*
SWIMMING IN ALL THE LAKES
Desolation Wilderness, near Lake Tahoe
To step in. To go deeper and deeper
into the cold. It was a baptism of will.
To swim fast and stay submerged,
not to be seared by the wind.
I lasted ten minutes perhaps,
each minute a rapturous torment.
The lakes were icy, but the sun
swam with me in every one —
and after, a rush of heat
would blossom in my body.
But before that brief paradise,
there I was in the shining, that dot,
that would-be Lorelei, but not
singing. Swimming and freezing
in that thumbnail of the brilliant sky,
inside a ring of granite
the color of rhinoceros, primeval.
Then the flower of my heart pulsing heat
down even to my shriveled
bluish fingertips. Any longer
and my heart wouldn’t bloom:
at those heights, in that purity, I’d die,
in the middle of the journey of my life,
out to prove what I couldn’t define —
the lakes glacial as heaven,
the water soft and clear forever,
my heart singing survive, survive.
~ Oriana
Mary:
Why do we seek such challenges, why are they so exhilarating — to pit our soft bodies and flower hearts against such unforgiving extremities, beautiful and merciless…irresistible.
*
POET, FASCIST, TRAITOR — WHO WAS EZRA POUND?
Convinced that rising tensions in Europe between the democratic nations on one side and the fascist states on the other would likely lead to war, in April 1939, Pound sailed for America to “educate” Americans about the “folly” of allowing themselves to be drawn into a conflict with his beloved Italy. Deeply disappointed by the apathy with which his pleas were met, he returned to Italy and in mid-November 1940 approached Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture with his ideas on ways to counter what he termed “anti-Italian and anti-Fascist propaganda” in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Pound’s offer was met with both enthusiasm and caution, the former, because he was still a world-renowned literary celebrity, and the latter, because officials in Mussolini’s intelligence service feared he might be an American plant. Suspicion of Pound’s motives eased when the Italian embassy in Washington reported that during his visit to the United States, the poet had “displayed his friendly feelings for Fascism and granted courageous interviews.”
His fascist bona fides having been validated, Pound was given the green light to begin his radio broadcasts. The first took place on January 23, 1941, when the poet spoke in English on Radio Roma’s “American Hour.” In some two hundred programs over the following eleven months, Pound lauded Mussolini’s accomplishments—such as reducing crime and improving Italy’s road and railway networks—while also advocating that fascism was the only cure for social injustice, financial inequity, and the “dire threat” posed by “international Jewry.” In return for his radio services and his written contributions to Italy’s print propaganda outlets, including weekly articles in the newspaper Meridiano di Roma, Pound received a monthly salary, as well as such perks as reduced train and bus fares.
The poet’s pro-fascist beliefs had caught the attention of the U.S. government even before he’d begun his radio programs, and in October 1941, the Federal Communications Commission’s Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service began occasional monitoring and recording of Pound’s shortwave broadcasts.
That same month, J. Wesley Jones, a State Department official who had just returned to Washington from Rome, raised an additional red flag regarding Pound. In a memo to Ray Atherton, then acting chief of State’s Division of European Affairs, Jones said that the poet was “still . . . broadcasting his views,” and suggested that Pound’s name should be added to “the list of pseudo-Americans” still living in Italy.
The frequency of the FBMS’s monitoring of Pound’s broadcasts increased dramatically following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. On the afternoon of December 7, even as Americans were desperately trying to understand the magnitude and import of Japan’s assault on the U.S. Pacific Fleet and Army and Navy airfields on Oahu, Pound was on the airwaves once again extolling the virtues of fascism. Because the program had been prerecorded, it included no mention of the disaster in Hawaii, making the poet’s comments seem all the more insensitive to his American listeners. Yet Pound himself was horrified by news of the attack, so much so that he vowed to “stand with my country right or wrong” and insisted he would “never speak over the airwaves again.”
His resolve lasted a mere seven weeks following America’s December 11, 1941, declaration of war against Italy, for he resumed his “American Hour” show on January 29, 1942. With the United States now a belligerent, Pound’s broadcasts stopped being seen by senior American officials as merely the ill-advised ramblings of a famously eccentric expatriate and entered a far more serious realm—that of treason.
In a very real sense, it was the president of the United States himself who kicked the American government’s investigation of Pound into high gear. On October 1, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt dashed off the following memo to Attorney General Francis Biddle:
"There are a number of Americans in Europe who are aiding Hitler et al on the radio. Why should we not proceed to indict them for treason even though we might not be able to try them until after the war? I understand Ezra Pound, [Robert H.] Best, [Jane] Anderson and a few others are broadcasting for Axis microphones."
Roosevelt’s query prompted Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, to reach out to the FBI regarding the expatriate poet. On October 13, Berge sent a memo to Hoover asking that the Bureau “obtain, if possible, transcripts of [Pound’s] broadcasts and transmit the same to this Division, together with any information you may have regarding this subject.”
Given that the FBI had been compiling a file on Pound since at least January 1941, Berge got a response to his memo just a day after Hoover received it. On October 14, the Bureau sent the assistant attorney general an eight-paragraph précis of the poet’s life, work, and political leanings. The document stated that “in February, 1940, Pound began airing his alien views and contempt for the United States over the Rome radio,” and added that a June 4, 1941, dispatch from the American consul general in Genoa “stated that Pound is known to have been very pro-Fascist for a number of years and to have spoken over the Italian radio system against the policies of the United States . . . it was stated that upon entering and leaving the Consular offices at Genoa, he was prone to give the Fascist salute.”
On November 20, the FBI provided Berge with three pages of excerpts of Pound’s post–Pearl Harbor broadcasts, with the first entry dated July 2, 1942, and the last on July 26. That initial tranche of transcripts was followed on December 12 by another eighteen pages spanning January 29 through June 28, 1942.
Just over a month after receiving the additional transcripts, Berge was ready to recommend a course of action. On January 15, 1943, he sent Attorney General Biddle a memo titled “Proposed Indictments for Treason of the Following American Citizens Broadcasting Enemy Propaganda from Axis Countries to the United States,” citing Pound and six other individuals.
The memo noted that the seven “have for some time been broadcasting enemy propaganda to the United States from Berlin, Germany, and Rome, Italy,” and added that if transcripts of their broadcasts and other information thus far gathered about the individuals led to the conclusion that “their activities are considered of sufficient importance to warrant action by this Department, they may be properly be deemed treason within the meaning of Title 18, U.S.C, Section 1.” The seven-page document then went into detail on the exact legal meaning of the word treason, as well as giving several examples of how earlier treason cases had been handled in U.S. courts.
The building wave of official U.S. government interest in determining whether Pound’s broadcasts and writings reached the level of treason prompted Hoover to launch a nationwide, in-depth effort to investigate the poet.
Having just gained President Roosevelt’s authorization for agents of the FBI’s SIS to operate in Europe, Hoover decided to make Pound the first treason suspect to be investigated in the combat theater. The task would require the assigned agent to be embedded with U.S. Army units as they moved across the Strait of Messina and up the Italian peninsula, and the investigation would be a test case for Hoover’s test case for the Army Liaison Unit. Given the stakes, the director would have to dispatch the best agent he could find. That man was an Italian American and former lawyer from Wyandotte, Michigan, named Frank Lawrence Amprim.
When the FBI agent began interrogating Pound on the morning of May 5, the poet apparently believed the uniformed Amprim was a CIC (Counter Intelligence Corp) officer. The revelation that he was actually dealing with an FBI agent prompted Pound to make two requests. First, he wanted to send a telegram to President Harry Truman offering his help, as a longtime student of Confucianism, in brokering a “just peace” between the United States and Japan. Second, he wanted to make a final radio broadcast in which he would plead for America to be a benevolent victor over the defeated Axis nations. That Pound was shocked when Amprim declined both requests gives a clear idea of the poet’s stunning naïveté and overwhelming sense of self-importance.
After five hours of questioning, Amprim dispatched a cable to Hoover stating, “ezra pound in custody cic, ninety second division, genoa. admits voluntary broadcasts for pay.”
Pound was questioned on May 6 and 7, and at the end of the final session, the poet voluntarily signed two important documents. The first was the final version of a six-page typewritten sworn statement in which Pound outlined his early life and his initial move to Europe in 1908, his relocation to Italy in 1924, his fascination with and approval of Mussolini and fascism, and his writings and broadcasts both before and after Pearl Harbor. Pound admitted making the transmissions under his own name and at least two aliases, and acknowledged being paid by the Ministry of Popular Culture for his radio and print work. He also said that after the fall of the Mussolini regime, he had approached the Salo Republic about doing more radio broadcasts.
He said he was given 3,000 lire in “living expenses” by Carl Giorgio Goedel, a German who had worked for the Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome and then for the same entity in Salo—an organization Pound would certainly have known to be completely controlled by the Nazis. The poet also admitted that after Fascist Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, he said in one of his broadcasts that America was getting into a “whale of a debt” and should get out of the war immediately. In the statement, Pound also acknowledged that he understood the document could be used against him in court and that he was “willing to return to the United States to stand trial on the charge of treason.”
In addition to his sworn statement and the written authorization to search his Italian abode, on May 8, Pound provided Amprim with two additional written “supplements.” The first, titled “Outline of Economic Bases of Historic Processes,” was an exceptionally dense and rambling treatise quoting, among others, John Adams and Vladimir Lenin. The second item, “Further Points,” while also rather disjointed, includes a few concrete statements Pound wanted Amprim—and presumably the U.S. court that might eventually try him—to know.
At one point, the poet wrote, “I do not yet know at what date the mere use of a radio in a foreign territory became a crime. I certainly had no news of its being illegal before the date, whenever it was, that I heard I was accused of treason.” He then added, “I do not believe I have betrayed anyone whomsoever.”
In a later additional typed statement that day, Pound wrote, “I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day’s work for a living.” This latter statement would have rung false to Amprim, who was aware that the poet had publicly sought to justify Mussolini’s Nazi-inspired “race laws” and the Germans’ treatment of Italian Jews following the 1943 capitulation.
Moreover, Pound added two lines to the statement that were to haunt him for the rest of his life: “Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a saint, and wanted nothing for himself.”
Amprim maintained a calm and friendly manner throughout his extended contacts with Ezra Pound despite such statements, and the poet later wrote that Amprim “expressed himself as convinced that I was telling the absolute truth . . . and has since with great care collected far more proof to that effect than I or any private lawyer would have got at.” Pound had obviously misconstrued the FBI agent’s “good cop” interview style, for Amprim was often irritated by the poet’s glib, offhand pronouncements in favor of Mussolini, Hitler, fascism, and anti-Semitism.
The agent was especially incensed that on several occasions, when Pound was being interviewed between May 5 and May 17, the poet routinely gave the Fascist salute when entering the room.'
In the end, Ezra Pound was never tried for treason. He was found mentally unfit to stand trial and transferred to Washington, D.C.’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane. Pound spent thirteen years in the institution, and upon his release in May 1958, he returned to Italy to live in Venice with his mistress, Olga Rudge. Pound died in 1972, followed by Rudge in 1996.
https://lithub.com/literary-celebrity-mussolinis-mouthpiece-and-american-traitor-who-was-ezra-pound/
Oriana:
I wonder if what will ultimately remain of Pound will be these two charming lines:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.
