*
AT THE WIND HARP
At the Marina, listening to the wind harp,
its rainbow of harmonic moans,
I felt a light touch
above my left wrist —
pale skin, pale aqua eyes —
like a pretty ghost child.
She was just beginning to smile,
like the wind into wind.
*
In gilded medieval light, I stood
on a sand dune overlooking
the city of Prague —
zlata Praha, ”golden Prague”
with its stony-ribbed cathedral,
castle of a thousand windows,
and the crooked narrow hope
in the crooked street below,
The Alchemists’ Lane —
and the legend of the Golem:
on the giant’s clay forehead
the word Emet, meaning Truth.
When the Golem grew dangerous,
Rabbi Liwa erased the first letter,
leaving Met, meaning Death.
And the Golem fell back to dust.
*
I started across the sand, but it bled
into the flat suburban streets, the dream
fled. I lay thinking, Will I ever
reach the golden city of Prague?
I thought of Kafka in the cold
cathedral, its moan of echoes,
prayers denied, denied, denied.
I thought of classes never taught,
of the ghost poems I wrote:
would they vanish like the night
into night? Then your image
returned — you returned,
child at the wind harp,
and with a touch as light as one
letter, you changed the word
from death to truth.
~ Oriana
Oriana:
The closest the we have to legend of the Golem, and more famous than the Golem by far, is Frankenstein’s Monster. It’s cruel to call him a monster; his mother, Mary Shelley, called him “the Creature.”
But now humanity has come up with another “creature,” known not by its full name but by the abrupt initials: “AI”. Having been warned by Mary Shelley, the creatrix of loneliest of all creatures, we are afraid that AI will outsmart us and turn against us. After all, if someone or something subverted our computers and cell phones, we’d be blind orphans begging for crumbs of guidance and affection. That would be the true "Great Replacement." We no longer know how to live without screens.
Hence essays like the one below:
AI AND FRANKENSTEIN'S "CREATURE"
There is an indisputable link between Victor Frankenstein’s creation (let’s try and veer away from the term monster), and Artificial Intelligence.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s narrative of the modern Prometheus has traveled through time and space, surpassing generations. For me, the classic tale of Frankenstein and his creation is timeless – in the true sense of the word. It cannot be bolted down. Born from growing scientific circles of the Victorian era and the mind of an intellectually advanced teenage girl, it boasts post-modern sensibilities and futuristic ideals.
There was a huge preoccupation with science fiction during this time, reflective of the rapid progress in early industrial, technological and scientific advancements. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (1859) challenged faith in the Church, questioning the fabric of what the majority of people at the time believed in creation and life itself. Frankenstein plays on these fears. A scientist playing god, a man creates a super-intelligent being – a being capable of things beyond human ability. It’s now, more relevant than ever, 200 years on.
The questions Shelley raises about a man-made being are relevant in the creation of AI. It explores the possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence and fears of the Singularity. There are many ethical concerns that link Frankenstein and AI too.
In the introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley speaks of her nightmare inspiration. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”
The iconography of artificial, man-made beings coming to life, rising up from the ‘slab’, has been replicated time and time again. Shows like Westworld, for example, have brought this trope to a new audience.
There could be a future where an AI holds consciousness and thought processing power far greater than humans. Shelley explores this way before the development of Machine Learning. Frankenstein’s creation learns language, and how to speak through a hole in a cottage wall where he secretly watches a family interact with one another. He is the very embodiment of machine intelligence. He learns like an algorithm throughout the novel.
Where Frankenstein and AI Meet
Regarding Victor Frankenstein’s demise, it plays on the fears that AI could inevitably lead to our own destruction. It’s believed by some that the advent of the singularity will be a pivotal event in our future – where Artificial Intelligence and human intelligence are equal. This fleeting moment will soon pass as AI’s computing power and ability to learn at high speed will result in a growing intelligence – beyond human. Frankenstein’s creation does exactly this. His ability to process large amounts of information and learn so soon after his ‘birth’ into the world is much faster than that of a human.
Developing AI needs nurturing, like a developing child. It’s still in its infancy, and like Frankenstein’s creation – if left unsupervised, things can – and would – go very wrong. In a later chapter, Frankenstein’s creature reveals to Victor, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” The ‘nurturing’ of the creator (whether a fictional monster or future AI agent), links to the creation.
It is our duty to ensure that the production of Artificial Intelligence is done so in an ethical and moral way. We need to confront the issues surrounding algorithmic bias and discrimination head-on. Many AI professionals and companies are already, and AI ethics have become a huge talking point and area of interest. The way in which Artificial Intelligence will shape our future is unknown. However, through works like Shelley’s, we are able to experience, reflect, and explore our future before it happens. Whilst Artificial Intelligence is a technological pursuit, literature is an extremely poignant way in which we can learn from our past in order to impact our future.
Interestingly, last year, the MIT Media Lab created a literary AI mash up of their own, inspired by none other than Mary Shelley. Powered by machine learning, Shelley AI is trained on thousands of horror stories, and a collection of super creepy stories from the r/nosleep reddit page. She then took to Twitter and engaged in story building with users who can interact with her initial story tweets.
You can see the collection here: https://stories.shelley.ai/
There is some poetry in the fact that Mary Shelley is alive as a distant relative to one of AI’s fictional ancestors that she created.
It’s really great to write about gothic literature and AI – and at what better time of year than autumn, with Halloween just around the corner? A large proportion of my Masters was in Gothic Literature so it’s nice to work this into my tech-focused day job! I really could go on, but it’s probably time to stop and go carve a pumpkin or something.
https://bigcloud.global/the-link-between-mary-shelleys-frankenstein-and-ai/
Oriana:
What struck me most in this article was the link between happiness and goodness. ~ “Frankenstein’s creature reveals to Victor, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” ~
I’m not sure if terms like “happy” and “virtuous” can be applied to AI; current AI does not have consciousness or feelings, though it can imitate feelings. But when it comes to humans, I think most of us would agree that it’s easier to feel kindness toward others when we feel happy than when we feel miserable. When we feel loved, it’s easier to be loving — not only toward our special person, but toward strangers — toward the whole world, in fact. I remember, long ago, falling in love, and writing in a poem, “I hold the world in my arms.”
Research has confirmed that doing good makes us feel good, thus creating a virtuous circle. Thank you, Mary Shelley, for perceiving the link between misery and evil, and kindness and happiness with such brilliant clarity.
*
WHO WAS VLADIMIR PUTIN BEFORE HE BECAME PRESIDENT?
Putin and body guardVladimir Putin removed all copies of his first official biography from libraries — even the heavily abridged version contradicted the version he wants to give to the public today.
But there were stories in that biography (and posts by his ex-wife after the divorce), which were available at the time; people still have copies. (I included info from these sources in my latest book.)
Young Vova grew in poverty.
There is a story that says he was adopted and spent the first years of his life in a remote Caucasus village with his biological mother, Vera Putina, where he was mercilessly bullied by local kids. [Oriana: Putin was an illegitimate child.] His mother was from a town in the Urals, midway to Siberia. After a few years, she sent her son back home and her parents gave the boy to relatives in St. Petersburg to raise. (His official parents were quite old when the boy was born in early 1950s. It was customary to hide the fact of adoption at the time in the USSR; some kids never learned the truth. Allegedly, Putin might be 2 years older than his official age — the date of birth was changed at adoption.)
Somehow, Vova decided to train in judo. His judo trainer during teenage years happened to be a former felon and criminal “authority” in the criminal ranks. This is why we are where we are today. He taught him how to be a mafia boss, taught him mafia “understandings.”
Putin and his judo instructor [and likely his first male lover]
Leonid Usvyatsov (“Lyonya-sportsman”) was killed in 1994 in a gang shooting. On his grave, he demanded to put his own poetry on the tombstone.
“I died, but mafia is immortal,” the words say.
1. This is my grave, and this is my epitaph: I died, but the mafia is immortal.
2. Hooray! I finally died!!!
All my life I slaved away, busting my ass for c*nts
Now I won’t spent even a kopek anymore on those liver tripes.
I got my last two sticks (ejaculations) in life, and they drive me out in a hearse.
Let’s drink to all of us, because the curtain will shortly fall.
*
Putin (center) was complimentary about his judo trainer in his early interviews; now Leonid Usvyatsov’s name is all but whitewashed from his biographies.
Apparentlty, it was Usvyatsov who helped Vova to get to the law school with judo scholarship, and then recommended him to join the KGB as a snitch during his university years. Vova was so good at snitching that he was invited to join them. (Putin’s post-Soviet boss Sobchak who brought him into politics was also a KGB snitch, as a professor at the same university… The KGB installed their people in power in St. Petersburg immediately after the USSR dissolved).
Vova joined the KGB in 1975, trying to make a career. First, he was taking tips from snitches and pestering dissidents. Then he was shaking up the locals who planned to emigrate to Israel (the only group allowed to leave the USSR were those whose nationality was listed as “Jewish”). Some say he was giving addresses to Usvyatsov’s crew, to clean up valuables from their apartments, as they were selling everything before leaving.
"The Czar in his own person"
In 1985, Vova got his dream job: post to East Germany. For that, he had to get married and get a kid (singles weren’t viewed as reliable by the KGB; they could defect). His wife said he dreamed to save enough money to buy a car on return to the USSR, so they were eating the cheapest food, trying to spend as little money as possible, and saving the meager “foreign trip” allowances, allocated to these working abroad (Soviet salaries were negligible; it would take decades to save enough money for a car). This shows you the position Vova managed to acquire after 10 years in the KGB — not much.
But then, the East Germans destroyed the Wall in 1989, and the Soviet spies were kicked out. His dream position abroad ended abruptly. He never got anywhere high, mostly organizing parties and entertainment for his bosses. Formally, he worked with the Stasi as a low level clerk, assisting in what he was accustomed to do at home: dissidents, snitching.
In 1991, Putin officially left the communist party during the August coup (KGB tried to take power and lost). He was already working under “democrat” Sobchak, who took him as an aide after being elected as a mayor of St. Petersburg. Within months, the USSR officially ended.
As Sobchak’s aide, he flourished, during the stage when the former Soviet apparatchiks were robbing the state assets. (Vova used his connections in the world of organized crime to build some creative schemes.) But he didn’t become an oligarch. He only got enough money and connections to find a job as an aide in Yeltsin’s administration when Sobchak lost re-election in 1996. (Vova was responsible for organizing his campaign.)
Vova in 1994, during Prince Charles’s visit to St. Petersburg. His wife remembers how they borrowed clothes from friends (including shoes), because he had nothing appropriate.
They promoted Putin as the director of the FSB (former KGB). Then, they promoted him to the post of the Prime Minister.
Putin took power de facto in August 1999. In Dec. 1999, Yeltsin officially resigned and Putin became the acting president.
Media oligarchs helped Putin get officially elected as president in March 2000.
After he was inaugurated in May 2000, he confiscated their media holdings, so the oligarchs wouldn’t be able to do the same for someone else.
It’s the 27th year of Putin in power in Russia. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
*
THE IMAGE OF THE SOVIET UNION AND PROPAGANDA
Chief Spokesperson of Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova tried to show off traditional family values at a Chinese restaurant in Moscow but it turned out that she doesn’t know how to bake (blini) pancakes!
Making blini is a more challenging task than painting the West as a decadent enemy clashing with Russia’s “traditional” values in endless monologues for the journalists who are not permitted to ask any questions.
