MTV Music Video Awards in 2024.
As the daughter of eminent Renaissance scholar Evelyn Welch, Florence Welch was clearly exposed to the period from an early age, and her ethereal looks make her something of a modern-day Simonetta. Elsewhere Rosalía's puritanical images for her Lux album evoke Isabella's simple styling during her religious vow periods.
Channeling the spirit of these remarkable women and the turbulent, formidably creative era in which they lived certainty results in some incredible looks.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251201-the-it-girl-style-wars-of-renaissance-italy
Oriana:
I think yet another strong contender for the Renaissance “It” girl was Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza ("Il Moro"), Duke of Milan. She was immortalized as “The Lady with an Ermine” by Leonardo da Vinci.
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WHY MORE YOUNG WOMEN WANT TO LEAVE THE U.S.
Aubrey and her wife are preparing to leave the United States for Costa Rica in January — a decision they haven't taken lightly, after building a life as homeowners in upstate New York.
Aubrey says months of unease about the political climate in the United States from debates over LGBTQ rights to concerns about basic safety — finally tipped them into making a plan to leave.
Her story is far from unique, according to a recent survey by US analytics firm Gallup which suggests 40% of American women aged 15 to 44 would move abroad if they had the opportunity.
These figures reflect aspirations rather than intentions, but they appear to highlight a trend that Gallup says began more than a decade ago — a growing number of younger American women reassessing where they see their futures.
The rise has also created the largest gender gap in migration aspirations that Gallup has ever recorded, with only 19% of younger men saying they want to leave the US.
Although Aubrey's decision crystalized in the last few months, under the Trump presidency, the trend has been apparent for many years — starting at the end of the Obama administration, according to Gallup.
Pressures have been building on women from the left and the right, says Nadia E Brown, professor of government and chair of the women's and gender studies at Georgetown University.
"It's not just partisan politics," says Professor Brown. "Women feel caught between expectations from both sides — traditional roles promoted by conservatives, and the pressures of progressive working life. Neither path guarantees autonomy or dignity, and that leaves women considering alternatives like moving abroad."
Economic reasons like student loans, the rising cost of healthcare and the cost of home ownership are also factors in shaping young women's decisions to forge a life in another country, she adds.
A recent survey from the Harris Poll — a US market research firm — suggested 40% of Americans have considered moving abroad, with many citing lower living costs as their main reason. The largest demographic groups thinking of moving were Gen Z and Millennials.
'No strong work-life balance in US'
"I was working a 9-to-5 in Los Angeles, and every day felt exactly the same. There's not a strong work-life balance in the US. I wanted to live somewhere with a different pace, different cultures, and learn a new language."
She now lives in Lisbon, works remotely as a freelancer, and says the lower cost of living and strong social culture have made her feel "more like a whole person again."
"I can't imagine ever going back to the US", she says.
'Women's rights were being stripped away in real time'
Despite the non-political nature of decisions made by people like Kaitlin, a clear gender divide emerged in 2017, with those who disapproved of the Trump presidency far more likely to want to leave, according to the Gallup data, which was based on 1,000 interviews.
Despite a slight decrease in the women's scores during Trump's first year in office compared with Biden's final year in office, the gap has reached its widest level.
For Alyssa, a 34-year-old mother who moved from the US to Uruguay earlier this year, the decision to leave wasn't just about lifestyle — it was a response to political and social pressures that felt immediate and personal.
She first began seriously thinking about leaving three years ago, after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling — ending the constitutional right to abortion in the US — but didn't make the move until early 2025.
"I have children and I don't plan on having more, but the increasing governance of women's bodies terrified me. I felt like women's rights were being stripped away in real time," she explains.
As a Latina, she felt unsafe because of rhetoric around immigration in the US, even as a US citizen. "I genuinely feared being detained in front of my kids," she says.
"We were living in Florida, and life there already felt backwards. But once Trump took office again, we knew we weren't doing this a second time," she says.
"It took around eight months. We sold everything, packed up two kids, and handled all the family logistics," she recalls.
Confidence in major US institutions drops
Another issue on which a gender divide appears to have widened is the matter of Americans' trust in institutions.
This has also sunk to historic lows, according to data from Gallup. Just 26% of Americans say they trust the presidency, 14% trust Congress and fewer than half express confidence in the court.
But the decline has been especially precipitous among young women.
In 2015, women aged 15 to 44 scored an average of 57 on Gallup's National Institutions Index — a measure of the confidence a country's residents have in national institutions.
Younger women's scores have fallen by 17 points since then — the sharpest decline of any demographic. Confidence dropped during both the Trump and Biden administration.
Some women are also weighing practical concerns like healthcare, and climate — factors that can tip the balance when considering a move abroad.
Marina plans to leave the US for Portugal next May with her boyfriend. "Healthcare not being a human right in this country is a huge part of why we're leaving."
"We also want to live somewhere where gun violence is unlikely," she said, citing a decades-old issue in America. "In Portugal it's much harder to get a gun — that alone makes life feel safer."
For Marina and her boyfriend, the challenges at home have made the decision to leave the US more urgent — including the nightmare of his house flooding during increasingly extreme weather, another issue that has intensified in recent decades.
"We're tired of the climate here — it's become unbearably hot, and it feels like there's a natural disaster every year now."
Her concerns reflect a broader mix of economic, environmental and safety pressures drawing younger women towards Europe and elsewhere.
A global trend
Younger American women were previously less likely than those in other advanced economies to see their futures abroad, Gallup has documented, a trend that has reversed since the late 2000s and early 2010s.
But Professor Brown says this "isn't just a US problem".
"Women in many countries are navigating similar challenges. The US just happens to be one where these pressures are particularly visible and acute," she says.
Access to subsidies for childcare and healthcare, which are more common in Europe, can impact an American woman's decision to move abroad.
"People don't realize how far behind the US is on maternal care, parental leave, and healthcare," Alyssa says, "until they leave the country.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgqz19ede19o
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A final test for police dogs: remaining calm when watching a cat.
Oriana:
The dogs are well trained, but it’s the cat that astonishes me. This cat has the nerves of steel.
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VOLCANIC ERUPTION MAY HAVE TRIGGERED EUROPE'S DEADLY BLACK DEATH PLAGUE
The Black Death fundamentally altered medieval society
A volcanic eruption around the year 1345 may have set off a chain reaction that unleashed Europe's deadliest pandemic, the Black Death, scientists say.
Clues preserved in tree rings suggest the eruption triggered a climate shock and led to a string of events that brought the disease to medieval Europe.
Under this scenario, the ash and gases from a volcanic eruption caused extreme drops in temperature and led to poor harvests.
To avert famine, populous Italian city states were forced to import grain from areas around the Black Sea — bringing plague-carrying fleas that carried the disease to Europe as well.
Tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees point to unusually cold summers in 1345, 1346 and 1347.
The Black Death swept across Europe in 1348-49, killing up to half of the population.
The disease was caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis spread by wild rodents, such as rats, and fleas.
The outbreak is believed to have started in Central Asia, moving around the world through trade.
But the precise sequence of events that brought the disease to Europe — killing millions of people – has been pored over by scholars.
Now researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig have filled in a missing part of the puzzle.
They used clues from tree rings and ice cores to examine climatic conditions at the time of the Black Death.
Their evidence suggests that volcanic activity around 1345 caused temperatures to drop sharply over consecutive years because of the release of volcanic ash and gases which blocked out some sunlight.
