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EURYDICE IN PALM DESERT
in a mist of promises, dissolving
And I loved that veil of waiting –
that lesson in perspective,
peering into the vanishing point.
The stations of Eros and roses,
hands waving hello, goodbye –
warning whistles, embraces breaking off –
and underneath, the humid heart,
its weather on the verge of
love and tears.
Now I stand rainless and trainless.
Memory, mother of the muses,
tell me this is luck: I will not be
swept away by a flood.
Unswept, unwept,
exposed on this plateau of light,
let me borrow
for a moment, for a breath,
the bride’s bouquet of fog.
~ Oriana
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SUSAN SONTAG: AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
Back cover of the dust jacket for Sontag's 1966 book "Against Interpretation"
In the late 1960s, very few critics penetrated American middle-class homes like mine – maybe Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Lionel Trilling, one or two others, but Susan Sontag managed to be among them.
Through a forceful combination of intellect and style, her books found a way into suburban dens where young rebels were in hiding, longing for an artistic culture that might somehow match the political upheaval of the time. Like other restless kids born in the Eisenhower years, I first encountered Sontag through her photograph on “Against Interpretation” (1966), showing a striking woman with short hair swept aside and intense gaze directed elsewhere (it was taken by her friend Peter Hujar). So this, I thought, is what a New York intellectual looks like.
Austere like her prose and engaged like her subjects, Sontag was my first inkling of avant-garde culture, my initial point of access to an edgy alternative to the Anglophonic modernism — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce — that represented high literature. Her European protagonists — Lukács, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Artaud, Weil, Sarraute, Pavese, Cioran, Ionesco, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Bergman — were exotic to me, and the notion that philosophers, writers, and filmmakers could be political was even more so.
I didn’t understand the many differences among these figures, but I sensed a shared posture, one that pointed to a way around the given terms of American culture, mass versus elite, and American politics, liberal versus conservative. I, too, wanted to be against. If Sontag could cross over to my living room, maybe I could cross over to her New York downtown (which even then I took to be the name of an elective affinity as much as an actual place), and I was hardly alone in wanting to do so.
It was her combination of lucidity and ambition that made Sontag so attractive; hers was a “style of radical will,” and we didn’t understand then that her emphasis on style might also be her limitation. Certainly, it prepared her critical success, which left Sontag, like other prominent women of her generation, somewhat unmoved by feminist critiques: smart and “serious” (her preferred term of approval) knew no gender for her.
As is often remarked, Sontag was a popularizer, but only in part, and if she invented terms that later became clichés, isn’t that what significant critics often do? (Two phrases that qualify in this respect are her plea for “an erotics of art” and her definition of camp as dandyism “in the age of mass culture.”)
A more fitting appellation for Sontag is guide, which she was from beginning to end. Again, she introduced many of us to the figures discussed in “Against Interpretation” and “Styles of Radical Will” (1969), and later she insisted that her New Yorker readers should at least be acquainted with authors like W. G. Sebald and Alexander Kluge.
However, by the time of “On Photography” (1977), “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1980), we had gained on her. We had read the same authors, often differently, studied others, and worked alternative lines of thought: the Frankfurt School, the different Marxisms of Althusser and Debord, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, deconstruction, discourse analysis, reception theory, and cultural studies. And we had received our reports from other sources as well — journals like New Left Review, New German Critique, October, and Screen — not from venues like her Commentary, Partisan Review, and the New York Review of Books, which remained mostly indifferent if not hostile to such critical work.
Yet this flourishing of theory also made us more sectarian than Sontag was. From first to last, she was a committed generalist, a “master synthesist,” as the New York Times obituary put it. Although she was “against interpretation” in principle, Sontag was always for it in this sense: She believed deeply in her mission to report to interested laypeople about difficult avant-gardes. Today, both sides of this relationship are less clear than they were then, and this difference makes the time of her rise appear distant. But then that very distance might challenge us to renew the vocation of mediator that she served for so long.
Sontag worked to bridge that gap on her own terms. At the same time, in “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) and “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965), the two texts that made her name, she insisted that other notorious divides — between avant-garde and kitsch and between high and low culture — had narrowed. It wasn’t easy to explain such matters, and sometimes Sontag showed the strain. Some of her arguments are more declared than demonstrated, with an authority claimed through assertion, though this is true of other commentary as well. (Clement Greenberg was expert at this apodictic sort of address, and many critics in the 1960s and ’70s followed suit.) Here, chosen more or less at random, are the first lines of a few essays from “Against Interpretation” and “Styles of Radical Will”:
“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory.”
“Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness.”
“A new mode of didacticism has conquered the arts, is indeed the ‘modern’ element in art.”
“Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself.”
“Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing.”
These are large claims, and sometimes they float away or pop like balloons. But in a way, that is what they are — trial balloons — and, often enough, they brought back accurate readings of the weather of the time.
Another vaunted term in the Sontag lexicon is “position.” The rush to position, which sometimes seems endemic to criticism, can end up as a posture unless it’s politically grounded. This isn’t to question her commitment to certain causes, which was evidenced by her controversial trips to Hanoi during the Vietnam War and Sarajevo during the Bosnian War; her consistent support of oppressed writers through PEN; and her courageous statements about AIDS, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib. But it is to query how much of it transformed her own production, which was the crucial test for at least one of her favorites, Walter Benjamin.
A common charge is that her seriousness was a matter of aesthetics or ethics more than politics, precisely a style of radical will. And her most engaged piece, “Trip to Hanoi” (1968), is about her own consciousness more than Vietnam, which becomes the scene of a personal disorientation, even though Sontag is also torturously aware of the Orientalism at play in her text.
Sometimes she turned the treatment of a problem, political or aesthetic, into an explanation of herself. Moreover, some of her essays on fellow critics contain worries that sound autobiographical: Am I, like Cioran, not original enough? Like Benjamin, too saturnine? Like Barthes, too seduced by sensibility? In “Remembering Barthes,” her moving homage to the great French critic on his death in 1980, Sontag touches on his “self-absorption” and comments that “his interest in you tended to be your interest in him.” One can’t help but wonder the same about her.
But then “self-absorption” was central to her work, to its interest, even to its strength. Her essential method was to replay her thoughts while reading, to dramatize her struggle toward interpretation, and sometimes her shifts in perspective did lead Sontag to rethink and to write again. She could turn her political ambivalence into critical insight (at least since Baudelaire, many important critics, especially when caught between class identifications, have done as much), and so Sontag made good on what Adorno (a critic she didn’t much engage) once called “a flagrant contradiction” — that “the cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent.”
Beyond critical insight, however, Sontag attempted to push her ambivalence into “passionate partiality,” as she wrote (echoing Baudelaire on criticism) in her preface to “Against Interpretation.” As she also implies there, criticism remained a literary offshoot for her, and sometimes her writing suggests an updated version of the Bildungsroman.
This self-absorption could be excessive (when her book of short stories “I, Etcetera” came out in 1978, one heard the plea “less I, more others”), and sometimes Sontag advanced it in default of other grounds on which to work, as she does here in her 1967 essay on Cioran: “The time of new collective visions may well be over. . . . But the need for individual spiritual counsel has never seemed more acute. Sauve qui peut.” No collective vision, everyone for himself, in 1967?
For these reasons, I balked when the New York Times obituary claimed that Sontag made “a radical break” with the postwar criticism of New York intellectuals, especially those around Partisan Review. Early on, her fondest dream was to write for that journal. Like most of its contributors, she occupied a cosmopolitan territory associated with the academy but not restricted to it (no university presses for her), and she made a living as an independent critic — not easy then and almost impossible now.
More important, though she might challenge particular judgments of Partisan Review writers, her language of evaluation was largely consistent with theirs. Against interpretation, Sontag remained an interpreter; dismissive of the opposition of form and content, she didn’t deconstruct it but valued style where they had valued “substance.” And her other central terms are all old-school: “condition,” “sensibility,” “temperament,” “taste.”
“Taste,” she states in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response.” For good or bad, no one who has passed through Adorno, Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, or Foucault, let alone Bourdieu, could easily write such a sentence. However opposed in principle to “the Matthew Arnold apparatus,” Sontag also argued for “the best that has been thought and known” in culture, as well as for a necessary connection between the aesthetic and the moral — and what could be more Arnoldian than her “seriousness”?
Certainly, her embrace of popular culture irritated some New York intellectuals, for it seemed to undercut their faith in modernism as high culture. Hence, in part, their enormous resentment of the counterculture of the 1960s, which also derided this belief, and their marked shift from liberalism to neoconservatism over that period. Yet for Sontag, the embrace of popular culture was a testing of high/low divides, a testing that was avant-gardist, not populist. Seriousness was always the criterion, even when it was mocked, as in camp; and sophistication was still the goal, even when it concerned the products of entertainment.
Strong signs of her good standing as a New York intellectual (perhaps Sontag was the last of the kind) were the encomia delivered by the New York Times on her death in December 2004 (no less than four articles), in stark contrast, say, to the smear given to Derrida when he died three months before her. Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed her “the preeminent intellectual of our time,” a valuation that depends, of course, on the definition of “intellectual,” let alone of “our time.” The preeminent critic? On this score, she was overshadowed by Barthes, to name just one. The preeminent theorist? That’s not her category.
One test of intellectual preeminence is whether young critics continue to engage the work, and Sontag isn’t high on reading lists today. Perhaps she’s too New York or “American,” neither “French” nor systematic enough in her thought, nor “German” or philosophical enough, nor “British” or social-historical enough. She didn’t participate in the great rereadings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which did in fact produce a “radical break with traditional postwar criticism.” She also didn’t write much about the great adventures of the sign, the psyche, and sexuality that were so formative to “the preeminent intellectuals of our time.” Nor was identity her thing. Perhaps the strength of her work — the focus on European avant-gardes — now appears as its restriction, but she’s not alone there.
In every cultural interregnum, there are a few figures on whom old and new generations can agree. Mahler was one such composer in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Sontag was one such critic in the latter decades of the last century, indulged by old New York intellectuals as a willful prodigy, yet valued by post-1968 intellectuals as a countercultural voice.
As such, she also served as a buffer between the two generations, and she was celebrated in part for this compromise position. In this light, Sontag was less a new model of the intellectual than a transitional figure between the critic and the theorist: between the critic, liberal in culture and politics, with one foot in (memories of) the Old Left and one foot in the studio, and the theorist, radical at least in philosophy, with one foot in (memories of) the New Left and one foot in the academy.
Oriana:
I met Susan Sontag when I was in college. Being in the presence of her intelligence was sheer joy. She knew how to charm the audience and make ideas come alive. She was full of joy and not at all aloof, a useful antidote to stereotypes of an "elite intellectual." She had warmth; she had charm; she had a genuine interest in how people live and what they think.
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ANCIENT GREEK FUNERARY INSCRIPTIONS
Some ancient Greek epitaphs collected and translated in the book “Cut these words into my stone” by Michael Wolfe:
“This patch of soil in Asia holds Philip’s son, Amyntor, A soldier made tough by iron war. No painful sickness dragged him down in the house of darkness. He died holding his shield over a friend.”
“If you join the dead and drink from the Lethe (oblivion) spring that makes men forget, please don’t drink the drop that makes you forget me. ”
“Now you lie face up beneath the stars, my star, if only I were the night sky, I would gaze on you with many eyes.”
“Now, my old friend, you lie somewhere, turned years ago into dust. Yet your verse lives on. And the God of Death will never touch it”.
“Here Philip, a father, laid down his highest hope, a twelve year old son, Nicoteles.”
This one is dedicated to a toddler: “Before you row death’s ship though the reeds of Hades, steady the ladder. Reach out the hand to the son of Cinyras, help him aboard. He is too young to walk well in sandals and frightened to touch the sand with his bare feet.”
One dedicated to a dog: “If you notice this tomb at all as you pass, don’t smirk because it holds just a dog, someone cried for me, my master’s hands heaped up the dirt, then cut these words on my stone.”
A humorous one: “My name is Dionysius. I was sixty. I never married. If only my father had not either”
And a Roman one for a 6 year old girl: “…O, Earth, please, don’t put a weight on her, since she never been a weight on you.”
The skull of a 7 year old girl found wearing a ceramic flower wreath (300 BC); Archaeological Museum of Patras
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Revenge is an act designed to inflict harm on someone because they’ve inflicted harm on us. We could yearn for anything after we’ve been mistreated, like a scoop of ice cream, a nap, or a relaxing massage. But what most of us really want is the other person’s pain—and for them to know that their pain is because of the pain they’ve caused us.
The desire for revenge is the root motivation for almost all forms of human violence. From childhood bullying to intimate partner violence, urban violence, police brutality, mass shootings, violent extremism, genocide, and even war, perpetrators of violence almost always believe they’re victims seeking justice.
Recent neuroscience discoveries reveal a chilling picture: Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. Brain imaging studies show that grievances—real or imagined perceptions of injustice, disrespect, betrayal, shame, or victimization—activate the “pain network,” specifically the anterior insula. The brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure. Pleasure can come from many things, but humans have evolved to feel intense pleasure from hurting the people who hurt us, or their proxies.
Over the past two decades, more than 60 neuroscientists at universities around the world have conducted brain scan studies demonstrating that when you’ve been wronged and begin to think about retaliating, the brain’s pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction awakens. The nucleus accumbens, associated with craving, and the dorsal striatum, associated with habit formation, spool up just as they do when drug addicts experience stress or see a place they connect with getting high.
Dopamine levels appear to surge and crash, producing the familiar sensation of craving. But unlike other addictions, to gratify revenge cravings, you’ve got to hurt the people who hurt you (or, again, their proxies). And when you do, you experience pleasure … for a while. But then, as with other addictions, the pain returns with a vengeance, leaving you feeling worse but wanting more. It may also expose you to the other person’s revenge cravings to hurt you—and leave a trail of wounded people in your wake.
Wanting revenge when you’ve been wronged is natural and is believed to have evolved as an adaptive strategy. But in modern societies, people often seek revenge for injuries like wounded egos that have little to do with survival or procreation. And if the prefrontal cortex—the area of your brain responsible for executive function and self-control—is hijacked or inhibited, then you might seek revenge for pleasure despite the negative consequences to yourself or others, like the destruction of families, careers, and other valuable relationships, and the perpetration of psychological and physical violence. That’s the common definition of addiction: the inability to resist powerful urges despite the negative consequences.
What does this compulsion look like throughout human history? In ancient times, Roman emperors staged public revenge spectacles in arenas and coliseums, feeding those who offended them or the state to wild beasts, forcing them to fight each other to the death as gladiators, and crucifying, incinerating, beheading, and scourging them for the pleasure of the cheering elite. During the Inquisition and witch hunts of the Middle Ages, aggrieved Christian leaders staged public revenge spectacles in villages and towns across Europe, torturing and slaughtering alleged infidels, heretics, and sorcerers with the strappado, the toca, the rack, the wheel, and burning at the stake.