Look at that crooked pancake! Maria, aren’t you supposed to be skilled at baking as per traditional values that you are purportedly defending?
Speaking of traditional values. There’s a new money-making trend that has emerged in Russia. It is called Money Gate.
During the sessions that take place at the gym, a trainee lies on her back and spreads their legs. A coach walks around and hits her in the crotch with a wad of cash.
Men don’t usually participate in this ceremony due to intense pain felt in the testicles when hit with a thick wad of cash.
Techniques for this ceremony were built upon Crotch Breathing sessions that were infamously practiced in Bali by Russian prosperity gurus.
The Gate Opening Coaches are in high demand across fitness centers in big cities in Russia.
*
Gentlesky Westernsky,
Before you rush to judge superstitious Russians, I encourage you to see below a photo story of an ordinary working day of a young Russian woman as she commutes to Moscow from Kaluga Oblast.
She wakes up at 4 am and brushes her hair.
After brushing her hair for twenty five minutes, she cooks a takeout lunch.
At 4:45pm, she says goodbye to her cat Funya.
At 5am she’s ready to go. Why brush hair when she wears a headscarf?
At 5:15am she gets into taxi to skip a long line at a bus stop.
At 5:35am she’s at a train station. That was one long taxi ride.
At 5:45am she gets on the train headed to Kievskaya Train Station in Moscow.
She sleeps throughout the 45 minute commute train ride. She wakes, applies makeup and brushes her hair again. Then she puts on her coat and headscarf.
At 7.45am she descends into legendary Moscow subway.
The first thing she does when she gets to work is head for the office kitchen. She heats up her breakfast that she prepared at home.
Every office in Russia has a kitchen to cook food because of traditional family values. She still doesn’t start her work routine and spends the next thirty minutes studying remotely. We learn that the young woman is an internal refugee from Belgorod thanks to Putin’s war (no doubt her parents have voted for him in every election).
At 9.05am, five hours after getting up she finally sits down to work. In Russia, when traditional values clash with Protestant work ethic, you know exactly which side wins every time.
5:30. Having told us absolutely nothing about her work but detailing her hair routine down to the last detail, our heroine heads home.
7 PM
At this point Gentle Westernsky might wonder why all these people travel three hours one way to work in Moscow for less money than a dishwasher makes in the boondocks of Mississippi. It is tradition!
At last she’s back at her town at 8.10 pm. There’s a stampede of commuters running to the bus stop to beat the line. A sharp, worldly reader after studying the photo story might have concluded that Russia is somewhere between a developed country and developing world and if he possesses critical thinking he might even infer that Russian leadership, unable to build a first world country, have taken the leadership of less developed nations as they are in a crusade against the West. I would not want to dissuade him from these musings for they are not too distant from the truth.
~ Misha Firer, Quora
Graham Walton:
The movie Chernobyl, which I assume was close to reality, showed the USSR being built on lies. Anything good was a lie, bad things were made better by lies. A great great pity. What a waste.
Michal Jančina:
But it worked. No waste. USSR was highly successful compared with the tsarist Russia. Bolsheviks lied to people that they are building communism, and it worked somehow. They did build, not communism but other things like atomic bombs, space rockets etc.
A succeasful country must have motivated people, and you can motivate them even by lying to them.
And it still continue. Russian men are dying in thousands in Ukraine. But they believe they are winning, so they are willing to die for victory. And maybe they indeed will win. The lie will triumph again.
Misha Firer:
That’s because every society is built on stories that people tell each other which are all made up.
Lasse Enevoldsen:
… at least the workday seems to be 7 1/2 hour, not 10 hours as in the US.
A tiny bit of European Marxist influence is still there?
Misha Firer:
Oh yes in spades.
*
FINDING YOUR WAY IN THE MAZE OF MOSCOW
Residents of New Moscow, Russia are used to loud noises of airline engines: they live in proximity to the runaway of Vnukovo Airport.
Yet nothing had prepared them for a passenger jet flying right above their apartment blocks so close they could see the passengers. The pilot later reported that he was evading a drone attack that had shut down airports in Moscow.
Due to electronic jamming of incoming drones, my car navigation system shows me that I’m in Moscow’s largest airport, Sheremetyevo, no matter where I am in the city.
Finding your destination in this crazy maze of streets and alleys is impossible. Streets abruptly terminate at a barrier blocking the entrance to a residential complex or a gate of some government complex. Roadworks are everywhere as the mayor is making a big buck selling his wife’s factory’s road materials. Dividing lanes are gone. There’s no asphalt. Nothing seems to work anymore in this chaotic, Asiatic city.
On Sunday, I drove around for more than an hour to find an indistinct off ramp from the motorway that goes all the way to St Petersburg. Nobody could help me out until this drunk security guard at a booth in a Hilton Hotel next to Kaspersky headquarters told me to use a wooden church as a landmark.
I would stock up on paper maps but they are not updated for the ever growing city. I’m gonna print out Google maps and staple them together and carry them in the glove compartment.
School collapse
A public school collapsed in the Novosibirsk region of Russia. No one was in the building at the time of the collapse. The classes were still in session that week. A criminal case has been opened for negligence. Will Putin get arrested for wasting public funds on war rather than fixing decrepit schools?
Russian authorities are hell bent on promoting traditional family values. They want citizens to have many kids. As they can’t actually sneak into the bedroom to ensure that husband and wife are doing their duty for the state, authorities try to bribe couples. Public officials are greedy and they don’t want to share and their offerings are crumbs from the table.
For example, the state offers a bank product called “family mortgage.” If you have kids, your interest rate is slightly lower.
In Moscow and other big cities this mortgage is only sufficient to buy a studio or one-room apartment.
The maximum mortgage amount in Moscow is 12 million rubles, with a 20% down payment and 6% annual interest. Note that the same authorities pay volunteers to fight in Ukraine sufficient funds for the down payment but they don’t offer it to the couples with children.
Henceforth the authorities pay more money to exterminate Russians than to stimulate having babies. Follow the money: the Kremlin is a death cult.
It ensures that no family — unless it is rich or inherited an apartment from a deceased family member — will have any children.
That’s why it was no problem for developers to build a small city right next to the airport and find eager buyers by offering slightly lower prices.
Authorities in the city of Omsk were instructed to build a new perinatal center. Traditional people are supposed to have a lot of babies. They need more places to give birth.
It’s one thing to build a church which nobody attends. It only requires to fill it up with priests and hang icons on the walls. And keep the whole thing in the dark so myopic babushkas buy candles from the church shop with their meager pensions to see the above-mentioned icons to address their prayers to.
It is more complicated to have a Potemkin maternity ward. You need trained medical doctors, nurses, equipment, administrative staff. And they would write on social networks that there are no pregnant women and the whole thing is a charade. Priests are more disciplined — they won’t complain that the church in their care is empty.
And so Omsk authorities refused to build a new maternity ward. They said that they closed down maternity hospitals because there are no babies. It would be lunacy to build a new one.
In 2025, the flow of Indian labor migrants to Russia increased by a quarter compared to the previous year.
Indians are filling vacancies in construction and services. Customer service in Moscow speaks with heavy Indian accent. There’s a visa program for them. Indian consulates are opening in Yekaterinburg and Kazan, and recruiters are assisting with documents and adaptation.
The quota for Indian laborers in 2025 reached 71,800 due to an acute labor shortage. Moscow authorities have greenlit construction of a massive Indian temple with a huge statue next to a metro station for an easy access.
The Hindu temple is guaranteed to be attended by droves of believers unlike Orthodox Christian churches. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
*
MARCH 17 1943: THE DAY GERMAN SPIES KNEW THE WAR WAS LOST
In a quiet, wood-paneled office in Berlin, Wilhelm Canaris stared at a single sheet of paper and understood something horrifying.
The document didn’t describe a new Allied super-weapon. It didn’t mention a secret army or a decisive battlefield defeat.
It described a factory.
An American factory so large, so efficient, that it was projected to soon produce one four-engine heavy bomber every single hour.
To most of the German high command, the report sounded ridiculous — obvious propaganda, too absurd to take seriously. But to the men who had risked their lives gathering the intelligence, it was something else entirely.
It was a death sentence written in numbers.
Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was not an ideologue. He was a professional officer who understood a truth many around Hitler refused to face: modern war was no longer decided by courage or genius alone. It was decided by factories.
And the numbers coming out of the United States were catastrophic for Germany.
The intelligence didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in through whispers from neutral countries. Diplomats spoke of production targets with an extra zero. Engineers mentioned an aircraft line that moved like a car plant. Japanese naval attachés — Germany’s own allies — sent reports filled with barely concealed dread.
Every thread led to the same place: Willow Run Bomber Plant.
Run by Ford, Willow Run was applying automobile mass-production methods to the B-24 Liberator — an 18-ton machine with more than a million parts. German factories needed weeks or months to build a comparable bomber. Willow Run aimed to build one every 60 minutes.
Canaris and his analysts did the math.
One an hour meant 24 a day.
Over 700 a month.
From a single factory.
At the time, Germany’s entire aircraft industry could barely match a fraction of that output.
If the report was true, Germany hadn’t just lost air superiority.
It had lost the war already.
But the truth collided head-on with ideology.
When Canaris presented the findings to Hermann Göring, the response was laughter.
Americans, Göring sneered, could build refrigerators and razor blades — not bombers.
Accepting the report would mean admitting the Luftwaffe was about to be buried under an industrial avalanche it could never stop.
So the report was dismissed.
Buried.
Ignored.
When the same numbers reached Adolf Hitler, the reaction was even worse. The idea that a “mongrel democracy” could outproduce the so-called master race at such a scale was not just unacceptable — it was heresy. The figures were rejected outright, not because they were wrong, but because believing them would shatter the fantasy holding the Reich together.
Half a world away, the impossible was already happening.
At Willow Run, tens of thousands of workers — women, immigrants, African Americans, disabled laborers — worked around the clock. Aircraft rolled off the line, not as symbols, but as inevitability. America wasn’t inventing miracle weapons. It was perfecting the assembly line.
And on March 17, 1943, German intelligence officers realized something no one in power would admit:
This was no longer a war of generals or soldiers.
It was a war of mathematics [Oriana: in terms of the American industrial potential].
And Germany was already outnumbered by time itself.
~ Ben Allen, Quora
Craig Kinard:
And the mastermind was none other than Henry Ford’s son, Edsel Ford, and unsung hero of WW II, who died not long after the war from ulcers brought on from a lifetime of psychological abuse by his father.
James Luna:
Yes, the same “weak” son who saved Ford by leading the development of the incredibly popular Model A, after Dad Henry let sales die from the outdated Model T. Edsel Ford was just one of many unsung heroes then of American business success.
Oriana:
I’m thrilled to see articles like the one above. It’s still not fully acknowledged that the central factor’s in the Allied victory in WW2 was America’s industrial potential.
*
THE TEARS OF AN ADMIRAL: THE DAY THE FIGHTING STOPPED
Talking about the end of World War II people normally talk about Berlin. But the war did fail in an obscure place known as Luneburg Heath. On May 4, 1945, one million men ceased the fighting due to one hard man and one easy map.
The German army was in great distress. They feared the Russian army approaching them on the East, and ran off to the West. Field Marshal Montgomery, or Monty, met a German Admiral called von Friedeburg, in the British camp.
