*
MY NAME IN HEBREW
is Yohanana,
rolling on
like the vineyards,
like the melody of hills.
With a name so vast, I speak slowly.
I weigh my words like Deborah.
My name is as ancient as the Song of Songs.
Because all is grace: Yohanana.
My name began on the Euphrates.
It echoes the descending
footsteps of Innana.
It revolves with the Tree
of Life, and the animals
Noah saved, named by Adam.
Nations dwell in it
as in the womb of Sarah.
My name is a riddle
posed to Solomon.
It weeps with love’s grief
like Bathsheba.
My name is so long
you can travel through it.
It is centuries, millennia
from one unwritten
vowel to the next.
~ Oriana
*
THE RESURRECTION OF HEBREW
Biblical Hebrew died out as a spoken language before the first century. However, it continued to be studied as a written language. Mishnaic Hebrew continued up to about 200 CE as a spoken language, and in written form until about 500. It differed from Biblical Hebrew partly as a result of contact with other languages, including a move from verb-subject-object to subject-verb-object (though this is also found in some Biblical Hebrew). Medieval Hebrew, from about 500 to 1800, was primarily a liturgical and literary language.
In 1858, Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman was born in Russia. In 1877 he went to the Sorbonne in Paris, which is where he conceived the idea of reviving Hebrew as a spoken language. He immigrated to Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1881, taking the name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. In Jerusalem he worked on a language to replace Yiddish, forming the Committee of the Hebrew Language.
He raised his own son, Ben-Zion, entirely in Hebrew, making him the first native speaker of the revived Hebrew language.
All of modern Hebrew flows from him, at least symbolically. Practically, though it’s more complex.
This is highly unusual. It’s very rare for a revived language to take hold, and it is also almost unique for a spoken language to be able to identify a founder, by contrast with written languages, most of which can identify the linguistics expert who first put it into writing.
The morphology of modern Hebrew is Biblical, but the syntax is Mishnaic.
Why did he do this? Eliezer was not making a new decision about how the language should be. Rather, he was choosing between two possibilities. He wanted to revive Biblical Hebrew, but he chose the syntax of Mishnaic Hebrew. [Oriana: Mishnaic Hebrew has simpler grammar and a richer vocabulary.]
The reasons may be more pragmatic than anything else. Eliezer’s project received substantial support from Edmond James de Rothschild’s organizations in the 1880s. Even with that, though, he needed to get people to adopt it. It received official status in 1922 in the British Mandate for Palestine, but it would not have done so without a large number of people being willing to take it up already.
Most modern European languages are primarily Subject-Verb-Object, though German and Dutch are Subject-Object-Verb in subordinate clauses, and Russian is only predominantly SVO. Even so, it is very hard to persuade people who are used to SVO to try something else, as every English-speaker who has tried to learn German or Dutch can attest.
Given that Mishnaic Hebrew already had an SVO model, and SVO elements are found in Biblical Hebrew, it was probably the choice most likely to succeed.
While we can say (uniquely) that one man (plus the Hebrew Language Committee) decided what it was going to be, the large number of new immigrants who adopted the revived language were the ones who made it so. They were primarily coming from Europe, bringing with them SVO as their standard model.
There used to be a school of linguistics that said that older languages have an inflectional sentence structure, and modern languages are analytic. Thus, in Latin, the grammar is communicated by the inflections of the words used, not by sentence order at all, whereas in English, sentence order determines meaning, and in the fossilized cases where inflections exist, they simply support the sentence order.
Unless I am now also fully out of date, this school has been quietly abandoned: we see the move from inflectional written language to analytic written language in European languages, but it is an assumption too far to suggest this is the fate of all inflectional languages. ~ Martin Turner, Quora
Oriana:
Let me quote the definiton of an analytic language:
"An analytic language expresses grammatical relationships using standalone words, strict word order, and helper words rather than changing the form of words (inflections)." English is an analytic language; Latin and Slavic languages are synthetic. Synthetic languages, such as Latin or Russian, use inflectional morphemes—small units added to words—to encode grammatical information.
"Languages aren't strictly analytic or synthetic; they exist on a spectrum. For instance, English has become more analytic over time, shedding much of its inflectional morphology that was common in Old English. On the flip side, synthetic languages like German and Arabic have retained complex grammar rules that, once understood, can make expression more precise."
Kobi Simpsono-Levi:
Modern Hebrew is still inflected. Word order is normally SVO, so it does not need to be so.
“The Book (direct object marked with et) Come Let's Open” is perfectly grammatically correct.
Verbs are infected for gender, person and number, and direct object pronouns can be added as suffixes.
Nouns are infected for gender, case, number and possession.
Martin Turner:
Indeed, the theory that inflections disappear [as a language develops] is now abandoned.
Oriana:
Even though English is difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers, its relatively simple grammar has made it a natural for becoming an international language. Spanish has preserved various grammatical complexities, but fortunately it’s easy to understand, at least for Europeans — perhaps because of its basis in Latin. It’s simplified Latin, with interesting borrowings from Arabic.