In more modern times, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao achieved a combined death toll of some 102 million people by waging a world war that included murdering—or ordering or encouraging the murder, torture, or starvation of—approximately 38.5 million people who they believed wronged them for things like betraying their nation (Jews in Germany), refusing to give up their land and possessions (peasants and landlords in communist Russia and China), and disrespecting or opposing them. By my estimate, of the top 20 human atrocities of all time, identified by researcher Matthew White in his book Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, 19 were the result of compulsive revenge-seeking. They left an estimated 336 million people dead.
These are enormous numbers, and they don’t include the daily acts of revenge-fueled violence humans experience, which lead to untold misery and loss of life. The World Health Organization estimates that violence-related injuries kill approximately 1.25 million people every year. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s National Violent Death Reporting System, the most common circumstance of violent death is “injury during an argument,” often in the pursuit of revenge to punish a real or imagined injustice. FBI and Secret Service studies and data show that most mass shooters are acting in accord with a personal grievance to achieve a measure of revenge.
By understanding the desire for revenge as the result of an addictive brain-biological process, and that revenge is the primary motive for almost all forms of violence, we can, for the first time in human history, develop evidence-based public health approaches to prevent and treat violence. On the prevention side, this might include things like school programs and public health campaigns to warn about the addictive dangers and risks of revenge use. On the treatment side, interventions could include revenge addiction counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, peer support, self-help strategies, and, one day, maybe even medications like the naltrexone and GLP-1 drugs (such as Ozempic) that have been shown to control compulsive cravings for food.
But neuroscientists have discovered a different, more potent and widely available remedy for revenge right inside our own brains: forgiveness.
Researchers conducting fMRI brain studies have discovered that when you simply imagine forgiving a grievance—without even informing the transgressor—you deactivate your brain’s pain network (the anterior insula)—stopping rather than merely covering up the pain of the grievance. You also shut down the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum—the brain’s pleasure and reward circuitry—which stops intrusive revenge desires. Finally, you activate your prefrontal cortex, restoring executive function and self-control so you can make decisions that are in your own self-interest.
In other words, neuroscience shows us that forgiveness is a sort of wonder drug that stops pain, stops revenge craving, restores rational thinking, and helps set you free from the wrongs and traumas of the past. On top of that, it’s free, available without a prescription, and you can use it as often as needed to lessen your pain and revenge fantasies whenever memories of a grievance return. There’s now scientific evidence supporting the ancient forgiveness teachings of Jesus and the Buddha.
Forgiveness is a form of self-healing that benefits victims, not perpetrators. And you can do it without being forced to accept or endorse what happened to you—and while preserving your right to defend yourself from present or future threats.
Despite these benefits, forgiving can seem difficult at first. To help people safely release their revenge cravings and experiment with forgiveness, I’ve created a method known as the Nonjustice System that’s contained in my book and in the free Miracle Court app. “Nonjustice” is a word I coined that means abstaining from seeking justice via revenge, but still processing the pain of being wronged—it’s a middle step between revenge and forgiveness.
The Nonjustice System and the app allow you to put on trial anyone who has ever wronged you while playing all the roles yourself: victim/prosecutor, defendant, judge/jury, warden, and even judge of your own life. You get to be heard, hold the person accountable, and imagine revenge, and then experience what nonjustice and forgiveness would feel like. In the study where we used the story of Billy, participants who experimented with nonjustice found that their revenge desires decreased, feelings of benevolence increased, and that they were able to think things through and achieve a sense of empowerment.
https://slate.com/life/2025/07/drug-brain-addiction-revenge-public-health-death.html
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HOW TRUMP SPENDS HIS DAYS
A recent data driven breakdown offers a striking look at how Donald Trump actually spent much of 2025 and it sharply contradicts the myth that he is some tireless workhorse president.
According to figures compiled by the Trump Golf Tracker, Trump spent roughly one quarter of his days in 2025 at golf clubs. In total, he made 88 visits to his golf properties during the year. August stood out as his most golf heavy month with 10 visits. He also played or visited clubs nine times each in March and November, followed by another nine trips to his West Palm Beach club in December.
These numbers matter because they directly challenge the long repeated MAGA talking point that Trump is the hardest working president in American history. His supporters frequently praise his supposed discipline and stamina, yet the record shows a president who devoted a significant portion of his time to leisure while serious national and economic challenges continued to grow.
The financial impact is just as alarming. Based on a 2019 Government Accountability Office report that calculated the cost of four Trump golf trips during his first term, the Trump Golf Tracker estimates that his 2025 golf outings cost taxpayers approximately 110.6 million dollars. Notably, this estimate does not even include the full cost of the December trips, meaning the real total is likely higher.
For historical context, President Barack Obama played an estimated 333 rounds of golf over the course of his entire two term presidency. At Trump’s current pace, he would surpass Obama’s eight year total in about half the time.
When discussions about leadership and work ethic come up, these verified figures are worth remembering. They show a clear gap between the image Trump promotes and the reality reflected in publicly available data. Facts like these are why careful analysis and accountability still matter in American politics, regardless of how loudly partisan narratives are repeated.
~Hudson Flores, Quora
Bruce:
Trump is the laziest, stupidest, most corrupt bum ever to disgrace the office of President. A national cancer and an international embarrassment.
Oriana:
I remember how upset I was when W Bush won, especially for the second time. I actually cried upon the news. Like many others, I saw W as incompetent and devoid of morality. I couldn’t imagine a worse president . . . until the current calamity. With W, at least he one doubted that he loved the country. Ditto with Reagan, whom I loathed. At least he read his daily briefing.
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YET ANOTHER REASON WHY RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE
The way I heard it, the Bulgarian psychic Baba Vanga, who died in 1996, predicted that Prince Vladimir of the Rus would win a great victory in Ukraine. Irrespective of whether you believe in psychics or not, dear reader, it’s a fact that Putin does, and he took this as a sign that he could win glory and strengthen his post-Soviet Greater Russia by attacking Ukraine.
But he forgot that the Rus used to be ruled from Kiev and that Zelensky is a Russian speaker, so now he’s terrified that he isn’t the Prince Vladimir that Baba Vanga was thinking of. Even his chosen war symbol, Z, is also Zelensky’s nickname.
We should remind Putin that he is King Croesus of Lydia, who was told by the Oracle at Delphi that if he attacked Persia a great empire would be destroyed — and didn’t ask *which* empire. It turned out to be his. ~ Claire Jordan, Quora
Francis King:
According to Herodotus, he did ask. He was told, “For as long as Persia is not ruled by a mule, you cannot be defeated.” Croesus was happy, since when would the Persians agree to be ruled by a donkey?
A mule is half horse, half donkey. Cyrus was half Persian, half Median.
Oriana:
Kievan Rus’ was founded by the Vikings at a time when Moscow didn’t even exist. Perhaps Ukraine should be turned over to Sweden? In any case, psychics are cunningly vague, so that whatever happens may be interpreted as the fulfillment of their prophecy. Yet it is striking that that the leaders of both Russia and Ukraine bear the same first name, which means “ruler of the world.”
But here is a more serious analysis (though I also suspect that Putin seriously believes Baba Vanga's prophecies)
The truth seems clear: the war isn't about protecting Russia anymore. It's about keeping Putin in power. If he stops fighting without a clear win, everything could collapse. Soldiers would come home angry and broken, asking why their friends died for nothing. Families would demand answers. The economy, now built around making weapons, would crash—factories closing, jobs gone, prices soaring. People would blame the government for years of lies.
Russia's whole system now depends on the war. It gives excuses for problems at home: "It's because of the fight against the West." Without it, Russians might turn on Putin. He can't win the war—gains on the map don't make up for all the losses. But he can't end it either, or face the backlash.
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“DEEPEST SORT OF SPIRITUAL DISORIENTATION”: THE ZEITGEIST OF SOVIET COLLAPSE
A railway worker sweeps a crossing on the outskirts of Moscow under the watchful eye of an old Lenin mural. February 16, 1993.
For decades, Russia’s “wild 1990s” have been remembered for economic hardship, libertarian freedoms, and rampant crime. Historian Joseph Kellner suggests another defining feature of the era: profound spiritual disorientation. In his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, Kellner tells the cultural story of the “end of history” and argues that the USSR’s disintegration was the final blow to a centuries-old European idea of progress.
He also describes what emerged from the ruins as a “seeking phenomenon” — an explosion of mystics, astrologers, and fringe sects in Russia in the early 1990s. For Meduza, journalist and author of the Playing Civilization research project Georgy Birger spoke with Joseph Kellner about what drove post-Soviet Russians toward radical new worldviews, how this spiritual crisis paved the way for Putinism, and why the West — now facing its own crises of meaning and truth — might be walking a similar path.
Joseph Kellner: My book is, I believe, the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse. There are many good studies of late-Soviet culture; it’s a booming field right now. Previously, historians would have called it the Era of Stagnation and said that nothing significant happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, there’s a major effort by many scholars to reverse that and reassess late-Soviet culture.
There are also histories of the collapse — roughly 1989 to 1993 — that focus, for good reasons, on the economic crisis and the various traumas of transition. Instead, I focus on a spectacular and visible flourishing of new and radical worldviews, spiritualities, and orientations that cropped up all at once around the time of the collapse. That includes the popularity of Hare Krishnas, astrologers, apocalyptic sects, and [Anatoly] Fomenko’s New Chronology. I see all these things together as an acute manifestation of the cultural crisis that comes with the collapse.
The book takes up the people I collectively call “the seekers” and looks at two things. First, why did they come to believe the things they did? For instance, why was astrology so credible to so many people all at once? Or “extrasensory healing” [by TV psychics] like Kashpirovsky and Chumak? And second, why the seeking? Why in this period do you see this amazing public searching? Because not every crisis brings this kind of cultural ferment.
Essentially, I find that what unites all these people is a set of deep questions about the world. They are looking for orientation in a world where it has been lost. There are questions of intellectual authority: who can we believe, and where does true knowledge derive? Then, [there are] questions of identity: what does it mean to be a Russian at this time? In Russia, the identity question often takes this form of East versus West: are we Europeans, or are we not? And finally, questions about the direction of historical time — where it is headed and where it has been. There is a deep spiritual orientation to all this: how do we affix ourselves to something permanent when so much of our world has eroded?
— The question about time was probably tied to the concept of the “end of history.”
— Certainly. The concept of the “end of history” didn’t survive very long, but the notion was a triumphal one in the West and in the United States, where it was coined. In the Soviet Union, there was another, real sense to this concept. Soviet ideology was fixated on history, historical meaning, and the “right” direction of history. So, when that great vision collapsed completely, it left people afraid and unsure where anything was headed.
That is why people were looking to astrology, for instance; it offered a cyclical understanding of the world, putting the crisis in a much larger context. Or they looked to nostalgic worldviews — Hare Krishnas are, in fact, very nostalgic. They looked for different golden ages because the Soviet one so obviously failed.
— How did those questions about the direction of historical time manifest?
— When I look at these different groups — like the one around Fomenko’s New Chronology — I see a fixation on time. Fomenko is a Soviet mathematician who, in the 1990s, came out with this extraordinary revision of history, claiming all history happened in the last 1,000 years. He shifted all of history around and made a total, psychedelic new understanding of time.
I think the reason everyone was so fixated on time was that, during the crisis, there was a sense that the past was now unknown. Glasnost and the revelations of the Soviet press of the 1980s were all about uncovering Soviet crimes. Everything you learned in history class turned out to be untrue. History teachers were writing to the newspapers saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been lying to my students all this time.” There was no consensus anymore about what the past was.
Then, when the crisis is so acute, the future becomes equally dark. There is no natural “bottom” to the crisis, no sense of when it will end. People feel isolated and completely lost in time. That lends the sense of temporal displacement — of being nowhere. That is the deepest sort of spiritual disorientation.
— The way I understand it is that the loss of the Soviet timeline was, in a way, more psychologically damaging than the loss of the Soviet economy.
— The two things are hard to compare. The material crisis was staggering — male life expectancy dropped six years, murder and suicide rates spiked. But I do think the spiritual crisis is a meaningful compounding factor. After all, you can have an economic crisis of a similar scale — like the Great Depression — without this fundamental loss of orientation or this desperate attempt to reimagine everything about the world.
The spiritual crisis came from how certain Soviet ideology was about the big questions.
Knowledge derived from reason along Western scientific lines; Soviet identity was a fixed thing with a clear place in world history. Even if people didn’t literally believe in communism per se by the 1970s and 1980s, it was the water they swam in. It was in the media and the education [system]: the values of Soviet society still rested on these Enlightenment values and the sense of progress. Seeing it collapse in a couple of years was spiritually jarring.
Perhaps the book’s biggest claim rests on the fact that Soviet communism and its value system were an heir to the Enlightenment and saw itself explicitly as carrying that mantle. And in this way, Soviet communism derived from the same time and place as 19th‑century liberalism. So, the collapse represented the end point of a very long, shared European arc of history, thought, and philosophy — a major, and perhaps the final, blow to the broader idea of historical progress, that shared 19th‑century belief among liberals and socialists that progress was effectively a law of history.
Even after World War II, both sides of the Cold War remained fundamentally optimistic about progress, whereas 1989 and the Soviet collapse marked the end of this centuries‑long arc. This is an event whose consequences are still unfolding, including in the West, and whose full scale will be hard to grasp without greater historical distance.
In this sense, the “seekers” of the late-Soviet and early post‑Soviet period are like the canary in the coal mine: they are the first to go out actively searching for entirely new worldviews once this big idea of history has died.
— One thing I’ve found surprising is the claim that figures like Chumak or Fomenko were not just anti-rational charlatans, but also a way to preserve a scientific way of thinking. Can you explain that?
— Certainly. Kashpirovsky, for example, claimed authority as an educated psychiatrist; it was his medical background. The astrologers I focus on almost all have backgrounds in the hard sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, or physics. At no point do they forsake that education; they still put enormous value on science. The dispute was over who defined science. And the truth is that it’s impossible to define pseudoscience. It is defined by whoever holds the scientific authority to do so.
In a time when official Soviet authorities were losing credibility, these people offered alternatives, but they did it in the language of science because there was still a deep understanding that science is a powerful window to the world. Even the Soviet Hare Krishnas, unlike their American counterparts, tried to demonstrate the scientific validity of their beliefs. It demonstrates a deep, lasting Soviet respect for science, even while, from the outside, it looks like unscientific ideas coming to the fore.
— Can you recall any immediate impact of seekers on Russian politics in the 1990s?