Monty was a very strict leader. He did not provide them with chairs and coffee. He had the officers of the Germans stand outside with a flagpole in front of them like school boys awaiting a schoolmaster.
Although he was aware that they were there to surrender, he pretended to be irritated. He questioned his staff, why are these men here? He wanted the Germans to feel small and defeated.
The deal which was rejected
The Germans attempted to be cunning. They said, we will cease to fight your British troops, but we desire to retain our soldiers in the East to fight the Russians.
Monty didn't listen. He said the answer was "No." He informed them that they must surrender all the soldiers in Holland, Denmark and Germany. It was everything or nothing.
The Power of a Map
As they were partaking of a hurried lunch Monty drew out a map of the war. He demonstrated to the Admiral that the armies of the Allies were like a trap shutting. The way not to run or hide did not exist.
The German Admiral was not able to bear the sight of the map when he saw it. He burst into tears and wept in the tent. He viewed the reality: Germany was defeated.
The Great Silence
On May 4 the Admiral was allowed to sign the papers. At 8.00 AM on the following day, the guns fell silent on one million men.
This was when the German army gave up indeed. It is an enormous tale that the majority of the world has forgotten, yet this is to show that occasionally, a mere map is more potent than a thousand bullets. ~ Camila Hall, Quora
Kostas K:
At that time, refugees (soldiers and civilians) were walking along the roads under heavy bombing of Allied airplanes. Monty says “I am not inhuman” and has this bombing stop after first meeting, before the final agreement.
*
MORE WORKING MOTHERS ARE QUITTING THEIR JOBS
For a while, having it all seemed almost possible.
The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of flexible work schedules and remote and hybrid work arrangements. More women – especially mothers with young kids – found they could juggle full-time jobs with their responsibilities at home, and fewer dropped out of the workforce to care for children and family members.
Then in 2025, more than 455,000 women left the workforce. Now, a national survey casts a light on what drove that decision for many women.
Nearly half of the women who voluntarily left said they did so because of their caregiving responsibilities and the high cost and limited availability of child care, according to a survey from women’s advocacy group Catalyst.
Forced into 'impossible decisions'
Sheila Brassel, a research director at Catalyst, said women's workforce participation has begun to lag because flexibility in the workplace is vanishing.
More companies are dialing back flexible work schedules and mandating that employees return to the office part-time or full-time, forcing women into tough situations. More than a third of women who left the workforce voluntarily reported working in jobs without flexibility, the Catalyst survey found.
These women are not quitting their jobs because they lack ambition, Brassel said, but because they lack options.
"Our data clearly shows that women are not opting out or leaning back from their careers. What we are really seeing is this is a structural issue. Without having the supports in place to navigate these caregiving responsibilities and really rigid, confined work schedules, women are needing to make impossible decisions," she told USA TODAY.
Leaving the workforce, even for a short time, is a difficult decision that can have long-term consequences on women’s career trajectories and prime earnings years, Brassel said, but women are torn "between someone who is reliant on you for their care and well-being and being able to show up at work."
'Sandwich generation' at risk
Though research shows that the lion’s share of responsibilities falls to women, caregiving is not just a woman's problem.
America is aging rapidly, and more Americans are joining the "sandwich generation" by simultaneously caring for children and parents.
A Harvard Business School study found that 3 in 4 employees have some kind of caregiving responsibility. Nearly a third had voluntarily left a job during their career because of it, with even higher percentage of senior-level employees doing so.
More companies are providing paid family caregiving leave, which employees can use to care for an aging parent, a family member with a serious illness, or a loved one recovering from surgery or hospitalization, according to Sparrow, a leave management company. In addition, 14 states now offer paid family leave insurance programs that cover family caregiving.
Caregiving has grown from 2.4% of all leave claims in 2020 to 6% in 2025 – a 150% increase. The median length of these leaves has nearly quadrupled.
"This suggests that employees are increasingly managing extended care situations − exactly the scenarios that, without proper leave support, force talented workers into chronic stress and burnout or out of the workforce entirely," Sparrow said in a report on employee leave released this week.
But for many organizations, caregiving remains a blind spot. More than half of employers do not track data on their employees’ caregiving responsibilities, the Harvard Business School study found.
What employers can do right now to help caregivers
Employers should take immediate steps to support employees, especially women who make up half of the labor force, Brassel said.
"We're seeing a return to traditional 9-5 in-office work, which will likely cause a resurgence in the burdens women face navigating caregiving and careers and result in women needing to leave their jobs," she said. Brassel recommends offering flexible schedules so that employees don’t have to choose between caregiving and work.
She said other policies that relieve caregiving pressures on employees — such as paid emergency care days, financial subsidies, and on-site childcare — can boost retention.
She also urges regular audits to ensure fair pay and career growth for women. Nearly 1 in 5 of women who voluntarily left their jobs reported that pay was a factor in their decision to leave the workforce, the Catalyst survey found.
*
A Pew Research Center study found that 45% of women aged 18–34 without children want them, compared to 57% of men.
*
GENERATION Z: RADICAL ROLE REVERSAL
The NBC News Decision Desk poll compares Gen Z men who voted for Trump and Gen Z women who voted for Harris (as well as the reverse) on what they consider essential to a successful life.
The data shows a sharp gender and political divide in priorities:
Men (Trump voters) prioritize having children (34%), financial independence (33%), and being married (29%). Emotional stability is very low (9%).
Women (Harris voters) emphasize a fulfilling job/career (51%), having money to do things you want (46%), and emotional stability (39%). Marriage and children rank at just 6%.
Men (Harris voters) prioritize fulfilling job and career at 54% and having money to do what they want at 42%. Marriage and children rank at 11% and 9% respectively.
Women (Trump voters) prioritize financial independence 40% and job/career 32%, having children 26% and marriage much lower at 20%.
In America’s cultural imagination of the 1970s and 1980s, success for men and women was narrowly scripted. Men were expected to pursue careers, provide financial security, and maintain family stability. Women, despite gains from the women’s movement, were still pressured to prioritize marriage and children—even as they pushed for greater access to the workforce and higher education.
Half a century later, the roles appear to have flipped. This new NBC News poll reveals that Gen Z women—especially those who supported Vice President Kamala Harris in the last election—place the highest value on fulfilling careers, financial flexibility, and emotional stability.
By contrast, Gen Z men—disproportionately aligned with Donald Trump—place greater importance on marriage, children, and traditional family life. It is a startling generational inversion.
The Trump–Harris Divide
The poll results underscore a truth I observe firsthand as a global women’s and corporate speaker, and best-selling author, engaging with young professionals: Gen Z women are increasingly independent-minded, career-focused, and unwilling to define their success solely in terms of family. Their overwhelming support for Kamala Harris reflects this ethos. Harris herself embodies the new trajectory: an accomplished lawyer, senator, and vice president who married later in life after building her career.
On the other side stands President Trump, and conservative podcasters like Joe Rogan, whose “masculine man” message appeals to a cohort of young men—predominantly white, but also at least 15-20% or more of Black and Latino men (with Latino men having a huge shift toward Trump in 2024 despite immigration issues being front and center)—who crave a return to a more traditional order. His political identity has become fused with the idea that manhood and success are defined by family formation, financial dominance, and control of the cultural narrative.
The Radical Role Reversal
This role reversal is radical not simply because men and women now prioritize different things, but because it reflects the collision of gender and politics. Gen Z women are not merely breaking with tradition—they are openly rejecting the June Cleaver archtype of their grandmothers’ 1950s era. Their vision of success is expansive: it includes careers, financial autonomy, and emotional well-being, with marriage and children as optional add-ons rather than defining markers.
Meanwhile, tribal politics’ influence has galvanized a generation of young men toward older ideals. Having children, getting married, and securing financial independence rank among their highest values—even as their female peers redefine success in more individualistic, career-first terms.
What leaps off the page in the NBC data is how independence dominates Gen Z’s definition of success—with one striking exception. For Harris-aligned men and women, autonomy and self-direction ranked first, while marriage and children fell to the bottom of their lists. Even Trump-supporting women, though more traditional than their Harris-leaning peers, still placed independence near the top while elevating family into their upper tier. Only Trump-supporting men broke the pattern, putting family formation above autonomy.
Across most of Gen Z, freedom to chart your own course—not marital or parental status—has become the clearest marker of success.
Why This Matters for Business and Society
For leaders and employers, these shifting priorities carry real consequences. The future workplace must adapt to a talent pool where Gen Z women—the most educated female cohort in American history—will not tolerate outdated barriers to advancement or rigid definitions of success. They will demand flexibility, purpose-driven work, and inclusive cultures that honor their autonomy.
At the same time, companies cannot ignore the significant share of young men who value stability, marriage, and family. Understanding these divergent perspectives is essential for building workplaces that can both attract and retain talent across the gender spectrum.
A New American Narrative
What this poll ultimately reveals is not just a divide between men and women, but two competing visions of freedom. Trump’s America looks backward—toward a gender order where men lead families and women follow. Harris’s America looks forward—toward a redefinition of success that allows women to ascend to the presidency, to lead corporations, to marry later if at all, and to live on their own terms.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary next July 4, 2026, Gen Z is showing us that the meaning of success is being radically rewritten. Women are chasing careers. Men are prioritizing family. And the tug-of-war between these visions will shape not only the workplace of the future but the soul of the nation itself. There is some good news for Gen Z women and men alike, because they do seem to share an ethos, or Gen Z ethos (purpose, autonomy, wellness).
3 Things Gen Z Men and Women Agree On:
Work Must Be Fulfilling
A career isn’t just a paycheck — it has to align with purpose and passions.
Independence Is Essential
Whether defined as financial freedom or autonomy in life choices, Gen Z sees control over their path as non-negotiable.
Well-Being Matters
Emotional and mental health are increasingly seen as part of real success, not an afterthought.
As an aging Gen Xer who has two nieces in this Gen Z cohort, I am excited for their unlimited future and possibilities as bi-racial women in America. They will have opportunities that my generation of doctors, lawyers, engineers, educators, scientists, and politicians helped to forge, as trailblazers. But they too will be blazing a new pathway for the women that come after them: one of financial independence, vast personal freedom, and lots of choices about when and how they want to marry or start a family.
Oriana:
I once met a man who lamented that he couldn’t find a woman who wanted to have children. He also seemed like the sort who lacked any professional ambition, hanging on to graduate school for lack of anything else to do. Later I also met a man who lamented that his wife didn’t want any more children while he happened to like the little ones: “Small kids can be a lot of fun.”
I also found an article that proclaimed, based on a survey, that fathers enjoyed parenthood more than mothers did. I found no surprise there, recalling also conversations with women friends who didn’t want any children, but would say, with a sigh, “I think I would make a great dad.”
Another memory: My mother’s friend met a man who, upon learning that she had only one child, exclaimed, “If I were a woman, I would want to have many children. “ She replied, “I too would want many children — if I were a man.” And she and my mother chuckled in that peculiar way that’s tinged with the sadness of being older and wiser.
Pardon the truism, but life rarely gives us exactly what we want — and we want a lot when we are young. There is an unforgettable line in a classic Polish novel, “The Emancipated Women,” which states, “Women can never be equal to men— because only women bear children.”
Another truism is that pregnancy and giving birth are great experiences. “Having a child is a great adventure,” a middle-aged woman said to me. “But for you,” she continued, “— for you it’s going to be a really great adventure.” I didn’t doubt that — and back then I was still able to kid myself that somehow, somehow I would manage to have a child and still have my own life — just later, later .