Just two lines, an unusual simile — not much, and yet I know I will carry that tiny flame of poetry deep in my memory for the rest of my life. The image is unexpectedly delicate, tender, even loving — nothing we usually associate with Pound, a hater of modernity, its “grimace of the age.”
Two lines of sheer poetry — not much, but far from nothing.
Yosip Brodsky has a marvelous essay on visiting, along with Susan Sontag, Olga Rudge in Venice, in his collection of essays, Watermark — I think those essays are Brodsky’s best work.
*
WHY THE VIKINGS WERE SO SUCCESSFUL
To say Vikings were "like pirates" is accurate in terms of their job description, but it underplays why they were so terrifying. If Caribbean pirates were armed robbers, the Vikings were more like a highly mobile, amphibious special forces unit.
The Vikings were successful not just because they were brutal, but because they possessed a piece of technology that fundamentally broke the rules of European warfare: the longship.
During the Middle Ages, you generally had two types of ships: deep-water vessels for crossing oceans, and shallow boats for river travel. The Viking longship was an engineering marvel that could do both. It was sturdy enough to cross the volatile North Atlantic but had a draft (the depth of the ship underwater) of as little as one meter (3 feet).
This technological advantage made them essentially invisible until it was too late.
In 845 AD, the Vikings didn't just attack the coast of France; they sailed all the way up the Seine River and besieged Paris. Imagine the psychological terror of living in an inland city, hundreds of miles from the sea, feeling completely safe, only to wake up and find 120 warships parked on your riverbanks. The Vikings turned Europe’s highway system (its rivers) against it. No one was safe, anywhere.
Beyond the boat, their success came from three other distinct factors that separated them from common pirates:
They targeted the "banks": When Vikings raided the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, it sent shockwaves through Europe. In the Christian world, monasteries were sacred, untouchable places. To the Vikings, they were undefended buildings filled with gold and supplies. They were pragmatic professionals who realized the Church held all the wealth but none of the weapons.
They were amphibious infantry: Most pirates are sailors who fight poorly on land. Vikings were arguably the best heavy infantry of their era. They would land, form a shield wall, seize horses for mobility (though they usually fought on foot), and move rapidly across the countryside.
They didn't just steal; they stayed: While pirates usually loot and leave, Vikings often practiced Danegeld (extortion) and eventually settlement. They hit regions so hard and so often that kings eventually paid them to stop—or, in the case of Normandy ("Northman's Land"), gave them massive territories in exchange for protection against other Vikings.
The fear they inspired wasn't just about violence; it was about unpredictability. Thanks to the longship, the Vikings could strike any town, on any river, at any time, with a speed that prevented local lords from gathering an army to stop them. They were the masters of asymmetric warfare.
*
COULD DEMOCRACY SUCCEED IN RUSSIA?
It’s official: the Russian government is cutting spending on social programs and laying off 15% of administrative staff in Moscow and the regions to help cover defense costs, which now consume nearly 40% of the federal budget.
Even before the special military operation in Iran, wealthy Russians had already snapped up every available villa in the Maldives for March — the very month they were supposed to be at their desks. Go back to work, you losers!
With the Gulf states in flames, travel agencies in Moscow are now scrambling to book every five-star hotel room they can find in Mauritius, Zanzibar, and the Seychelles.
This past winter, Russia added 16 new dollar billionaires, bringing the total to 105. Their fortunes come from metals, mining, investments, and retail. Today, 10% of Russians own 90% of the nation’s wealth.
Meanwhile, we are subsidizing Europe with diesel fuel from Indian refineries made from Russian crude oil that neither India nor Europe can pay for directly because of sanctions.
Russian government is sending us to fight in their foreign war, while our rich help themselves to half of what we earn and spend most of the year lounging on tropical islands with the talent from exactly the same “modeling agencies” that Jeffrey Epstein once commissioned to entertain his rich Western friends.
What is this global conspiracy of the billionaire class, as they gaslight us into believing we live under the best of all possible political systems?
Do they really think we’re stupid enough to fall for it?
All right, that was a rhetorical question. Of course they do because we are.
Rant over. And now, to the news from our glorious Motherland.
Import substitution schemes were supposedly designed to convince us that we can manufacture things just as well as the Chinese, who have spent the past forty years honing their craft at scale, have predictably devolved into a farce.
Take, for example, this vehicle used to clear snow from the roads. And there it is, emblazoned on the back in Russian: “Made in Russia. Brand new.”
One assumes it will remain new until they repaint it after some arbitrary expiration date for "newness" has passed.
However, when you look at the vehicle from the front, you can’t help but notice the Mercedes logo. It reminds me of a popular bumper sticker among owners of Soviet clunkers: “I want to be a Mercedes when I grow up.”
Then there was another government scheme that went south in a hurry: they introduced a recycling fee on purchases of new cars that nearly doubled the price of new vehicles.
The idea was to collect a hefty sum and revive sales at AvtoVAZ, the local passenger car manufacturer. The company has long been a byword for Russia’s inability to manufacture anything except tanks and bombs.
A year later, AvtoVAZ’s flagship Lada line saw sales plummet by 22.5%, and the brand’s market share dropped to a record low of 23.8%.
As it turned out, once buyers realized they were being taxed to subsidize these crappy cars just so the factory could keep overcharging for them, they decided to boycott the brand.
As a result, sales of Chinese cars went up, which is exactly the opposite of what the scheme was supposed to achieve. Quality and fair price have won again.
The communists in the Kremlin just can’t win against Kapitalism even when they cheat. ~ Misha Firer, Quora, 3-6-26
Pavel Yatsuk:
Democracy has never existed in Russia, not even for a single day—because it's a concept alien and hostile to the communists who still rule Russia. They shouldn't have spoken out, but rather broken this rotten bundle of sticks over their knees in 1991 and burned communism in all its forms to the ground—as they did with Nazism.
Edward Lokshin:
The 1996 race came down to what many considered a choice between the lesser of two evils. Boris Yeltsin managed to draw significant support from younger voters, urban residents, and people moving into the emerging private sector. For many of them, the late Soviet experience meant stagnation, shortages, rigid career paths, censorship, and limits on travel abroad. The contrast between that system and the promise of market reforms, political pluralism, and personal mobility was powerful. Yeltsin also succeeded in attracting part of the nationalist electorate by forming an alliance with General Alexander Lebed.
Boris Ivanov:
The premise of competitive democracy is that you don’t reward failure just because you hope for the best. You vote for the other guys to show that the people in power are underperforming. Or looting the country, as it was at the time. They even stole the slogan “Choose or lose” from Clinton’s campaign in 1992. Note that it rhymed in English, but not in Russian. They were that lazy.
Edward Lokshin:
By 1996, many Russians had begun to experience some of the tangible benefits of the new economic system. For the first time, ordinary citizens bought items like a Japanese VCR or took a trip abroad, things that had largely been reserved for the Soviet elite. Having just gained access to these opportunities, many voters were reluctant to risk a return to the Communists and instead opted for what they saw as the safer path forward.
Also keep in mind that Russia did have a degree of balance of power in the 1990s. Throughout much of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, particularly between 1995 and 1999, the State Duma often stood in opposition to the government. Deputies pushed back against major reforms, sought to curb executive authority, and in 1999 even launched impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin, though the effort did not succeed. At the regional level, many governors aligned themselves with opposition forces, which further complicated the Kremlin’s efforts to assert consistent control across the country.
As does “They even stole the slogan” — they were not lazy, they were inexperienced. The 1996 race was the first presidential election in post Soviet Russia, and the political system was still in its infancy. There was no established campaign infrastructure, no seasoned media strategists, and no deep institutional memory of how to run a modern presidential contest.
As a result, Yeltsin and his team faced a steep learning curve. To compensate for the lack of domestic expertise, they brought in a group of American political consultants who had experience with media strategy and polling. Their role was to advise on campaign organization, advertising, and voter targeting, areas that were relatively new in Russia at the time.
Urmas Alas:
In short, anything was possible until Putin began to systematically destroy democracy. This was orchestrated by Vladislav Surkov, who is often described as the Kremlin’s ‘main ideologist’ and was a key architect of the Russian political system in the 2000s and early 2010s. He played a pivotal role in constructing the ‘power vertical’ – a system designed to consolidate authority under Vladimir Putin by eliminating horizontal checks and balances, enforcing regional loyalty and creating a technocratic, loyalist elite.
Misha Firer:
Moscow, 2025. Sentimental Russians bring flowers and take selfies against the restored bas-relief to honor the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin who allegedly killed more Russians than Hitler.
It is scientifically proven that Russian mindset is 30% sadistic and 70% masochistic. And one percent nostalgic for the restoration of the glorious Soviet Union where there was no private property and nobody was allowed to speak their mind or leave abroad.
“The USSR still exists,” said Russian presidential adviser Anton Kobyakov.
According to him, the legal procedure for dissolving the Soviet Union in 1991 was violated.
Konya is right: Soviet Union lives on in Russian hearts, the most glorious open air prison ever built. Freedom proved too much to bear and even Putin turned out to be not Stalin enough.
There were no presidents in the USSR, which means the current one was elected in violation of the laws of the USSR, and is illegitimate. And Russian Federation is a 404 country.
Stalin, the genocidal premier who resettled whole nations randomly for no reason and whose show trials were permitted to have only one verdict “to be shot” is an important part of Russian cultural code.
Russians often complain that Putin is weak. He spares them untold suffering and miserable death by tens of millions. Kudos for the president’s mismanaged pandemic that killed a million, and special military operation that buried another million, but Russians are not satisfied with this paltry death harvest.
And so Russians have transformed the passage at the metro station with the controversial landmark into a shrine and a popular photo spot.
Six new Stalin statues were inaugurated last year and more are on the way that hopefully will be conducive to the increase of body/hectare ratio in the battlefield.
Jaap Folmer:
Can Russia be a democracy after Putin? I have little doubt, if I look at Ukraine. It is Russia’s alter ego. It shows that it can be done.
That is most likely the real reason why Putin is so adamant to destroy it. Just like Xi did in Hong Kong and would love to do to Taiwan. They are the living proof that people like Putin and Xi are not needed. And something better is possible.
Jim Lancaster:
One of the most perceptive observations regarding Soviet pathology was captured by an anti-Soviet protester in the waning days of the Soviet Union: “Seventy Years on the Road to Nowhere!”
In hindsight, perhaps a more apt epitaph should have been applied: “Seventy years of retrogression!”
Far from modernizing the post-Tsarist Russian cultural and economic landscape, Stalinism ultimately distorted it — infected it with chronic maladies from which it has not recovered and may never recover. Why? Because the the inhabitants of the nations of the post-Soviet empire are still mired in and in dialogue with the pathologies of Bolshevism and, in its hideous mutation, Stalinism, unleashed more than a century ago.
*
THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA AND ITS SHRINKING POPULATION
In a photograph I took while walking through Moscow, I want to draw your attention to two municipal workers building a handicap ramp for the public toilets in Düsseldorf Park, in the southeastern part of the city.
The drill is a Makita, a nice piece of foreign gear, but the crude metal sheets are locally sourced. No disabled person will ever use these facilities, because they can barely navigate the city streets in the first place. Still, Mayor Sobyanin is eager to build his Potemkin village, hoping to sweep Chinese visitors off their feet.
I took this photograph at the Spartak ice sports facilities in Sokolniki Park. The famous sports club takes its name from a Roman gladiator because in Russia, athletes are actually modern-day gladiators. They sacrifice their health and their bodies to bring glory to whoever currently sits in the Kremlin.