— It’s interesting because the seekers themselves were almost universally not invested in politics. They considered politics to be superficial and were not after political solutions. That is an important thing that gets lost. People try to draw lines from the 1990s to the Putin era to explain Putinism, and while one helps explain the other, these seekers were not necessarily proto-Putinists.
Rather, political fatigue was almost universal in the early 1990s. Having invested so much hope in Gorbachev’s reforms and seen them fail, then seeing [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin as an inspiration and quickly hating him — there was no sense that the political system was going to save people. So, as they had in the 1970s and 1980s, they looked elsewhere for meaning. They looked outside the official political world.
— But did this movement still affect the current state of Russia?
— Yes. What is remarkable is that Putinism has concrete, confident answers to the driving questions of the 1990s: the shape and direction of history, what it means to be Russian, and who you can trust. It has a clear view of the West and where Russia stands. The questions that plagued the 1990s are now “settled” in a somewhat frightening mode that is hostile to pluralism. That may be one reason for the appeal of Putinism — it provided answers in a very uncertain world. The right wing always has a very simple story to tell, and it can be a very compelling story.
— So, did these fringe theories of the 1990s simply migrate from the grassroots to the Kremlin?
— I think most of these specific currents that I wrote about subsided by the end of the 1990s. The energy behind extrasensory healing, astrology, and the Hare Krishnas was in retreat by the time Putin came on the scene. However, there are still mystical currents within Russian culture — for example, people often see Eurasianism as a mystic, quasi-scientific nationalism. So, there are continuities you can find, and I think Eurasianism is probably the easiest one to point out.
— In an article for Jacobin, you argue that similar things are happening in the U.S. now. Who would be the Kashpirovsky or Fomenko of this process?
— I don’t think we have them yet. We don’t have an equivalent seeking phenomenon, although we certainly have a lively world of conspiracy thinking. We don’t have a similar cultural crisis, at least not in the form that I described in the Soviet case. And we haven’t had a big economic crisis yet — though everyone is expecting it, whether from the debt ceiling games, an AI bubble, or fossil fuels. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a crisis caused a dramatic spiritual seeking or “Great Awakening.”
For now, the major cultural figures setting trends are more explicitly political and tend to be on the right wing — people laying out visions that get a lot of followers. People like [white nationalist] Nick Fuentes and [right-wing blogger] Curtis Yarvin. But I don’t know anyone who I would draw parallels directly to Kashpirovsky and Chumak.
[Billionaire Peter Thiel’s theories about the Antichrist] might be as close as we get — the merger of reactionary politics and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity with tech utopianism/dystopianism. That is the making of a frightening ideology. All the ingredients are here. If an American “Fomenkoism” were to emerge with a charismatic leader, I think it’s easy to imagine millions of readers because there is nobody in America who has the authority to dispute such a theory anymore.
— Historians rarely draw parallels between Russia’s case of de-democratization and current worldwide and U.S. trends. The usual explanation is that democracy was too young and fragile in Russia, and that’s why it crumbled. What arguments do you have in favor of learning from post-Soviet Russia’s experience?
— Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand that democracy requires institutional memory. Imagining a democratic Russia is a very difficult task, especially compared to the United States, where there is a deeply rooted sense of popular power. But the common feature of both countries, as they move in the opposite direction of democracy, is the current state of capitalism.
In the 1990s, Russia got the business end of capitalism — the sharpest and most aggressive form of the system — applied to a country that, coming out of the Soviet experience, simply could not compete on the world market and was picked apart by foreign capital and by its own state through corrupt privatization under Yeltsin.
The rise of the oligarchs in a state with weak institutions and a huge concentration of wealth in a small circle of people is very hard to square with democracy, because those people end up functioning as a kind of pseudo‑government, producing the mafia state of the 1990s.
The Yeltsin government attempted to install neoliberal capitalism as it existed in the United States: eliminating subsidies, leaving no real space for unions, keeping taxes low, and placing great faith in markets to solve every problem. In Russia [this was a] catastrophic and very fast [process], whereas in the U.S., it has been a slower, forty‑year process with similar results.
In both countries, this has meant huge inequality, a dramatic loss of faith in the political system and in democracy, and a concentration of power in a very small set of oligarchs — though Americans are allergic to that word, even as today’s billionaires surpass the Rockefellers and Carnegies of their time. These shared developments make the similarity of the reaction unsurprising, and what we are seeing now is the long‑standing conflict between capitalism and democracy becoming extremely sharp.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/01/01/the-deepest-sort-of-spiritual-disorientation
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A DISAGREEMENT OVER ISRAEL INSIDE MAGA
When historians look back on President Trump’s second term, they may see it as the pinnacle of the Republican Party’s enduring support for Israel. They may also see it as the moment when the partnership undergirding this support — between evangelical Christians and the Republican foreign-policy establishment — began to unravel.
For decades, the American right’s unwavering advocacy for Israel has effectively been a sure thing, and the Trump administration’s actions have only affirmed the strength of this bond. The president has given Israel free rein to bomb Gaza and to attack enemies across the Middle East, even joining an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities this summer; he has negotiated a peace deal in Gaza that favors Israel; he has defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a guest at Mar-a-Lago this week — in the face of his ongoing prosecution on corruption charges. Closer to home, the administration has pressured universities to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists.
But inside the Republican Party, something seems to be shifting. A recent Manhattan Institute survey of Republicans nationwide found that a majority of the party’s longstanding voters remain firmly pro-Israel, but that a “sizable minority” of new Republican voters — younger, more diverse and more likely to have voted for Democrats in the past — are more critical of the Jewish state.
Often, their sentiments are darker than mere criticism. The Manhattan Institute’s survey found that a significant number of young Republican voters reported openly racist or antisemitic views. Some of the comments during an accompanying focus group with 20 Gen Z conservatives were positively chilling: One participant praised Hitler’s “leadership values.” Another claimed that Israel had ties to human trafficking. Still another called Jews “a force for evil.”
Separating the right’s mounting criticism of Israel — often made on the grounds of American self-interest — from the rising antisemitism inside the Republican ranks can be difficult. Many of the ideologies revived by the Make America Great Again movement, such as nationalism, Christian nationalism and nativism, have not only helped fuel attacks on America’s support for Israel; they have given political cover to antisemitism that has been bubbling up since the days of the so-called alt-right.
The right-wing media and activist classes now appear to be in an open civil war over the matter of Israel. Candace Owens has called the Jewish state “demonic,” while spinning out wild anti-Israel conspiracy theories on her popular weekly YouTube show. Closer to the mainstream, Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential MAGA voices, has described Christian Zionism as a “brain virus” and characterized evangelical support for Israel as “Christian heresy.”
In late October, he hosted the white nationalist influencer and prominent antisemite Nick Fuentes on his YouTube show; the fallout is still tearing apart the Heritage Foundation, an institution at the heart of the Republican establishment. This month, Carlson and Steve Bannon, a fellow nativist, traded insults with Ben Shapiro, a pro-Israel conservative and an observant Jew, at the Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix.
Vice President JD Vance — who is close to Carlson and is, for now, the de facto future leader of the MAGA movement — has been conspicuously noncommittal on the fight. Amid the continuing turmoil, he didn’t even mention Israel during his speech at the Turning Point conference, nor did he denounce the rising antisemitism on the right, saying instead that he didn’t believe in “purity tests.” “When I say I’m going to fight alongside of you,” he said, “I mean all of you — each and every one.”
For more than four decades, the alliance between evangelicals and pro-Israel conservatives has been an almost uniquely powerful force in American politics, shaping not only foreign policy but also domestic elections, with donations flowing freely every election cycle from pro-Israel Christian groups and individuals to pro-Israel Republican candidates.
Political coalitions are inherently perishable. They are created to advance common interests that invariably diverge at some point. But this particular coalition was unusual from the start. It was built not just on the belief that defending Israel was in America’s strategic interests, but also on faith: Many of the evangelical Christians who have long made up the core of the Republican Party’s base saw the Jewish people’s return to their biblical homeland and their subsequent, improbable military victories over their Arab enemies as divine providence, a sign that the second coming was imminent.
Now, other kinds of Christianity are taking hold in conservative power circles. A growing number of evangelicals subscribe to a very different understanding of the biblical prophecies about Christ’s return, while other influential Christians — including Vance — have been gravitating toward Catholicism. At the same moment, many Republicans are pushing for a nationalist retreat from American commitments overseas.
In other words, the very forces that built this coalition — geopolitics and theology — are the ones tearing it apart.
A Messianic Vision
The Republican Party wasn’t always reliably pro-Israel. It was a Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, who first recognized the Jewish state in 1948. In the immediate years after its establishment, Israel, founded under an ideology of Labor Zionism, was viewed by many conservatives as too socialist. And besides, an explicitly Jewish state wasn’t exactly a natural ally for the WASP-dominated Republican establishment. William F. Buckley Jr. was deeply skeptical of Israel during its early years; in 1956, his magazine, National Review, called it “the first racist state in modern history.”
The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 helped turn Buckley and many other conservatives around. Israel defeated the Soviet-backed forces in just six days, and Cold War hawks immediately identified a new ally in the struggle against Communism. “Now Israel could be grafted onto the correct side of the only war that mattered — the Cold War,” said Sam Tanenhaus, author of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.”
The 1967 war also captured the attention of evangelical Christians, then a growing force in American life. Israel had not only beaten back a coalition of well-armed Arab states; it had also extended its control over Jerusalem, reunifying the holy city. To many evangelicals, this was more than an unlikely military victory. It was an unmistakable sign that history was moving, inexorably, toward its final climax.
A few years later, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary and former campus ministry worker, Hal Lindsey, popularized this belief — known as premillennial Dispensationalism — in his mass-market paperback “The Late Great Planet Earth.” Lindsey aimed his book squarely at baby boomers — “the searching generation,” he called them — offering a divine truth based on his own reading of biblical prophecies. Now that the Jewish people had returned to their homeland and taken control of Jerusalem, all they needed to do was rebuild the temple destroyed by the Romans to enable the rapture (“the ultimate trip,” as Lindsey called it) to commence. It became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s.
Televangelists like Jerry Falwell took up Israel’s cause around this time. They saw the Cold War through a religious lens, casting Israel as the hero against Soviet atheists and their Muslim proxies. They offered a new theological paradigm for evangelicals, de-emphasizing the Christian tradition of trying to convert Jews and instead stressing the divine importance of supporting the State of Israel.
These evangelicals spoke of Judeo-Christian civilization out of a belief that America (to them, of course, a Christian nation) and Israel were both uniquely privileged in the eyes of God. Falwell folded support for Israel into the “Biblical Plan of Action” underpinning the Moral Majority, his political organization that helped ensure Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and effectively gave birth to the modern Christian Right.
It was during the Reagan years that the G.O.P. truly became America’s pro-Israel party. Reagan claimed Israel as a democratic partner in the Cold War against totalitarianism, and forged an alliance with the conservative Likud party, which took power in 1977 and shared his free-market ideology. He also stocked his foreign-policy team with neoconservatives, many of whom were Jewish and steadfast Israel supporters. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s powerful lobbying group in Washington, had been a Democratic institution since its inception in 1963; in 1982, the organization named its first Republican leader.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the ties grew stronger. President George W. Bush was a born-again evangelical himself and had also put neoconservatives into important positions in his administration. When the United States began its global war on terror, Israel — then in the midst of the second intifada — became a natural ally in the fight against radical Islam. The two countries’ causes were seen as effectively intertwined. In 2006, John Hagee, the megachurch pastor who founded the influential group Christians United for Israel, called the Book of Genesis “God’s foreign-policy statement.”
‘Really What They Should Do Is Become Christians’
But throughout, strains of skepticism toward Israel persisted on the right, animated sometimes by an “America first” foreign policy, sometimes by outright antisemitism — and sometimes by a mix of the two.
In 1988, the influential conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk accused the neoconservatives of mistaking Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States. During the 1990s, the neo-isolationist Pat Buchanan, a two-time Republican presidential candidate, referred to Capitol Hill as “Israel-occupied territory” and blamed “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” for dragging the United States into the first gulf war.
Significantly, both men were Catholics who did not share the dispensationalist view of modern-day Israel.
Years later, during the 2016 presidential election, similarly nativist, anti-Israel sentiments spread across the internet, inspired in part by Trump’s “America First” campaign — even as the future president cast himself as a “lifelong supporter” of Israel. At the time, the anti-Israel contingent seemed like a marginal force within the party, largely confined to a resurgent white nationalist movement. In fact, these were just the first tremors of a much broader realignment motivated by both ideology and religion.
“Part of the power of the moment is that the politics are driving this just as much as the theology,” says Daniel Hummel, a historian of U.S. religion at the Lumen Center, a Christian research institute, and the author of “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation.” “There are political consequences to the conversation.”
Evangelical Christians remain a powerful voting bloc for the Republican Party. White evangelicals make up more than 20 percent of the total electorate, and Trump won about 80 percent of their votes in 2024. And for the moment, they remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
Israel is trying to keep things that way, spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign targeting U.S. churches. Older evangelicals, meanwhile, are trying to shore up the base, reminding Christians that a person doesn’t have to subscribe to a specific end-times scenario to be a Zionist. “Evangelicals support Israel because they love God, cherish their country and believe faith and freedom are inseparable,” Ralph Reed, the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. “Israel, like the U.S., is a beacon for those timeless and, one hopes, eternal values.”
As the head of the Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson, in the 1990s, Reed once wielded enormous influence among Christian voters. But today, the religious right’s political power is far more diffuse. The towering figures who once served as its theological and political gatekeepers, shaping American Christian thought about both the Bible and the ballot, are largely gone. They have been replaced by a wide range of online figures like the Texas pastor Joel Webbon, who advocates a breaking of geopolitical ties between America and Israel and has written on X that Jews are “generally marked by subversion, deceit, and greed.”
A growing number of Christians are turning away from premillennial Dispensationalism and toward other theological frameworks that see, at most, a diminished role for Israel and the Jewish people in God’s plan for redemption. Many believe that God abrogated his covenant with Abraham when the Jews rejected the Gospel of Jesus and that the church replaced ancient Israel as the vessel of God’s will.
Some of these Christians are known as “postmillennialists.” Premillennialists believe that the second coming will occur before the 1,000-year reign of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation as the millennium. Postmillennialists believe that Christ will return after the millennium, and that it’s their duty to prepare for this moment by making the earth fit for him. Many postmillennialists don’t see Judaism and Christianity as complementary, but as at odds with each other.
“They are much more likely to think that Jews are in a state of theological incompleteness and really what they should do is become Christians sooner rather than later,” said Samuel Goldman, an associate professor at the University of Florida and the author of “God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.”