And my last truism for now is that “later” easily morphs into “never.” Adventure or not, why would a woman want to add an enormous amount of stress to her already stressful life? Even the care of a puppy may seem too demanding, a huge responsibility, no matter how much she'd love the cuddly puppy and the fun and adventure it would be. (Once I even had a dream about being pregnant with a puppy. And I felt happy about it; my immediate concern was the correct diet I should follow in order to give birth to a healthy puppy.)
“Motherhood is the most difficult job in the world,” is another statement I kept hearing over and over. ("And it's absolutely terrifying," one woman added.) That was perhaps the clue to the whole dilemma. Parenting would always be difficult — there was no way out of that. And it would also always be a great adventure, and a special kind of fulfillment like no other.
Is there some way of making child-bearing less stressful and more rewarding? As the demographic crisis of aging population is beginning to unfold practically everywhere in the world, perhaps it’s high time to ponder how to make parenting a little less stressful. The greater rewards would be automatic.
But for that to happen, the whole society would have to agree that new parents — or simply parents — need an effective support system.
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JEANNE VILLEPREUX-POWER, MOTHER OF THE AQUARIUM
Jeanne Villepreux-Power was a pioneering French marine biologist, described by English biologist Richard Owen as the "Mother of Aquariophily." In 1832 she was the first person to invent and create aquaria for experimenting with aquatic organisms. The systematic application of the aquarium to study marine life which she created is still used today. As a leading researcher on cephalopods, she proved that the Argonauta argo produces its own shells, as opposed to acquiring them. Villepreux-Power was also a noted dressmaker, author and conservationist, as well as the first female member of the Accademia Gioenia di Catania in 1832.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power was born in Juillac, Corrèze, on September 24 or 25, 1794, the eldest child of a shoemaker and a seamstress. She lived until age 18 in rural France, where she learned to read and write. With the exception of reading and writing, Villepreux-Power's schooling was fairly basic. Her family had to live on a strict budget and her mother died when she was eleven years old.
Moving to Paris
At the age of 18, in 1812, she walked to Paris to become a dressmaker, a distance of over 400 kilometers (250 mi). The relative who was designated as her travel guardian assaulted her on the way to Paris and took her identity documents with him. She had to seek refuge in an Orleans police station until she could receive new travel documents.
Due to that delay, her employment opportunity had been given to someone else. She found another opportunity working as a seamstress assistant. She built up and improved her skills many times over, until she became fairly well known.
In 1816, she became well known for creating the wedding gown of Princess Caroline in her wedding to Charles-Ferdinand de Bourbon. She met and married the English merchant James Power in 1818, and she took the surname Villepreux-Power following their marriage. The couple moved to Sicily and settled in Messina where they lived for about 25 years.
Foray into Science
It was after moving to Sicily that Villepreux-Power took an interest in continuing her education. She began to study geology, archeology, and natural history; in particular she made physical observations and experiments on marine and terrestrial animals. She wanted to inventory the island's ecosystem and did so during frequent walks around the city. She was a self-taught naturalist who explored Sicily, cataloging and commenting on its flora and fauna while gathering examples of minerals, fossils, butterflies, and shells. As she traveled, she would document and collect samples which were later compiled and published in Itinerario della Sicilia riguardante tutti i rami di storia naturale e parecchi di antichità che essa contiene and Guida per la Sicilia.
Villepreux-Power then began to make a more intent study of cephalopods and other marine life and was in need of a vessel that would allow her better access to observation over time of the same marine animals. While land animals could be observed somewhat easily, marine life was distinctly harder to examine. As such, she worked to develop a glass enclosure, ultimately developing three working models to study live marine life in and out of the water. The first was the aquarium as we know it today; the second glass surrounded by a case that was submerged in the ocean; the third an anchored cage also to be submerged in the ocean for larger marine life like mollusks. It was revolutionary at the time as she was the first to record that some species of octopuses could use tools to pry open their prey's shells.
In 1834, a professor, Carmelo Maravigna, wrote in the Giornale Letterario dell’Accademia Gioenia di Catania that Villepreux-Power should be credited with the invention of the aquarium and systematic application of it to the study of marine life. She created three types of aquarium: a glass aquarium for her study, a submersible glass one in a cage, and a cage for larger molluscs that would anchor at sea. Her first book was published in 1839 describing her experiments, called Observations et expériences physiques sur plusieurs animaux marins et terrestres.
Her second book, Guida per la Sicilia, was published in 1842. It has been republished by the Historical Society of Messina. She also studied molluscs and their fossils; in particular she favored Argonauta argo. At the time, there was uncertainty over whether the Argonaut species produced its own shell, or acquired that of a different organism (similar to hermit crabs). Villepreux-Power's work showed that they do indeed produce their own shells. As a groundbreaking discovery, there was a considerable amount of backlash that she received for her work.
Villepreux-Power was also concerned with conservation, and is credited with developing sustainable aquaculture principles in Sicily. She was among the first to investigate aquaculture as a means of safeguarding and restoring fish and other marine animal populations. Being intrigued also helped to find ideas of aquaculture, which is largely considered a more sustainable food source in the future, specifically through utilizing cages attached to the shore containing fish at different lifecycle stages to generate repopulation opportunities that could be moved to underpopulated rivers.
She was the first woman member of the Accademia Gioenia di Catania, and a correspondent member of the London Zoological Society and sixteen other learned societies.
Innovation
Jeanne Villepreux-Power significantly brought forward the capabilities of marine biological research gained admission into prestigious scientific societies after developing one of the most significant experimental tools in marine biological research. The innovation she came up with addressed a key problem at the time, the inability to see underwater. Her solution, the first-ever glass aquarium, was a transformational innovation that changed the way marine biological research was conducted. Before it was created, studying marine species presented several difficulties for biologists. The development of marine biology as a scientific field was hampered by the incapacity to efficiently investigate these organisms in their native habitats.
This problem was a significant pain point and was resolved by Villepreux-Power's idea, which helped scientists learn more about the biology and behavior of marine life. Jeanne Villepreux-Power created different models of the glass aquarium, one that could observe creatures in shallow waters, and a cage-like design that could be lowered to different depths, furthering the capabilities of marine biology research. For her outstanding work in the field of Marine Biology Villepreux-Power became the first female member of the Catania Accademia, as well as many other scientific academies.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power’s innovation is still in use today, and although it has been improved many times, the core idea lives on. There are already more than 200 marine aquariums and ocean life centers across the globe. The world is seeing an increase in the construction of aquariums, which are now enjoyable destinations for both children and adults to explore. We wouldn't be able to examine and investigate aquatic life more easily without her innovation.
The modern day style of the glass aquarium created by Villepreux-Power was developed by the British biologist Philip Gosse (1810–1888). The first public aquarium opened in London in 1853, and Gosse supplied the units displayed there. Aquaria became popular among the middle classes. Following London, the Berlin Aquarium Unter den Linden (Berlin) opened its doors in 1869, and the Public Aquarium of Trocadero (Paris) opened its doors in 1867.
Late life
Since women were not permitted to give talks at academic conferences, enroll in colleges, or work in the scientific community, her results were disseminated around the globe via a proxy. Her research was presented to the London Zoological Society on her behalf by Sir Richard Owen, the preeminent scientist in Britain before Charles Darwin. They had been communicating with one another throughout her experiments. Her research was swiftly published in German, French, and English and rapidly dispersed throughout Europe.
Villepreux-Power and her husband left Sicily in 1843, and many of her records and scientific drawings were lost in a shipwreck. Although she continued to write, she conducted no further research. She did, however, become a public speaker. She and her husband divided their time between Paris and London. She fled Paris during a siege by the Prussian Army in the winter of 1870, returning to Juilliac. She died in January 1871.
Commemoration
It was not until much later, in 1997, that Jeanne Villepreux-Power's work was rediscovered after she had been forgotten for more than a century. In 1997 her name, "Villepreux-Power," was given to a crater on Venus discovered by the Magellan probe.
Popular culture
A biographical song about Jeanne Villepreux is featured on 26 Scientists Volume Two: Newton to Zeno, a 2008 album by the California band Artichoke.
Secrets of the Sea: The Story of Jeanne Power, Revolutionary Marine Scientist, a 2021 biographical picture book by Evan Griffith and illustrated by Joanie Stone, adapts the story of Villepreux-Power's discoveries and legacy into an educational children's book.
Source: Wikipedia
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THE INNOCENTI: THE RENAISSANCE-ERA ORPHANAGE IN FLORENCE
With nine perfectly symmetrical arches as lovely as a swan’s neck, this orphanage had long stood out to me for its architectural splendor, which has inspired many to call it the first Renaissance building.
Whenever I stood in the piazza, which is just a few minutes’ walk from the Duomo yet somehow buffered from its tourism and commerce, I felt calmed, as the orphans must have felt after all the chaos and drama they had left behind. I admired the Innocenti’s mission and vaguely knew some of its history, but it was always more of a backdrop—just another ambient visual triumph in a city prodigal of beauty.
Because the piazza was unusually empty, my friend and I decided to stop at the building’s loggia and take in Filippo Brunelleschi’s exquisite design. For a long while, neither of us spoke. We just gazed, and I began to feel the history of the Innocenti in a way I hadn’t before.
I had always taken a parent’s love for granted because it surrounded me at every stage of my life. But my father had long since passed away, and my mother, a once-vigorous woman who could pluck three chickens and skin a rabbit in the time it took to load the dishwasher, was approaching ninety.
The children of the Innocenti enjoyed no such luck in the parental lottery. Some were abandoned because they were the fruit of an illicit affair or an act of sexual violence. Others, because their parents couldn’t feed them. Others still, because their mother or father had fallen ill or unexpectedly died.
Suddenly, the ghosts of all those unwanted children seemed to fill the piazza. They were no longer the generic heirs of della Robbia’s anonymously adorable infants. The surge of their salvaged lives coursed through me like an electric current.
Not long after my visit to the Innocenti, I spent the morning with my mother at the home where she had raised me and my five siblings. My wife took a picture of the two of us along with our youngest daughter, Sofia. Not surprisingly, all my mom’s attention in the picture is focused on Sofia. More unusual, my ungovernable whirlwind of a two-year-old looks pleased as punch, smiling docilely for the camera and exuding the joy that comes from feeling loved and safe. That was her nonna’s effect on children.
An immigrant from a poor village in southern Italy, Yolanda Luzzi had no public life to speak of, barely having worked a day outside the home in her entire life. Even her Italian identity card from 1951 listed her occupation as casalinga, housewife. Yet she and the Innocenti shared a legacy: both had served as guardians of the vulnerable, caregivers of last resort.
A decade or so earlier, my late wife, Katherine, had died in a car accident. She was eight and a half months pregnant, and our daughter, Isabel, was rescued by an emergency cesarean. That night in Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, as the black waves of grief engulfed me and Isabel rallied against the odds in the neonatal unit, my nearly eighty-year-old mother announced to our gathered family that she was going to help me raise my daughter.
For the next three years, she performed tasks and activities that would have exhausted a twenty-year-old, as she waged her own private battles with tinnitus, insomnia, arthritis, and a weakened heart given temporary reprieve by a quadruple bypass. She changed diapers, prepared meals, and fed a tired and hungry baby, though she was by then a grandmother and great-grandmother many times over.