This in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region. To avoid starvation, Italian city states traded with grain producers around the Black Sea, unwittingly enabling the deadly bacterium to gain a foothold in Europe.
Dr Martin Bauch, a historian of medieval climate and epidemiology from GWZO, said climatic events met a "complicated system of food security" in what amounted to a "perfect storm."
"For more than a century, these powerful Italian city states had established long-distance trade routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, allowing them to activate a highly efficient system to prevent starvation," he said. "But ultimately, these would inadvertently lead to a far bigger catastrophe.”
The findings are reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5gr2x914ro
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ASEXUAL, ASOCIAL YOUNG MEN
When Scott Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man was released last month, it raced to the top of the bestseller lists. The US author, tech entrepreneur and podcaster explains his theories on dating, crying – and the rise of Donald Trump.’
It takes balls to title your book Notes on Being a Man. And, superficially, Scott Galloway could easily be lumped in with a dozen other manosphere-friendly alpha-bros promising to teach young men how to find their inner wolf. He is, after all, a wealthy, healthy, white, heterosexual, shaven-headed, 61-year-old Californian who made his name and fortune as a successful investor and podcaster.
But in reality, he is almost the opposite: liberal, left-leaning and surprisingly sensitive. The guy who advises his readers on “how to address the masculinity crisis, build mental strength and raise good sons” has been described as a “progressive Jordan Peterson”, or “Gordon Gekko with a social conscience.”
Galloway is also sufficiently self-aware not to claim he has all the answers. “I don’t think it would be well received for me to say, ‘This is how you become a man,’” he says, speaking from his London home. “What I’m trying to say is, this is where I’ve had some success, and mostly where I screwed up trying to become a man.”
He moved to the UK from Florida three years ago, partly because he and his wife thought it was a better place to raise their two sons, who are now 15 and 18. “Great culture, interesting people, the proximity of the continent is amazing, and the Premier League is just fantastic – there’s nothing like it.” Also: “If you’re talking about assault rifles or bodily autonomy, it’s not even a discussion here.” He still finds the weather challenging, though.
There’s a studio in the basement where Galloway records his popular podcasts: Prof G Pod (business and life wisdom – and he really is a professor, of marketing, at New York University); Raging Moderates (with the liberal Fox News host Jessica Tarlov); and most popular of all, Pivot, with tech journalist Kara Swisher. The two of them are good company, comparing their jetset lifestyles, commenting on tech, politics and current affairs, their easy banter peppered with Galloway’s willfully crude jokes. “We can rib each other,” he says, “because that’s a form of equality and affection.”
When Galloway first started talking about masculinity, he says, people weren’t prepared to listen. “It was like, here’s more misogyny, here’s more men blaming women – the gag reflex was so strong.” This was about four years ago, but all that has now changed. When Notes On Being a Man was released in early November, it raced to the top of the New York Times advice books bestseller list and Galloway has been in demand in the media ever since, giving his take on what’s wrong with men, and what to do about it.
Galloway has plenty of statistics to back up his claim that young men really are in trouble. Drawing on research by writers such as Richard Reeves (author of 2022’s Of Boys and Men) and his NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt (whose recent book The Anxious Generation sounded the alarm on social media), he sketches out a landscape of rising rates of everything from boys’ school suspensions to male unemployment, addictions, loneliness, and failure to complete college. “We’re going to graduate probably two women for every one man from college in the next five years, because men drop out at a greater rate.”
And if men aren’t economically viable, that’s when the problems start, he contends. “They’re just going to have an absence of mating opportunities. And when men don’t have a romantic relationship, they tend to kind of come off the tracks.” He cites statistics that women fare much better without men than vice versa. “Men have a difficult time maintaining friendships without a romantic partner. They tend to reallocate that energy into conspiracy theory, going extremely online, porn – and they never develop the skills to establish a romantic relationship.”
Galloway has been highly vocal about the tech industry and social media’s role in compounding these problems, by giving men easy dopamine hits and fewer reasons to ever leave their bedrooms. As he puts it, “I worry we are literally evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial male.”
Galloway’s analysis can become somewhat Darwinian and reductive – a little bit, “men are this and women are this”, as if there’s a one-size-fits-all set of solutions to these problems – colored by nostalgia for a bygone patriarchal order. Nuances of race or sexuality are barely addressed, as Galloway readily admits: “People say, well, what’s the masculinity code for gay men? And the honest answer is, I have no fucking idea. I’m not even gonna take a swing at it.”
But isn’t it also a bit … Jordan Peterson? Peterson proposed his own cure for “the masculinity crisis” in his bestselling 2018 book 12 Rules for Life, which received as much ridicule as it did praise – rule number one was “stand up straight with your shoulders back.” And we’ve had plenty of masculine self-help books in this mold since. Galloway has a surprising respect for Peterson, not least for broaching this subject before it became fashionable.
“Where we differ is that I find that Jordan basically uses his incredible skills of communication and knowledge of psychology to always reverse-engineer into an incredibly conservative viewpoint that sometimes, in my view, takes women’s rights away. That it basically goes back to this notion of ‘women are happiest when they’re in a supporting role to men’. I just don’t think that’s accurate.”
Galloway is at pains to point out that he’s not blaming women for men’s problems. “I do not think the answer is to in any way economically disadvantage women,” he says. “I’m not trying to repackage violence here and say that women need to lower their standards such that we don’t have a bunch of angry men out there. I think men need to level up. And I think, as a society, we need to implement more programs to level up all young people.”
Given all this, you wonder why he chose to focus just on men. Beyond his book – in his TED Talk last year, for example – Galloway has persuasively argued that the real problems facing all of society, especially in the US, are the transfer of wealth and power from the young to the old, and the commercialization of politics, healthcare and higher education. When it comes down to it, he says, “this is a battle between liberal and illiberal, it’s not a battle between men and women. The genders have done a great job convincing themselves it’s the other gender’s fault. I just don’t think that’s productive.”
Where Peterson and his ilk seek to trace men’s problems back to the erosion of conservative values, Galloway does some reverse-engineering of his own: back to a place of economic, romantic and especially family security. If there’s a moment “when a boy comes off the tracks and develops problems later in life”, he says, “it’s the moment he loses a male role model through death, divorce or abandonment.” The thesis is more personal than his data-driven approach suggests.
Galloway’s own father and mother emigrated from Scotland and England, respectively, and settled in California in the 1960s, but their American Dream did not last. When Galloway was nine, his father walked out and moved in with another woman, leaving his impoverished mother to bring him up alone. Not exactly a role model, then, but his father, Galloway’s grandfather, was even worse, he says – an angry alcoholic. “When my dad was a very young boy, his father used to come home and wake him and beat him.” It’s a low bar, Galloway admits, but at least his own father was an improvement.
Their relationship taught him a lot, he says. One of his biggest breakthroughs was when he realized that he kept a score card around relationships, starting with his dad. Like, “Why am I being such a good son when he wasn’t that good a father?” He says he became much happier when he put the score card away and just focused on being the son he wanted to be – and the husband, partner, friend, co-worker he wanted to be, on his own terms. It’s made him happier and his relationships better, he says. His father died earlier this year. “My dad softened as he got older, and we had a wonderful relationship the last 20, 30 years of his life.”
When Galloway tells his origin story, he does not paint himself as an exceptional talent. He was unremarkable academically and physically, better at scoring weed than picking up women, it seems. He puts his success as much down to luck and structural advantages: good schooling in a prosperous state in a prosperous country, not being subject to racial or gender discrimination, a loving mother, scraping into a good university (the University of California, Los Angeles). “The truth is, I was born on third base.” But having grown up relatively poor, economic security was always his motivation. “I took a very much like, ‘How do you win capitalism?’ approach.”