This is by no means a new framework. It was the default position throughout most of Christianity, and it laid the foundation for the church’s long history of persecuting Jews, justifying their expulsion from Christian societies and playing into countless anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. “The Jews are suffering and stateless because Christ came to them first and they rejected him,” said Mark Tooley, a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church and the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, describing the theology.
A new cohort of religious leaders and thinkers are now repurposing this theology for our contemporary politics, arguing that America should embrace Christianity as its national religion. They are, in a sense, the Protestant answer to liberalism’s Catholic critics — like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule — who have gained prominence during the Trump era. They include Stephen Wolfe, the author of “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” and Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist pastor in Idaho who recently opened a branch of his church on Capitol Hill — and counts Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth among his admirers. “I am no kind of Zionist,” Wilson has written.
Carlson, a Protestant, is also tapping into this new, post-Dispensationalist energy to buttress his own anti-Israel views. One of the repeat guests on his podcast, the country singer John Rich, has amplified an unfounded conspiracy theory that it was a Jewish family, the Rothschilds, who underwrote the publication of the first Bibles with study notes that advanced the theology of Dispensationalism. [a Protestant theological system for interpreting the Bible, viewing history as divided into distinct "dispensations" or eras where God interacts with humanity differently, emphasizing a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church, a literal approach to prophecy, and a future earthly kingdom for Israel.]
Carlson’s viral interview last summer with Ted Cruz, during which he pressed the evangelical senator to offer a religious defense of his support for Israel, did not happen in a historical vacuum. “Tucker is not leading this theological re-evaluation of Israel,” Hummel says. “He’s just participating in it and capitalizing on it.”
The Gaza Generation
What we are witnessing on the right is, as much as anything, a demographic shift, as a new generation of Christians comes of age, both theologically and politically.
“There is, and really has been for at least 20 years, a revolt of younger, more intellectual American Christians against the old-American style of evangelical Protestantism that became so familiar in the 1980s and ’90s,” Goldman said. “They are much less likely to see the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of the various biblical prophecies and promises.”
They are also less likely to see support for Israel as either a moral or strategic imperative. These are Christians who grew up in the shadow of America’s protracted involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at a historical remove from the horror of the Holocaust, which helped convince many older American Christians of the need for a Jewish homeland.
Today’s young right-wing Christians complain that America is facing too many urgent crises at home — like the cost of living and illegal immigration — to justify sending billions of dollars a year to Israel. Over the past two-plus years, their social media feeds have been flooded with graphic images from Gaza — and no shortage of nationalist, nativist and antisemitic commentary.
The Democrats are engaged in their own civil war over America’s policies toward Israel. While the Republicans have been the more staunchly pro-Israel party in the modern political era, the Democratic establishment has also been broadly aligned with Israel. But it, too, is now finding itself under increasing pressure from the younger wing of the party.
In recent months, congressional Democrats have divided over whether to block arms transfers to Israel, whether to accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and whether to recognize a Palestinian state. And the cracks are spreading. A number of progressive Democratic politicians are centering criticism of Israel in their primary challenges against pro-Israel incumbents.
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor and an outspoken critic of Israel, has little in common with Fuentes, a white nationalist. Mamdani speaks a language of pluralism, human rights and social justice; Fuentes rails against immigration and women’s rights, and he has talked about the need to preserve America’s “white demographic core.” But both came of age in the years after the war on terror and have emerged into the political spotlight at a time when the old pieties in American politics about Israel are eroding.
“People tend to think of generational politics in a narrow way, as the arrival of a new voice who speaks to his generation in a different vocabulary,” Tanenhaus said. “But there’s another kind of generational politics, which is formed by shared experiences that can cut across ideological boundaries. This is the Gaza generation.”
Trump has shown no signs of turning against Israel, and there is still a powerful pro-Israel faction within the G.O.P. Four decades of consistent support won’t go quietly. But the party’s post-Trump future is up for grabs, and it’s easy to imagine the fight over Israel becoming a primary battleground in the larger war for the party. Will the isolationists or the interventionists win out? How much influence will Christian nationalists have? Will antisemites be allowed inside the tent — and if not, who will have the authority to draw the boundaries that keep them out?
Charlie Kirk saw it all coming. Last summer, with both anti-Zionism and antisemitism rising among young conservative activists, he convened a group of Turning Point USA chapter leaders from across the country for a focus group on Israel. “I’m trying to find this new path,” he said of his effort to reconcile hard-right America First nationalism with Zionism. “I love Israel, I’ve visited there, my wife and I had the best experiences ever. I saw where Jesus rose from the dead and he walked on water. But also, I’m an American, and I represent a generation that can’t afford anything. And we are flooded with illegals, and no one speaks English.”
Kirk never got to see this effort through. Within days of his death in September, a bitter fight had broken out on the online right over whether he had been in the process of turning against the Jewish state — complete with an unfounded conspiracy theory that the Mossad was behind his assassination.
~ Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001.
Canute:
We haven’t had a serious attempt at military isolationism since the early 1940s. From WWII to 911, there was always a clear return on investment from American “force projection.” Israel was one part of that. Now the idea is that these investments have become liabilities. I’m not convinced. Neither were the geopolitical theorists who studied this problem in the 30s and 40s. Even if the US had complete mastery of Canada, Mexico, and South America, over 86% of the world population and over 66% of global GDP are in Eurasia and Africa. If a single power controlled shipping from the major ports of Europe and Asia, it would be the end of American prosperity and self-determination. It would also be the end of the global commons for shipping and communication. (Kiss your free internet goodbye.)
The US didn’t rebuild and defend Europe for 80 years out of kindness. They knew that its loss to the communists would be an economic disaster for the US. I don’t know what role, if any, Israel will play in America’s next round of military commitments. But I don’t think the isolationists will have the upper hand for long. Harsh realities will intrude.
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JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SEX LIFE
In his twenties, Rousseau began a sexual relationship with a much older divorcée, whom he called Maman (Mommy).
Later in life, a laundry girl bore him five illegitimate children, which he immediately abandoned.
His bestselling novel, 'Julie', was inspired by his two greatest love affairs.
In neighboring Savoie, he found shelter with a priest, who put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytizer in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary for an ailing countess.
At the age of 20 or 21, Rousseau returned to Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, Rousseau considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman (“Mommy”), and she him Mon petit (“My little one”).
In those years, Rousseau struggled to establish himself in a career and spent a year traveling. He traveled mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his passion for music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of 27, he took up a position as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.
Paris and Venice
With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of 30, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery but found his system impractical and rejected it.
In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He reveled in Italian music but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.
He met a laundry girl called Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority.
Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, which stood at the heart of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.
Rise to fame
In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes. While walking to Vincennes, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” This led to the radical idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality.
In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, “Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.” With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the “First Discourse”), he rose into a cause célèbre.
In 1752, he wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining notoriety as “the man who had refused a king’s pension.”
In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back to Calvinism. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.
In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the “Second Discourse”), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original “state of nature” and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: “No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.”
Sophie d’Houdetot and La Nouvelle Héloïse
The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother.
He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of damaging letters. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron.
His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.
The Social Contract and Emile
After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile.
In the Social Contract, he sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness.
In Emile, he lays out a system of education that might preserve the individual’s innate vigor and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, “to prefect reason by sentiment.”
Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart, Sophie, Rousseau states that women should be “passive and weak” and “put up little resistance.”
Book IV contains the controversial “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," in which the vicar’s argument leads only to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God.
In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile “a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known.”
Years of exile
Both the Social Contract and Emile were banned from France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest.
Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.
In 1766, Rousseau traveled to England with David Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, James Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, “Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.”
His paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the center of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.
Return to France and death
Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name and spent the next three years in relative seclusion. He married Thérèse, practiced botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions.
He died in 1778, at the age of 66, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). In 1794, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed next to those of... Voltaire.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ataraxia/202512/rousseaus-shocking-sex-life
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THE STRANGE BUT TOTALLY REAL PLAN TO BLOT THE SUN AND REVERSE GLOBAL WARMING
Janos Pasztor was conflicted. Sitting in his home office in a village just outside Geneva, he stared into the screen of his computer, where a bizarre Zoom call was taking place. It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.
Pasztor, a deliberate and self-assured Hungarian with thick, arched eyebrows that give him the appearance of a mildly perturbed owl, was stunned by the seriousness of Stardust’s operation. He had long been expecting that some company would try this. But the emergence of a well-financed, highly credentialed group represented a shocking acceleration for a technology still largely confined to research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels.
For decades, scientists had theorized that lacing the atmosphere with a cloak of dust could temporarily reduce global warming. Few, however, had actually advocated researching the practice, and none could say how dangerously it might destabilize weather patterns, food supplies or global politics. Many scientists still warn it will take many years to know whether such technology would prove wise or disastrous. The terms for it — “solar geoengineering,” “stratospheric aerosol injection” or “solar radiation management” — sound deceptively anodyne. To most people, the idea of blotting out the sun still induces derision and disgust — a kind of planetary body horror.
If what Stardust was claiming on the Zoom with Pasztor was true, then a key threshold had already been crossed. Humanity had gained the power to turn down the sun, and barely anyone on the planet even knew. What’s more, that untested power was now effectively for sale. In a world of rising chaos, sci-fi-pilled billionaires and nationalist leaders, a private company offering the means to control the world’s temperature — with almost no international laws regarding the deployment of such technology — was a disturbing prospect, thought Pasztor.
But there was another consideration he couldn’t ignore: What if it was the only option left?
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Stardust’s plan wasn’t all futuristic. The company’s technology is based on a process nearly as old as the Earth itself.
In June 1783, a 16-mile volcanic fissure blew open the southern side of Iceland. “First the ground swelled up with tremendous howling, then suddenly a cry shattered it into pieces ... exposing [the Earth’s] guts, like an animal tearing apart its prey,” recalled Jón Steingrímsson, a local pastor. He survived the ordeal to write an account that was published long after his death. It remains one of his country’s earliest and most important autobiographical works.
For the next eight months, lava spewed from the earth. The sun was hidden by ash and smoke. One in five Icelanders died in the aftermath. Steingrímsson himself only escaped by good luck — or perhaps something more divine. One terrible day, a great wave of lava swept toward his church and village. The pastor gathered his congregation and delivered a sermon of such mighty power and devotion that, it was said, God himself diverted the course of the fire.
As the eruption went on, sunlight grew dimmer far beyond Iceland’s shores. The Laki eruption, as it would come to be known, had sent 122 million metric tons of sulfur into the sky. Much of it would reach the stratosphere, the placid layer of the atmosphere that begins between 4 and 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. Those particles drifted on barometric currents around the Northern Hemisphere, wreaking havoc on the world’s weather. China and Egypt were hit by drought, then famine. In North America and Europe, winter was exceptionally brutal. In February, the Mississippi River froze down to New Orleans. Ice floes were seen bobbing into the subtropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Benjamin Franklin, who was then serving as ambassador to France from the newly independent government in Washington, wrote from a frigid Paris that the sun’s rays were “rendered so faint … that when collected in the focus of a burning glass they would scarce kindle brown paper.” In a striking insight, Franklin suggested the bleak weather was related to reports from Iceland of a “vast quantity of smoke” belching from the land.
Scientists now know that sulfur particles from volcanic eruptions hang in the atmosphere obscuring the sun like an umbrella of dust. Really big booms can have a noticeable cooling effect on the planet that lasts a year or more. In 2019, researchers concluded that Franklin’s hunch about Laki was right.
Stardust claims to have developed a system that can replicate and maintain the global cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, without all the lava and sulfur. The mechanics would be quite simple. Stardust envisages a fleet of around 100 planes — to begin with — flying into the stratosphere to deliver payloads of their particles, landing to reload, then immediately taking off again to repeat, continuously, every flight a tiny volcanic cough.
Researchers, including Visioni, found last year that the most efficient way to achieve a steady, uniform decline in the global temperature would be to spread the particles from the regions just north and south of the tropics. That means launching from at least two places, for example Florida and southern Brazil. The particles would then spread around the globe producing a gradual, uniform decline in the global temperature, before eventually dropping out of the sky after around a year, according to Stardust, and needing to be replaced. The particles would reflect a very small proportion of sunlight back into space, but enough to cool the Earth.
Given the mind-blowing dollar figures that come attached to climate change, solar geoengineering would be comparatively cheap. “The cost is small,” said Douglas MacMartin, an aerospace engineer at Cornell University. It would be something along the lines of “tens of billions of dollars per year.” That’s what Stardust hopes will make it appealing to the governments it is courting as potential customers. For a country like the U.S., climate and weather-related disasters are growing ever more costly. In 2024, the bill was $182.7 billion. Faced with this, a few tens of billions could look like a bargain.
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That the global temperature would drop is not in question. Britain’s Royal Society, the august scientific club that counts Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and (him again) Franklin among its past members, said in a report issued in early November that there was little doubt it would be effective. They did not endorse its use, but said that, given the growing interest in this field, there was good reason to be better informed about the side effects.
Solar geoengineering is hardly a cure — more Wegovy than smallpox vaccine. But that doesn’t mean it can’t have broad benefits when weighed against deleterious climate change, according to Ben Kravitz, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University who has closely studied the potential effects of solar geoengineering. “There would be some winners and some losers. But in general, some amount of ... stratospheric aerosol injection would likely benefit a whole lot of people, probably most people,” he said.
Some researchers still don’t think the field should be given time and resources. Speaking to reporters in September, Martin Siegert, professor of geosciences at the University of Exeter, said large-scale solar geoengineering would mean severing the natural link between the temperature of the planet and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It was, he said, “an extremely profound and challenging thing for me to accept that that would be a good way forward for us when decarbonizing, of course, is such an obvious and necessary priority.”
And in fact, carbon will continue to build up as long as the world continues to burn oil, gas and coal — even if sunlight-reflecting technology is put to use. The additional carbon would require more and more cooling to counteract — good for a business like Stardust. This would do nothing to prevent ocean acidification, localized air pollution and other harms from drilling, mining, processing and burning fossil fuels.
And then there’s the problem of trying to stop. Because an abrupt end to geoengineering, with all the carbon still in the atmosphere, would cause the temperature to soar suddenly upward with unknown, but likely disastrous, effects. This extremely worrying proposition is referred to by scientists as “termination shock.” This raises the risk, Pasztor said, of “extortion” by the companies or governments with control over geoengineering. In response to a question about this concern, Yedvab wrote: “Governments have established mechanisms to prevent misuse of technologies, such as over-pricing, by their contractors, and we are confident the same would apply here.”
Once the technology is deployed, the entire world would be dependent on it for however long it takes to reduce the trillion or more tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a safe level — a process that would involve untold armies of industrial carbon suckers, mashed up carbon-bonding basalt spread across the fields around the world, massive reforestation and a host of other novel efforts. All of which have their own downsides.