Isabel wasn’t the only person she had to care for. With my life at ground zero, I needed as much help as my infant daughter. Like the Renaissance parents who failed to care for children they abandoned, I too had produced an “innocent”: a helpless Isabel depended entirely upon my mother’s unconditional love as I struggled to meet her needs while rebuilding my life as a widower and single parent.
We like to say that it takes a village to raise a child, and the civic and political groups who created the Innocenti understood this intuitively. The Renaissance is often mythologized as the age of individual titans, like the obsessive Michelangelo, who singlehandedly painted the Sistine Chapel, the endlessly curious Leonardo, who filled notebook upon notebook with drawings of anatomical structures and fantastical inventions, and the monomaniacal Brunelleschi, who designed the Duomo with no formal training in engineering.
That “great man” view of history can obscure the more collectivist and community-based ethos that defined the Renaissance, especially in its urban cradle, Florence. It took a team of painters—Masolino and Masaccio in the 1420s, and Filippino Lippi in the 1480s—to complete a single massive work: the Life of Saint Peter fresco cycle in Florence’s Brancacci Chapel, which Giorgio Vasari described as a kind of art school that drew Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, among others, to study its revolutionary approach to the human figure.
Similarly, later works by an artist as renowned as Botticelli were often as much the work of his bottega, workshop, as of the maestro himself. Nowhere was that communitarian spirit more prominent than in the complicated project of establishing the Innocenti.
The first home in Europe devoted exclusively to caring for unwanted children, the Innocenti took in its first infant in 1445 and would go on to care for close to 400,000 children. It is often referred to by the generic term orphanage, but technically it did not become one until 1890, when the newly formed Italian government made it an official public charity and changed it from an ospedale, hospital, to a brefotrofio, orphanage.
The Innocenti was originally called a hospital because it provided basic medical services for its children through its affiliate, the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, the largest health care provider in Florence from the Middle Ages to the present. Beyond its official terminology, the best way to think of the Innocenti for the bulk of its five-hundred-year history is as a foundling home: it was the place where children were abandoned, sometimes because they were in fact orphans with no living parents, but more often than not because one or both parents were unable or unwilling to provide for them.
Since the term foundling home can come across as remote and antiquated, I will refer to the Innocenti as an orphanage in the broadest sense—a place for unwanted children whose care became a matter of state concern.
The idea for the Innocenti began in medieval times and required more than a century of plans, donations, and negotiations before the arrival of its first trovatello, foundling. Its protracted, contentious genesis is not surprising: terms like child and childhood are complicated ones with a vast array of meanings and competing interpretations. One observer even described the history of childhood as a “nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.”
In the landmark study Centuries of Childhood (1960), the French scholar Philippe Ariès famously argued, “In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist . . . as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny, his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society.”
To prove his point, Ariès cited the many old-looking Jesuses filling the canvases of painters like Duccio, writing, “Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it.” Ariès might have looked to medieval literature for a similar sentiment: in his philosophical treatise The Banquet (1304–07), Dante ignored infantia, infancy, altogether and focused instead on adolescentia, adolescence—the ages of eight to twenty-five—when the presumably unformed being developed into adulthood.
Ariès wasn’t saying that medieval parents didn’t love or dote on their kids as we do today. Rather, he wrote, they lacked an “awareness of the particular nature of childhood” and of what “distinguishes the child from the adult.”
Ariès’s notion that the concept of childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages, and that it was invented in the Renaissance, is a hotly debated one. The artistic representation of children in paintings may give us clues, but certainly not conclusive evidence or proof of how people of a given time thought about children and how children themselves construed their own identities.
Yet one thing is undeniable: the Renaissance witnessed an explosion of interest in children and the family. Thinkers rejected the medieval view that children were imperfect little adults moored in a transitional state between infancy and maturity that required constant Christian instruction. Theorists including the polymath Leon Battista Alberti and his fellow humanists wrote influential tracts on what we might call home economics: the organization and structures of domestic life along with the roles and responsibilities of the family unit, including the previously ignored category of children.
From our perspective today, these books contain many blatant inaccuracies. For example, Alberti claimed in his Book on the Family (1433–40) that illness could be passed on by “bad milk” from wet nurse to child, a dubious notion echoed by Matteo Palmieri in his widely read On Civic Life (1431–38), which argued that the more “ethnic” the wet nurse, the more unworthy her milk: “what worse thing can one do than subject the infant to the breast of a Tartar, Saracen, Berber, or other bestial and crazy nations?”
Despite their flaws (and occasionally raging xenophobia), these and other works, like Francesco Barbaro’s On Wifely Duties (1415), offered a new philosophical understanding of the family, especially its youngest members. Florence’s best minds increasingly believed that children of all classes and backgrounds should cultivate certain essential human qualities: a moral compass, an appreciation of art, a sense of meaning and purpose and the tools to acquire it. They pushed this agenda in the face of countless obstacles.
Back then, only children of the wealthy and highborn enjoyed the perks of what we now consider a normal childhood—school, play, and the freedom from having to provide for one’s own care and upkeep. Less affluent kids knew nothing beyond work and survival. Childhood leisure and the long, slow path to maturity it now encompasses for many were the rarefied province of Renaissance one-percenters.
Nevertheless, the unequal, stratified society of Renaissance Florence—which had two forms of currency, a gold florin for the wealthy and their luxury goods and a silver or “little florin” for the working class and their everyday purchases—dedicated itself to the protection of unwanted children. To be a true Florentine, the feeling went, one had to be an active, engaged, and patriotic citizen, beholden to no less than the ultimate Christian authority. This sense of civic and religious responsibility toward the least fortunate was measured as carefully as a business’s gains and losses.
As one scholar observed, “Every Tuscan counting-house had an especial account in its ledger, il conto di Messer Domeneddio [Master God Almighty’s Account], in which the part of the profits laid aside for charity was duly inscribed, and every rich merchant, however unedifying his life or cynical his opinions, felt bound to endow or support some charitable institution.” The Innocenti was the result of this moral calculus, as its abandoned children held up a spiritual mirror to a society suspended between the eternal joys of heaven and the fleeting seductions of secular life.
In 2022, my mom finally succumbed. In the months that followed, I was surprised, even astonished, that though I missed her intensely, I found it impossible to grieve or mourn her. Her legacy felt too alive to be associated with death or loss.
At her funeral, scores of family, friends, and community members came to express their love and pay their final respects—the surge of ambient emotion was similar to the one I had experienced during that fateful visit to the Innocenti a few years earlier, when hosts of the infant dead seemed to fill the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. Casting off their usual morbid sheen, the grounds of the cemetery exuded life as my mom was returned to the earth. I was asked to say a few words about her by her grave, and I ended my eulogy, without knowing exactly why, with Dante’s final verses in The Divine Comedy, when he has a vision of the world held together by cosmic love.
A few months after the funeral, I visited the Innocenti and came across an exhibit that asked visiting schoolchildren to share their thoughts and impressions about the Renaissance foundling home. The responses were as various as one would expect, from random declarations like “Ti Amo, Ettore!” (“I Love You, Hector!”) to heartfelt expressions like “Oggi è un giorno speciale!” (“Today is a special day!”) and “I bambini sono più grandi di quanto pensiamo” (“Children are more grown-up than we think”).
Then there was one that felt dropped from above like a gift from my mom, a spare phrase in block letters and blue ink that repeated my parting words to her from Dante—words that seemed to lay bare the Innocenti’s mission, as it aimed for the heavens while often foundering on the planet Earth of human corruption and thwarted ideals:
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle: the love that moves the sun and other stars.
https://lithub.com/the-innocenti-the-renaissance-era-orphanage-in-florence/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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MARGUERITE PORETE
In 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was taken to a stake in the center of Paris. A crowd watched as she was condemned as a heretic. She was burned after she refused to submit or take back her words.
Her crime was writing a book.
Marguerite Porete came from the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. No one knows her exact birth year, but it is usually placed in the mid 1200s. Very little about her early life is certain.
She joined the Beguines. They were women who chose a spiritual life without the usual monastic vows. They often lived in small communities and supported themselves through work.
The Beguines lived with a level of independence. Many served the poor, prayed together, and tried to draw closer to God outside strict church structures. To some church leaders, women doing this without direct clerical control could feel threatening.
Marguerite took that freedom further than most.
Sometime in the late 1200s, she wrote a mystical book called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It is written as a conversation between allegorical figures, Love, Reason, and the Soul. It describes seven stages of spiritual change.
At the center of the book is a bold idea. A soul, she says, can become so united with divine love that it no longer needs the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries in the same way. In the highest union, the soul gives up its own will to God completely, and in that surrender, it finds perfect freedom.
"Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love.”
She did not write in Latin, the language of the clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French, the language ordinary people could understand. That meant her ideas could travel beyond monasteries and beyond the usual channels of control.
And they did.
Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes. He also ordered Marguerite never to share it again.
She refused.
Marguerite believed her book carried divine truth. She said she had consulted respected theologians before sharing it, including the Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines. Whatever support she believed she had, she would not let one bishop silence her.
She kept sharing her book. She kept insisting that the soul’s bond with God did not belong to any earthly institution.
In 1308, she was arrested. She was handed to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris. He was also confessor to King Philip IV, the same king who was moving against the Knights Templar at the time.
Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with the trial, and she would not answer questions.
Her silence was not passive. It was an act of defiance, and it enraged the authorities.
A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They pulled out fifteen statements they judged to be heretical. One of the most alarming was the claim that a soul fully united with God could give nature what it desires without sin, because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.
To the Church, that sounded like a moral disorder. To Marguerite, it described the freedom that comes from perfect surrender.
She was offered many chances to recant. Others saved their lives by admitting error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, first claimed he was her defender, then later recanted and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Marguerite did not bend.
On May 31, 1310, William of Paris declared her a heretic again after she had already been warned. He turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the square used for public executions.
The Inquisitor denounced her as a "pseudo mulier," a fake woman, as if no real woman could defy the Church that way. Then they burned her alive.
But something unexpected happened in the crowd. A chronicle linked to Guillaume de Nangis, a monk who did not support her ideas, says the crowd was moved to tears by how calm she was. The chronicle says she showed signs of penitence that appeared noble and pious.
Her serenity unsettled people who expected a screaming heretic. Instead, they saw a woman who seemed to have already risen above the fire that would consume her.
Authorities ordered copies of The Mirror of Simple Souls destroyed. They wanted her words erased along with her life. They did not succeed.
Her book survived. It circulated in secret, passed from hand to hand across Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English.
For centuries, it was read without her name. It was even credited to other writers. The text was too powerful to disappear, even when the author was hidden.
In 1946, more than six hundred years after her death, a scholar named Romana Guarnieri studied manuscripts in the Vatican Library. She connected The Mirror of Simple Souls to Marguerite Porete. The woman the Church tried to erase finally had her name returned.
Today, Marguerite Porete is seen as one of the most important mystics of the medieval period. Scholars often compare her to Meister Eckhart. People still debate what influence, if any, her work had on later writers.
Her ideas were condemned, but they did not vanish. She wrote about love that could outgrow fear. She wrote about surrender that could lead to freedom.
Marguerite spent her final months in silence, refusing to answer those who demanded she deny what she believed. But her book has been speaking for seven centuries. It is still speaking now.
~ my thanks to Violeta Kelertas
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Just 2 decades ago, Christianity was 33% of the global population. Now it’s around 23–25%.