He was also fortunate to hit his stride as an entrepreneur just as the dotcom boom was beginning, and founded some successful (and some unsuccessful) companies in emerging fields such as e-commerce and digital market research. In 2017 he sold his business intelligence firm L2 for $155m (he estimates his own net worth at about $150m (£117m)).
Now Galloway divides his time equally between writing, investing and media, including his podcasting network. He is happy in London, but is planning to return to the US next year “to make America America again.” In preparation for the 2026 and ’28 elections, he wants to help build an informal, Democrat-friendly podcast network, and is already working with several Democratic candidates. “People hear all these celebrities talking about how they’re going to leave America. I actually think, when your country isn’t doing well, that’s when you’re supposed to go home.”
Whether or not a crisis among men led to the current regime, the men now in power are definitely not the manly paragons Galloway has in mind. “I would argue that what Trump and guys like Elon Musk are doing could not be more anti-masculine,” he says. “They have conflated, or tried to conflate, masculinity with coarseness and cruelty. And it’s not only incorrect, it’s a terrible role model for young men.”
Who are Galloway’s role models? The first two he offers are Muhammad Ali and, more surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher. “I don’t know if it’s fair to call her masculine, but I think that kind of strength …” He’s also an admirer of Keanu Reeves, who “gives a lot of his exceptional compensation to other actors, is super kind, donates time, very humble.”
Is Galloway a good role model? He’s not so sure. “People say, ‘Oh, your kids are so lucky to have you,’ and I get self conscious because there are so many weekends where I’m so wrapped up in my own shit and not spending enough time or attention with my kids. I’m not present enough. So I have huge impostor syndrome around this.”
For all his life lessons, Galloway is not afraid to admit his own fallibility and vulnerability. When his father died earlier this year, for example, he spoke movingly about it and wept on his Pivot show. Crying is good for men, he argues. “For the last 3,000 years, we’ve been taught if you demonstrate weakness – and a way to demonstrate weakness is crying – that some other dude might take your shit, fuck your wife and eat your children. And so men have been taught to not express that weakness. And the good news is, we live in a modern society where people are not going to kill you because you cry, and it just feels really good.”
He didn’t cry between the ages of 29 and 44, he says. Now “I don’t have anything that [holds] me back from crying. And it’s not an attempt to demonstrate my femininity, it’s just an attempt to slow time down.”
Despite his rigorous fitness regime, his access to luxury experiences and cutting-edge healthcare (including regular testosterone injections), and his embrace of a certain amount of hedonism (he likes his cannabis edibles, he happily declares), Galloway is starting to feel his age.
“When you hit about your late 50s, years turn into seasons, seasons turn into months, months into weeks, and it’s like, ‘Fucking A, the end is barreling towards us.’ And one of the tricks I found for slowing it down is if you find something that inspires you and really moves you, stop and feel it, and touch it. I walked in Regent’s Park yesterday, and there’s this rose garden there I’d never seen. I’m not into roses, but I just thought, God, this is so cool. So I just stopped and thought, why do I find this interesting? Who does this? Why do they do it?”
He gets emotional every other day now, he says, “in the context of watching Modern Family, or reading something that moves me, or hearing a friend talk about the struggles with their kids. And I’ve generally found that it informs your own emotions, it makes you feel closer to people, and that, for the most part, people are really receptive to it.” Especially other men. Rather than wanting to take his shit away, he says, “they’re like, Jesus, can I have some of that?”
Maybe this openness to emotion is what really sets Galloway apart from his testosterone-fueled peers. You can model the alpha-male lifestyle and dispense codes and maxims, but it still takes balls to admit it’s good for guys to cry.
LAURA BATES: ‘FOR TEENAGE GIRLS, ESCAPING HARASSMENT, REVENGE PORN AND DEEPFAKE PORN IS IMPOSSIBLE’
She wrote the definitive book on online misogyny – which led to the police installing a panic alarm in her home. Bates explains how the ‘manosphere’ radicalizes boys, how the media feeds the problem – and why she is still hopeful.
“I think this is the biggest generation gap we’ve seen,” says Laura Bates. “It hasn’t happened before, and it might not ever happen again.” Five minutes into a conversation that lasts nearly two hours, Bates is crisply reminding me of one of the key things that define this bit of the 21st century. We have met to talk about misogyny, the online gathering grounds known as the manosphere, and Andrew Tate, the Big Brother contestant turned influencer responsible for webcam pornography businesses and a great splurge of misogynistic rhetoric.
But the conversation also keeps returning to the huge gap between the younger generations, Z and alpha, who have never known anything other than the chaotic, sense-distorting, internet-defined reality of the 21st century; and the parents, politicians and journalists who are still running to keep up.
Older people, she says, tend to be resident in a world where YouTube is reducible to “movie trailers and cat videos” and social media largely means Facebook. Bates is 36, and from the cohort that cut its teeth on MSN Messenger and Myspace, and became immersed in the online world, but was spared the kind of adolescence that would soon be completely dominated by phones, platforms for constant communication, online porn and internet videos. Today’s teenagers, by contrast, know nothing else.
For millions of girls, what that means is now terrifyingly clear: “Just the impossibility of escaping from harassment, revenge pornography, deepfake porn – just a whole bombardment,” Bates says. “I was talking to a 14-year-old girl at a book event the other day. She said 10 boys had messaged her, pressuring her to send them nude pictures, in a single night. That landscape of what teenage girls are navigating is completely new.”
The other key aspect of this new reality was the subject of the brilliant, sobering book that Bates published in 2020: Men Who Hate Women, subtitled The Extremism No One Is Talking About.
Over its 350 pages, Bates introduced her readers to “incels” – “involuntary celibates” – who see their romantic failure and loneliness as a social injustice wrought by all-powerful women, and whose ideas shade into violence (Jake Davison, who murdered five people in the Keyham area of Plymouth in 2021, was obsessed with incel culture). She shone light on the self-styled pickup artists who “portray women as little more than objects whose sole purpose is to provide sexual pleasure to men”. She also explored the cult of Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW: those whose hatred is so deep-seated that they try to live as if women don’t exist.
There was also compelling material about a category summarised by Bates as Men Who Exploit Other Men: grifters and influencers who trade on misogyny and male inadequacy to feed growing cults of personality, online and in the more traditional media. All this, she pointed out, is poured into the lives of boys and young men by the algorithms of online video and social media companies, and clumsy – and often implicitly sympathetic – coverage from conventional journalists and broadcasters.
A small part of this story spectacularly burst into the wider culture last summer, when Tate’s 11bn-plus viewings on TikTok and women-hating pronouncements – claims that women should “bear responsibility” for rape and be men’s property, and such references to violence as “bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck – shut up bitch” – suddenly became a huge news story. Since he was arrested in Romania, where he is being detained on suspicion of rape, organized crime and human trafficking, his infamy has inevitably increased.
The danger, Bates says, is that because so many media gatekeepers know almost nothing of the reality of contemporary online life, a whole world of prejudice, hatred and violence is being reduced to the story of one man.
“If it’s all focused on Andrew Tate rather than the much broader problem,” she says. “If he does end up being jailed or losing his social media access, there’s a real risk of people saying: ‘Brilliant. Problem solved.’”