Scientists have estimated that it could take a century or more. If humanity still can’t kick its fossil fuel addiction and successfully scrub carbon from the sky, scientists say the world would need to stay on the Stardust treatment plan indefinitely.
Then there are ethical — even cosmological — questions. “Do we have the right to do this?” said Cynthia Scharf, a former colleague of Pasztor’s at the U.N. who later worked with him on geoengineering governance issues. “Thinking about future generations, do we have the right not to?”
The parasol Stardust wants to build in the sky would, at times, be visually beautiful. In the evening, the aerosols could extend the colors of the sunset, creating dramatic whole-sky light shows. It would be humanity’s largest ever, entirely deliberate attempt to change the fabric of nature. It’s a little on the nose, perhaps, that Stardust’s first address in a science park on the outskirts of Tel Aviv was Oppenheimer 4. The street is named after a botanist and not the father of nuclear weapons, but just like the invention of the atomic bomb, solar geoengineering would give rise to questions that have troubled scientists, theologians and storytellers through time.
So far Stardust has not opened its technology up to public scientific scrutiny. Stardust’s ongoing secrecy has left solar geoengineering experts confused and frustrated. Stardust has tried to consult widely among those working on sunlight reflection science. But researchers are typically asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect the company’s intellectual property. While not an unusual move for a company with a potentially valuable invention, this is another source of tension with specialists in the field who see such contracts as antithetical to scientific freedom and peer review, especially for a technology that would affect every person on the planet.
Stardust claims to have solved many technical and safety challenges, especially related to the environmental impacts of the particle, which they say would not harm nature or people. But researchers say the company’s current lack of transparency makes it impossible to trust. “There’s absolutely no reason to believe anything they say without them providing evidence of it,” the Cornell aerospace expert MacMartin said flatly.
“My only advice was that they not be a for-profit company,” said Keith, who previously helped create Harvard’s solar geoengineering program. “I think that they are foolish, and I told them that.”
To Pasztor, dismissing Stardust is not an option; its weaknesses only highlight a larger gap in need of addressing. “Society has to wake up and figure out whether you want to ban them or you want to create governance frameworks within which they can operate,” he said. Despite his disappointments, he still sees international cooperation as a vital guardian.
“Global full-scale deployment” could begin by 2035, the timeline said. This brief development-to-deployment arc coincided neatly with the investment cycles of many venture capital firms. VCs generally raise money from investors, buy stakes in risky but promising startups and then seek to deliver outsized returns within a dozen years, when some of the companies they invested in go public or are sold to larger firms.
The annual cost of the initial stage of global cooling, according to the pitch deck, would be around $20 billion per year, in line with previous cost estimates for solar geoengineering. Even if the U.S. government were to entirely foot the bill, that’s still only around a fifth of the annual amount analysts predicted Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act would have spent cutting emissions.
The expected payoff for Stardust from going stratospheric would be $1.5 billion in annual revenue. Elsewhere in the 2023 pitch deck were pictures of the stardust itself, a fine white powder heaped up in a manner that recalled the scene in Scarface, where Al Pacino’s paranoid drug lord sits at a desk behind a small mountain of cocaine.
Solar geoengineering is “a solution that needs to have an horizon of decades. It’s not a solution for, you know, a single president,” he said, avoiding mention of Trump, who has fought domestic and global efforts to limit climate change.
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The rain was now really coming down outside Pasztor’s window. Just behind the central square of the village was a park. Beneath the park, Pasztor said, was a bunker, one of roughly 360,000 public and private fallout shelters built by the Swiss during the Cold War in case of a nuclear strike. To this day, many are kept fully stocked with emergency supplies. It’s an enduring symbol of Swiss wealth and caution. It’s also an alpine hedge against human nature — a bet that someday soon all the safeguards will fail, and we will be faced with only bad choices.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/21/stardust-geoengineering-janos-pasztor-regulations-00646414?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE FATAL TRAP ADVOCATES OF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME FALL INTO
To win the argument for universal basic income, advocates must confront the myth that less work means less worth.
The general idea behind universal basic income (UBI) is almost as old as America itself. You can trace it back to 1797, when Thomas Paine argued for guaranteed payments in his political treatise “Agrarian Justice.” Fast forward to 2020, and Andrew Yang revived the idea with a “Freedom Dividend” during his failed presidential campaign. Despite the 200-plus-year chasm that separates these two men, the criticism they faced for backing UBI was strikingly similar: that “no one will work” and that “we can’t afford it.”
Because of this, supporters of the program might be tempted to believe that the purpose of UBI experiments is to allay these concerns with empirical evidence on the effect of UBI on work hours. The problem, however, is that these concerns are not rooted in empiricism but normative belief: namely that 1) lower-class people who refuse employment should receive nothing and 2) UBI costs more than it’s worth. And while not all UBI opponents believe these things, those who are often move the goalposts to portray almost any findings about cost and labor effort as reasons to reject UBI.
We must resist playing this game.
UBI-related experiments consistently find evidence that no participant responds to UBI experiments by dropping out of the labor force. Yes, some people reduce their hours of work, but the decline in work effort (if any) is clearly within a sustainable range. In other words, the evidence decisively contradicts claims that “no one will work” and “we can’t afford it.” But if we take the bait of focusing on such extreme statements, we attract everyone’s attention to opponents’ favorite issue: “Did the people who got the UBI ‘work’ as much as the people who didn’t?” Once the question is framed this way, it tosses a softball to opponents who predictably argue UBI is out of the question because some people didn’t work as much as they otherwise might have.
Any unconditional grant large enough to live on necessarily allows lower-class people to refuse employment. This fact — at least for critics who feel that people who refuse employment should receive nothing — makes UBI undesirable by design. To them, UBI will always be “unaffordable” because it will appear to cost more than they think it’s worth. UBI supporters fall into their trap if they attempt to refute this belief with, say, technical explanations of the difference between a 4 percent decline in labor hours and 4 percent of people leaving the labor force.
Supporters need to focus on all the good that comes of guaranteed income. As Bru Laín argues, UBI has a “positive impact on socioeconomic indicators related to a lack of money,” including the “alleviation of stress and mental illness, improvement in eating habits, settlement of household and personal debts, improvement of happiness, subjective well-being and social and community participation.”
Meanwhile, proponents of UBI that fall headfirst into critics’ trap even when they point to findings that that UBI increases labor effort. Consider these headlines from a UBI experiment in Stockton, California: “Experiment in guaranteed income leads to more work,” “Californians on universal basic income paid off debt and got full-time jobs,” and “The Biggest Payoff From Stockton Basic Income Program: Jobs.”
Even the city’s mayor, Michael Tubbs, who was instrumental in establishing the program, employed this kind of rhetoric, saying, “Number one, tell your friends, tell your cousins, the guaranteed income did not make people stop working. In fact, those who received the guaranteed income were working more than before they received the guaranteed income and almost doubled in increase compared to those in the treatment group.”
The results Tubbs points to are largely determined by the design of the study: People who receive small grants when they weren’t working very much to begin with usually work more in UBI studies; people who receive larger grants when they are working full-time to begin with often work less. By portraying the uptick in Stockton’s labor effort as self-evidently good, Tubbs’ comments make it more difficult for future experiments that might involve larger grants to report the likely finding that people work less.
Buying into the narrative that it is always “good” for low-income people to spend as much or more time on paid labor than they are now is a game UBI supporters can’t win and shouldn’t play. If the biggest problem in the world today were getting the lower class to work as much as possible, UBI would not be the best policy to achieve it.
Instead of trying to assuage critics’ fears, the pro-UBI movement needs to challenge the narrative in which any refusal to accept employment is a “bad” experimental observation. After all, how could it be a good thing for the global poor to spend more hours in grueling jobs for which they’re likely underpaid and overworked? What do you think will happen to wages and working conditions if the two billion people in deep poverty around the world all decide to work more at the same time? Theory predicts they would work longer hours for lower hourly wages.
One of the many disadvantages of UBI experiments is that they cannot measure how much wages and working conditions might improve in response to a substantial UBI, because that effect depends on the interaction between millions of citizens and employers across the country. The closest thing UBI experiments can measure is the first step in the process, and that step involves giving people a choice beyond working too hard for too little. So, rather than trying to quibble over hours worked, UBI supporters might have better luck broadcasting the good that comes when people with the worst jobs decide to work less — and using experiments as a platform for participants to tell their stories.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-fatal-trap-ubi-boosters-keep-falling-into/
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HOW PLANTS ARE RESPONDING TO GLOBAL WARMING
Between 2013 and 2017, saffron production in Kashmir declined by 90 percent.
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*Phenology = the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life.
Examples of Phenological Events: Leaves changing color in fall, First blossoms of spring, Arrival of migratory birds, Insects hatching or butterflies emerging, and Animals waking from hibernation.
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Winter and spring 2023 were very warm in much of the eastern United States, causing springtime biological activity to start much earlier than usual. The news media took note, with dozens of outlets trumpeting the earliest spring in decades, a premature beginning to the allergy season, and an early start to flowering in the iconic cherry trees of the mid-Atlantic region. Even “Saturday Night Live” gave it a nod, with an opening skit featuring early sightings of stereotypical characters who populate Central Park when the weather is nice.
It was mid-April and New York City had already reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit, three months ahead of schedule. Many of the clearest changes in phenology — a term that refers to the timing of seasonal activity — are occurring in spring. While we might appreciate the break from bulky winter clothing, changing climate conditions and progressively earlier springtime conditions create challenges for both plants and animals, with repercussions that ripple throughout ecosystems and extend to humans.
The biggest shifts in springtime activity are occurring in Asia, followed by Europe, though our ability to state this with confidence is hampered by limited information from the Southern Hemisphere. On each of these continents, the timing of leaf out in common overstory trees has shifted to between nine and 15 days earlier since the early 1980s. Changes in the timing of leaf out are less dramatic in the United States; since the early 1980s, spring leaf out has advanced by about a week.
A fantastic example of how overstory deciduous trees and understory herbaceous plants from temperate ecosystems, such as those in Europe and the United States, have adjusted the timing of spring activity since preindustrial times hails from New York. In the early 1800s, instructors at secondary schools across the state regularly documented when they observed meteorologic conditions as well as plant and animal activity. They continued this effort until the Civil War. These data languished, all but forgotten in dusty annals, until Dr. Conrad Vispo, cofounder of the Farmscape Ecology Program in Hawthorne Valley, discovered them in 2014.
Vispo immediately began to digitize the old data, appreciating the gold mine these historical records offered. Yet he recognized that they had little scientific value without a modern context.
So he searched “phenology in New York” online and discovered the New York Phenology Project, a statewide phenology monitoring effort that had been initiated in 2012 by Dr. Kerissa Fuccillo Battle. The two scientists were astounded when they realized the similarity between the two efforts. They began a collaboration on the spot.
When the two datasets were compared, the findings were eye-popping. Tulip trees now flower 27 days earlier than in the 1800s, and common milkweed, a plant that is critically important to endangered monarch butterflies, now flowers 13 days earlier. Overall, plants in the study leaf out 19 days sooner than they did in the early 1800s.
While the results of the New York study are impressive, they are not novel. Dozens of studies have shown impressive shifts in springtime plant and animal activity in the temperate forests of the United States. In West Virginia, two spring wildflowers, cutleaf toothwort and yellow trout lily, now flower approximately six days earlier than 100 years ago. In Mohonk, New York, hepatica, bloodroot, and trout lily now flower over a week earlier than in the 1930s. In Concord, Massachusetts, yellow wood sorrel now flowers 32 days earlier than 150 years ago. This pattern extends to Europe. In Switzerland, horse chestnut has shifted leaf out by 11 days since the early 1800s, and cherry trees have advanced their flowering time by 30 days over the past 130 years.
But not all plants are shifting their springtime activity earlier in the year. Some are exhibiting the opposite response, delaying their springtime activity. For example, in North Dakota, nannyberry, smooth sumac, and black walnut now flower approximately 10 days later than in the first half of the 1900s. And many other species seem not to care much about changing conditions and persist in undergoing springtime activity at the same time that they have in decades past. This is especially true in the Southern Hemisphere. Approximately 70 percent of the species evaluated in a comprehensive study in Australia and New Zealand showed no evidence of changes in phenology.
A handful of generalizations is starting to emerge from the hundreds of studies of plant phenology from around the globe. In general, plants active the earliest in the spring show the greatest changes in the timing of their activity. In addition, annual plants, which complete their entire life cycle — from germinating to producing mature fruits or seeds — within a single year, generally evidence larger advancements than their longer-lived counterparts.
Further, shifts in the timing of leaf out and flowering appear to be greater for wind-pollinated plants than those that are pollinated by insects. Wind-pollinated plants produce abundant pollen grains that are small and lightweight enough to be carried on air currents from one plant to another. These plants are the ones responsible for causing seasonal allergies, as the pollen grains produced by these plants are small enough that we breathe them into our lungs.
In contrast, the pollen grains produced by insect-pollinated plants are comparatively large and often sticky or spiky, enabling them to hitch a ride on the insects visiting the plants for nectar. The trend toward earlier flowering in wind-pollinated plants is not good news for those of us suffering from seasonal allergies; this means an earlier start to the allergy season! Shifts toward earlier activity are often greater for plants introduced to an environment than those exhibited by native species. And finally, plants at higher elevations and latitudes frequently show greater changes in their timing than their lower-elevation and latitude counterparts.
For many of us, autumn is a favorite season, bringing cool, crisp days, brilliant gold, crimson, and orange leaves, and pumpkin spice everything. Around the globe, however, the natural events that signal our autumn experience, like leaf color change and leaf fall, are changing as well.
In general, autumn events are drifting later in the year than in decades past, though patterns in autumn are not as clear or strong as those emerging for spring. Autumn phenophases — life cycle stages such as leaf color change and leaf drop — appear to be shaped not only by temperatures, beginning when temperatures start to cool in the late summer, but also by daylength and available moisture.
In general, when temperatures are warmer, leaf senescence — when the chlorophyll that is responsible for giving leaves their green color breaks down — is delayed. Moreover, the reveal of the brilliant yellows and oranges that were there all along but masked by green as well as the generation of the anthocyanins responsible for dazzling red in some leaves are both delayed.
Yet midsummer drought can cause leaf color change to occur earlier in the season or even cause leaves to drop with no coloration at all. The opposite is true for fruit ripening, though. Following suit with leaf out and flowering, fruit ripening is generally occurring earlier in the year now than in the past in response to warmer temperatures.
Changes at the Grocery Store
Agricultural crop losses are one of the most direct ways we experience changing phenology. Crop success is dependent on many factors, including daily temperatures, rainfall, extreme weather events, and the presence of pollinators, pests, and disease, all of which farmers track and use to shape immediate decisions.