The ice rink has been leased out for this young figure skater to train. Just a little girl, but she’s already giving everything to the sport. One day, she'll become a champion. And then she'll lose her medal after being busted for doping.
*
“THE OLIGARCHICAL CORRIDOR” (Timothy Snyder)
Is this [Iran] an American war? It surely is, in the sense that Americans will bear some of its consequences. And it surely is, in that American voters are among its causes, having brought Donald Trump to power. But in its causes and in its purposes, one sees very little that connects directly with the people or the institutions of the United States of America.
If we examine the origins, or what we can discern of them, we get an inkling of something rather different: a closed domain of international oligarchs, exploiting the state’s power and patriotic sentiment, while creating a world order in which the American state is much weaker, or simply ceases to function. An oligarchical corridor.
Is the war American in its origins? Can we find the genesis of Trump’s war against Iran in the United States? There is of course a domestic politics to the war. Trump has already telegraphed that he wants to exploit this war to try to fix (”federalize”) the elections of November 2026, and preserve his power with artificial majorities of supine Republicans. But that would work with any war. And, for all we know, by the summer or autumn Trump may well have moved on to another war in Cuba, or yet another one after that.
The question is: why this particular war? Why Iran? There are certainly Americans who have wanted a war with Iran for a very long time. Years, decades, in 2003, longer. But that does not explain the timing. Why now? There does not seem to be an American answer to that.
No doubt the decision was Donald Trump’s, in the narrow sense that no one else enjoyed the practical authority to order the American armed forces into battle. But this begs the question rather than answer it – and Trump himself lacks answers. Why did he make the decision that he did? He has been unable to explain why he started the war, to a degree that defies any explanation from deliberate ambiguity or even mental decline. He does not even seem very interested in the question, as though it had been answered by others for him. He clearly wanted a war, after the pleasure of Venezuela. But why this one?
One can recall various American origins for a war, more or less honorable, or more or less tawdry. We have fought wars that originated in legitimate threats from abroad, in attempts at secession within the country, in press campaigns, in governmental analyses of threats, in government propaganda campaigns. In all of these historical instances, however, there was some American component, some American process. That American input is missing here.
The subject is not the legitimacy of those past wars. The issue is a much simpler, analytical one: in all of these cases, there was some sort of American origin story to the armed conflict. In the case of the Third Gulf War, there is not. There was no threat, abroad or at home, nor any subjective public sense of such a threat. We see little evidence of any sustained discussion or debate within departments of the government (Vietnam) or even of a government press campaign designed to sway opinion (Second Gulf War).
Let us accept Trump’s own account that the only limitations to what he does are inside his “own mind.” That too just begs the question. What things are inside his head, and how do they get there? We see no sign that what is inside his mind right now has to do with his own expressed convictions (peace prize), public opinion (against the war), government consensus (absent) or propaganda campaign (likewise). What then are the channels into Trump’s head? The pathway to Trump’s mind seems to be an oligarchical corridor.
We don’t know nearly enough to be confident about what is in that corridor, as any historian will acknowledge. Decades from now historians will be debating why this war started, as we debate the origins of all great conflicts.
Those future scholars will have a difficult time, because there will be little written evidence. What passes for American foreign policy is largely carried out by private emissaries who are often unaccompanied by note-takers and who do not benefit from the institutional competence or area expertise of government departments.
One trace is left by the exhaust fumes of private jets which speed, tellingly, to some capitals but not to others. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have been involved in three sets of negotiations which touch the parties concerned by this war. They were Trump’s negotiators with Iran, where in their impatience (to put it mildly) they took a position that leaned towards that of Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf States. They were among Trump’s negotiators with Israel over Gaza, where I think it can be said without glaring injustice that their position tilted towards that of Tel Aviv. And they are Trump’s negotiators with Russia and Ukraine, where Witkoff’s stance is ostentatiously pro-Kremlin.
These men do have a place in Trump’s mind. His friend and his son-in-law are his chosen emissaries, and he talks to them. They connect him to countries concerned by this war: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf States), Russia, Ukraine. Witkoff and Kushner have favorites. Kushner has a plan to turn Gaza into a giant resort. In the case of the Gulf States, the two men benefit from (known and documented) financial transactions of unusual flexibility and generosity. There is no known financial connection between Kushner or Witkoff and the Kremlin, but it would be untrue to say that the possibility of such an arrangement does not intrude upon the imaginations of of regional experts.
America itself is outside the oligarchical corridor. We see three individual Americans — Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump — who share that cozy passage, an informational and emotional environment with interested and often extravagantly wealthy individuals from other countries. The conventional inputs from the American public and the American government being obviously irrelevant, and any threat to American safety or any account of American interests being just as conspicuously absent, we are justified to attend to the corridor.
In addition to asking about inputs – what goes into the corridor –, we can consider outputs – what comes out. Who benefits from this war? The United States certainly does not. No national interest is being served, and no real effort is even being expended to try to define one.
We are shedding credibility, and we are shedding allies, we are exposing weaknesses in our practice of war, and we are burning munitions that might have been needed elsewhere.
And so who does benefit? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.
Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.
This propaganda line is historically ridiculous – remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling.
What about Russia? Here the case is certainly more complex. It is embarrassing for Putin that he has lost another political friend: after Maduro, now Khamenei. And Iran has been Russia’s backer during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, supplying the Shahed drones that have terrorized and traumatized the Ukrainian civilian population. Iran even sent its own personnel to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory in autumn 2022 to teach Russians how to pilot drones; it would be very surprising if those trainers themselves did not direct some of the countless lethal attacks against Ukrainians. (The number of drone attacks on Ukraine is on the order of one hundred thousand, which is worth bearing in mind when a single drone attack on American forces is treated as something exceptional and dramatic). There is no doubt that the American attack on Iran will hinder any further supply of Iranian weapons to Russia.
Given their experience with those Iranian weapons, it is unsurprising that many Ukrainians greet the American attack on Iran as of benefit to them. I am afraid that this is not really the case.
The Ukrainians have one major vulnerability in the war right now, and that is air defense: in particular, the need for Patriot missiles that the Americans produce and which Europeans now buy and pass to Ukraine (there is no direct American weapon provision to Ukraine). The United States is now burning through those Patriot interceptors at a wild pace, to the delight of its possible adversaries.
The Patriot has exceeded all expectations in Ukraine these last two years. But if the United States wastes the stock of Patriots in its Iran adventure, then it will be hard to protect Ukrainian cities, or for that matter anything else. According to Kyiv, the Americans went through more Patriots in the first three days of the war with Iran than the Ukrainians have used in four years of defending themselves from a full-scale invasion by Russia.
This is, incidentally, a strong suggestion that the Americans are fighting in a way that is tactically as well as strategically unwise. It appears that the Americans are firing expensive Patriots at cheap drones, which is not how a modern war is fought. It wastes money, but it also wastes the potential that Patriots have to stop missiles. The Americans seem unprepared to deal with drone warfare. For this, they will need Ukrainian help. Whether the Americans acknowledge this in any way is another question.
The Russians have one major vulnerability in the war, and that is hydrocarbons. They depend upon selling oil and natural gas to buy weapons and pay soldiers. Thanks to the war on Iran, thanks to the oligarchical corridor, oil prices have now increased, to Russia’s great benefit, and Russia is filling the void left by Iran.
So on balance, the war exposes a Ukrainian vulnerability, and addresses a Russian one. The United States might have made preparations to prevent Russia from immediately profiting from its actions, but did not. This is consistent with an ongoing conversation inside an oligarchical corridor, in which American oligarchs would as a matter of course address Russian concerns.
Here too American propaganda might be revealing. Of the two propaganda messages that have survived for longer than a day, one is a Russian talking point: that Ukraine is to blame for everything, including American mistakes.
Trump and his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt have been claiming that the United States has the infinite weapons needed for a forever war — but if that infinity is somehow violated, this is a result of the Biden policy of arming Ukraine.
This is absurd on a number of levels. Historically, the US sells the most arms to Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Israel, in that order. After the full-scale invasion, of 2022, Ukraine was generally given weapons that were about to be decommissioned. Ukraine used those weapons to hold off a full-scale invasion by Russia, which was backed by China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an incomparably more meaningful conflict than Trump’s war on Iran.
Ukraine improved some of those weapons, deployed some of them in new ways, and then shared experience with the Americans, who were able to make improvements in both design and in practice.
The unfairness of this has to be registered; the point, though, is that Trump and Leavitt are repeating a Russian cliché. And, as with the idea of our always having been a Saudi client, the notion that Ukraine is to blame for everything is the only consistent American propaganda message. (The Americans don’t have to repeat Israeli propaganda: the Israeli prime minister went on Fox and supplied it himself, without the need for mediation.)
The war serves Israeli, Saudi, and (with qualifications) Russian interests; the war has led the White House to share Israeli, Saudi, and Russian messaging. These are the outputs thus far.
And so from the inputs and the outputs, we get a certain picture, one in which America is peripheral, and the oligarchical corridor is central.
I don’t believe in the “smoking guns”: that one conversation with an Israeli or a Saudi or a Russian brought about this war. I think it is more fruitful to imagine the corridor in which an ongoing conversation takes place: one in which the American people are absent, American institutions are absent, and indeed everything American is absent. And through this absence we see the emerging reality: the American state is allowed to decay and falter, while oligarchs use the bits that remain to pursue private interests and private fortunes.
This is a world which better serves states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, where the state and the oligarchy are already in alignment. It is not a world in which the United States has much of a place, or at least the United States considered as its people or its representative institutions. It is the world of Trump’s Board of Peace, in which peoples are understood as objects of deals, not as citizens of states.
The American armed forces will be sent hither and thither, as suits the chancy whimsy of the oligarchical huddle, but what they do will be untethered from anything that is substantively American. Their commendable loyalty to the state is abused by a president to whom such commitment is utterly alien. The violence that Americans wreak around the world will affect, among other people, Americans as well; the killing and dying is done in their name, though without their input or any thought to their well-being.
Is this an American war? It is a war of the irresponsibility of a few Americans inside the oligarchical corridor, one which pushes the country towards a future in which institutions fail and citizens do not matter. It could also be a war which allows other Americans to see this future, and to hinder it, and to imagine a better one. If we face squarely that this war is a step to our unmaking, then we have the beginnings of a plan for the remaking.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1#inbox/FMfcgzQfCDWTtTxHRpRjRlGwWglcmdnJ
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CHILD LABOR LAWS AND POOR FAMILIES
You might expect that poor families in the 19th and early 20th centuries cheered when governments began banning child labor. After all, who wants to send their six-year-old into a coal mine or a textile mill?
But in reality, the initial reaction from many destitute families was often fear, anger, and active resistance.
To understand why, you have to look at the economic reality of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. For the poorest families, a child’s income wasn't "pocket money"—it was often the difference between eating and starving.
In Victorian England and early industrial America, wages for unskilled adult laborers were frequently below the subsistence level. A father working 14 hours a day often could not earn enough to buy bread for a wife and four children. The "family wage"—the idea that one breadwinner should be able to support a household—was a distant dream for the lower classes.
As a result, children were economic assets. A ten-year-old working as a "doffer" in a mill or a "breaker boy" sorting coal might earn only a fraction of an adult's wage, but that fraction paid for the rent.