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WHEN DID THE REFORMATION END?
From 1517, when Luther’s 95 Theses sparked schism and bloodshed, the Protestant Reformation divided Europe. Can we say when – or if – the conflict concluded?
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| The Colloquy of Poissy between French Catholics and Huguenots, 1561, Jean Lulves, 1882. |
‘From the start, it was criticized as an unfinished project’
The concept of the Reformation as a discrete event, with a beginning and an end, is a relatively belated development. For much of Christian history reformation was an ongoing and open-ended process. The recurrent impulse to recover the pristine purity of the faith in its infancy took both institutional and personal forms. The medieval Church and the religious orders strove to recapture their original zeal and to correct abuses that had crept in over time.
But reform was also a moral and spiritual enterprise that took place in individual hearts, souls, and minds. By definition, such initiatives could never be complete: worldly structures were always riddled with corruption and fallen human beings were frail and sinful creatures. Reformation was understood less as a noun than as a transitive verb.
Martin Luther anticipated that the ‘Reformation’ that his protest against indulgences in October 1517 inaugurated would be over swiftly. Never lacking in confidence, he boasted that the Protestant Gospel would quickly triumph over the Antichristian papacy. This would be the triumphant prelude to the second coming and Christ’s return to reign on Earth.
But these hopes were soon dashed. The crystallization of the Lutheran movement into concrete ecclesiastical and political forms was accompanied by growing disillusionment about whether it could really claim to have succeeded. Like the advent of the millennium, the culmination of this phase of ‘reformation’ was steadily pushed forward into the future.
Elsewhere, a similar sense of disappointment set in. England’s idiosyncratic Reformation was a curious confection of evangelical energy and pragmatism. From the start, it was criticized as an unfinished project. Puritans complained that the established Church was ‘but halfly reformed’ and their efforts to perfect and consummate it were repeatedly frustrated. When the opportunity finally arose to achieve this in the mid-17th century, no one could agree on what the ‘blessed Reformation’ should look like, let alone when it could realistically be completed.
For the Roman Catholic minority, meanwhile, the Reformation was a living nightmare, which they earnestly hoped and prayed God would bring to an end. But the glorious day for which they patiently waited never came.
‘Protestantism faced new movements of imagination’
We’ve learnt to speak of ‘Reformations’ rather than ‘the Reformation’, making it even more taxing to define a single terminal date. Yet surveying the patchwork Reformations that survived much Catholic rollback in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), 1700 provides a general measure of a new phase in Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. By then a failure was evident: the original aim of Protestant leaders was to establish a purified and uniform Catholic order governing the whole Western Latin Church. They had not.
Instead, a number of regional states sought to impose one out of various different confessional packages on their subjects. Not all were successful: Ireland saw a continuing assertion of popular Catholicism against a Protestant government dominated by England, and the Netherlands was equally odd, with its official Reformed Church prevented by a largely Protestant governing class from imposing itself on the population. The Netherlands was the clearest example of a region where Reformation’s partial success allowed many to choose the shape of their religion regardless of authority – something which only the most radical and imaginative had done during Luther’s initial rebellion.
By 1700 even established state Protestant Churches were affected by such personal choices, especially in the fluid situation of North America. The 18th-century global Evangelical Revival was a movement emphasizing personal choice: not at all like the earlier Reformation.
Around 1700 all Western Protestantism faced new movements of imagination, looking at the Bible in new ways, and increasingly undermining religious disciplinary institutions that controlled the lives of ordinary people. Women began asserting themselves in intellectual spheres; people of the same sex began imagining lifelong and equal partnerships with each other. Such movements provoked irrational fears without precedent: notably paranoia about masturbation. This has only recently dissipated in Western society, amid a general acceptance that the sexual regime of the 16th century was not eternal but a product of its age. All this amounts to a Protestantism gradually looking past its original goals and accepting that maybe apparent failure simply means recognizing new priorities.
‘The bloodletting of 1524-25 defeated the evangelicals’ hopes’
The (very) long Reformation is fashionable: Robert Ingram’s excellent Reformation Without End (2018) is about the 18th century. And of course reformation is a perpetual feature of Christianity’s history. But if ‘the Reformation’ means anything, it had better have a beginning and an end.
We could ask when people began to talk about ‘the Reformation’ as a distinct event in the past. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf’s Commentary on … the Reformation of Religion Led by Dr. Martin Luther (1688) made the term canonical. But as Benjamin Guyer’s How the English Reformation Was Named (2022) points out, it was normal to talk about ‘the English Reformation’ by the 1640s. In John Knox’s History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland, written in the mid-1560s, it was already a done deal.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is one traditional end-point, but long before that the wars of religion had put an end to dynamic processes of religious change that could meaningfully be called ‘reformation’. The outbreak of civil war in France in 1562 abruptly collapsed fluid, shifting French religion into distinct, entrenched parties that abandoned any attempt to convert each other, except by brute force. So perhaps it is the years of flux from 1555-66, which saw dramatic shifts in Germany, France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands – plus the unexpectedly decisive conclusion to the Council of Trent. The Calvinist revolutions of the 1560s are sometimes called the ‘second Reformation’: so presumably the first one was now over?
But that’s tediously close to conventional wisdom. Here’s another answer: 1525, the first, most important time that mass violence collapsed the wave-form of religious change into stubbornly persistent, opposed particles. Before the German Peasants’ War, in the heroic days of Luther’s Reformation, anything seemed possible: transformation, reconciliation, synthesis, even a turning of the tide. But the bloodletting of 1524-25 defeated the evangelicals’ dearest hopes while also guarding them from utter suppression. The result was one nobody wanted and which made no theological sense: geographical partition, a pattern which then unfolded itself with grisly inevitability across Europe. By 1525 it was all over bar the shouting and the shooting. There would be plenty of both to come.
‘The Reformation had no easily identified end point’
In 2017 the beginning of the German Reformation was marked with numerous educational events and publications as well as with Martin Luther rubber ducks and a Luther figurine that became Playmobil’s fastest-selling toy ever. Focusing on one moment obscures the complexity of the Reformation’s origins, but the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses against indulgences on 31 October 1517 does at least provide a convenient date to hang onto, an obvious milestone on the path from medieval to early modern.
The Reformation had no equivalent easily identified end point. A straw poll of colleagues conducted in response to History Today’s question produced a majority response of ‘it’s not over yet’, and most 16th-century reformers would surely have agreed. If the purpose of the Reformation was spiritual renewal, if it was driven by sinful mankind’s search for a right relationship with God, then it was not finite. Movements of evangelical awakening such as Pietism and Methodism testify to the continuing search for an internalization of Christian teaching and a transformation of Christian life into the 18th century and beyond.
Luther died in 1546 a disappointed man. The promulgation of God’s word had failed to achieve the spiritual and moral renewal that he had sought. There had been no universal theological or ecclesiastical reform, and at that moment the Catholic Church was in fact growing stronger once again. True Christians faced the ongoing onslaughts of Satan and his purported allies, not only the Roman Antichrist but also the Turks, the heathens, the Jews, and the sectarians.
And yet the Protestant Reformation persisted. Historians of Germany might date its terminus to 1555, when the Peace of Augsburg brought an end to religious unity in the Holy Roman Empire by granting limited legal recognition to Lutheranism. Or to 1580, when the Formula of Concord resolved the theological disputes that had divided Lutherans since the reformer’s death. Or to 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia made permanent the settlement of 1555 and extended toleration to Calvinists. Ultimately, however, despite such external landmarks, a movement predicated on the quest for spiritual reform and renewal can never end.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/when-did-reformation-end
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THE RISE IN HEART ATTACKS IN PEOPLE UNDER FORTY
Heart attacks are no longer a concern primarily limited to older adults. Studies show a rise in heart attacks among younger adults under 40. While heart attacks remain a leading cause of death, this shift toward younger people is growing.
According to the American College of Cardiology, the heart attack rate in this age group grew by nearly 2% each year during a 16-year study from 2000 to 2016. Today, about one in five heart attacks occur in people under 40. This trend is significant compared to previous decades when heart attacks were rare in younger populations.
Several risk factors contribute to this increase, but two stand out as the primary drivers.
“The rise in heart attacks in younger people is related to the growing twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity,” says R. Kannan Mutharasan, MD, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine.
More young people are being diagnosed with diabetes and obesity:
38.1 million adults age 18 and older, which is 14.7% of all adults in the United States, have diabetes.
40.3% of adults age 20 and older experience obesity.
Other risk factors for heart disease in younger adults include:
Inherited and medical conditions
High blood pressure
High cholesterol
Family history of heart disease
Lifestyle and health behaviors
Poor diet
Lack of exercise
Chronic stress
“If you have a strong family history of heart disease, you are at higher risk for a heart attack,” says Dr. Mutharasan.
Although a family history of heart disease can increase the risk of a heart attack, lifestyle choices often tip the scale. Both inherited and behavioral factors can lead to damage to the coronary artery and weakened heart muscles.
Heart Attack Symptoms in Adults Under 40
Classic symptoms of a heart attack like chest pain or pressure and shortness of breath are not always present or obvious right away in younger adults.
Other early signs to watch for include:
Unexplained sweating
Dizziness
Discomfort in the neck, jaw or arm
Women may experience different or additional symptoms, including:
Fatigue
Vomiting
Nausea
Stomach pain or abdominal discomfort above the belly button that may be mistaken for acid reflux
“A lot of the time, symptoms in younger adults are the same symptoms seen in older adults,” says Dr. Mutharasan. “But heart attack symptoms can be different for everyone. They can also come in a variety of patterns. Sometimes they build gradually over time and sometimes they come on suddenly.”
Ignoring symptoms can delay treatment and worsen outcomes. Seek immediate medical attention or call 911 if you have these symptoms.
Prevention and Screening: Start Early
Preventing heart attacks starts with strong heart-healthy habits.
The American Heart Association recommends following Life's Essential 8, a set of important measures to improve and maintain heart health:
Eat a healthy diet
Be more active
Quit tobacco
Get healthy sleep
Manage weight
Watch cholesterol
Manage blood sugar
Manage blood pressure
“Know your numbers like blood pressure and risk factors like family history. To lower your risk of a heart attack, find ways to reduce your blood pressure and cholesterol if they are high,” says Dr. Mutharasan.
People with increased risk factors should start screenings like blood pressure and cholesterol checks at age 20. This helps assess heart disease risk early.
“Get age-appropriate screenings like a coronary calcium scan,” says Dr. Mutharasan. “You can start by talking with your primary care physician about what you can do now to help prevent heart disease.”
Wearable technology and health apps are another proactive way to help prevent health issues. They can track your heart rate and alert you to any irregularities worth discussing with a healthcare professional.
Heart Attack Outcomes in Adults Under 40
Experiencing a heart attack at a young age often comes as a shock — both physically and emotionally.
Younger people usually recover better than older adults because they tend to have fewer chronic conditions and stronger overall health. However, having a heart attack early can raise the risk of another one.
“Anyone who has had a heart attack is more likely to have a future cardiac event,” says Dr. Mutharasan.
Building heart-healthy habits can make a significant difference in long-term outcomes. These include:
Regular exercise
Balanced nutrition
Managing stress
Medical treatments and recovery
If you do have a heart attack, your care team will create a treatment plan. Depending on the blockage (full or partial), treatment will likely include surgery and cardiac medications.