As climate conditions have changed rapidly in recent decades, farmers have had to adapt. In many parts of the world, farmers are planting earlier in the year. As well, in many places they are harvesting earlier in the year as plants reach maturity more rapidly. For example, some varieties of wine grapes in the north of France are now harvested four weeks earlier than only 40 years ago. Sap flow in sugar maples — the key ingredient in maple syrup — has also inched notably earlier in recent years. With continued warming, sap flow is anticipated to shift to an entire month earlier by the end of the century, dramatically affecting the timing of the harvest as well as where sugar maples successfully grow.
Likewise in India, the flowering period for saffron has been substantially shortened in recent years. Saffron “threads,” highly valued for the flavor and rich color they bring to dishes and drinks, are actually the female reproductive parts of the saffron crocus flower. In parts of India, saffron flowers now open when temperatures are too warm for their development. This leads to a high rate of flower death, and with no flowers, there is no saffron. Between 2013 and 2017, saffron production in Kashmir declined by 90 percent. Consequently, many saffron farmers are shifting their plantings to higher elevations with cooler temperatures.
The northeastern United States is a major fruit production region, as are southern states. As temperatures in these regions have warmed, leaf out and flower bud development as well as the last spring frost have shifted earlier in the season. In many locations, however, the date of the last frost has not shifted earlier to the same degree as plant activity.
Consequently, tender plant tissues are at greater risk of exposure to damaging frosts. Many of the plants that produce fruits we enjoy, including blueberries, apples, and cherries, open their flower buds early in the season, sometimes even before they break leaf buds. Once flower buds begin to open, they become sensitive to cold temperatures.
As with saffron, if flower buds are killed by frost, there are no fruits. So advancing phenology is expected to worsen the risk of frost damage in the coming decades. The start of springtime biological activity in the United States is projected to advance by up to three weeks by the end of the century. One set of predictions indicates that we can expect to experience early warm springs followed by damaging freeze events in nearly one out of every three years by the mid-21st century. The same is predicted for Europe and Asia, with up to a third of Europe and Asia’s forests predicted to be threatened by frost damage in future decades.
Longer Growing Seasons and Your Health
Achoo! Sniffle. Does it seem like your allergies have gotten worse lately? It sure feels like it to me. If you said yes, you’re not wrong. Since 1990, the pollen season has lengthened by over 20 days in the United States and the amount of pollen generated by wind-pollinated plants has increased by about 20 percent.
Why is this happening? The higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and warmer global temperatures we are now experiencing essentially fertilize plants, enabling them to grow larger and produce more pollen than in the past. The consequences for those of us who suffer from seasonal allergies are real.
Dr. Stanley Fineman, an allergist who has practiced in Atlanta, Georgia, for over 40 years, recently shared that in years past, he would instruct his patients to begin using their allergy medications on Saint Patrick’s Day (March 17) to be prepared for upcoming surges in airborne pollen. Yet because the growing season — and consequent pollen production — starts so much earlier now, he has changed his advice to initiate medication on Valentine’s Day (February 14), a full month earlier.
Changing climate conditions also benefit many insects that carry disease. Milder winters and a longer growing season encourage earlier emergence and later fall activity in ticks, which carry Lyme disease and other pathogens, and mosquitoes, which carry dengue, West Nile virus, malaria, and multiple forms of encephalitis. The longer seasons of insect activity increase the period during which humans can be exposed to these disease vectors. The same is true for waterborne illnesses: warmer fresh and marine waters promote growth in harmful algae, bacteria, viruses, and parasites, and likewise increase the potential for exposure through a longer period of activity.
In mid-December 2023, my friend and colleague Dr. Jorge Santiago-Blay sent me photos of cherry trees on the Penn State York campus in Pennsylvania, United States, bearing many open blooms. While he expressed pleasure over the lovely sight, the phenomenon sparked confusion and disorientation because typically, eastern Pennsylvania is wracked with frigid temperatures and snow by this time of the year — hardly favorable conditions for delicate cherry blossoms.
With increasing variability and change in the earth’s climate, we are poised to experience oddball phenological events such as this with increasing regularity, with impacts to not only to the species exhibiting the unseasonal activity but also our health, cultures, diets, and mental states. Changing phenology, while seemingly innocuous, impacts our lives in many clear and tangible ways.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-plants-are-responding-to-a-warming-world-and-what-it-means-for-us/
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CALIFORNIA’S “WHITE GOLD” DISCOVERY COULD POWER 375 MILLION ELECTRIC VEHICLES
In the southeastern corner of California lies the Salton Sea, a vast, body of water that might be the future of clean energy development
The Salton Sea, a vast, shrinking body of water that might just be the key to the world’s future in clean energy.
In the southeastern corner of California lies the Salton Sea, a vast, shrinking body of water that might just be the key to the world’s future in clean energy.
According to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report, this area holds a treasure trove of lithium—enough to power over 375 million electric vehicle (EV) batteries. This is more than the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads, positioning the region as a potential powerhouse in the global lithium market.
Governor Gavin Newsom refers to lithium as “white gold” and says the Imperial Valley could be the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
Lithium is crucial for the production of rechargeable batteries used in everything from electric cars to smartphones. With the global push towards clean energy and the U.S. aiming for greater energy independence, this discovery seems like a promising development. However, as experts from the University of Southern California (USC) caution, the rush to mine lithium in America could come with severe environmental and public health consequences.
The Promise of ‘Lithium Valley’
“‘Lithium Valley’ is now poised for a potential economic boom—one promoted not just by companies but by environmentalists who believe that the method of lithium extraction being proposed there is the ‘greenest’ approach available,” explained Manuel Pastor, director of the USC Equity Research Institute. “But the question is, who will benefit from the boom and who will face continued marginalization?”
Geothermal brine lithium recovery extracts battery-grade lithium from natural geothermal brines found in hot springs and salt lakes such as the Salton Sea
The Salton Sea’s lithium is found in geothermal brine, a hot, mineral-rich water that lies beneath the surface. This type of lithium extraction is considered less damaging to the environment compared to traditional hard rock mining. The method involves pumping the brine to the surface, where lithium can be extracted, and then returning the brine to the ground. This process is being hailed as a potential game-changer for sustainable lithium production.
California’s Entry into the Lithium Market
Australia currently leads the world in lithium production, mainly from hard rock mines. Countries like Argentina, Chile, and China are also major producers, extracting lithium from salt lakes. But now, California’s Salton Sea is becoming a significant player, according to the World Economic Forum.
The pandemic and geopolitical tensions have highlighted the risks of relying on foreign sources for essential materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt, which power the batteries in EVs and electronic devices. The World Bank predicts that the demand for lithium will surge by 500% by 2050.
“To enable sustainable future production from local resources, the U.S. needs to reduce the amount of lithium used in batteries and seek alternative local sources of lithium,” stated Greys Sošić, an expert in sustainability and global supply chains at the USC Marshall School of Business.
Geothermal brine lithium recovery, as proposed for the Salton Sea, is one such alternative that could help meet the soaring demand while reducing reliance on foreign lithium supplies.
Environmental and Public Health Concerns
The Salton Sea is an unusual body of water. It was accidentally created in 1905 due to an engineering error and has since been shrinking, exposing toxic dust from its dry lakebed. This dust poses significant health risks, especially for children in the surrounding communities, which are already grappling with environmental and economic hardships.
“This is one of the poorest counties in California, with a median household income roughly one-third of that in Silicon Valley … and it has a population which is 85% Latino but with political representation falling far short of that standard,” Pastor said.
In these communities, childhood asthma rates are alarmingly high. Shohreh Farzan, an associate professor of population and public health at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has been studying air quality around the Salton Sea since 2017. “The childhood asthma rate for the communities around the sea is 22%, compared to the national average of roughly 8%,” she reported.
“Many children in this area are affected by respiratory symptoms, such as wheezing and allergies, and the local air quality is a likely contributor to the high rates we see,” Farzan noted. “The trade-off with lithium is that while it can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, there is much that remains to be understood about the environmental impacts of the extraction process and whether this energy transition could impact the health of the surrounding communities.”
Balancing Progress with Protection
The push for lithium extraction in the Imperial Valley reflects a broader global challenge: balancing the urgent need for clean energy with the imperative to protect vulnerable communities and ecosystems. Jill Johnston, an associate professor in the division of environmental health at USC, emphasized this point.
“While efforts to move away from fossil fuels and promote zero-emissions technology is important for public health, it is critical to avoid creating new environmental hazards. The overly burdened families near the proposed lithium extraction site deserve to have clean air and water and protection of their health,” she said.
As the world races towards a green energy future, the Imperial Valley stands at a crossroads. The potential economic benefits from lithium extraction could be substantial, offering jobs and growth in a region that sorely needs them. Yet, the environmental and health challenges cannot be ignored.
The key will be finding a way to harness the Salton Sea’s lithium in a manner that respects both the people and the environment of this unique area. If done correctly, ‘Lithium Valley’ could become a model for sustainable resource extraction. If not, it could become yet another example of how economic development can leave the most vulnerable communities behind.
https://www.thebrighterside.news/green-impact/white-gold-discovery-in-california-could-power-375-million-electric-vehicles-2/
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ESTABLISHING THE CONCEPT OF TRINITY
Contrary to popular opinion the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD did not establish the dogma of “trinity.”
That came later.
Rather, the Council of Nicaea, via a vote of a board meeting of bishops, promoted Jesus from an inferior, subordinate “son of god” to a divine being who was “of the same substance as god,” whatever the hell that means.
What the the Council of Nicaea did was create a nebulous duality of Yahweh and Jesus, not a “trinity.”
What a long, strange trip it’s been, from the fully human, fallible Jesus of the gospel of Mark, to the SILVER SURFER JESUS of the gospel of John.
But the upgraded Jesus of John was not equal to god.
Rather, the Jesus of John was clearly the Greek LOGOS (the “Word”) and the LOGOS was an inferior, subordinate deity created by the transcendent god in order to create and interact with the material universe.
Why?
According to Neo-Platonic theory, the transcendent god was too pure to sully his hands with anything material, like stars, planets or human flesh.
Thus he left the dirty work up to his inferior and subordinate creation, his divine lackey, the LOGOS.
Properly interpreted, the opening chapter of John says: “In the beginning was the LOGOS, and LOGOS was with god, and the LOGOS was a deity.”
Thus the creator god of the old testament was replaced a Neo-Platonic intermediary god or creative principle, depending on one’s interpretation of LOGOS.
The now-lauded holy ghost was always the junior partner of the loopy “trinity” and did not become an official member of the “trinity” until much later, in 381 AD at the Council of Constantinople, via another board meeting vote. ~ Michael Burch, Quora
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DRINK COFFEE, LIVE LONGER: HOW COFFEE INCREASES LONGEVITY
Recent studies have highlighted the potential health benefits of coffee, particularly its influence on longevity and reducing chronic disease risk.
A study suggests that consuming 3 to 4 cups of coffee daily could increase lifespan and may add 5 extra years of life.
A recent review also indicates that 3 to 5 cups of coffee a day could decrease mortality and lower the risk of some diseases.
A third piece of research further suggests the health benefits of drinking coffee, especially in women as they get older.
Coffee is among the world’s most popular beverages, with more than 2 billion cups of coffee consumed daily worldwide.
Roughly two-thirds of American adults drink coffee each day, with the average American coffee drinker consuming 3 cups per day.
Given the high consumption levels of coffee, ongoing research is investigating the health consequences of coffee intake. As well as being a favored drink, coffee consumption may also provide numerous health benefits, possibly reducing mortality and lowering disease risk.
Healthy aging refers to the process of maintaining physical, mental, and social well-being throughout life. It typically involves focusing on preventative care and making healthy lifestyle choices, such as being mindful of one’s dietary pattern.
While more research is still necessary, growing evidence is highlighting how coffee consumption may contribute to healthy aging.
Medical News Today looks at three recent studies we have covered to offer an overview on the role of coffee and how it may benefit healthy aging
MODERATE DAILY COFFEE CONSUMPTION COULD SLOW BIOLOGICAL AGING BY 5 YEARS
Major psychiatric disorders, such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, have links with accelerated biological aging. This describes when the body’s functional decline occurs faster than a person’s chronological age.
Health experts can measure this using cellular markers, and those with higher biological ages are at an increased risk for for age-related diseases, cognitive decline, and earlier mortality.
A study published in BMJ Mental Health in November 2025, indicates that consuming 3 to 4 cups of coffee a day could slow premature aging that is typically associated with individuals living with major psychiatric disorders.
The study found that individuals aged 18 to 65 with major psychiatric disorders who drank 3 to 4 cups of coffee per day had longer telomeres.
This describes repetitive DNA sequences that protect the ends of chromosomes, preventing them from damage. Telomere length shortens with age, making it a valuable cellular marker for gauging biological age.
The telomere length in these moderate coffee drinkers was comparable to those typically seen in people about 5 years younger biologically.
By contrast, participants who reported no coffee consumption had shorter telomere lengths than those who drank the recommended number of cups daily. People who drank more than 4 cups of coffee a day did not have longer telomeres.
This effect may be due to coffee’s antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds protecting cells from oxidative stress, which is a driver of telomere shortening.
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, a registered dietitian who specializes in heart disease, not involved in the study, explained to MNT:
“Coffee contains bioactive compounds, particularly chlorogenic acids (CGA) and trigonelline, that act as antioxidants, neutralizing free radicals and activating cellular defense pathways to protect DNA from oxidative damage. CGA and trigonelline likely slow telomere shortening by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation.”
However, it is important to note that this is a cross-sectional study using data from participants with psychiatric disorders in Norway. As such, it relies on self-reported coffee intake and cannot prove a causative connection.
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3–5 cups of coffee a day may increase longevity, reduce diabetes risk
A review published in Nutrients in August 2025 also highlights the potential health benefits of moderate daily coffee consumption.
The researchers note that studies consistently relate coffee consumption to decreased mortality and lower risk of major chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, cognitive decline, and respiratory illnesses, for most people.
Interestingly, the review suggests that drinking three to five cups of coffee daily is associated with a lower risk of death and reduced risk of developing major disease.
The lowest overall mortality risk was observed at around 3.5 cups daily, and both regular and decaffeinated coffee showed these associations.
Review author Farin Kamangar, MD, PhD, CRA, highlighted the main components of the review to MNT:
“The results of several decades of high-quality research on millions of people, show that coffee is overall beneficial to health. Moderate coffee consumption, typically 3 to 5 cups a day, is linked to increased longevity and reduced risks of many major diseases, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, respiratory illnesses, and cognitive decline.”
The authors indicate that compounds present in coffee, such as polyphenols, may help improve glucose metabolism, reduce chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, and supper better overall metabolic health.