When reformers (often from the middle and upper classes) pushed for laws restricting child labor, poor parents frequently viewed these measures not as liberation, but as a threat to their survival.
Forged Documents: It was common for parents to forge birth certificates or lie to inspectors about a child's age so they could keep working.
Protests: In some textile towns in the American South, parents actually protested against reformers, arguing that the government was stripping them of their right to govern their own families and finances.
The Education Trade-off: While we view school as a universal good today, for a family in 1890 living on the edge of eviction, mandatory schooling was a double tax: they lost the child's income and often had to pay for school supplies or clothing suitable for the classroom.
There is a famous account by social reformer Jane Addams, who described the heartache of mothers who had to choose between their children's long-term health and their family's immediate hunger. She noted that while these parents loved their children, the crushing weight of poverty made them pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness.
It wasn't until adult wages rose and automation made child labor less necessary that the working class fully embraced the removal of children from the workforce. The laws were necessary to break the cycle of poverty, but for the very first generation to experience them, they often felt like a punishment. ~ Quora
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HOW YOUR NAME AFFECTS YOUR PERSONALITY
The first piece of information strangers learn about most people is a moniker picked for them by their parents. But what you are called can have a surprising impact on how others perceive us.
You might have dwelt on the different ways that your parents shaped you – from their warmth and strictness to their generosity and pushiness. But perhaps you haven't thought so much about the consequences of one particularly important gift they bestowed upon you – your name – and whether you like it, and how wider society views it.
Parents often agonize over what to call their children. It can feel like a test of creativity or a way to express their own personalities or identities through their offspring. But what many parents might not fully realize – I know I certainly didn't – is that the choice they make over their children's names could play a part in shaping how others see their child and therefore ultimately the kind of person their child becomes.
"Because a name is used to identify an individual and communicate with the individual on a daily basis, it serves as the very basis of one's self-conception, especially in relation to others," says David Zhu, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, who researches the psychology of names.
Of course, many factors sculpt our personalities. Some of it is influenced by our genes.
Formative experiences play a huge role, so too the people we hang out with, and ultimately the roles we take on in life, whether at work or in the family. Amidst all these dynamics, it's easy to forget the part played by our names – a highly personal influence imposed on us from birth and that usually stays with us through life (unless we go to the trouble of changing it). As Gordon Allport, one of the founders of personality psychology put it in 1961, "the most important anchorage to our self-identity throughout life remains our own name.”
At a basic level, our names can reveal details about our ethnicity or other aspects of our background, which in a world of social bias carries inevitable consequences (for instance, American research conducted in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks found that the exact same resumes were less likely to attract interviews when attributed to a person with an Arabic-sounding name as compared with a white-sounding name). This is unjust on many levels, particularly because names can be an unreliable indicator of our background.
These consequences should not be taken lightly, but that's not where the influence of names ends. Even within a single culture, names can be common or rare, they can have certain positive or negative connotations in terms of their meaning, and they can be seen as appealing or unfashionable and disliked (and those views can change over time with fashions too). In turn, these features of our names inevitably affect how others treat us and how we feel about ourselves.
A study from the 2000s led by US psychologist Jean Twenge, found that, even after controlling for family background and general dissatisfaction with life, people who didn't like their own name tended to have poorer psychological adjustment. This was most likely either because their lack of confidence and self-esteem caused them to dislike their name or disliking their name contributed to their lack of confidence – "the name becomes a symbol of the self", Twenge and her co-author wrote.
In terms of how names affect the ways we're treated by others, consider a German study published in 2011, in which users of a dating site were asked whether they would like to follow up with potential dates on the basis of their names. Jochen Gebauer, now based at the Universität Mannheim, and his colleagues, including Wiebke Neberich, found that people with names considered unfashionable at the time (such as Kevin) were more likely to be rejected, as compared with people with more trendy names (such as Alexander).
If the dating situation is broadly representative of how these people were treated through life, it's easy to see how their names could have shaped how people treated them more generally, and in turn the kind of person they themselves became. Indeed, new research that's still in press, also conducted in Germany, found that participants were less likely to help out a stranger with a negatively rated name (Cindy and Chantal were the two names rated most negatively) as compared with strangers with names rated positively (Sophie and Marie were the most positively rated). [Oriana: too bad. I strongly prefer Cindy – or, better yet, Cynthia – and particularly Chantal – to Sophie or Marie.]
One can imagine it is difficult to be a warm, trusting person (having high "agreeability" in personality trait terms) if you face repeated rejection in life by virtue of your name. Another part of the dating study backed this up: the daters with unfashionable names who were rejected more often also tended to be less educated and have lower self-esteem – almost as if the rejection they experienced on the dating platform were a reflection of how they'd fared in life more generally.
Other recent work has similarly hinted at the harmful consequences of a having an unpopular or negative-sounding name. Huajian Cai and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology in Beijing recently cross-checked the names of hundreds of thousands of people with their risk of having been convicted of crimes. They found that even after controlling for the influence of background demographic factors, people with names seen as less popular or having more negative connotations (for example, rated on average as less "warm" or "moral") were more likely to have been involved in crime.
You could see this tendency toward criminal behavior as a proxy for a person having low agreeability. Again, this is consistent with the notion that having a negative-sounding or unpopular name sets a person up for social rejection and an increased risk for developing a disagreeable personality.
Our names can have these consequences, says Cai, because they can affect how we feel about ourselves and how others treat us. "Since a good or bad name has the potential … to produce good or bad results, I suggest parents should try to give their baby a good name in terms of their own culture," he says.
One can imagine it is difficult to be a warm, trusting person (having high "agreeability" in personality trait terms) if you face repeated rejection in life by virtue of your name. Another part of the dating study backed this up: the daters with unfashionable names who were rejected more often also tended to be less educated and have lower self-esteem – almost as if the rejection they experienced on the dating platform were a reflection of how they'd fared in life more generally.
You could see this tendency toward criminal behavior as a proxy for a person having low agreeability. Again, this is consistent with the notion that having a negative-sounding or unpopular name sets a person up for social rejection and an increased risk for developing a disagreeable personality.
Our names can have these consequences, says Cai, because they can affect how we feel about ourselves and how others treat us. "Since a good or bad name has the potential … to produce good or bad results, I suggest parents should try to give their baby a good name in terms of their own culture," he says.
So far these studies point to the apparently harmful consequences of having a negative or unpopular name. But some recent findings also hint at the potential beneficial consequences that your name might have. For instance if you have a more "sonorant" sounding name that flows easily such as Marla (as compared with an abrupt sounding name such as Eric or Kirk), then it's likely people will prejudge you to be more agreeable in nature, with all the advantages that might bring.
Moreover, while a less common name may be disadvantageous in the short-term (increasing the risk of rejection and lowering your likability) it could have advantages over the longer-term by engendering in you a greater sense of your personal uniqueness. Consider another new study by Cai and his team at Beijing's Institute of Psychology – even after controlling for family and socioeconomic background, they found that having a rarer name was associated with increased odds of having a more unusual career, such as film director or judge.
"Early in life, some people may derive a sense of unique identity from their relatively unique names," the researchers say, proposing that this sense fuels a "distinctiveness motive" that drives them to find an unusual career path that matches their identity. This appears to be somewhat reminiscent of so-called "nominative determinism" – the idea that the meaning of our names influences our life decisions (apparently explaining the abundance of neurologists called Dr Brain and similar amusing occurrences).
Having an unusual name might even shape us to be more creative and open-minded, according to research by Zhu at Arizona State University and his colleagues. Zhu's team cross-checked the names of the chief executives at over a thousand firms and found that the rarer their names, the more distinctive the business strategies they tended to pursue, especially if they were also more confident by nature. Zhu invokes a similar explanation to Cai and his colleagues. "CEOs with an uncommon name tend to develop a self-conception of being different from peers, motivating them to pursue unconventional strategies," he says.
If you're a prospective parent, you might be wondering whether to plump for a common, popular name, perhaps enhancing your children's popularity and likability in the process, or whether to give them an original moniker, helping them to feel special and act more creatively.
"Common and uncommon names are both associated with advantages and disadvantages, so expectant parents should be aware of the pros and cons no matter what types of names they give to their child," advises Zhu.
Perhaps the trick is to find a way to have the best of both worlds by choosing a common name that is easily modified into something more distinctive. "If [you] give a child a very common name, the child is likely to have an easier time being accepted and liked by others in the short-term," Zhu advises. "But parents need to find ways to help the child appreciate his or her uniqueness, perhaps by giving the child a special nickname or frequently affirming the child's unique characteristics.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210525-how-your-name-affects-your-personality
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“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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EV BATTERIES ARE BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, BUT EVs ARE STILL AHEAD OF GAS-USING CARS
Electric vehicles are sometimes called "zero-emission vehicles." But the batteries that go into them are not zero-emission at all. In fact, making those batteries takes a lot of (mostly-not-clean) energy and hurts the environment in other ways, a fact that's become common knowledge after widespread media coverage.
Does that environmental damage cancel out the green benefits of giving up gasoline? Or, as Jennifer Sousie, who owns a Nissan Leaf, put it: "Does the manufacturing and ultimate disposal of the batteries completely negate all the good that the no-emission aspect of my car does?"
The answer is no. Here's why.
Batteries do more harm upfront – then less year after year
With all that's required to mine and process minerals — from giant diesel trucks to fossil-fuel-powered refineries — EV battery production has a significant carbon footprint. As a result, building an electric vehicle does more damage to the climate than building a gas car does.
But the gas car starts to catch up as soon as it goes its first mile.
If you look at the climate impact of building and using a vehicle – something called a "lifecycle analysis" – study after study has found a clear benefit to EVs. The size of the benefit varies – by vehicle, the source of the electricity it runs on, and a host of other factors – but the overall trend is obvious."
The results were clearer than we thought, actually," says Georg Bieker, with the International Council on Clean Transportation, who authored one of those reports. (This is the group that busted Volkswagen for cheating on its emissions tests. Holding industries accountable for whether they're actually reducing emissions is the ICCT's whole thing.).
Building a battery is an environmental cost that's paid once. Burning gasoline is a cost that's paid again, and again, and again.
Gasoline's environmental cost is ongoing
People ask about the negative impacts of mines, beyond carbon emissions. There are several: They disrupt habitats. They pollute with runoff or other waste. And people can suffer in other ways: worker poisonings, child labor, indigenous communities' rights violated and more.
Thea Riofrancos is a political scientist who has sounded the alarm about these impacts. She's glad people are asking these questions – which she'd like to see them do for more than just EVs. "The fact that mined products are in basically everything we use should give us pause," she says.
And, she says, anybody weighing an EV versus a gas-powered car needs to think just as carefully about the other side of the equation: the cost of relying on fossil fuels.
"A traditional car needs mining every day, needs mining every time it's used. It needs the whole extraction complex of fossil fuels in order to power it," she said.
The carbon pollution from burning gasoline and diesel in vehicles is the top contributor to climate change in the U.S. And there are other costs: Oil spills; funding for corrupt oil-rich regimes; the illnesses and preventable deaths caused by pollution from fossil fuels.
Add it up, she says, and if you're concerned about all the harms from mining, you'll still want to choose an EV over a comparable gas car.
New technology and better practices can reduce EVs' footprint
There are several ways that manufacturing EVs could become cleaner.