Treatment challenges often include sticking to heart medications and maintaining healthy lifestyle changes, especially for those who feel like they’re “too young” for serious illness.
Cardiac rehabilitation programs are strongly recommended because they can improve recovery and reduce future risk. Through these programs, your healthcare team can provide education, exercise guidance and emotional support.
Looking ahead, prevention remains a major focus. Cardiologists and other physicians often encourage their patients to monitor their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar regularly, even after recovery from surgery. Early awareness and proactive care are essential to breaking the cycle of repeat cardiac events.
The Myth That You’re Too Young to Have a Heart Attack
Many young people believe they’re safe from heart attacks, but that’s a dangerous myth. Heart disease can happen to young people, too.
“It’s common for people to think they’re too young to have a heart attack,” says Dr. Mutharasan. “Always be thoughtful and really honor your body’s signals. If something seems off, seek help right away.”
Prevention, including regular exercise and eating healthy, starts early. If you notice any symptoms, don’t ignore them — get them checked. It’s always better to be seen by your physician than risk leaving symptoms untreated.
https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/the-rise-in-heart-attacks-in-people-under-40
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THOUSANDS OF GENOMES REVEAL THE WILD WOLF GENES IN MOST DOGS’ DNA
Dogs were the first of any species that people domesticated, and they have been a constant part of human life for millennia. Domesticated species are the plants and animals that have evolved to live alongside humans, providing nearly all of our food and numerous other benefits. Dogs provide protection, hunting assistance, companionship, transportation and even wool for weaving blankets.
Dogs evolved from gray wolves, but scientists debate exactly where, when and how many times dogs were domesticated. Ancient DNA evidence suggests that domestication happened twice, in eastern and western Eurasia, before the groups eventually mixed. That blended population was the ancestor of all dogs living today.
Molecular clock analysis of the DNA from hundreds of modern and ancient dogs suggests they were domesticated between around 20,000 and 22,000 years ago, when large ice sheets covered much of Eurasia and North America. The first dog identified in the archaeological record is a 14,000-year-old pup found in Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany, but it can be difficult to tell based on bones whether an animal was an early domestic dog or a wild wolf.
Despite the shared history of dogs and wolves, scientists have long thought these two species rarely mated and gave birth to hybrid offspring. As an evolutionary biologist and a molecular anthropologist who study domestic plants and animals, we wanted to take a new look at whether dog-wolf hybridization has really been all that uncommon.
Little interbreeding in the wild
Dogs are not exactly descended from modern wolves. Rather, dogs and wolves living today both derive from a shared ancient wolf population that lived alongside woolly mammoths and cave bears.
In most domesticated species, there are often clear, documented patterns of gene flow between the animals that live alongside humans and their wild counterparts. Where wild and domesticated animals’ habitats overlap, they can breed with each other to produce hybrid offspring. In these cases, the genes from wild animals are folded into the genetic variation of the domesticated population.
For example, pigs were domesticated in the Near East over 10,000 years ago. But when early farmers brought them to Europe, they hybridized so frequently with local wild boar that almost all of their Near Eastern DNA was replaced. Similar patterns can be seen in the endangered wild Anatolian and Cypriot mouflon that researchers have found to have high proportions of domestic sheep DNA in their genomes. It’s more common than not to find evidence of wild and domesticated animals interbreeding through time and sharing genetic material.
That wolves and dogs wouldn’t show that typical pattern is surprising, since they live in overlapping ranges and can freely interbreed.
Dog and wolf behavior are completely different, though, with wolves generally organized around a family pack structure and dogs reliant on humans. When hybridization does occur, it tends to be when human activities – such as habitat encroachment and hunting – disrupt pack dynamics, leading female wolves to strike out on their own and breed with male dogs. People intentionally bred a few “wolf dog” hybrid types in the 20th century, but these are considered the exception.
Tiny but detectable wolf ancestry
To investigate how much gene flow there really has been between dogs and wolves after domestication, we analyzed 2,693 previously published genomes, making use of massive publicly available datasets.
These included 146 ancient dogs and wolves covering about 100,000 years. We also looked at 1,872 modern dogs, including golden retrievers, Chihuahuas, malamutes, basenjis and other well-known breeds, plus more unusual breeds from around the world such as the Caucasian ovcharka and Swedish vallhund.
Finally, we included genomes from about 300 “village dogs.” These are not pets but are free-living animals that are dependent on their close association with human environments.
We traced the evolutionary histories of all of these canids by looking at maternal lineages via their mitochondrial genomes and paternal lineages via their Y chromosomes. We used highly sensitive computational methods to dive into the dogs’ and wolves’ nuclear genomes – that is, the genetic material contained in their cells’ nuclei.
We found the presence of wild wolf genes in most dog genomes and the presence of dog genes in about half of wild wolf genomes. The sign of the wolf was small but it was there, in the form of tiny, almost imperceptible chunks of continuous wolf DNA in dogs’ chromosomes. About two-thirds of breed dogs in our sample had wolf genes from crossbreeding that took place roughly 800 generations ago, on average.
While our results showed that larger, working dogs – such as sled dogs and large guardian dogs that protect livestock – generally have more wolf ancestry, the patterns aren’t universal. Some massive breeds such as the St. Bernard completely lack wolf DNA, but the tiny Chihuahua retains detectable wolf ancestry at 0.2% of its genome. Terriers and scent hounds typically fall at the low end of the spectrum for wolf genes.
We were surprised that every single village dog we tested had pieces of wolf DNA in their genomes. Why would this be the case? Village dogs are free-living animals that make up about half the world’s dogs. Their lives can be tough, with short life expectancy and high infant mortality. Village dogs are also associated with pathogenic diseases, including rabies and canine distemper, making them a public health concern.
More often than predicted by chance, the stretches of wolf DNA we found in village dog genomes contained genes related to olfactory receptors. We imagine that olfactory abilities influenced by wolf genes may have helped these free-living dogs survive in harsh, volatile environments.
The intertwining of dogs and wolves
Because dogs evolved from wolves, all of dogs’ DNA is originally wolf DNA. So when we’re talking about the small pieces of wolf DNA in dog genomes, we’re not referring to that original wolf gene pool that’s been kicking around over the past 20,000 years, but rather evidence for dogs and wolves continuing to interbreed much later in time.
A wolf-dog hybrid with one of each kind of parent would carry 50% dog and 50% wolf DNA. If that hybrid then lived and mated with dogs, its offspring would be 25% wolf, and so on, until we see only small snippets of wolf DNA present.
The situation is similar to one in human genomes: Neanderthals and humans share a common ancestor around half a million years ago. However, Neanderthals and our species, Homo sapiens, also overlapped and interbred in Eurasia as recently as a few thousand generations ago, shortly before Neanderthals disappeared.
Scientists can spot the small pieces of Neanderthal DNA in most living humans in the same way we can see wolf genes within most dogs.
Our study updates the previously held belief that hybridization between dogs and wolves is rare; interactions between these two species do have visible genetic traces. Hybridization with free-roaming dogs is considered a threat to conservation efforts of endangered wolves, including Iberian, Italian and Himalayan wolves. However, there also is evidence that dog-wolf mixing might confer genetic advantages to wolves as they adapt to environments that are increasingly shaped by humans.
Though dogs evolved as human companions, wolves have served as their genetic lifeline. When dogs encountered evolutionary challenges such as how to survive harsh climates, scavenge for food in the streets or guard livestock, it appears they’ve been able to tap into wolf ancestry as part of their evolutionary survival kit.
https://www.si.edu/stories/your-dog-little-wolfy
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THE RED SEA ONCE DRIED UP
Geology is more than just studying rocks. With advancing technology, scientists are reconstructing Earth’s makeup in greater detail, uncovering how landscapes and oceans looked millions of years ago.
A fascinating geological event is the desiccation of seas, where bodies of water are cut off from the open ocean and slowly evaporate, leaving behind vast salt deserts. Famously, the Mediterranean Sea dried up about 6 million years ago and only refilled during the dramatic Zanclean flood, after remaining mostly dry for nearly 700,000 years.
Now, researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, have found evidence that the same phenomenon occurred in the Red Sea around 6.2 million years ago. Initially connected to the Mediterranean near today’s Suez Canal, the Red Sea rejoined the world’s oceans through a catastrophic southern flood that carved out the Bab el-Mandab Strait we know today.
Massive Flood Revived the Red Sea
Once tectonic shifts cut off the Red Sea’s connection to the Mediterranean, the basin became a vast enclosed water body bordered by what is now Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In their study, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, the KAUST team used seismic imaging, microfossil analysis, and geochemical dating techniques to show that the Red Sea completely dried out for roughly 100,000 years.
Blocked from the Indian Ocean by a volcanic ridge to the south, the basin remained desiccated until an enormous flood about 6.2 million years ago refilled it with seawater — and life.
“Our findings show that the Red Sea basin records one of the most extreme environmental events on Earth, when it dried out completely and was then suddenly reflooded about 6.2 million years ago,” said lead author Tihana Pensa of KAUST in a press statement. “The flood transformed the basin, restored marine conditions, and established the Red Sea’s lasting connection to the Indian Ocean.”
Marine Life Flourishes In the Red Sea Today
The Red Sea was born around 30 million years ago when the African Plate began separating from the Arabian Plate. What started as a chain of lakes along a narrow valley eventually connected to the Mediterranean about 7 million years later. Fossils from that period reveal flourishing marine life, until rising salinity and evaporation once again left the basin dry after the Mediterranean connection was severed.
Today, coral reefs line the Red Sea’s coastlines, supported by its link to the Indian Ocean, which continuously replenishes it with seawater. Traces of the flood that revived the Red Sea remain visible: a 200-mile-long underwater canyon carved by torrents of water rushing into the basin 6.2 million years ago.
Earth’s Oceans Are Resilient
The Red Sea’s desiccation actually ended almost a million years before the Mediterranean’s Messinian Salinity Crisis came to a close, highlighting how these extreme events unfolded on different timelines.
“This paper adds to our knowledge about the processes that form and expand oceans on Earth. It also maintains KAUST’s leading position in Red Sea research,” said co-author and KAUST professor Abdulkader Al Afifi.
According to the press statement, the Red Sea serves as a living laboratory for studying how oceans form, how massive salt deposits accumulate, and how climate and tectonics shape marine environments over millions of years. Its history underscores the resilience of Earth’s oceans: even after experiencing extreme desiccation, the basin returned as a thriving ecosystem, offering scientists key insights into global ocean change.
CAN DIET MIMIC WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS LIKE OZEMPIC? (repost)
The new generation of weight-loss drugs mimic a process that naturally occurs in our bodies every day. When we eat, our guts produce the hormone GLP-1, which increases insulin levels in our blood, reduces the liver's sugar production, slows digestion and reduces appetite.
GLP-1 hormones are "master regulators" of our body's whole metabolic process, says Chris Damman, gastroenterologist and clinical associate professor at the University of Washington.
"These pathways are highly nuanced, involving many different hormones," he says.
The two main elements of our diet that are associated with GLP-1 are fiber and polyphenols.
"Fiber is the preferred food for the trillions of bacteria living in our gut," says Mary Sco, a resident physician and nutrition writer in Virginia in the US.
When we eat foods rich in fiber and polyphenols, these components are converted by our gut microbiome into short-chain fatty acids, which stimulate the production of GLP-1. Foods high in fiber include nuts, legumes, fruit and vegetables, while polyphenols can also be found in fruit, vegetables and nuts.