However, the evidence is from observational studies, so they do not prove that coffee directly causes these health benefits.
While more research is still necessary, Kamangar suggested this may lead to a shift in doctors’ coffee discussions.
“For clinicians, the message is clear: For most adults, moderate coffee drinking can be safely encouraged as part of a healthy lifestyle,“ he told us.
“However, there may be some caveats,“ Kamangar cautioned. “Adding sugar and cream can blunt some of coffee’s protective effects, suggesting black coffee or lightly sweetened versions may be best. For optimum results: consult your doctor and consult your body.”
Coffee linked to healthy aging in women
While the possible benefits of drinking coffee may apply to most people, further research is necessary to identify which populations stand to benefit the most, or should exercise caution.
Results from a study shared at the Nutrition 2025 conference, and published in Current Developments in Nutrition, suggest that regular coffee consumption may support healthier aging, particularly in women.
The researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study, involving about 47,513 women tracked over decades. For the analysis, the authors defined healthy aging as reaching later life with no major chronic diseases, no physical impairment, no cognitive or memory issues, intact mental health, and no functional limitations.
Study author Sara Mahdavi, BSc, HBSc, RD, MSc, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, in the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Nutritional Sciences, highlighted the following findings of the study to MNT:
“We found that moderate intake of caffeinated coffee during midlife was modestly associated with healthy aging later in life. We defined healthy aging stringently: Not only surviving into older age, but doing so without major chronic disease, cognitive decline, physical disability, or poor mental health. Each additional cup of coffee was linked to about a 2% higher chance of healthy aging, while cola intake was associated with a 20% lower chance. The association appeared to be dose-responsive for coffee, though modest, and was not observed with decaf or tea, possibly due to lower intake and differences in bioactive content.”
However, the authors note that the findings come from observational data, and the cohort was limited to mostly white women. This means the results may not generalize to other groups.
Additionally, other details like coffee type, additives, and changes in consumption over time were not deeply analyzed.
While the study results note the potential benefits of coffee, it is still advisable to consult a doctor about how caffeine might interact with any medications, or impact any underlying conditions.
Mahdavi offered the following caveat: “Coffee is not universally beneficial. Caffeine metabolism varies significantly based on both genetics and hormonal factors, such as estrogen, which slows caffeine clearance.“
“Our prior research has shown that women with slower caffeine metabolism (due to genetic variation in the CYP1A2 gene) may not benefit from high intakes, and could be more susceptible to adverse effects. Personalized nutrition — taking into account both sex and genetic differences — will be key in future recommendations,” she told us.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/roundup-coffee-and-longevity-3-studies-explore-how-coffee-may-benefit-healthy-aging
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HIGHER POLYPHENOL METABOLITE LEVELS, LOWER HEART DISEASE RISK SCORES
For this study, researchers followed more than 3,100 adult participants of the TwinsUK cohort, who completed the EPIC-Norfolk Food Frequency Questionnaire, for more than 10 years.
Of the participant group, 200 were asked to give urine samples, from which scientists determined their polyphenol exposure by measuring their polyphenol-rich dietary score (PPS-D) and accompanying urinary metabolic signature (PPS-M).
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that metabolites in study participants’ urine samples confirmed that those with higher polyphenol metabolite levels also had reduced cardiovascular risk scores, as well as higher levels of HDL “good” cholesterol.
“[This] means that people who had more polyphenol breakdown products in their urine tended to show a more favorable cardiovascular profile,” Rodriguez-Mateos explained.
“Because this is an observational study, we cannot say polyphenols cause these differences, but the patterns support the idea that diets rich in polyphenol-containing foods may be linked with better heart health. Importantly, measuring metabolites in urine provides a more objective and accurate reflection of dietary intake than questionnaires alone,” she added.
More polyphenols linked to slower heart disease progression
Study participants also had their cardiovascular disease risk scores assessed through their atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk score and HeartScore.
In addition, researchers discovered that although heart disease risk naturally increases as we age, having a higher intake of polyphenol-containing foods was linked to a slower progression of risk over the 11-year follow-up period.
“Evidence from many randomized controlled trials shows that polyphenols can help blood vessels function better, as well as lower blood pressure, and improve blood lipid profiles,” Rodriguez-Mateos continued. “They appear to act through several mechanisms, including boosting nitric oxide availability in blood vessels, which helps them relax and support healthy circulation.”
“We plan to run a randomized controlled trial to test whether consuming a diet rich in polyphenol-rich foods can directly improve markers of heart health,” she added. “We are also developing new biomarker-based tools to measure diet more accurately and better understand how these compounds relate to long-term health.”
MNT spoke with Cheng-Han Chen, MD, a board certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills, CA, about this study.
“These results add to our current understanding of polyphenols as natural compounds with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties that can improve blood vessel function and potentially be beneficial to heart health,” Chen, who was not involved in the research, commented.
“Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Research into the health effects of our daily diet will go a long way toward helping us control many of the known risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity,” he told us.
“Future research can further investigate whether some polyphenol-rich foods — such as tea, coffee, and certain nuts/berries — are more beneficial to heart health than others,” he added.
“You don’t have to overhaul your whole diet — small, consistent shifts toward more plants, as accessible and available, can support your heart, gut, and brain starting today,” she advised.
Richard explained that people can add more polyphenols to their diet just by adding more plants to their plate. She suggested starting simple with one or two changes a day, such as:
adding berries to breakfast dishes
add spinach or peppers to egg dishes
tossing beans into soups
sprinkling nuts or seeds onto salads, or having them as a snack
choosing green or black tea instead of sweetened or diet soft drinks or syrup-laden coffee beverages
using herbs and spices like cinnamon, oregano, turmeric, or basil, which can be added to soups, casseroles, salads, sandwiches, and in sauteed, grilled, or baked entrees
reaching for fruits like apples, grapes, oranges, pears, and pomegranates, which are “easy-on-the go” snacks or desserts, and are great for the heart and brain, while their fiber and nutrient content supports gut function and the immune system.
“And yes, even a square of dark chocolate counts with a handful of nuts can be beneficial while satisfying that afternoon craving,“ said Richard.
“Polyphenol literally means ‘poly’- many, and ‘phenols’—a chemical structure (aromatic ring) in plant compounds that contains a phenyl group,” Richard detailed. “The translation — many protective compounds. Think of polyphenols as nature’s defense molecules — plants make them, and we benefit when we eat them.”
“Remember that meeting with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN) can help personalize and tailor your needs to your health goals based on your current health, lifestyle, preferences, activity level, current nutrition status, and more,” she added. “Work with your healthcare team or local search engine to find one that may be a good fit for you and your polyphenol needs.”
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/polyphenol-rich-foods-cocoa-coffee-berries-olive-oil-support-heart-health#How-to-add-more-polyphenol-rich-foods-to-diet
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EATING DARK CHOCOLATE MAY SLOW BIOLOGICAL AGING
A new study investigates a compound called theobromine, which is found predominantly in chocolate.
Participants with the highest blood levels of this compound had signs that their biological age was advancing more slowly.
Theobromine is found in cocoa and, to a lesser extent, coffee. It is chemically similar to caffeine but does not have such a pronounced stimulant effect.
A new study, published in the journal Aging, measured levels of this compound in people’s blood.
They found that those with the highest levels had epigenetic markers associated with slower biological aging.
Theobromine is a bioactive phytochemical, meaning that it comes from a plant, and it can influence human physiology.
The primary sources of theobromine in the human diet are chocolate and, to a lesser extent, coffee.
Theobromine is a major component of cocoa beans, comprising around 3.3% by weight. It is molecularly similar to caffeine and shares some of its effects.
However, experts consider theobromine to be a more “gentle” central nervous system stimulant, partly because it does not cross the blood-brain barrier as easily as caffeine.
Theobromine is toxic to humans in high doses, but not at the levels normally consumed, which is why chocolate is safe for humans, thankfully. For cats and dogs, though, it is a different story. Because they metabolize the compound more slowly, it can build up and become toxic more easily.
BIOLOGICAL AGING
Chronological age is the number of birthdays you have had since you were born. Biological age, on the other hand, is not bound by time. Rather, it is the physiological condition of your cells, tissues, and organs.
Some people, for instance, may be 80 in chronological years but, if they avoided serious disease, ate a healthy diet, and exercised regularly throughout their lives, their biological age might be 60.
This can run in the other direction, too. Someone who has not lived a healthy life might have a biological age of 80 even if they have only traveled around the sun 60 times.
Although there is not a single way to measure biological age, scientists have designed a number of methods that can provide insights. In this study, they used a number of measures, including epigenetics and telomere length.
Our genetics are set in stone. The genes we have as a fetus are the same ones we carry to the grave. However, these genes can be turned “on” or “off” by so-called epigenetic changes.
Medical News Today reached out to Fady Hannah-Shmouni, MD, who was not involved in the study. He is an endocrinologist and geneticist at the University of British Columbia and medical director at Eli Health. To help us understand epigenetics, he explained:
“You can think of your DNA as the hardware of your body, the basic blueprint you’re born with. Epigenetics is like the software settings that tell your cells how to use that blueprint.”
Importantly, the authors of the current study write that “Epigenetic deregulation is a key hallmark of aging.”
They also explain how research shows that alkaloids, like theobromine, can influence epigenetics. Therefore, they decided to investigate whether the health benefits of cocoa and coffee might be attributable to epigenetic changes.
How DNA methylation leads to epigenetic changes
One common epigenetic mechanism is methylation. “DNA methylation is one of the key epigenetic switches,” Hannah-Shmouni told MNT. “Small chemical tags called methyl groups (tiny carbon-and-hydrogen clusters) get attached to DNA.”
“When a gene gets a lot of methyl tags,” he continued, “it often becomes harder to read; the gene is ‘turned down’ or sometimes ‘turned off.’”
In the current study, the scientists used a methodology called GrimAge. According to Hannah-Shmouni, “GrimAge is one of the most advanced and researched epigenetic aging clocks. It predicts biological age, but also something deeper.” He explained how it can also predict:
Mortality risk
Disease risk, including heart disease and cancer
Lifespan-related biomarkers, such as inflammation and smoking exposure
Rate of aging.
Another biomarker of aging is telomere length.
Telomeres are like the protective caps on the ends of shoelaces. They sit at the end of chromosomes and ensure that their complex 3-D structure does not become unraveled.
As we age, our telomeres grow shorter, and scientists can use this as a marker of biological aging.
Theobromine slows biological aging
For their study, the researchers recruited 1,669 participants, 509 of whom were twins. They analyzed their blood samples for theobromine and other compounds found in coffee and chocolate.
They found that those with the highest levels of theobromine in their blood had signs of slower epigenetic aging than those with the lowest levels. They saw the same pattern in telomere length, although the relationship was weaker.
This difference, the authors explain, may be because these two measures “capture separate aspects of the aging process that do not necessarily overlap.”
When they investigated links between other chocolate and coffee bioactives in the blood, they did not find the same association with biological aging. This suggests that theobromine is responsible for the effect.
Although previous studies have shown that theobromine and related compounds can extend the life span of worms, this is the first study in humans to reach a similar conclusion.
This study is fascinating, not only because it hints that chocolate might slow aging, but also because this widely-consumed compound is relatively safe (for humans).
However, this is not an open-and-shut case; there are many questions left. Although the scientists did assess blood levels of a few compounds, there are many more that they did not measure.
For instance, as the authors explain, coffee contains other health-promoting compounds, like the polyphenol flavan-3-ol.
In this study, they did not measure this compound, but because it is found in chocolate, if someone has high theobromine levels, they may also have high levels of flavan-3-ol.
As the authors explain, “the cardiometabolic and healthy aging benefits of flavan-3-ols are well established.” So, this study could be a red herring. Maybe the slowed biological aging is simply due to higher levels of another compound in chocolate.
Hannah-Shmouni also mentioned that reverse causation might explain the results. “People with slower biological aging may metabolize theobromine differently,” he explained.
For instance, as the authors explain, coffee contains other health-promoting compounds, like the polyphenol flavan-3-ol.
Hannah-Shmouni thinks that “The findings are intriguing and justify future intervention studies.” Suggesting future directions, he recommends randomized controlled trials with controlled doses of theobromine, longitudinal studies, and studies that include the measurement of other polyphenols.
“Dark chocolate that’s at least 70% cocoa and only contains a handful of ingredients can actually support good health. Cocoa contains a range of healthy, bioactive plant compounds, like polyphenols, which are antioxidants and support a healthy gut microbiome,” according to Federuca Amati, PhD.
“Aside from phytochemicals, chocolate is also rich in iron, magnesium, copper, manganese, and many other micronutrients,” she added.
So, the bottom line is this: Theobromine might support slower biological aging, but if it does not, you can still enjoy chocolate if you choose the right product.
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Oriana:
I apologize for posting about coffee so often, but then coffee is indeed extraordinary.
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A SIMPLE EXERCISE PREVENTS BACK PAIN
You know the feeling. You bend down to tie your shoelaces and experience a sharp searing pain in the bottom of your back. Suddenly, you've become part of a startling statistic – you've joined the estimated 619 million people worldwide living with lower back pain. Luckily there is handy exercise which can help, called seated salsa.
And the best thing? You don't even have to get up to do it.
Lower back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. It's defined as pain between the lower edge of the ribs and the buttocks. It can affect anyone, but is more common in people who are overweight, smoke, or who have a family history of the condition.
"I used to work with spinal surgeons, and if you look at where people have most problems in the back, it's the bottom two discs in the vertebrae," says Chris McCarthy, an associate professor of physiotherapy at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The backbone is made up of 33 vertebrae, each of which is separated by a spongy layer of cartilage called a disc. The discs provide cushioning; they act as shock absorbers during everyday activities such as walking, running and jumping.
The bottom two vertebrae, where most lower back pain is located, are attached to the pelvis with very thick ligaments. This holds them firmly in place, allowing them to do their job of supporting the weight of the torso. However, there is a downside.
"It's a really stiff part of the back, and it's very difficult to get it to move, especially when the local muscles are in spasm due to pain, or tight due to lack of use," says McCarthy.
One good way to exercise the muscles in the region is to rotate the pelvis from one side to the other, which makes the bottom of the back tilt from side to side in a kind of rocking motion. This happens naturally when you walk. However, when a person experiences lower back pain, the back muscles go into a spasm and immobilize the area, stopping it from moving.
"Unfortunately, that creates a vicious cycle where it [the lower back] just gets stiffer and stiffer, and more and more painful," says McCarthy.
Studies show that, when it comes to back pain, moving can be a vital part of the healing process. Usually this can be achieved with exercises, stretches and manual therapy. But most stretches recommended for back pain don't exercise the bottom part of the back.