Bates – who is originally from Taunton, in Somerset, and has an English degree from Cambridge – is so across her brief that there seems to be nothing you can ask her that she has not thought about in great depth. She talks about Tate and the stories that swirl around him with a mixture of caution and weariness. A key problem, as she sees it, is that even well-intentioned coverage of Tate only boosts his profile – and, in the minds of his followers, justifies their sense of persecution and paranoia. (His online admirers believe in an anti-Tate conspiracy orchestrated by something they call “the Matrix”.) As with Donald Trump, this is the nature of the cult he speaks to.
Tellingly, she says she wasn’t aware of Tate until last year. “His name hadn’t come up in school visits I did until it came up in the mainstream media,” she says.
And here is what she sees as the key story: “They’ve provided him with coverage that they never would have provided to a different kind of extremist. The depths in which they’ve gone into his ideology, the replication of his quotes in massive detail in mainstream news platforms … I’ve been asked by journalists to come on TV and do a kind of origin story of Andrew Tate, looking at him as a sort of mystical figure. And mainstream media platforms have put elements of his ideology to me as if they’re facts, and presented them as valid things for debate.”
Can she give me an example? “‘Isn’t it true that he raises really important issues that are affecting men, like the fact that men have fewer economic and career chances than women?’ That simply isn’t true: it’s just not a question that a serious journalist should be asking you. Other forms of conspiracy theories and extremist, prejudiced beliefs just wouldn’t be given that kind of airtime. I just think that because it’s misogyny, there’s a real acceptability, giving him this almost kind of star treatment.”
In that sense, Tate’s arrival in the news is yet another reminder of how much has to change. Tate’s accounts may have been removed by Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, but these internet giants continue to carry huge amounts of the misogyny he represents. As for Prevent, the government’s anti-terrorism program, even after Keyham (and, for that matter, the 2018 Toronto attack in which a self-described incel killed 11 people), it still puts violent misogyny in its “mixed, unclear or unstable” category; a recent official review of Prevent concluded that incel culture should not be a counter-terrorism matter.
And what of schools? Bates has been visiting education settings for eight years, talking about sexism and misogyny in most of its manifestations, and seems to now feel a guarded kind of optimism.
“The schools where I’m really seeing a shift in the atmosphere – and you can really see that if you go back several years in a row – are the ones who are doing the most to tackle things at as many different entry points as they can,” she says. “It’s not just a one-off assembly led by a female teacher. It’s schools where male senior leaders and male teachers are heavily involved in the process, making it clear that it matters to them. And it’s not just siloed into PSHE [personal, social, health and economic education] – it’s being brought into the politics curriculum, into English literature, into drama, into history.”
There is, however, a downside. “You can’t divorce this sort of theoretical stuff from what’s happening day to day in terms of sexual harassment and school dress codes,” she says. “The thing I think is wild about the Andrew Tate conversation is that we’ve just had an Ofsted report that found that 79% of girls said sexual assault was common in their friendship group. But we’re having this separate conversation about online misogyny. Very rarely does anybody ask me about those two things in the same conversation, which is mad. Because they’re so clearly connected.”
What children and young people can and can’t wear to school, she says, threatens to become one of the most insidious, overlooked examples of how seemingly innocuous things open up a path that leads to much more sinister stuff.
“Dress codes are a good example of where cultural norms feed into manosphere extremism,” she says. “We’re seeing schools where girls are being sent out of lessons, or sent home, because of skirt length, because of their shoulders or collarbones or bra strap showing. And in some cases the rhetoric that’s being used around that is about distracting boys or about making male teachers uncomfortable.
“When that happens, although it might not be deliberate, schools are sending the message to kids that, at adolescent or prepubescent age, girls’ bodies are powerful and dangerous in a way that boys’ bodies aren’t; that girls are responsible for covering themselves up to avoid harassment rather than boys being taught to respect women. It just plays into every possible cultural trope that we’ve seen very much in the wake of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa’s murders recently: ‘Women should be avoiding this. Women need to learn to do the right things.’”
In among such backwards steps, she also sees other signs of hope. “It’s true that there is a worrying minority of boys who are really being radicalized into these hardened, misogynistic, extremist ideas,” she says. “But it’s also true that there are boys standing up against this stuff in a way that I’ve never seen before. And their generation is also a generation of girls who are politicized and aware of feminism and advocating and starting campaigns in a way that definitely wasn’t the case 10 or 15 years ago. Almost every school I visit now has got a feminist society or gender equality society. So it’s a mixed picture.”
There is one set of people we haven’t talked about so far. If you’re a parent – particularly of a teenage boy – and you’re increasingly concerned about these great oceans of women-hating material online and how they wash up into everyday life, what should you do?
“Don’t panic. Any parent asking: ‘What can I do?’ is already ahead of the curve; the biggest problem is parents who just aren’t really aware of this at all,” she says. “One of the biggest things is trying to cross that digital culture gap. So have a look at some of the men’s rights pages on Reddit. Sign up for some of the biggest comedy meme accounts on Instagram and see what they’re pumping out. Try typing something innocuous about women on YouTube and then pay attention to the five or six videos that the algorithm serves up to you next. Make a TikTok account, and get a sense of what that world actually is like.”
When it comes to talking, she says, “it has to be little and often; it’s more about opening up channels of communication that are supportive and non-judgmental than trying to shut things down. None of that is going to work in the face of really effective radicalization, which is what’s happening here. It’s about giving them opportunities to ask questions and to feel that you’d like to talk stuff through.”
I have one last question: how is she right now? In Men Who Hate Women, she described endless death and rape threats, repeatedly moving home, and never sharing details of her family and friends. “I’m scared about this book coming out,” she wrote, and by the sound of it, those fears have been realized.
“Yeah, much more so since that book came out. It had a quite dramatic effect in terms of an uptick in the amount of threats that I was receiving – to the degree that the police put a panic alarm in my home, and various security measures that I’m not allowed to talk about publicly. So it really does affect your life and your family and the people that you love in very real ways. And there’s no getting around that.”
The Everyday Sexism project she set up in 2012 to catalogue and collect women’s experiences goes on. Last year saw the publication of her incisive polemic about deep-rooted, institutionalized prejudice, Fix the System Not the Women. She says she’s working on a novel, but there’s no sense of any real let-up in her activism.
Is there a voice in her head that occasionally wants to stop, if only for the sake of her well-being and the prospect of a halfway calm and quiet life?
“Yeah, there definitely is. But there’s a whole number of reasons also for saying no to it.”
She talks about women around the world who are “putting their lives at immediate risk” as they fight the same problems, and teenage girls in this country who write to her every day describing life in the midst of what she talks and writes about. There is also an oblique mention of the people and forces that she and her allies are up against, and the faintest of smiles.
“That’s the bloody-minded part of me,” she says. “I just don’t want to let them win.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/07/laura-bates-for-teenage-girls-escaping-harassment-revenge-porn-and-deepfake-porn-is-impossible
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ARE THE DOGS OF CHERNOBYL EXPERIENCING RAPID EVOLUTION?
For decades, scientists have studied animals living in or near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant to see how increased levels of radiation affect their health, growth, and evolution.
A study analyzed the DNA of 302 feral dogs living near the power plant, compared the animals to others living 10 miles away, and found remarkable differences.
While the study doesn’t prove that radiation is the cause of these differences, the data provides an important first step in analyzing these irradiated populations, and understanding how they compare to dogs living elsewhere.
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in northern Ukraine—then part of the Soviet Union—exploded, sending a massive plume of radiation into the sky. Nearly four decades later, the Chernobyl Power Plant and many parts of the surrounding area remain uninhabited—by humans, at least.