Another important nutrient for metabolism is monounsaturated fat, which has also been associated with raised GLP-1. This can be found in olive oil, avocado and nuts.
This process also starts before food reaches our gut. Research shows that the bitter taste of polyphenol-rich foods triggers our taste receptors to send signals to the gut to produce digestive hormones including GLP-1.
Naturally raising GLP-1 levels in the body isn't just about what we're eating – but also how we eat, says Sco.
"There's emerging research showing that the order in which we eat also matters," she says.
Researchers write in a 2020 review that there is some research to suggest that eating foods high in protein, such as meat and eggs, and vegetables, before carbohydrates, leads to higher GLP-1 levels compared to eating carbs first. However, they say that the mechanisms behind this are largely unknown.
The time of day you're eating may also make a difference to how much GLP-1 our bodies produce. There is some research to suggest that the body produces more GLP-1 when eating a meal early in the morning, compared to eating later in the evening.
This effect is linked to the natural changes to our hormone levels throughout the day, and eating early in the day supports the body's circadian rhythm, researchers wrote in the 2023 paper.
It would make sense, therefore, that eating a diet rich in fiber, polyphenols and monounsaturated fat would ensure we're producing lots of GLP-1. However, modern Western diets are currently lacking in the elements that produce the most GLP-1, says Damman.
"These weight-loss drugs are tapping into something fundamental in our satiety mechanism that's been short-circuited by modern ultra-processed foods," he says.
Do drugs or diets work better?
While for some people, a balanced diet and active lifestyle are enough to lose weight, for others, the GLP-1 agonists are necessary, Damman argues.
"It comes down to behavior change, which is incredibly difficult. That's why lifestyle measures very often won't work for people caught in metabolic ruts, and why these drugs have been incredibly helpful for people with morbid obesity with complications.”
For others, eating a diet rich in fiber, polyphenols and monounsaturated fats can be an effective way to control our appetites, Sco says.
"Certain individuals might not have as large a benefit, but they will still get some. The rules apply to everyone because it's basic human physiology – we all get the 'stop-eating' signal."
Ultimately, a diet that encourages natural production of GLP-1 diet is full of whole foods, including fruit, vegetables, legumes and nuts, says Damman. That people could be discovering this by attempting to mimic the effects of weight-loss drugs is an irony not lost on some nutritional scientists, including Damman.
"The journey has come full-circle," he says. "All roads lead back to eating whole foods – there's no substitute for them."
The future of GLP-1 research
While we know prescribed GLP-1 agonists are generally considered safe, there's a lot we still don't know about them, says Damman.
But there is an emerging area of research that the weight-loss drugs are giving way to, which might help to better understand how to treat obesity, says Gary Schwartz, professor of medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
The reasons for rising rates of obesity in many parts of the world are numerous and complex, but many researchers agree that our food environment and modern lives are one part of the driving force.
Schwartz says that our food environment has only come to pose a threat relatively recently in human life, thanks to high-sugar, high-fat ultra-processed foods that maximize the components of food we're biologically wired to seek out.
When we consume these foods, the reward areas in our brain are activated with hits of dopamine, which means we overeat them. This, Schwartz says, can reduce our sensitivity to those components over time, so that we have to consume more and more to achieve the same level of sensory satisfaction.
But emerging data suggests that these drugs reduce people's desire to eat these palatable foods, over and above the side-effects of nausea and other GI symptoms people can experience while taking them, Schwartz says.
"These findings suggest that there's some kind of mechanism we can tap into to restore healthy eating without drugs by limiting the sense of reward and achieving a sense of satisfaction without overeating," he says.
Researchers could look at brain activity and behavior during eating, weight loss and regain, Schwartz says, to see if there are any dietary and exercise interventions that can have similar effects.
"It will take clinical or dietary trials in conjunction with imaging and maintained weight loss, but within a decade, people will have an idea of certain hotspots in the brain and how to target them with behavior or diet," Schwartz says.
THE CLOCK THAT STARTS TICKING WHEN SOMEONE DIES
When something dies, a telltale radioactive signal ticks like a natural clock. Discovering it helped us solve all sorts of natural mysteries.
There would be heaps of the stuff in sewage. Willard Libby was sure of it.
It was the mid-1940s, and the US chemist's goal was to find a radioactive form of carbon, carbon-14, in nature. He had realized that, if it were there, it would leave a slowly decaying trace in dead plants and animals – so finding out how much was left in their remains would reveal when they died.
But Libby had to prove that carbon-14 existed in the wild in concentrations that matched his estimates. Other scientists had only ever detected carbon-14 after synthesizing it in a lab.
Libby reasoned that living things would deposit C-14 in their excrement, which is why he turned to sewage. Sewage produced by the people of Baltimore, to be precise. And he found what he was looking for.
Libby didn't know it then but the idea that you could use radioactive carbon – radiocarbon – to date things would have all kinds of applications.
Since the mid-20th Century, radiocarbon dating has confirmed the age of countless ancient artefacts, helped solve missing person cases and put ivory traffickers in jail. It has even enabled scientists to understand the intricacies of Earth's climate. Radiocarbon dating is one of the keys that unlocks our world.
But how does carbon-14 come into existence in the first place? Libby understood that it was being produced constantly by cosmic rays striking nitrogen atoms in the Earth's atmosphere and changing their structure. The resulting carbon-14 atom quickly combines with oxygen to make radioactive carbon dioxide (CO2).
Back on the ground, plants absorb some of that radioactive CO2 in the air as they grow, as do the animals – including humans – that eat them. While a plant or animal is alive, it keeps replenishing its internal store of carbon-14, but when it dies, that process stops. Because radiocarbon decays at a known rate, measuring how much is left in organic material will tell you the material's age.
A clock that starts ticking the moment something dies
Once Libby confirmed there was carbon-14 in the methane gas from Baltimore sewers, he went on to detect radiocarbon in many different things, allowing him to prove how old they were – from the linen wrappings of the Dead Sea Scrolls to a piece of a ship found in the tomb of Sesostris III, an Egyptian king who lived nearly 4,000 years ago.
"This is a problem where you won't tell anybody what you're doing. It's too crazy," Libby later said. "You can't tell anybody cosmic rays can write down human history. You can't tell them that. No way. So we kept it secret."
But once he had proved it worked, he let the world know. And, in 1960, Libby won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
His technique works on organic material up to 50,000 years old. Older than that, and there is too little carbon-14 left. Carbon-14's gradual decay is what makes radiocarbon dating possible – but that also means you can only go back so far. Even so, radiocarbon dating is now central to our understanding of history.
"In terms of putting things in order, in terms of being able to compare between different regions in particular, and understand that pace of change, it has been really important," explains Rachel Wood, who works in one of the world's most distinguished radiocarbon dating labs, the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.
She and her colleagues date materials including human bones, charcoal, shells, seeds, hair, cotton, parchment and ceramics, but also stranger substances. "We do the odd really unusual thing, like fossilized bat urine," she says.
The lab uses a device called an accelerator mass spectrometer to directly quantify the carbon-14 atoms in a sample – unlike Libby, who was only able to measure the radiation emitted and thereby infer how much carbon-14 a sample contained. The accelerator can also date tiny samples, in some cases a single milligram, whereas Libby needed much more material.
Removing carbon-containing contaminants can take weeks, but once done the accelerator readily spits out a sample's estimated age. "It's really exciting to be able to see the results immediately," says Wood.
Radiocarbon dating has settled some long-standing arguments. Take the human skeleton discovered by theologian and geologist William Buckland in Wales in 1823. Buckland insisted it was no more than 2,000 years old, and for more than a century, no-one could prove he was wrong. Radiocarbon dating eventually showed it was actually between 33,000 and 34,000 years old – the oldest known buried human remains in the UK.
More recent human remains have also revealed their secrets thanks to this technology.
In 1975, a 13-year-old girl called Laura Ann O'Malley was reported missing in New York. Remains found in a California riverbed in the 1990s were thought to have originated in a historic grave until radiocarbon dating earlier this year showed they belonged to someone born between 1964 and 1967, who most likely died between 1977 and 1984. This fitted the timeline of O'Malley's disappearance, and DNA analysis confirmed the remains were hers.
Forensic analyses often rely on the "bomb pulse" method of radiocarbon dating, which is possible due to the hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s.
The blasts sent vast quantities of additional carbon-14 into the air, but these artificially high levels have been falling ever since. And so, by comparing carbon-14 measurements with that downward-sloping curve, it is possible to date materials from the mid-20th Century onwards very precisely – to within a year or so, in some cases.
"I don't know of any other technique that comes close to that," says wildlife biologist Sam Wasser at the University of Washington. "It's extraordinarily useful."
Wasser has analyzed radiocarbon dating results from ivory samples as part of efforts to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. The data can show whether the elephants died before or after the 1989 ban on ivory sales, whatever traffickers may claim.
One man jailed on this evidence is Edouodji Emile N'Bouke, convicted in Togo in 2014. While DNA tests uncovered the geographic origin of the ivory he trafficked, radiocarbon dating showed exactly when the elephants were poached. These two strands of evidence were "the smoking gun critical to bringing N'Bouke to justice", the US State Department later said.
The same techniques have exposed artworks as forgeries. Take the painting of a village scene that one forger claimed was made in 1866. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that it had actually been painted, and artificially aged, during the 1980s.
Radiocarbon dating has also shed light on climate change by helping scientists understand the effect of fossil fuel emissions on Earth's climate. Studies of glaciers and ancient ecosystems, for example, are made much more accurate thanks to radiocarbon dating technology.
This research has informed reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in 2007 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – along with former US Vice President Al Gore – for its work disseminating information about climate change.
"It's also very useful for people who want to use climate models to predict what the climate may potentially be like in the future," says Tim Heaton, professor of applied statistics at the University of Leeds. Scientists can use radiocarbon records to establish how Earth's climate changed over time, and check climate models against those results, validating the models' accuracy.
But another clock is ticking. Fossil fuels contain copious quantities of carbon but no carbon-14 – the organisms that became coal, natural gas and oil, died so long ago that the carbon-14 they once contained has long since decayed. That means fossil fuel emissions are diluting the carbon-14 in Earth's atmosphere today, which has a direct effect on how much radiocarbon ends up in living things.
Heather Graven, professor of climate physics at Imperial College London, says that in the worst-case scenario of extremely high emissions during the next century or so, the accuracy of radiocarbon dating could crumble.
"Something that's freshly produced will have the same [radiocarbon] composition as something that's maybe 2,000 years old," she says. Radiocarbon dating wouldn't be able to tell the two apart.
Rachel Wood argues that these problems won't arise any time soon, but Paula Reimer, professor emeritus at Queen's University Belfast, thinks fossil fuel emissions do "put a damper" on radiocarbon dating and ultimately threaten its accuracy.
She spent many years working to heighten the precision of radiocarbon dating, by making painstaking measurements of the radiocarbon found in tree rings, for example, to reveal variations in atmospheric levels of carbon-14 across millennia.
Extremely precise curves of radiocarbon levels are now available dating back 14,000 years or so. But fossil fuel emissions may eventually bring this era of incredible precision to an end.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250926-the-natural-clocks-that-can-pinpoint-the-time-of-death
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ending on beauty:
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
~ Philip Larkin, from Aubade
"Can't Let Go"; Hsieh Tong-Liang, 2001