That's where seated salsa comes in. To perform the exercise, sit up straight with your feet firmly planted on the floor. Bring your legs together so that your thighs are running parallel with each other. Then, while keeping your shoulders absolutely still, push your right knee forwards while pulling your left knee back. Then switch so that your left knee goes forward and your right knee goes back. Your pelvis should roll forwards on one side and back on the other side, just like in a traditional salsa dance. Repeat this movement for one minute.
McCarthy and colleagues at the MMU Manchester Movement Unit, a physiotherapy unit, have conducted a yet-to-be-published pilot study, where they asked patients with lower back pain to perform the seated salsa while hooked up to electromyography (EMG) sensors. The sensors measure how tight the muscles are in the back. The results showed that just one minute of seated salsa every 30 minutes was enough to make their muscles relax, easing symptoms of back pain.
"The nice thing about it is it's very easy to do whilst you're at work. You don't even have to get up from the desk," says McCarthy.
Office workers often spend large portions of the day sitting down, raising the risk of lower back pain. Standing up more and walking around – even if it's just to get a drink – can help reduce this risk. However, sometimes getting up from a desk is not feasible.
"If office workers are in the middle of something and they don't want to get up and stretch, rather than standing up, you could just every half an hour, have a little bit of seated salsa for a minute or so," says McCarthy.
The exercise could also be useful for older people who maybe can't stand up and sit down as easily, or for people who have reduced mobility after an operation. Research shows that keeping mobile and exercising regularly is key to living a long and healthy life.
"We know that lots of older people are not very physically active," says Jugdeep Dhesi, a consultant geriatrician and president of the British Geriatrics Society.
"If you are not able to move properly, seated exercises are a good way of building up strength. But if you are, then there's so much stuff people could do. Whether it's standing on one leg while you're brushing your teeth, or doing just two or three squats holding the back of the chair while the kettle is boiling – it's all about building this into a habit that just becomes a norm that you will always do."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251106-seated-salsa-the-miracle-movement-to-help-ease-back-pain?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20251231&at_send_id=4511008&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20251106-seated-salsa-the-miracle-movement-to-help-ease-back-pain&at_bbc_team=crm&at_audience_id=266492954
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RESVERATROL AND COPPER REDUCED THE AGGRESSIVENESS OF GLIOBLASTOMA BRAIN TUMORS
It may be possible to coax some of the most deadly brain cancer cells into a sort of healing, rather than simply trying — and often failing — to destroy them. This is the finding of a new study from the Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer, in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai.
The study found that tablets containing resveratrol and copper appeared to positively affect a variety of biomarkers in glioblastoma tumors.
The patients took tablets containing the nutraceuticals four times a day for an average of 11.6 days leading up to previously scheduled surgeries, during which their tumors were removed. They were then compared to tumors from similar glioblastoma patients who did not receive tablets.
The patients taking the tablets reported no side effects.
The researchers’ hypothesis was that the combination of resveratrol and copper would produce oxygen radicals capable of deactivating cell-free chromatin particles released by dying glioblastoma cells. These particles aggravate living glioblastoma cells, making them more destructive.
The treated resveratrol/copper glioblastoma cells exhibited several promising changes:
Levels of Ki-67 were nearly one-third lower in the treated tumors — Ki67 is a protein that serves as an indicator of the speed at which glioblastoma cells are dividing, and thus the cancer’s aggressiveness.
A set of nine biomarkers recognized as the “hallmarks of cancer” were detected in 57% fewer cells.
Six of the body’s immune checkpoints, which inhibit the body from attacking cancer cells, were reduced by 41% in the tumors.
There was a reduction of 56% in markers linked to stem cells that allow glioblastoma to spread as quickly as it does, and to resist treatment so stubbornly.
The study is published in BJC Reports.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/supplement-mix-resveratrol-copper-helps-reduce-tumor-aggressiveness-deadly-brain-cancer
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NON-TOBACCO NICOTINE AND ALZHEIMER’S
Nicotine prevents the formation in the test tube of protein clumps linked to Alzheimer's disease, scientists announced at a press conference today. The finding may provide a useful starting point for developing drugs that delay or prevent the disease. The researchers are quick to caution, however, that harmful effects of smoking--strengthened by a report in Science last week linking a carcinogenic byproduct of cigarette smoke to a specific kind of lung tumor--far outweigh any possible benefit from nicotine in tobacco.
Michael Zagorski, a biochemist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and his colleagues were looking for a biochemical mechanism to explain why smokers appear to have a lower incidence of Alzheimer's. They found that nicotine prevents aggregation of beta amyloid, a protein that forms damaging plaques in Alzheimer's patients' brains. The researchers added nicotine to a solution of beta amyloid, which can take several shapes. They found that nicotine binds to the soluble protein and prevents it from aggregating in a form found in Alzheimer's plaques. The results of the study, which was partially funded by the tobacco firm Philip Morris, are published in this month's Biochemistry.
The findings are "intriguing," says neurobiologist Neil Buckholtz, director of Alzheimer's research at the National Institute on Aging. However, he points out, the concentrations of beta amyloid and nicotine in the study are much higher than levels in the brain. Still, nicotine or related compounds might someday be used as a drug to delay or prevent Alzheimer's, says Ken Keller, a pharmacologist at Georgetown University Medical Center. Don't expect nicotine to cure Alzheimer's, however. ”No one thinks nicotine is going to be a turnaround drug,'' Keller says.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nicotine-and-alzheimers
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IS NON-TOBACCO NICOTINE ACTUALLY NEUROPROTECTIVE?
Research suggests nicotine has neuroprotective properties, potentially shielding against conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's by activating receptors (nAChRs), reducing inflammation, and boosting protective growth factors, but these benefits are complex, dose-dependent, and exist alongside the severe harms of smoking, highlighting a critical distinction between pure nicotine's effects and tobacco use.
Potential Neuroprotective Mechanisms
Receptor Activation: Nicotine binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) like α4β2 and α7, activating pathways that protect neurons.
Neurotransmitter Release: It stimulates the release of dopamine and acetylcholine, improving focus, memory, and attention.
Growth Factors: It can increase beneficial growth factors (BDNF, NGF) and pro-survival pathways (PI3K/AKT) that support neuron health.
Antioxidant & Anti-inflammatory: Nicotine may act as an antioxidant and reduce inflammation in the brain, counteracting damage.
Key Considerations
Dose & Timing: Neuroprotective effects are often seen at low doses, while high doses can be harmful; effects also vary by age (e.g., detrimental during adolescent development).
Smoking vs. Nicotine: While nicotine shows promise, smoking is a major health risk, causing cancer, stroke, and other diseases, and its harmful components mask any potential nicotine benefits.
Conclusion:
While pure nicotine shows significant promise in lab and some human studies for protecting against neurodegeneration, it's crucial to separate these findings from tobacco smoking, which is extremely harmful. More research is needed to develop safe, effective nicotine-based therapies without the addiction and broader health risks of tobacco. (AI overview)
truckerron:
I've been wearing a patch for about 6 months now almost every day. I have noticed it DOES bring about better memory and cognition.
KimberlyADarling:
Bredesen Protocol does demonstrate proof, in early to mid range stages, dementia CAN BE REVERSED. The medical community at large fights the headway Dr Bredesen has recorded studies/PROOF of, going on 25 years. And other functional medicine doctors are doing similar studies. There are several areas required to address, including diet, vigorous exercise, supplements, to name three.
@skypilot23:
yes my dreams get bigger on a patch i might try this for executive stuff
annnarebecca3384:
I buy the 21 mg patch and cut into 4 pieces. It gives me energy to get things done!
yisroelhommick6175:
So do I, even though it says over & over not to cut it up. I assume (rightly or wrongly) that cutting it up just makes the mechanism uneven, but not ineffective, which is all I care about.
shebear7775:
There is research and case studies that nicotine also shrinks tumors & cures cancer
hotuish:
I work as a psychotherapist in a residential mental health program. It’s just known that nicotine reduces symptoms in many of our schizophrenic patients.
mikecaprock9684:
Use nicotine 2mg -4mg in am as lozenges. My problem is I enjoy it so much. But I think personally 2-4 mg 4-5 days a week can help with focus and motivation. I am 70. I started as a nurse when I noticed my older patients who smoked were very sharp . But don’t smoke nicotine. In small doses is ok.
mh0862:
If I put on a 14mg patch before bed, wild dreams ahead. Not scary or nightmares, just wild. Kinda fun.
PerAsperaAdAstra8755:
Dr. Newhouse, a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, emphasizes that while tobacco is carcinogenic and harmful as a delivery system, nicotine itself is not known to be carcinogenic. He describes nicotine as a "good drug" in a "bad delivery system.” The "Perfect Psychotropic": Nicotine acts on acetylcholine receptors in the brain, functioning as a "modulator" that can either calm a person down if they are anxious or make them more alert if they are sluggish.
Alzheimer’s and Memory: Research suggests nicotine can improve attention and memory in patients with memory loss. It helps by enhancing the brain's ability to resist the effects of neuronal damage.
Depression: Preliminary studies show a "dramatic" antidepressant effect in older patients, specifically improving executive function and mood.
ADHD: Because it helps with impulse control and executive function, nicotine has been shown to improve cognitive deficits associated with ADHD.
Addiction and Delivery Speed: Dr. Newhouse explains that nicotine's addictiveness is highly dependent on how fast it enters the brain. Rapid delivery ( smoking, vaping ) is highly addictive, while slow-release methods ( patches ) show almost no abuse potential or withdrawal symptoms in non-smokers.
"Less is More": In therapeutic contexts, lower doses (around 7–10 mg ) often provide better benefits with fewer side effects than the high doses typically used to quit smoking.
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NICOTINE MYTHS COMPLICATE PUBLIC HEALTH
A majority of people in the U.S. wrongly believe that nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that causes cancer. In fact, “the harm from smoking comes from the burning of the ingredients in a cigarette, not from the nicotine itself,” said Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, a health policy researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. More than 70 carcinogens have been identified in the cigarette smoke produced by the combustion of tobacco, which can damage people’s DNA and lay the groundwork for cancer.
For many years, cigarettes were the main way that most Americans consumed nicotine. That meant it wasn’t a big problem from a public health perspective if people conflated the dangers of smoking with the dangers of that particular chemical, so long as that helped deter them from lighting up.
Recent headlines suggest there is potential for nicotine’s reputation to tip in the opposite direction. An article in Slate explored early research on nicotine as a treatment for people with long Covid dealing with brain fog. Meanwhile, social media users touting Zyn nicotine pouches as “gas station Ozempic” say it helps with weight loss.
According to Jonathan Foulds, PhD., Professor of Public Health Sciences and Psychiatry at Penn State, the evidence that nicotine is harmful to the developing brain is of about the same quality as evidence on the impact of caffeine on young people. Both are stimulants that may plausibly have an adverse effect on brain development, he said. “But the same people who are out there saying nicotine causes brain damage, they’re giving their kids pocket money to putt around to Starbucks and buy whatever they like.” (In a sign of growing concerns about the health effects of caffeine on young people, the U.K. recently announced plans to join a growing number of countries in banning the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to anyone under 16.)
https://www.statnews.com/2025/09/10/nicotine-myths-complicate-public-health/
Nicotina rustica
Nicotine possesses unique neuroprotective and cognitive-enhancing properties. Nicotine works by binding to receptors in the brain called “nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.” These receptors are important in learning, memory, attention, and neuroprotection.
When nicotine activates brain receptors, it sets off a chain reaction. Receptors known as α7 receptors allow calcium to flow into neurons, which triggers a cellular pathway that also gets activated by brain chemicals that help neurons stay alive and healthy. This causes the cell to make protective proteins that act like shields, preventing brain cells from dying when they're under stress or attack.
Nicotine also exhibits anti-inflammatory effects in the brain. It activates the "cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway," which reduces the production of inflammatory chemicals known as “cytokines” while preserving anti-inflammatory signals. This dual action of neuroprotection plus anti-inflammation makes nicotine an intriguing potential treatment for neurodegenerative diseases where neuronal death and inflammation play key roles.
Promising Research in Parkinson's Disease
One of the most exciting areas of nicotine research involves Parkinson's disease. Studies have consistently shown that smokers have a significantly reduced risk of developing Parkinson's disease. This appears to be a dose-dependent effect, with heavier smokers experiencing greater protection.
Animal studies have demonstrated that nicotine can protect dopaminergic neurons, which are the brain cells that are damaged in Parkinson's disease. In laboratory models, exposure to nicotine before or during exposure to toxins protects against damage and preserves motor function.
Researchers have found that nicotine provides this protection by reducing levels of a protein called SIRT6 that causes neurons to die in Parkinson's disease. Brain tissue from Parkinson's patients shows increased levels of this protein, while tissue from tobacco users shows reduced levels. This explains how nicotine protects brain cells and suggests that nicotine therapy might prevent or slow Parkinson's progression.
Cognitive Enhancement and Alzheimer's Disease
The potential for nicotine therapy extends beyond Parkinson's to Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are progressively lost during Alzheimer's disease, and current Alzheimer's medications work partly by boosting the activity of the remaining receptors.
A study performed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center showed that nicotine can improve attention, memory, and cognitive processing in both healthy individuals and those with mild cognitive impairment. The improvements appear to be more pronounced in individuals carrying the APOE4 gene variant, which increases Alzheimer's risk.
The Anti-Inflammatory Connection
One of nicotine's most therapeutic mechanisms involves its anti-inflammatory effects. Chronic inflammation in the brain contributes to all neurodegenerative diseases, and nicotine's ability to reduce inflammation may explain many of its protective effects.
Receptors known as "α7 nicotinic receptors" acts as a switch that can reduce inflammation. When activated by nicotine, these receptors suppress the production of inflammatory molecules. This anti-inflammatory action may explain why nicotine shows promise for conditions as diverse as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, and even inflammatory bowel diseases. Nicotine's anti-inflammatory properties help explain its various benefits.
Clinical Applications and Current Research
The therapeutic potential of nicotine is being explored through various delivery methods that avoid the harmful effects of smoking. Patches that are applied to the skin are the most widely studied approach. These patches provide steady nicotine levels without the toxins found in tobacco smoke.
In addition to improving memory in individuals with mild cognitive impairment, clinical trials have shown nicotine patches can also improve memory in healthy elderly individuals. Nicotine has also showed promise as a treatment for depression, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-leading-edge/202506/the-hidden-healing-power-of-nicotine
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ending on beauty:
GARDENING
Near my reddest rose I found
a raspberry-like vine
that survived and climbed up,
though deprived of light.
Still no sign of flower
or fruit, but the thorns
look promising. The berries
could be sweetest yet.
That’s what we learn to expect
in the household of a god
whose image has been both
the serpent and the dove.
~ Oriana
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