Animals of all kinds have thrived in humanity’s absence. Living among radiation-resistant fauna are thousands of feral dogs, many of whom are descendants of pets left behind in the speedy evacuation of the area so many years ago. As the world’s greatest nuclear disaster approaches its 40th anniversary, biologists are now taking a closer look at the animals located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), which is about the size of Yosemite National Park, and investigating how decades of radiation exposure may have altered animals’ genomes—and even, possibly, sped up evolution.
Scientists from the University of South Carolina and the National Human Genome Research Institute have begun examining the DNA of 302 feral dogs found in or around the CEZ to better understand how radiation may have altered their genomes. Their results were published in the journal Science Advances in 2023.
“Do they have mutations that they’ve acquired that allow them to live and breed successfully in this region?” co-author Elaine Ostrander, a dog genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute, told The New York Times. “What challenges do they face and how have they coped genetically?”
The idea of radiation speeding up natural evolution isn’t a new one. The practice of purposefully irradiating seeds in outer space to induce advantageous mutations, for example, is now a well-worn method for developing crops that are well-suited for a warming world.
Scientists have been analyzing certain animals living within the CEZ for years, including bacteria, rodents, and even birds. One study back in 2016 found that Eastern tree frogs (Hyla orientalis), which are usually a green color, were more commonly black within the CEZ. The biologists theorize that the frogs experienced a beneficial mutation in melanin—pigments responsible for skin color—that helped dissipate and neutralize some of the surrounding radiation.
This made scientists ponder: could something similar be happening to Chernobyl’s wild dogs?
The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City. While this may seem to heavily imply that these dogs have undergone some type of rapid mutation or evolution due to radiation exposure, this study is only a first step in proving that hypothesis.
However, one environmental scientist, speaking with Science News, says that these studies can be tricky business, largely due to the fact that sussing out radiation-induced mutations from other effects, like inbreeding, is incredibly difficult.
And in the time since the original study was published, other researchers have dug into this question and come up with competing results. In fact, a study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population. Published in the journal PLOS One by scientists from North Carolina State University and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, this new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level, and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.
To establish a baseline for comparison, the team compared the genome of Chernobyl City dogs located 10 miles from the CEZ to dogs found in regions of Russia, Poland, and other nearby countries. Once they determined that the populations were genetically similar, they then used the Chernobyl City dogs as a representative control for their study. Of course, the task wasn’t simple, as more than a couple dozen dog generations have past since the original pups that witnessed to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.
“We know that, for example, exposure to high doses of radiation can introduce instability from the chromosomal level on down,” Matthew Breen, senior author of the study from North Carolina State University, said in a press statement. “While this dog population is 30 or more generations removed from the one present during the 1986 disaster, mutations would likely still be detectable if they conferred a survival advantage to those original dogs. But we didn’t find any such evidence in these dogs.”
That said, the 2023 study still provides a template for further investigation into the effects of radiation on larger mammals, as the DNA of dogs roaming the Chernobyl Power Plant and nearby Chernobyl City can be compared to dogs living in non-irradiated areas.
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A THIRD STATE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
Experts found a third state exists between life and death, where cells exhibit unexpected activity even after an organism has died.
Instead of shutting down immediately, some cells continue to function, repair themselves, and even adapt in ways that challenge our understanding of biological consciousness.
In fact, certain cells – when provided with nutrients, oxygen, and bioelectricity – have the capacity to transform into multicellular organisms with new functions after death.
This discovery raises fascinating questions about whether individual cells might possess a form of awareness, independent of the body as a whole.
If cells can persist and respond after death, it could redefine our perception of consciousness at a microscopic level. Some researchers argue that this cellular resilience hints at a deeper, more fundamental form of biological intelligence.
While the idea remains controversial, it opens doors for new insights into medicine, organ transplantation, and even the nature of life itself.
Could this "third state" mean that parts of us remain alive long after we’re gone? The implications are both profound and mysterious, offering a fresh perspective on what it truly means to be alive.
learn more https://www.popularmechanics.com/.../cells-conscious.../
Scientists were diving into a mysterious biological phenomenon known as the "third state," where cells of a deceased organism can adopt new functions after death.
University of Washington biologist Peter Noble and Alex Pozhitkov have detailed this exploration in an article for The Conversation.
Their research highlighted the surprising resilience of xenobots and anthrobots, which can survive beyond the life of their host organism.
"Taken together, these findings demonstrate the inherent plasticity of cellular systems and challenge the idea that cells and organisms can evolve only in predetermined ways," the researchers wrote, Popular Mechanics reported. "The third state suggests that organismal death may play a significant role in how life transforms over time."
The researchers highlighted a study from Tufts University in Massachusetts, where skin cells from deceased frog embryos reorganized into new multicellular organisms called "xenobots."
Popular Mechanics reported that xenobots exhibited new behaviors beyond their biological roles.
The underlying reasons for this phenomenon remained a mystery but a leading hypothesis suggests that specialized channels and pumps in cell membranes act as electrical circuits.
This third state, however, is not an immortal realm; cells typically perish within four to six weeks, ensuring that medicines delivered by these bots do not inadvertently cause harm.
While scientists are only beginning to understand this biological "third state," early findings suggest that life and death are not as clear-cut as once believed.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/scientists-discovered-third-state-between-life-death-new-functions-reality-change-breakthrough-finding-understand-biological-research-cells-organisms-people-living-host-survive
Robin Page:
Three months ago I experienced heart failure and then a stroke. The doctors all told me I should have died. But something strange happened to me! They had removed two blood clots from my heart. My heart was dying from lack of blood. They opened the intake valve to my heart and have held it open with stints. After the surgical procedure I slept for several hours. When I awoke, I honestly felt I had been given a new life! My brain was functioning as clear as though I was a child again. My body was strong and I could breathe better than I had in years. All of the doctors were amazed, as was I. I do think that my cells had somehow healed themselves. I believe that I was in that place between life and death. Ever since this happened I have had an overwhelming need to learn everything I can about science, math and musical vibrations. I am 71 years old and think and learn with a new thirst that isn’t yet fulfilled.
Giselle Da Vinci:
Have you heard of the stories from people who get transplants? Some of them get personality changes. Some have “cellular memory” most evident with heart transplant patients although the topic is still being researched.
[Chinese name]:
Some Parts of the Story Are Well-Supported: Delayed cell death, post-mortem gene expression, and cellular repair mechanisms are real phenomena.
Other Parts Are Speculative: The idea of a distinct "third state," cells forming multicellular organisms after death, and cellular consciousness are much more speculative and controversial.
Research is Ongoing: This is an active area of research, and our understanding is constantly evolving.
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WHY WE HAVE TWO NOSTRILS RATHER THAN ONE BIG HOLE
If you close one eye or put a finger to your ear, there’s an immediate sense of loss. Two eyes help us see the world while two ears enable us to locate sounds. But there’s not the same dramatic sense of loss if you block one nostril. Unlike the eyes or ears, they’re in almost the exact same position on our face. So why don’t we just have a large hole like the mouth? Why do we have two nostrils?
It turns out that each nostril behaves differently to the other nostril throughout the day. This is known as the nasal cycle, and it plays a vital role in our overall health. At a certain point, one nostril takes in air more rapidly. Later the dominant nostril shifts. Throughout the day, which nostril is dominant keeps swapping. This alternating airflow seems to help us breathe and smell more effectively.