Public pressure and a shift toward mining in regions with stronger regulations, like the U.S. instead of China, could reduce the harms done in mines. New technology, like a mining method called "direct lithium extraction," could produce minerals with much smaller footprints.
Batteries are also changing. A group called Lead the Charge is evaluating automakers on their efforts to clean up supply chains and source materials ethically; there's a wide range of ratings.
Right now, if you want to avoid cobalt in your battery because of the horrific mining conditions, you could seek out an LFP battery, which is made without cobalt – they're used in vehicles like the Tesla Model 3 and Ford Mach-E.
In the future, batteries based on sodium might be an alternative to lithium.
And last but not least, battery minerals can be recycled. This won't meaningfully reduce the need for mining until huge numbers of EVs on the road have reached the end of their lifespan. But eventually, the same molecules of lithium and nickel could be used for many generations of cars – something that can't be said for fossil fuels. (Recycling batteries is also important because it addresses environmental concerns about the risks of throwing them out.)
What's best for the planet? Smaller batteries, fewer vehicles
Meanwhile, for people who want to minimize their impact on the environment today, Riofrancos has some advice.
First, ask whether you need a car at all. Riofrancos is a big advocate for bikes and public transit, which have much smaller footprints than an EV. But she also knows first-hand that many parts of the U.S. are not designed for car-free living – after years as a bike commuter, she now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where that doesn't work. (She tried.)
She and her husband recently replaced their vehicle. "I was not going to buy another car that uses gasoline, knowing what I know about the climate," she says. "But I also have a lot of question marks about EVs, knowing what I know about EV supply chains."
So after careful consideration, she bought an EV. But not just any EV. A used Chevy Bolt, which is a small EV – smaller batteries require less mining. And since it was used, it was both more affordable and already had more than made up for the impacts of its manufacturing through the gasoline it had saved.
Drivers worried about battery mining impacts are asking the right questions, Riofrancos says. And the answers are more complicated than "yes" or "no" to EVs – they might include what kind of EV, what size and type of battery, and whether to buy a car at all.
"You know, there's no perfect world out there, but there is better and worse and everything in between," Riofrancos says.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/09/1250212212/ev-batteries-environmental-impact
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THE ENERGY DEBATE
There’s a fight underway about how to characterize this moment in energy and climate. Depending on who you ask, we’re living through an era of energy security, energy addition, or climate realism. The long-standing phrase energy transition remains operative for much of the world—though others reject it.
At this juncture, the narrative isn’t entirely clear. In much of the world, and especially for the climate-concerned, the phrase energy transition still reigns. That implies that both economics and policy will favor clean technology in the near term. For policymakers in national capitals, energy security has become a primary phrase because of concerns that geopolitical disruption could hamper access to energy. That narrative favors any domestic energy source, so long as access is reliable.
In industry, the phrase super cycle has once again caught on, reflecting the rapidly growing demand for just about any energy technology. “We’re at the beginning of a multi-decade super cycle,” said Roger Martella, the Chief Corporate Officer at GE Vernova, on the MIT panel. “The entire world needs electricity.”
There is truth to each of these narratives, but none of them fully captures all of the factors at play on its own. And there are many reasons for this narrative divide.
Geopolitical pressures mean energy is increasingly fragmented across geographies with different energy dynamics playing out in different places. Concern about unreliable gas suppliers pervades Europe, for example. The demand for electricity for AI is not just enormous but hard to predict with precision. How fast AI use grows depends on a range of sociopolitical factors—from citizen backlash to stalled permitting—as much as it does on technology and economics. And political pressures have created a state of flux. In Asia, the energy transition persists as governments continue to push to address climate change; in the U.S., climate change has become a forbidden phrase in the White House.
There are some key similarities between the threads. In any scenario, we will need more power. Solar and storage does well under most frames because it’s easy to install and relatively cheap. Natural gas wins in all but the most aggressive energy transition scenarios because of its mix of reliability, price, and lower emissions profile compared to other fossil fuels.
But as you get deeper the picture gets more complex. And all of these dynamics depend on a mix of economic indicators combined with the story we tell ourselves about what comes next. In the book Narrative Economics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller shows how viral stories, or narratives, spread and drive economic events like booms and busts. “Narratives are major vectors of rapid change in culture, in zeitgeist, and ultimately in economic behavior,” he wrote in a 2017 paper.
The truth is that we’re in the midst of a major zeitgeist shift and we don’t know how today’s many narratives may converge to define the next era. This has resulted in an odd dynamic. Markets see enormous opportunity for any energy source that might meet AI-driven electricity demand. At the same time, the chaotic and confusing state of play has made companies and investors reluctant to make big capital investments.
Make no mistake: whichever narrative wins out will shape the future of energy and climate. Until then, investors and businesses will need to hold multiple narratives simultaneously.
https://time.com/7381633/climate-change-energy-security-debate/
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"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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TRUMP ALONE CAN’T STOP THE ENERGY CHANGE
We’re six weeks into the wildest presidential administration certainly of my lifetime and likely in modern U.S. history. From day one, energy has been a top theme. And, yet, the new Trump Administration hasn’t been the primary focus of my writing. There are several reasons for that. For one, I think it’s important to highlight that things are happening in spite of Trump. The global picture, while complicated, is far more promising than the domestic one. And, in the private sector, many companies are continuing their decarbonization initiatives.
But there’s perhaps another more fundamental reason: it’s really hard to speak definitively about what’s happening in Washington and what the implications will be for the future of climate.
President Trump entered office with bold declarations. Many of those statements and policy moves will have concrete, devastating consequences for climate efforts; others are exaggerated or even meaningless. On the heels of his address to Congress this week, where he once again declared energy a top priority, I figured it’s the right time to take a first stab at identifying the signal in the noise.
A month and a half into Trump’s second term, there is no question that this administration will dramatically set back efforts to decarbonize the global economy, but dire warnings that clean energy is over and fossil fuels now reign supreme overstate reality. Politics and policy shape energy markets, but they do not control them. To dismiss the energy transition because Trump does would be to make a severe miscalculation.
One of the biggest gaps between rhetoric and reality comes with Trump’s “drill baby drill” promise. Trump has promised to expand the country’s oil and gas production with an eye to economic growth and lower prices. To do that, he’s said the federal government will open wide swathes of land to drilling and promised to expedite approvals for fossil fuel infrastructure.
There are a few key challenges to such a vision. Most importantly, even as Trump puts his finger on the scale, the market and simple economic questions will determine the appetite for new oil and gas drilling. In recent years, companies have been reluctant to make big, risky investments in new drilling, and it’s hard to imagine what Trump could do to change that.
A core piece of his fossil agenda is his day one executive order declaring what he calls an “energy emergency.” The order promises to accelerate federal approvals for energy projects across the country—excluding wind and solar. But many questions remain. For one, the order is likely to be litigated at every turn in its implementation. “There are obstacles built into the system that only Congress can really remove,” said Michael Catanzaro, who served as an energy and environmental policy advisor at the first Trump White House and is now CEO of public affairs firm CGCN Group, at a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) discussion I moderated this week.
And many analysts have said that whatever authorities are ultimately activated are likely to be used to improve the country’s electric grid and accelerate transmission—something that’s actually helpful for the energy transition because renewable energy is often located in remote places requiring long-distance wires to get to the grid.
Let’s be clear. While some of Trump’s claims are often overstated or murky, there are other moves that will represent decisive setbacks to climate and clean energy efforts. The offshore wind sector comes to mind. That’s not only because Trump has a particular hatred for the electricity source but also because in general offshore wind farms require a greater number of and more complex federal permits than those needed for many other renewable energy projects.
Attacks on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) threaten to undermine critical weather and climate data that companies use to make essential business decisions. Efforts to address environmental justice have been wrapped together with the much-maligned DEI, and it’s safe to say that such issues are no longer a concern of the federal government.
And the administration is reportedly planning to target the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” a scientific document that provides the legal basis for the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If Trump succeeds in nixing it, the move would eliminate the foundation of much of the U.S. regulatory regime around climate change. And, of course, a big test will come with the fate of the clean energy tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. The list could go on and on.
So how do all of these variables shake out for the U.S. emissions trajectory? At this stage, it’s hard to know. A climate modeler faces the same challenges I do when trying to paint an accurate picture, only multiplied. But the truth is that factors outside of Washington are likely to play a significant role shaping the near-term future of U.S. emissions, most importantly the country’s rapidly growing electricity demand that is coming in large part as a result of data center expansion. Developers of these projects are racing to get electricity—often zero-emission but increasingly gas powered because it’s easier to get.
“We are going to see a continuation across the board in the development of energy,” former Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz said at an American Council on Renewable Energy event last week. “It's a reality that most of the new capacity added has been renewables, second natural gas. I don’t see how that’s going to change.”
And then there are the knock-on effects around the rest of the world. Trump’s moves will inevitably inspire other like-minded countries to do the same. “There are lots of changes taking place, hard to keep up for everyone,” says Alice Hill, senior fellow for energy and the environment at CFR. “But I think it's clear that the world, as a result of President Trump's [decisions], is taking a step back on cutting its emissions.”
We’ve already seen pullback in places like Argentina and Indonesia. But there’s another way to think about the implications of Trump’s rollbacks in a global context. The U.S. represents about 12% of global emissions—the second highest share after China. That’s significant, but the U.S. is just a small piece of the puzzle. Whether other countries can find a way to put the puzzle together without the U.S. is another question entirely.
https://time.com/7265747/trump-cant-stop-the-energy-transition/?itm_source=parsely-api
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HOW BIG ARE THE GAS GIANTS? DO THEY HAVE A SMALL SOLID CORE?
For decades, textbooks illustrated gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn using the "peach pit" model: a massive, cloudy atmosphere surrounding a small, distinct, solid ball of rock and ice in the center.
Recent data from space missions, particularly NASA’s Juno orbiter, has completely overturned this picture. The cores of gas giants are not small, compact seeds. They are diffuse, "fuzzy," and surprisingly large.
The Dilute Core Model
In the case of Jupiter, the core is not a solid surface you could stand on. It is a "dilute core"—a vast region where heavy elements (rock and iron) are mixed with the planet's metallic hydrogen envelope. There is no sharp boundary where the gas ends and the core begins. Instead, there is a gradual transition that stretches across nearly half the planet's radius.
Imagine a glass of water with a distinct layer of sand at the bottom. That was the old model. Now, imagine stirring that glass violently until the sand is suspended throughout the bottom half of the water. That is Jupiter.
Size and Mass
Because the boundary is fuzzy, defining the "size" is difficult, but the heavy-element concentration in Jupiter likely extends out to 30% to 50% of the planet's radius.
While this region is volumetrically huge, the actual mass of the heavy elements within it is estimated to be between 10 and 20 times the mass of Earth. However, because these heavy elements are dissolved into the hydrogen, the entire "core region" encompasses a massive portion of the planet's volume.
Why Rock Dissolves
The reason for this fuzziness is the extreme environment deep inside the planet. Near the center of Jupiter, pressures exceed 50 million atmospheres, and temperatures soar to tens of thousands of degrees. Under these conditions, the distinction between "rock" and "gas" breaks down.
Hydrogen turns into a liquid metal (metallic hydrogen), and the rocky material (iron, silicates) becomes soluble in that liquid. Over billions of years, the solid rock of the original core dissolved into the liquid metallic hydrogen ocean above it, creating a slurry rather than a solid ball.