How our nostrils take turns breathing
We’re wired to breathe through our nose. Mouth breathing is only really required when we need more air during exercise or respiratory distress, or when the nose is blocked.
Unlike the mouth, the nose does more than just draw air into and out of the lungs. One of its core functions is to prepare the air for the lungs, something the mouth cannot do. The nose filters out dust and pollutants, warms the air to body temperature, and adds the right amount of moisture so that the air is at 100 percent humidity before it gets to the lungs. Without this process, the air would be colder and drier, which irritates and constricts the airways and can lead to inflammation.
Having two nostrils helps the nose cope with this demanding task of preparing air for the lungs. “The fact that we have two nostrils is not unusual, as we have two eyes and two ears,” says Ronald Eccles, an emeritus professor at Cardiff University who founded its Common Cold Center. “What is unusual is that the nostrils alternate airflow from one side to the other. This may allow one side of the nose to rest.”
Studies have shown that at no point do both nostrils draw in the same amount of air. Every few hours one side of the nose is more open and handles most of the airflow while the other processes less air, enabling it to recover moisture.
How each nostril smells differently
Smell is closely linked to breathing. As we breathe, odor molecules enter the nostrils, dissolve into the mucus lining and bind to neurons that send signals to the brain. Thanks to the nasal cycle, air flows into the nostrils at different speeds and so each nostril handles odors differently.
When we breathe, one nostril is more closed than the other and so has a slower rate of airflow. That slower flow of air means that there’s more time for slowly-absorbing chemicals to dissolve into the mucus lining. Experiments suggest that people smell slowly absorbed chemicals more strongly through a resting, or more closed, nostril.
However, the more closed nostril is not as good at detecting quickly-dissolving odor chemicals. Meanwhile, the more open nostril’s faster airflow means that quickly-dissolving chemicals can reach more of the smell-detecting tissue in your nose and send more signals to the brain. So basically each nostril smells slightly differently.
“It’s not one blunt odor that’s hitting you,” says Thomas Hummel, the head of the Interdisciplinary Center for Smell and Taste at Dresden University of Technology.
“You perceive chemicals differently because they are absorbing differently.” This usually happens without our conscious awareness. The alternating airflow ensures that each nostril gives the brain different inputs. The brain then combines these inputs together to get more information and a richer sense of smell.
Two nostrils improve our ability to locate smell
The distance between our two nostrils is not as large as the distance between the eyes or ears. But having two nostrils can still help us locate smells. “The brain is good at using even small inputs,” says Matthew Grubb, a professor of neuroscience at King’s College London, who focuses on the olfactory system. “There’s pretty good evidence that one of the things nervous systems can do is to use information from the two nostrils to figure out where a smell is coming from.”
In one experiment, scientists asked blindfolded participants to sniff out a 33-foot chocolate trail through grass. Participants wore a device that fits onto the nose and mixed odors from the outside world so that there was no difference in what each nostril smells. This made participants slower and less accurate at locating and tracking the chocolate scent than when they didn’t wear the device.
Two nostrils might give us an advantage against colds
Two nostrils could even bring other benefits besides breathing and smell: They may help us fight viral infections. When you have a cold, one nostril is a lot more congested while the other manages most of the breathing. Having a severely blocked nostril causes the temperature of the nasal passage to increase. This may repel cold viruses since viruses don’t reproduce well at high temperatures.
Having two nostrils is far from redundant. We might not notice the nasal cycle, but it’s still a key part of the way the nose functions. The nostrils work together to enhance the way we breathe and smell. So next time you take a deep breath or smell a delicious pie, don’t take your two nostrils for granted.
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-we-have-nostrils/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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A woman doesn't need to say very much. It's enough that she looks at you long enough." ~ Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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HOW TO CUT DOWN THE CHANCES OF RESPIRATORY ILLNESS THIS WINTER
I’m sure Thanksgiving holiday travel has spread all sorts of illness. Meanwhile, the appearance of a new flu variant and lagging vaccination rates will probably contribute to a severe flu season, much like last year or even worse.
What should you and I do? I turned to CNN wellness expert Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and clinical associate professor at George Washington University. She previously was Baltimore’s health commissioner.
I know she can’t guarantee good health all winter, but I bet she can help to reduce the odds of getting sick, navigate the illness once it does happen (because you most likely will fall ill sometime this winter), and decide when it’s time to get medical treatment. And bless you, if you just sneezed.
CNN: Do we really fall ill more frequently in winter, or is it just all this travel?
Dr. Leana Wen: We do see more respiratory infections in the winter months. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consistently shows that illnesses such as respiratory syncytial virus, influenza and many viruses that cause the common cold surge between late fall and early spring. Covid-19 cases also have tended to rise during this period.
There are several reasons for this seasonal pattern. First, colder weather means people are spending more time indoors and nearer one another. Windows are closed, ventilation is reduced, and people gather at school, at work and during holidays. That all creates ideal conditions for viruses to spread.
Second, dry air helps respiratory viruses survive longer in the environment. Studies have shown that some virus particles remain airborne longer and stay infectious longer when humidity is low, which is common in winter months.
Travel adds another important layer. Airports, planes, buses and family gatherings bring together large numbers of people from different places. If viruses are circulating, travel and holidays can accelerate transmission, especially when people go from event to event without knowing that they are contagious. So yes, travel affects spread, but it is working on top of winter conditions that already favor viruses.
CNN: How do I reduce my chances of getting sick?
Wen: There is no guaranteed way to avoid illness entirely, but some steps can lower your risk. Vaccination is one of the most effective tools to reduce severe illness. Getting the flu vaccine, the updated Covid vaccine and the RSV vaccine for eligible individuals helps to reduce the risk of hospitalization and severe complications.
Hand hygiene is also key. It’s good practice to wash hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using shared public spaces, after coughing or sneezing, and before eating. Handwashing helps prevent the transfer of viruses from surfaces to your mouth, nose or eyes. When soap and water are not available, alcohol-based sanitizer is a reasonable backup.
If you are in crowded spaces, especially indoors or around people who are coughing or sneezing, a well-fitting N95 or equivalent mask can add a layer of protection. This step is especially important for people at higher risk, including those over 65, people with chronic illnesses such as diabetes or lung disease, or those with a weakened immune system. If you’re sick, masking can help reduce the odds that your loved ones will get sick.
Ventilation can help, too. Opening windows when possible, improving airflow with fans or using a portable HEPA, or high-efficiency particulate air, filter can dilute airborne viruses. These strategies are especially useful when hosting gatherings inside. If weather permits, outdoor gatherings also substantially reduce infection risk.
Finally, if you are sick, stay home. Reschedule that holiday meal or exchange gifts another day. One of the most important ways to reduce spread is for people to avoid exposing others while contagious.
CNN: What do I do if I am sick? Should I get tested?
Wen: Most respiratory infections can be safely managed at home. Rest and drink plenty of fluids, especially if you have fever or congestion, because dehydration can worsen symptoms like headache and fatigue.
Testing can be helpful in certain cases. People eligible to receive antiviral medications if they have Covid-19 or influenza should test as soon as they have symptoms since it can be helpful to know what’s making you sick in case you need to get treatment. Flu and Covid tests, individually and in combination, are widely available over the counter and should be used by those who are medically vulnerable or living with those who are.
CNN: What if I have a fever?
Wen: Medications such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen can reduce fever and provide relief for symptoms such as headache and fatigue. Here again, hydration is essential. Fever causes the body to lose more fluid than usual, which can lead to dehydration. Drink plenty of water, broth or electrolyte drinks.