Saturn is Similar
Saturn tells a similar story. By studying "ring seismology"—ripples in Saturn's rings caused by the planet's internal gravity waves—astronomers determined that Saturn’s core is also diffuse. It likely spans 60% of the planet's radius and contains about 17 Earth masses of rock and ice mixed with hydrogen and helium.
The cores of gas giants are essentially planetary-sized oceans of dissolved rock and metallic hydrogen, lacking any solid surface or clear outer edge.
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SHOULD WE BE EATING THREE MEALS A DAY?
The idea that we should eat three meals a day is surprisingly modern. How many meals a day is best for our health?
It's likely you eat three meals a day – modern life is designed around this way of eating. We're told breakfast is the most important meal of the day, we're given lunch breaks at work, and then our social and family lives revolve around evening meals. But is this the healthiest way to eat?
Before considering how frequently we should eat, scientists urge us to consider when we shouldn't.
Intermittent fasting, where you restrict your food intake to an eight-hour window, is becoming a huge area of research.
Giving our bodies at least 12 hours a day without food allows our digestive system to rest, says Emily Manoogian, clinical researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, and author of a 2019 paper entitled "When to eat".
Rozalyn Anderson, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and Public Health, has studied the benefits of calorie restriction, which is associated with lower levels of inflammation in the body.
"Having a fasting period every day could reap some of these benefits," she says. "It gets into the idea that fasting puts the body in a different state, where it's more ready to repair and surveil for damage, and clear misfolded proteins." Misfolded proteins are faulty versions of ordinary proteins, which are molecules that perform a huge range of important jobs in the body.
Misfolded proteins have been associated with a number of diseases.
Intermittent fasting is more in line with how our bodies have evolved, Anderson argues. She says it gives the body a break so it's able to store food and get energy to where it needs to be, and trigger the mechanism to release energy from our body stores.
Fasting could also improve our glycemic response, which is when our blood glucose rises after eating, says Antonio Paoli, professor of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Padova in Italy. Having a smaller blood glucose increase allows you to store less fat in the body, he says.
"Our data suggests that having an early dinner and increasing the time of your fasting window increases some positive effects on body, like better glycemic control," Paoli says.
It's better for all cells to have lower levels of sugar in them because of a process called glycation, Paoli adds. This is where glucose links to proteins and forms compounds called "advanced glycation end products", which can cause inflammation in the body and increase the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease.
But if intermittent fasting is a healthy way to eat – how many meals does this leave room for?
Some experts argue it's best to have one meal a day, including David Levitsky, professor at Cornell University's College of Human Ecology in New York, who does this himself.
"There's a lot of data showing that, if I show you food or pictures of food, you're likely to eat, and the more frequently food is in front of you, the more you're going to eat that day," he says.
This is because, before we had fridges and supermarkets, we ate when food was available.
Throughout history, we consumed one meal a day, including the Ancient Romans who ate one meal around midday, says food historian Seren Charrington-Hollins.
Wouldn't one meal a day leave us feeling hungry? Not necessarily, Levitsky argues, because hunger is often a psychological sensation.
"When the clock says 12pm, we may get feelings to eat, or you might be conditioned to eat breakfast in the morning, but this is nonsense. Data shows that if you don't eat breakfast, you're going to eat fewer calories overall that day.
"Our physiology is built for feasting and fasting," he says. However, Levitsky doesn't recommend this approach for people with diabetes.
But Manoogan doesn't recommend sticking to one meal a day, since this can increase the level of glucose in our blood when we're not eating – known as fasting glucose. High levels of fasting glucose over a long period of time is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
Keeping blood glucose levels down requires eating more regularly than once a day, Manoogan says, as this prevents the body thinking it's starving and releasing more glucose when you do eventually eat in response.
Instead, she says, two to three meals a day is best – with most of your calories consumed earlier in the day. This is because eating late at night is associated with cardio-metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.
"If you eat most of your food earlier on, your body can use the energy you feed it throughout the day, rather than it being stored in your system as fat," Manoogan says.
But eating too early in the morning should be avoided, too, she says, as this wouldn't give you sufficient time to fast. Also, eating too soon after waking up works against our circadian rhythm – known as our body clock – which researchers say dictates how the body processes food differently throughout the day.
Our bodies release melatonin overnight to help us sleep – but melatonin also pauses the creation of insulin, which stores glucose in the body. Because melatonin is released while you're sleeping, the body uses it to make sure we don't take in too much glucose while we're sleeping and not eating, Manoogan says.
"If you take in calories when your melatonin is high, you get really high glucose levels. Consuming a lot of calories at night poses a significant challenge to the body because if insulin is suppressed, your body can't store glucose properly."
And, as we know, high levels of glucose over long periods of time can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
This doesn't mean we should skip breakfast altogether, but some evidence suggests we should wait an hour or two after waking up before we crack open the eggs. It's also worth remembering that breakfast as we know and love it today is a relatively new concept.
"The Ancient Greeks were the first to introduce the concept of breakfast, they'd eat bread soaked in wine, then they had a frugal lunch, then a hearty evening meal," says Charrington-Hollins.
Initially, breakfast was exclusive to aristocratic classes, says Charrington-Hollins. It first caught on in the 17th Century, when it became the luxury of those who could afford the food and the time for a leisurely meal in the morning.
"The concept today of breakfast being the norm [came about] during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and its introduction of working hours," says Charrington-Hollins. Such a routine lends itself to three meals a day. "The first meal would be something quite simple for the working classes – it might be street food from a vendor or bread.”
But after war, when availability of food diminished, the idea of eating a full breakfast wasn't possible and a lot of people skipped it. "The idea of three meals a day went out the window," says Charrington-Hollins. "In the 1950s breakfast becomes how we recognize it today: cereal and toast. Prior to that we were happy to eat a piece of bread with jam."
So, the science seems to say the healthiest way to eat throughout the day is to have two or three meals, with a long fasting window overnight, to not eat too early or too late in the day, and to consume more calories earlier on in the day. Is this realistic?
Manoogan says it's best to not specify the best times to eat, as this can be difficult for people with responsibilities and irregular time commitments, such as those working night shifts.
"Telling people to stop eating by 7pm isn't helpful because people have different schedules. If you try to give your body regular fast nights, try to not eat too late or early and try to not have huge final meals, this can usually help. People can at least adopt parts of this," she says.
"You could see a dramatic change just from a small delay in your first meal and advancing your last meal. Making this regular without changing anything else could have a big impact."
But whatever changes you make, researchers agree that consistency is crucial.
"The body works in patterns," says Anderson. "We respond to the anticipation of being fed. One thing intermittent fasting does is it imposes a pattern, and our biological systems do well with a pattern." She says the body picks up on cues to anticipate our eating behaviors so it can best deal with the food when we eat it.
When it comes to how many meals we deem normal, Charrington-Hollins is seeing change on the horizon.
"Over the centuries, we've become conditioned to three meals a day, but this is being challenged now and people's attitude to food is changing. We have more sedate lifestyles, we're not doing the level of work we were doing in the 19th Century, so we need fewer calories.
"I think, long-term, we'll be reducing back to a light meal then a main meal, depending on what happens work-wise. Our working hours will be the driving force.
"When we came off rations, we embraced three meals a day because there was suddenly an abundance of food. But time goes on – food is everywhere now.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220412-should-we-be-eating-three-meals-a-day
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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A NEW THEORY OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Your brain begins as a single cell. When all is said and done, it will house an incredibly complex and powerful network of some 170 billion cells. How does it organize itself along the way? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientists have come up with a surprisingly simple answer that could have far-reaching implications for biology and artificial intelligence.
Stan Kerstjens, a postdoc in Professor Anthony Zador's lab, frames the question in terms of positional information. "The only thing a cell 'sees' is itself and its neighbors," he explains. "But its fate depends on where it sits. A cell in the wrong place becomes the wrong thing, and the brain doesn't develop right. So, every cell must solve two questions: “Where am I? And who do I need to become?"
In a study published in Neuron, Kerstjens, Zador, and colleagues at Harvard University and ETH Zürich put forward a new theory for how the brain organizes itself during development.
The answer, Kerstjens proposes, hits close to home. "Consider how human populations spread across a country over generations," he says. "Descendants settle near their parents, so people who share ancestry end up in neighboring regions, producing large-scale geographic structures without long-range communication. We argue that a similar principle operates in the developing brain. Cells that descend from the same progenitor tend to remain near one another."
To test this theory, Kerstjens and colleagues built what they call a "lineage-based model of scalable positional information." They started with theoretical computations. Then they tested their hypothesis at scale by looking at individual and group gene expression in developing mouse brains. Finally, they confirmed their results in zebrafish, showing that the model can be used across brains of different sizes.
Kerstjens says the model supports the notion that chemical signaling works in conjunction with a lineage-based mechanism to convey positional information. And while his work focuses on the brain, the theory could apply to many other types of developing tissue, including tumors. There may even be implications for self-replicating AI models that pass information from one generation to the next, just as our own brain cells do.
Perhaps most importantly, showing how a single cell grows into a complex organ could help scientists solve fundamental mysteries of the mind.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20260302/Scientists-put-forward-a-new-theory-of-brain-development.aspx
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WANTING VERSUS LIKING
If you’ve learned to want something enough, liking it becomes almost irrelevant. ~ Tom Bellamy
Falling into the limerent habit
Desire is a curious thing. Some desires are easily satisfied — they pass quickly after they are successfully gratified, and rarely intrude into our consciousness. A lazy afternoon at the beach is a pleasure, but one we only seek occasionally. Other desires are insatiable. For those rewards, the thirst for more persists no matter how much access we get. Even after gratifying such desires, the longing barely fades—or if there is any relief it’s short-lived. Indulgence of such desires can lead to an escalation of the hunger, rather than contented satisfaction. This is not always a negative thing—to give and receive love is an example of a desire we never tire of—but insatiable desires are hard to moderate.
At the worst extreme, some desires can develop into such an irresistible craving that they become the primary focus of life, dominating all other concerns. These are the desires that religions warn us about. People battle to resist temptation, instinctively sensing that they are too seductive, too powerful, too encompassing; too deranging or destructive to be safely managed. Such desires can persist even after the reward itself ceases to be pleasurable.
This is the realm of addiction.
Limerence certainly falls into this category. Desire for a limerent object is shockingly powerful. Many limerents describe their experience in terms that are usually associated with drug addiction—feeling high, craving supply, suffering withdrawal.
By the time I realized I was in serious trouble my limerence was out of control and it was too late, I was hooked on LO and couldn’t let go. — L
I look for him and crave the feeling that I get when I see him, even as I know that I don’t want to go back to all the lying and hiding….I know I don’t want him—just the flood of chemicals that he triggers. It can be really discouraging and feel shameful to be this kind of junkie. — J
This isn’t just hyperbole. There is good reason to frame limerence in terms of addiction. The arousal, reward, and bonding systems that produce the ecstatic connection of limerence are also central to the development of addiction. When driven too hard and for too long, these systems adapt and remodel. Reward-seeking becomes unbalanced and difficult to resist. The progression of limerence can be understood as a shift from desiring another person to becoming addicted to them.