For babies younger than 3 months, fever should be evaluated by a clinician. You should call the pediatrician right away if a young baby develops a fever greater than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Parents of children 3 months or older and up to 2 years old should call the child’s physician if they have a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit or greater, or if they have had a fever for more than 24 hours without an obvious cause.
CNN: What about for older kids and adults? When should they head to the doctor?
Wen: Seek medical care if symptoms last more than a week without improvement. Also, if you start getting better and then suddenly worsen again, it could be a sign that you have a secondary infection, such as a bacterial infection, that needs to be treated. People with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease or weakened immune systems should reach out sooner because they are more prone to complications.
Other reasons to contact a health care clinician include trouble catching your breath, persistent wheezing, severe headaches, one-sided ear pain, sinus pain lasting more than a few days or dehydration. And if you are eligible for antiviral treatment, you should also reach out to your doctor as antiviral medications are most effective if prescribed early in the course of illness.
CNN: When should I go to the emergency room?
Wen: Emergency care is necessary when symptoms suggest a serious complication or when breathing is affected. Warning signs include difficulty breathing, chest pain, confusion, severe dehydration, inability to stay awake, bluish discoloration of the lips or face, or symptoms that rapidly worsen.
For infants, additional red flags include difficulty feeding, fewer wet diapers, fast or labored breathing or unusual sleepiness. If you are unsure but concerned about someone’s breathing or alertness, it is best to seek emergency care right away.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/virus-flu-family-covid-wellness
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YOUR BEST DEFENSE AGAINST LEAD IN YOUR FOOD
Exposure to the substance has been linked to a wide range of health impacts, including developmental problems, nervous system damage and hearing problems in children; and high blood pressure, joint pain and reproductive problems in adults.
At the same time, reports continue to document high levels of lead in food products such as applesauce, cinnamon powder, protein powder and chocolate. This year, the US Food and Drug Administration established new guidance on limits of lead content in baby food.
It makes sense to ask: Why would there be lead in your diet at all?
How lead gets into food
Lead is a naturally occurring metal found in our planet, and it has been used in products such as gasoline, paint, plumbing, cosmetics, ceramics and batteries, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Science.
Some plants are more prone to absorbing the lead in the soil and storing them in their own tissue, he added. If crops are grown in areas with higher levels of lead in the environment, they may contain more of the metal.
But not all the lead sources in the environment are natural, Zagorski said. Human activities such as smelting frequently lead to lead contamination, and there have been pesticides that contained lead, he added.
Use of leaded gasoline can also lead to contamination of plants through the air, said Dr. Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist for the Environmental Working Group. Lead has been phased out of gasoline for cars, but is still used in some fuel types.
Contamination also can occur through someone adding lead to food, as appeared to be the case in 2023 with some applesauce pouches. But that is not usually the case.
Closer to zero
Because the heavy metal is found in the environment, people are unlikely to reach a point of zero lead exposure in our food or anywhere. However, lead – even in small doses – can have health impacts, Stoiber said.
For children, the concern is particularly great because their smaller bodies and metabolisms put them at a greater vulnerability for harms caused by exposure, according to the FDA.
The federal agency has been working to reduce dietary exposure to contaminants for children to as close to zero as possible. And no safe level of exposure to lead has been identified, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, the FDA does use a benchmark of 2.2 micrograms per day of dietary lead exposure for children and 8.8 micrograms per day for women of childbearing age. Experts use those numbers to evaluate when an exposure is potentially a concern and a product needs to be alerted.
Your best defense against lead
The guidelines on dietary lead exposure are hard to translate into practical use at home, and you likely won’t know exactly how much is in the food you are eating, Stoiber said.
She recommends looking into brands that regularly test their food products for lead levels. And your best defense against lead –– and any other toxin –– is a diverse, nutritionally dense diet, Zagorski said.
Eating a variety of foods can help in two ways. First, it reduces the likelihood that you are eating too much of one food that may be more likely to contain lead.
For example, earlier this year a report found lead in protein powders. Occasional use of those protein powders isn’t as concerning as a person making protein shakes three times a day.
“Protein powder is intended to be a supplement and not a diet,” Zagorski said.
Second, a nutrient-dense and varied diet also can help with your body’s natural defenses against unwanted elements, he added. Your body prefers absorbing iron over lead — so if you have enough iron in your diet, your digestive system is more likely to let the lead pass through, he said.
“The dose makes the poison,” Zagorski said. “Your body is very good at taking care of itself and getting rid of toxins, so (make) sure that we are giving it the tools it needs and not overconsuming one thing.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/25/health/lead-in-food-wellness
~ Adequate iron, calcium, and Vitamin C can help block lead absorption. ~
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THE BLACK FUNGUS FROM CHERNOBYL THAT MAY FEED OFF RADIATION
Mold found at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster appears to be feeding off the radiation. Could we use it to shield space travelers from cosmic rays?
In May 1997, Nelli Zhdanova entered one of the most radioactive places on Earth – the abandoned ruins of Chernobyl's exploded nuclear power plant – and saw that she wasn't alone.
Across the ceiling, walls and inside metal conduits that protect electrical cables, black mold had taken up residence in a place that was once thought to be detrimental to life.
In the fields and forest outside, wolves and wild boar had rebounded in the absence of humans. But even today there are hotspots where staggering levels of radiation can be found due to material thrown out from the reactor when it exploded.
The mold – formed from a number of different fungi – seemed to be doing something remarkable. It hadn't just moved in because workers at the plant had left. Instead, Zhdanova had found in previous surveys of soil around Chernobyl that the fungi were actually growing towards the radioactive particles that littered the area. Now, she found that they had reached into the original source of the radiation, the rooms within the exploded reactor building.
With each survey taking her close to harmful radiation, Zhdanova's work has also overturned our ideas about how radiation impacts life on Earth. Now her discovery offers hope of cleaning up radioactive sites and even provide ways of protecting astronauts from harmful radiation as they travel into space.
Eleven years before Zhdanova's visit, a routine safety test of reactor four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had quickly turned into the world's worst nuclear accident. A series of errors both in the design of the reactor and its operation led to a huge explosion in the early hours of 26 April 1986. The result was a single, massive release of radionuclides. Radioactive iodine was a leading cause of death in the first days and weeks, and, later, of cancer.
In an attempt to reduce the risk of radiation poisoning and long-term health complications, a 30km (19 mile) exclusion zone – also known as the "u7nhy7" to keep people at a distance from the worst of the radioactive remains of reactor four.
But while humans were kept away, Zhdanova's black mold had slowly colonized the area.
Ionizing radiation may have led tree frogs inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone to have darker skin (left) than those outside it (right)
Like plants reaching for sunlight, Zhdanova's research indicated that the fungal hyphae of the black mold seemed attracted to ionizing radiation. But "radiotropism", as Zhdanova called it, was a paradox: ionizing radiation is generally far more powerful than sunlight, a barrage of radioactive particles that shreds through DNA and proteins like bullets puncture flesh. The damage it causes can trigger harmful mutations, destroy cells and kill organisms.
Along with the apparently radiotropic fungi, Zhdanova's surveys found 36 other species of ordinary, but distantly related, fungi growing around Chernobyl. Over the next two decades, her pioneering work on the radiotropic fungi she identified would reach far outside of Ukraine. It would add to knowledge of a potentially new foundation of life on Earth – one that thrives on radiation rather than sunlight. And it would lead scientists at Nasa to consider surrounding their astronauts in walls of fungi for a durable form of life support.