It’s strange that we have a vulnerability like this built into our brains. How does a neural system that evolved to help us seek good things and avoid bad things go haywire and make us want something with harmful intensity? The answer lies in the subtleties and peculiarities of the reward system, and our old friend dopamine. In particular, there are three important concepts that, taken together, explain the strength and persistence of desires: incentive salience, wanting versus liking, and habituation. Broadly—why we notice things, enjoy them and then get bored of them. These factors help explain why limerence can escalate so dramatically from initial attraction into overweening obsession.
Incentive salience
Incentive salience is the phenomenon of noticing things in the environment that we have learned are rewarding, and thereby recognizing them as desirable. It explains why some cues are attention-grabbing—they seem to jump out of the complex background and demand our attention. If you were to walk into an untidy room with litter everywhere, you’d quickly notice if a handful of sparkling gold coins were scattered among the debris, and likely feel an urge to collect them up as a prize. Dopamine is at the heart of this phenomenon, and it causes the stirrings of motivation that begin after we notice something desirable. As it turns out, like good comedy, the influence of dopamine over incentive salience is all in the timing.
Dopamine release is the mechanism by which the brain tracks rewards, and it works by providing a “reward prediction error.” In the simplest case, an unexpected reward (say, discovering some tasty fruit when hungry, or having someone attractive declare their love for you) causes a burst of dopamine release into a part of the basal ganglia known as the striatum—specifically, the nucleus accumbens. This is a part of the brain that registers pleasurable rewards. When we are not anticipating a reward, but receive it as a surprise, dopamine is released in a burst of activity that signals this unexpected outcome. The failure to anticipate reward is the first kind of prediction error.
The next stage of reward prediction depends on the fact that the reward system does not operate in isolation. It is integrated into other brain regions, most notably those that lay down memories (the hippocampus) and interpret outcomes (the prefrontal cortex). When a reward has been experienced enough times, we learn to associate that particular object, person, or set of circumstances with pleasure, and therefore know how and when we can get more. As an example, consider the merits of a good cup of coffee. For those who have learned the association, drinking a cup will give predictable gratification. The aroma of coffee brewing reliably provokes desire.
For this reward-prediction scenario, there is an interesting and important shift in the timing of dopamine release. Instead of simply registering surprise, the dopamine system begins to take the initiative. It becomes attuned to cues or triggers in the environment that we’ve learned are associated with rewards, and dopamine is released in anticipation of securing the prize. The reason I start desiring coffee in the morning when I arrive at my desk is because my cup is next to the keyboard, the kettle is plugged in beside it, and I habitually start my day with a stimulating hit of caffeine. All these cues are reminders of a source of reward, and that causes the release of dopamine in anticipation of pleasure, which motivates me into taking action.
(To give an impression of how effective this system is, I just stopped writing to brew coffee, as the craving was beginning to nag at me enough to spoil my concentration.)
Dopamine release operates as a motivating impulse. Instead of registering an unexpected reward, dopamine is released to stimulate us to seek reward. Because of the learned association, cues in the environment subconsciously trigger reward-seeking behavior.
If this motivated pursuit results in us successfully securing the reward, a curious thing happens to our dopamine levels: nothing. The burst of dopamine that triggers motivation simply subsides. If the expected reward is secured, then no prediction error has occurred, and no additional dopamine is released.
Alternatively, if the expected reward doesn’t occur—for example if I’ve carelessly brewed my coffee too strong—then there is a change in the reward circuits. The dopamine neurons stop firing. That pause in dopamine release signals a failure in reward arrival, a new kind of prediction error.
This final point highlights another important subtlety in the dopamine reward system: it’s always on. The neurons that release dopamine into the striatum are firing at a baseline rate—ticking away constantly to release a regular, low-level supply of dopamine, known as the “tonic” level. Unexpected rewards cause short-lived bursts of release that are superimposed on top of this baseline (the “phasic” dopamine release), whereas failed rewards decrease the tonic rate of firing. In a way, the reward system works a bit like cruise control in a car—it maintains a fixed steady speed (your basic level of motivation), but you can always hit the accelerator or brake to deal with changing conditions.
The reward system therefore operates as a multifunctional mechanism that allows us to detect rewards, learn to anticipate rewards, recognize cues in the environment that are linked to rewards, motivate action to seek the reward, and assess the success of our predictions. Quite clever, really.
Unfortunately, it has a few imperfections.
Wanting versus liking
The first interesting wrinkle that needs to be considered is the fact that dopamine does not directly cause the sensation of pleasure. Dopamine is a relay system that integrates all the sensory inputs that denote reward, and activates the desire to seek more, but it isn’t needed in itself to experience the joyful thrill of bliss.
A recent advance in our understanding of reward-seeking behavior is the fact that wanting and liking are distinct phenomena. Feeling pleasure and wanting pleasure are separate processes at a neurochemical level. The experience of wanting is driven by dopamine. The experience of liking seems to be triggered by different neurotransmitters, most likely endorphins and endocannabinoids (the natural equivalents of heroin and cannabis, respectively).
Within the circuits of the reward system, there are tiny subregions known as “hedonic hotspots” that are central to the sensation of experiencing pleasure. Injecting drugs that mimic the “liking” neurotransmitters into these hotspots can greatly amplify the intensity of pleasure.
The discovery of this phenomenon came from watching mice drink sugar water. Sweetness is intrinsically pleasurable, and it’s possible to measure this objectively from the expression that animals (and people) make when they are enjoying the sensation. From careful research, the details of these neural centers have been pieced together. It’s now becoming clear that the mechanism for experiencing intrinsic pleasure is separate from the reward-seeking systems, which means that wanting something and liking it can become uncoupled. Even with no motivation to seek sugar, you can still experience pleasure from tasting it. Conversely, you can be motivated to seek something that no longer provides intrinsic pleasure — because once you learned to want it.
This discovery can explain apparently irrational behavior. For example, why a bitter drink like coffee, which should be aversive, can become an acquired taste that is craved as a stimulant. It explains why someone suffering a fearsome hangover could nevertheless want to get drunk again. It explains why some still seek the affection of a partner who was once loving and attentive but has turned moody and distant, or why you continue to crave contact with a limerent object (LO) who is obviously incompatible. If you’ve learned to want something enough, liking it becomes almost irrelevant.
As a further curiosity of “liking,” the distribution and sensitivity of those tiny, hedonic hotspots can be altered by other factors, such as stress, hunger, or pain. That means that you like things less when you’re stressed, but you still want them. In fact—in one of life’s little ironies—you’ll probably want them more than ever, right when they fail to give the hedonic pleasure you’d hoped would bring relief.
Finally, it turns out that many different sources of pleasure all work through the same hotspots. So, chocolate, orgasms, limerence, and heroin may all depend on the same little bundles of cells to evoke their fundamental sensation of pleasure. Our higher centers in the cortex make sense of the different contexts and meanings of the pleasures, but liking has a simple, fundamental basis in the brain.
Dopamine makes us want things, independently of whether we still like them, but what makes that desire for reward fade away? What makes “wanting” stop?
Habituation, or why desire fades
In terms of neuroscience, the fading of reward is known as “habituation.” It’s a fundamental feature of neurophysiology, and describes the phenomenon where repeated exposure to a stimulus (either good or bad) leads to a diminished response over time. You get used to things that happen repeatedly. This process allows you to stop wanting things that are easily obtained and stop fearing things that are easily avoided.
If you repeatedly listen to a song that you really like, you’ll tire of it. If you eat your favorite meal every day, you’ll lose your appetite for it. If you constantly consume erotica, you’ll become jaded. Habituation is the mechanism through which exposure to rewards leads to fading pleasure, but the devil is in the details, again. There are some subtleties to the mechanism that can explain the unpredictability of loss of desire.
The process of learning to suppress a response to the rewarding stimulus happens at the level of the reward system—there is a decrease in the size of the dopamine release caused by a particular reward cue once the circuit has become habituated. Habituation is most effective when the rewarding stimulus is weak, encountered frequently, and can be predictably secured. People who own orchards rarely crave apples. In contrast, some stimuli are incredibly powerful, hard to find, and unpredictable. Finding a romantic partner is a high-stakes, low-odds endeavor that many people pursue with single-minded determination.
The habituation process isn’t always smooth and straightforward. A long period of foregoing a pleasure can result in the desire returning—you effectively forget that you had grown tired of the reward. Similarly, encountering a stimulus in a new or different context can reignite old desires. Finally, some stimuli are stubborn to habituate and undergo a period of increased desire in the early phase of experiencing them—a process known as sensitization.
That means a taste of bliss leads to increasingly urgent reward-seeking that grows in intensity before you ever begin to develop a resistance to its charms.
Putting this all together, habituation teaches us that you don’t ever really stop wanting something, it’s more that you learn you don’t need to want it anymore. The brain actively, but provisionally, suppresses the reward systems while in a time of plenty. It’s pretty obvious that this is a fairly fragile mechanism for suppressing desire. The scope for relapse is high.
How habits form
These neurochemical details of how reward and pleasure work in the brain might seem like an academic diversion—an intellectual rabbit hole—but they have real-world implications for understanding the apparently irrational behavior of people who have been driven into a state of compulsive, single-minded desire. There is an understandable, foreseeable progression to the behavior that can be predicted from the rules that govern the underlying neural circuits.
When someone encounters an extremely pleasurable reward for the first time, both the dopamine reward and endorphin “liking” systems will be maxed out. This could be the euphoric bliss of an orgasm, a hit of heroin, the thrill of skydiving, a big win for a gambler, or that romantically potent lingering eye-contact with a new limerent object. Such an experience would be memorable and inflame an intense desire. Inevitably, we will want more.
The early phase of reward learning then begins, where the source of pleasure is sought, experimented with and refined until we feel it’s understood—how and when the reward can be secured, what cues are linked to it, and what particular behavior enhances or reduces the chance of reward. We test the boundaries and parameters until we are confident about how to get access to the pleasure again. Then we keep doing it, each time reinforcing this reward-learning mechanism.
Once these associations are learned, dopamine motivates us to repeatedly carry out the behavior that works. This is when environmental cues that remind us of the reward trigger the impulse to seek it. Importantly, once this associative learning process has set in, it becomes largely unconscious. We act before we are even aware of what’s happening. It isn’t that we spot a cue, think about its significance, decide what the best response should be, and then make a purposeful choice—instead, we spot a cue and our brainstem dumps dopamine into the striatum to impel us into action, faster than our thoughts can catch up.
While seeking a limerent object is a good case study in unconscious motivation, perhaps the best modern example of this phenomenon in practice is the cell phone. We’ve all learned that the little black rectangle in our pocket is an almost limitless source of stimulation—an infinity pool that can be relied on for a rewarding boost of entertainment and distraction when we’re bored or uncomfortable. It’s often in our hands and lighting up before we’re consciously aware of having summoned it. The web browser icon on my desktop is the same—I’ve often launched it before I’ve given any thought to what I was intending to look up. I’ve just learned, at a very deep, subconscious level that there’s good stuff on the other end of that click.
The momentary confusion you feel when you find yourself looking at a screen that you didn’t consciously, actively choose to engage with, is a good sign that your “executive brain” has been sidestepped by subcortical associative learning. The reward-seeking behavior has transcended active intent. It has become a habit, and habitual behavior can be very hard to unlearn. Once it’s established, a habitual program basically runs on automatic.
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ARE LONGEVITY DRUGS ON THE HORIZON?