At the center of this story is a pigment found widely in life on Earth: melanin. This molecule, which can range from black to reddish brown, is what leads to different skin and hair colors in people. But it is also the reason why the various species of mold growing in Chernobyl were black. Their cell walls were packed with melanin.
Just as darker skin protects our cells from ultraviolet (UV) radiation, Zhdanova suspected that the melanin of these fungi was acting as a shield against ionizing radiation.
Just as those black molds colonized an abandoned world at Chernobyl, perhaps they could one day protect our first steps on new worlds elsewhere in the Solar System
It wasn't just fungi that were harnessing melanin's protective properties. In the ponds around Chernobyl, frogs with higher concentrations of melanin in their cells, and so darker in color, were better able to survive and reproduce, slowly turning the local population living there black.
In warfare, a shield might protect a soldier from an arrow by deflecting the projectile away from their body. But melanin doesn't work like this. It isn't a hard or smooth surface. The radiation – whether UV or radioactive particles – is swallowed by its disordered structure, its energy dissipated rather than deflected. Melanin is also an antioxidant, a molecule that can turn the reactive ions that radiation produces in biological matter and return them to a stable state.
In 2007, Ekaterina Dadachova, a nuclear scientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, added to Zhdanova's work on Chernobyl's fungi, revealing that their growth wasn't just directional (radiotropic) but actually increased in the presence of radiation. Melanized fungi, just like those inside Chernobyl's reactor, grew 10% faster in the presence of radioactive cesium compared to the same fungi cultured without radiation, she found. Dadachova and her team also found that the melanized fungi that were irradiated appeared to be using the energy to help drive its metabolism. In other words, they were using it to grow.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251125-the-mysterious-black-fungus-from-chernobyl-that-appears-to-eat-radiation
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TERMINAL LUCIDITY
Some take these episodes to prove that we are more than our material bodies.
These episodes may just reveal how little we understand the brain.
The political scientist Charles Murray, best known for The Bell Curve and other fiercely debated works on human intelligence, has taken up a more metaphysical interest: the existence of the soul. In a Wall Street Journal essay, Murray declares that materialism—the idea that the mind is nothing but brain processes—is collapsing under the weight of new scientific evidence. His chief example is the phenomenon of terminal lucidity: startling episodes in which people suffering from severe dementia or brain damage suddenly regain coherent consciousness, memory, and personality, just before death.
As a philosopher who specializes in the mind–body problem, I agree that materialism is less plausible than many suppose, and that its traditional rival, mind-body dualism, should be taken seriously. So, I welcome Murray’s willingness to reopen the question. But I do not find the evidence he gives persuasive.
Terminal Lucidity vs. Materialism
Terminal lucidity is a fascinating and understudied topic. A woman suffering from Alzheimer's has not talked or responded to family members for several years. One day, out of the blue, she starts talking coherently: She recognizes her granddaughter, asks about her family, offers advice. Shortly afterwards, she dies.
Many such cases have been reported. The spell of lucidity tends to be brief, and the patient usually dies within a week, often on the same day. The phenomenon is real, even if there has been little scientific research into it.
How does this challenge materialism? Murray’s contention is that if materialism is true, then there must be some neurological explanation for terminal lucidity, and that no such explanation can be given. He writes:
A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.
Murray proposes another explanation: Terminal lucidity is evidence of the human soul. Can this be true?
The Brain Is a Mystery
Here is the first problem with Murray’s view. We have a very thorough understanding of how the heart operates and why, without its pumping, the circulation of blood would be very hard to explain. By contrast, we have only a very limited understanding of how the brain operates.
It is true that neuroscientists have built a body of knowledge about the brain that is, in one sense, very large. It would take many lifetimes to master it in detail. However, that enormous body of knowledge only represents a minuscule fraction of how much there is to learn. The brain is, to repeat a platitude, very complex, and we can know a lot about it even while remaining ignorant of a great deal more.
Murray appears to overestimate how far neuroscience has advanced. He states that “the brain has been mapped for years.” In fact, scientists have only lately produced a detailed map of a fruit fly's brain. We are a very long way from doing the same for humans. (The fruit fly brain contains 140,000 neurons; the human brain has 86 billion. The difference in number between the neurons in a fruit fly brain and a human’s is therefore approximately 86 billion.)
Our limited understanding of the brain is a problem for anyone who wants to use neuroscience to argue in favor of materialism. But it also undercuts Murray's case against materialism. If "some so-far-unknown capability of the brain" is needed to explain terminal lucidity, then such a capability may well be there just waiting to be discovered.
Can Neuroscience Explain Terminal Lucidity?
The other problem with Murray's reasoning is that it is not true that neuroscience lacks the resources for a plausible explanation of terminal lucidity.
Murray’s claim that terminal lucidity refutes materialism rests on a questionable presupposition. It assumes that, on a materialist explanation, dementia and brain damage must operate by permanently destroying the neural structures responsible for memory, personality, and coherent thought.
If that were the only materialist perspective available, then the return of lucidity would indeed seem to suggest some immaterial factor. But it is plausible that dementia involves not the annihilation of the relevant neural structures but their disruption. The circuits underlying clear thought and memory may still exist but be kept from their normal function.
The problem might lie in depleted neurotransmitters—the chemicals that carry signals from one neuron to another—or dulled sensitivity of neurons to those chemicals, or the pathological overactivity of inhibitory neurons that dampen communication across relevant regions of the brain. Such conditions would suppress lucidity without erasing its physical basis.
On that picture, the striking clarity that sometimes appears near death need not be supernatural. It may arise from the dying process itself: A shift in neurochemistry, the exhaustion of overactive inhibitory cells, or a surge of electrical activity may cause long-dormant circuits of memory and personality to spark back to life, offering a final glimpse of the person as they once were.
We already know that even severely damaged brains can regain function under certain conditions. Similar “paradoxical lucidity” has been observed in patients with severe brain injury after the administration of drugs such as zolpidem. There is nothing implausible about the idea that the drastic changes that occur at the point of death could have a similar effect.
None of this should be read as dismissing the mystery of terminal lucidity, or the comfort that it often brings. The dying mind is among the least understood phenomena in nature. Whatever the explanation, the chance to exchange a final goodbye is a rare and moving gift.
It may be that terminal lucidity will eventually prove beyond neuroscientific explanation. For my part, I think that scientists have been much too quick to dismiss the possibility that consciousness might involve some nonphysical aspect of reality. But terminal lucidity does not establish that conclusion.
For now, I am unpersuaded that terminal lucidity is the evidence that overturns materialism. It is, rather, a reminder of how mysterious the brain is, and of how cautious we should be when looking for metaphysical answers in scientific data.
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ending on beauty: (or maybe not really beauty, but the right timing)
THE OLD SOLDIER
He thought about that last winter of the war. The Ardennes. So long ago now, but still he could feel that snow and that wind and that darkness. It was the winter that would not end. The shivering that would not stop.
He never thought that men could die that way. Some died shivering and some died not shivering, slipping into their frozen selves like children falling asleep anywhere they could.
He remembered his pal Frank Miller. They had been together since boot camp in '43 in South Carolina.
Frank was a joker and he was joking about the cold that night, joking how it wasn’t as bad as one time he remembered in Alaska, and then his eyes closed and his lips stopped moving, everything was still about him, and he never finished the joke.
Maybe that was the punchline. To die in the middle of the punchline.
~ John Guzlowski