A longevity drug that could help people live healthier for longer had once seemed like a pipe dream. Kristen Fortney, co-founder and CEO of BioAge Labs, thinks it’s now within our grasp.
“There are all these exciting discoveries in academia,” she says. “The next step is translating them.”
Fortney founded BioAge in 2015 to do just that. The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions, and is collaborating with large pharmaceutical companies to find new drug targets.
Fortney, who was in her early 30s when she co-founded BioAge, first cut her teeth as a researcher of aging biology and bioinformatics. She doesn’t fit the stereotype of a longevity enthusiast. Her only longevity “hacks” are eating a Mediterranean-style diet and working out; she takes no supplements (“I probably will look more into it as I get older,” she says). But she is an avid enthusiast of the quest to extend healthspan: the number of years people spend in good health.
As part of TIME's series interviewing longevity leaders and influencers, we spoke to Fortney about how she hopes to turn promising research in animals into safe and effective drugs that could transform our approach to health.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO STUDY AGING?
“I’ve always been really excited and motivated by the fact that you can have so much impact by working on aging,” she says. “There are all these cool examples from nature that are very motivating: Bowhead whales that can live over 200 years and the Greenland shark that lives over 400 years. So you think, what are the limits for human biology?”
What was always motivating to me was not just finding the target, but getting to the medicine and the real-world impact. I started BioAge 10 years ago now. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of translation going on.
More companies are now doing this translation work than ever before. Even large pharma companies will talk about longevity now, and that's new—that was not happening a few years ago. It’s really a time of growth for the field, but if you were to compare the clinical pipeline for aging vs. that for, say, oncology, it's still like a drop in the bucket. So we have a long way to go.
I think the time is right for translation. There are a lot of very promising mechanisms where we have solid evidence in animal models, at least, and the next step is to build drugs and to go to human trials.
Aging is complicated and hard, and so many things don't translate from mice to humans. But there are eight billion human experiments in the world, right? There are all these people walking around with different genetics, different environments, different diseases that they get as they get older. And we’ve been asking ourselves: How can we study that more directly?
We've partnered with several biobanks [repositories that store biological samples and health records for research], including the HUNT Biobank in Norway. The Norwegian biobank is a really rich resource because it contains detailed health records of people over a three-decade follow-up period. So we can look at samples from the same individual through time: How did their physical function change as they age? How did their cognitive function change?
Ultimately, how long did they live? And we can go into these really precious samples and interrogate them with modern technologies.
We can, for example, measure over 10,000 different proteins in each blood sample, and we can ask questions like, “What changes with age?” but also “What predicts different outcomes? What’s different about, say, that subset of people who go on to live to 90 and everything still works vs. the rest of us?”
We use this data to reassure ourselves that the targets we're working on will be relevant to people. The other way we use it is, like, hey, there’s a signal in humans, and no one has studied it before. Let’s go study it. Maybe we’ll discover a new target.
What are some potential drugs that BioAge is exploring?
We are working on one that targets NLRP3 [an immune protein involved in inflammation].
As you get older, your immune system gets more and more active. This is one of the hallmarks of aging that people call “inflammaging.” When you have more inflammation, it increases your risk of many different diseases that you might think of as quite distinct: It increases your risk of Alzheimer's, for example, and of heart disease.
NLRP3 gets overexpressed as you age [and appears to drive inflammation]. There’s a lot of evidence in mice that NLRP3 is an important target in aging, and we’ve seen very nice human data too that gives us conviction that it will translate in people.
Our drug inhibits [NLRP3]. It's a pill that you would take once a day to correct your NLRP3 levels. This mechanism is looking really promising for multiple potential applications in multiple diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but the one that has the most exciting human data today and is probably the first one that a lot of companies are looking at is cardiovascular disease.
Another company called Ventyx Biosciences recently published studies showing that if people took their NLRP3 inhibitor, it cut their levels of hs-CRP [or high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, a biomarker for stroke and heart disease] by almost 80%, which is a really big deal.
At BioAge, we are looking at obese populations who have elevated cardiovascular risk factors to see if we can correct that. We are in Phase I clinical trials now.
Another program is targeting apelin, a molecule that your body makes in response to exercise. So if you go for a run or a bike ride, your body makes more of it, and it's thought to potentially mediate some of the positive benefits of exercise. We think this is a mechanism that might help you retain muscle—for example, when you are taking [weight-loss drugs like GLP-1s, which can cause muscle loss].
Is the idea that you would get some of the benefits of exercise without actually needing to do any?
Especially for older populations, yes. The people at most risk of losing muscle are those who suffer from lack of mobility after a hip fracture, for example. For most people, their bones get repaired just fine, but they're at serious risk of poor outcomes because their muscles disappear very quickly because they're not moving, so I think it's really important in older populations to have ways to augment this.
We think it would be really exciting to combine our drug with [drugs like GLP-1s] to see if you can get more weight loss on the combination and to see if you retain more muscle than people who are just on the weight-loss drug. Muscle loss [from GLP-1s] isn’t necessarily a concern for everybody, but I do think it's a concern for older people because if you’re older and you lose weight, a bigger chunk of that is muscle.
BioAge is collaborating with a couple of large pharmaceutical companies. What can you tell me about those projects?
One of them is with Lilly ExploR&D, a collaborative division of Eli Lilly. There are a couple of targets that we’ve nominated from our human data platform, and they are helping us build drugs against them. [Editor’s note: BioAge in 2023 partnered with Eli Lilly to test an earlier experimental drug that mimicked the effects of apelin alongside Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drug Mounjaro. The phase II trial was halted in 2024 because of liver-related safety concerns. BioAge has said that it is exploring new apelin-mimicking drugs that are structurally distinct. The new targets that BioAge is exploring with Lilly haven’t been publicly disclosed.
The other collaboration is with Novartis and is really around novel target discovery. Novartis has a fairly new department called Diseases of Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and they're really excited about this whole concept of targets from aging biology being potentially really impactful. They want to discover new ones and they’re also big believers in human data. So the way this collaboration works is that we have our human datasets that I've described and Novartis has some really cool datasets on the response to exercise, and we’re sort of overlaying those two datasets together and trying to find more things that are like apelin—things that change with age that help mediate the positive response to exercise.
The whole reason we study aging in humans is we're trying to copy what already works, right? Some people already live to 100—something works—and it's honestly similar to exercise. What's the only anti-aging intervention that works today? It’s exercise. What can we learn from that biology? How can we harness that to develop medicines?
It's a big sort of computational exercise that we're doing together to find some new targets, and then BioAge will take some of those forward and Novartis will take some of those forward. The first stage is, let's find some exciting targets that look good just from a data analysis. And the second step will be to put them into cells and see if they work. If they do and there’s a promising disease, then you build a drug.
Why do you think Big Pharma is leaning into anti-aging drugs in such a significant way?
I think the success of the [GLP-1] weight-loss drugs has been a big part of why longevity is hot right now. These drugs are preventative. They reduce your risk of cardiovascular outcomes. Weight loss is what happens in the short term, but they're making you healthier. And that’s always been the aging pitch: These are medicines that are preventative, that will make you healthier.
But I think pharma is also thinking about what could improve the weight-loss drugs they already have. How can they pair them with other drugs so that the cardiovascular outcomes are even better or Alzheimer’s risk is reduced? And that's where aging biology fits really well because it's things like muscle, it's things like inflammation. NLRP3 and apelin both have potential there. And that's true for a lot of other aging targets, too.
I think every pharma should have a department of aging. They have the resources to really move ahead because the early stage of research and translation is pretty cheap—doing stuff in a mouse, even building a drug. But then the clinical trials are so expensive, especially for these big chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease. Only pharma can really do those, so for small biotechs, having that sort of deep-pocketed partner can really turn the tide. It’s good for everybody.
https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/
Oriana:
Most people don't realize that we already have a widely prescribed drug that lowers blood sugar and extends lifespan: metformin. The supplement that has the same benefits is BERBERINE. In addition to lowering blood sugar, berberine also improves the lipid profile, lowering LDL cholesterol and raising HDL cholesterol.
Berberine synergizes with amlodipine, a calcium-channel blocker commonly prescribed for high blood pressure. This combination can improve cardiovascular, lipid, and renal parameters.
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THE TALE OF TWO CINNAMONS
If you walked into a typical supermarket today and bought a jar simply labeled "Cinnamon," you almost certainly bought Cassia. While delicious, this common spice contains a natural compound that acts as a potent hepatotoxin—a liver poison—when consumed in sufficient quantities.
The reason Cassia is considered riskier than Ceylon cinnamon comes down to a single organic chemical: coumarin.
Coumarin is a fragrant organic chemical compound found in many plants, acting as a defense mechanism against predators. It has a sweet scent and contributes to that warm, spicy flavor we associate with baked goods. However, coumarin is biologically active in humans. In the mid-20th century, synthetic coumarin was actually banned as a food additive in the United States because animal testing revealed it caused severe liver damage and hemorrhaging.
While we can't add synthetic coumarin to food, we are allowed to buy cinnamon, which contains it naturally. The risk disparity lies in the concentration of this compound between the two main species of cinnamon.
1. Cassia Cinnamon
This is likely what is in your pantry. Sourced largely from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, it is cheaper to produce and has a stronger, punchier, and spicier flavor that holds up well in baking.
Coumarin Content: High. Cassia cinnamon typically contains around 1% coumarin by weight. In some samples, specifically Vietnamese (Saigon) cinnamon, the levels can be even higher.
2. Ceylon Cinnamon (Cinnamonum verum)
Often called "True Cinnamon," this variety comes primarily from Sri Lanka. It is more expensive, lighter in color, and has a delicate, floral, and complex flavor profile.
Coumarin Content: Negligible. Ceylon cinnamon contains roughly 0.004% coumarin. That is approximately 250 times less coumarin than Cassia.
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The Math of Toxicity
For the casual consumer—someone sprinkling a dash of cinnamon on a cappuccino or eating a cinnamon roll once a week—Cassia poses virtually no threat. The human liver can process small amounts of coumarin without issue.
The danger arises with regular consumption, particularly for two groups of people:
Health-conscious individuals: Many people take high doses of cinnamon daily to help regulate blood sugar levels or aid in insulin sensitivity
Children: Because toxicity is weight-dependent, a safe threshold for an adult might be toxic for a child.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) set the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) of coumarin at 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
For an average adult weighing 60kg (132 lbs), the limit is about one teaspoon of Cassia cinnamon per day
For a child weighing 15kg (33 lbs), the limit is reached with just a quarter of a teaspoon.
If an adult takes a tablespoon of Cassia cinnamon daily for health benefits, they are vastly exceeding the safe limit of coumarin, potentially causing liver toxicity over time rather than health improvements. If that same adult switches to Ceylon cinnamon, they could consume an entire jar without approaching the toxic threshold for coumarin.
Cassia sticks look like thick, hard bark. They usually curl inward from both sides, resembling a scroll. They are dark brown and very difficult to grind at home.
Ceylon sticks look like a tight, cigar-like roll of many thin, flaky layers. They are tan or light brown and are fragile enough to crumble by hand.
If you are just making apple pie for Thanksgiving, the common Cassia is fine (and arguably tastes better for that purpose). But if cinnamon is a daily part of your diet or supplement regimen, the switch to Ceylon is a necessary safety measure for your liver. ~ Quora
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ending on beauty:
FRENCH WALK
~ Anna Lena Phillips Bell
bluegreen river
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