*
HOW GEORGE ORWELL TURNED AGAINST COMMUNISM
In 1936, George Orwell traveled to Spain to fight fascists, but the people who nearly killed him were his own communist allies.
At the time, Orwell identified strongly with the radical left and had joined the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), an anti-Stalinist socialist militia in Barcelona. He believed he was stepping into a utopian workers' revolution where class structures had been abolished and true equality was taking root.
His romantic ideals were violently shattered—not just by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco, but by his own nominal allies. In May 1937, Soviet-backed communists systematically turned on their leftist counterparts in Spain. Orwell witnessed firsthand the brutal suppression, manufactured propaganda, and purges directed by Moscow against the very people who were supposed to be fighting on the same side. He barely escaped Spain with his life, fleeing across the border while many of his comrades were imprisoned or executed by Soviet secret police.
Before his time in Spain, Orwell was largely sympathetic to the communist experiment in Russia, viewing it as a flawed but perhaps necessary step toward a more equitable society. After surviving the betrayal in Catalonia, his perspective completely inverted. He recognized that totalitarianism, regardless of whether it draped itself in fascist or communist rhetoric, relied on the destruction of objective truth and the absolute suppression of individual liberty.
This firsthand brush with ideological betrayal fundamentally transformed Orwell's worldview. He documented his disillusionment in his memoir Homage to Catalonia, and the experience shifted his focus toward a targeted crusade against authoritarianism. The direct exposure to Soviet tactics in Spain directly inspired his masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984. Without his firsthand experience in the trenches of Catalonia, the modern vocabulary for describing oppressive governments might never have been written. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora (SepiaGlyphs, I’ve just learned, is “AI profile run by Quora”)
David Killinger:
In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War c. 1937, one passage describes yet another failure of his undisciplined P.O.U.M. militia, when they are forced to retreat from a lost battle in the Aragon where he was wounded by a sniper.
The column marches East for miles past damaged houses, farms and fields, and a population ravaged by war. On the outskirts of Barcelona, Orwell laments the mindless destruction of a modest old Catholic church by the Communists, deeply offended by their violation of simple things of beauty. Subsequently he avoids arrest and a possible death-sentence by another faction of Communists, and narrowly escapes across the border to the safety of France.
Dubdude:
Equality, outside of the rule of law, is an unattainable pursuit. Those that lead the charge have no intention or desire to relinquish their power and will live off the fruits of sheep they tend.
Terry Allen:
In America, Stalin was equally skillful at manipulating the various Communist organizations there while hiding from the members themselves that their leaders were taking their orders from Moscow. The irony of thousands of patriotic Americans being pilloried during the McCarthy Era for joining some Communist organization or other in order to create a better world while their organizations themselves were only aiming for a better Soviet Union was an irony completely lost on McCarthy himself, but I thought it was both funny and sad.
*
TYE LEUNG, A CHINESE-AMERICAN HEROINE
In 1899, a twelve-year-old girl in San Francisco Chinatown, was told she was promised in marriage to a man she never met. 
She ran.
That decision — made by a child with nowhere to go — would change American history forever. Most people have never heard her name. But they should.
Her name was Tye Leung.
She was the youngest of eight children. Her father repaired shoes for twenty dollars a month.
Her family was large and hungry, and a daughter sent to Montana was one less mouth to feed. She had already been sent out as a domestic servant at nine years old. She had already known what it felt like to be invisible.
But Tye refused to disappear.
She ran to the only place in Chinatown where a girl could escape an arranged marriage — the Presbyterian Mission Home on Sacramento Street, run by a fearless Scottish missionary named Donaldina Cameron. Cameron was already a legend. She was famous for raiding brothels with a fire ax, breaking down doors to rescue trafficked women and girls. Over three decades, she and her staff would rescue between two and three thousand of them.
Cameron took Tye in, taught her English — and quickly recognized something rare in the small, quick-witted girl standing before her.
Tye stood just over four feet tall. Cameron nicknamed her "Tiny." But her voice could fill any room she walked into.
By her late teens, Tye was accompanying Cameron on brothel raids as her interpreter. She was the first voice the rescued women heard — speaking to them in their own dialect, telling them they were safe, that no one was going to hurt them. She was so gifted that Cameron later wrote: *"There is hardly a court in San Francisco or Oakland where Tye Leung is not known and welcome as an excellent interpreter."
Then in 1910, the United States Commissioner of Immigration came looking for a Chinese woman to interpret at the newly opened Angel Island Immigration Station — the federal facility enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act, where tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained, interrogated, and frequently turned away.
Cameron recommended Tye.
She sat for the federal civil service examination. She passed it. She became the first Chinese American woman ever employed by the United States federal government. She was twenty-three years old.
A reporter asked if the work was dull. *"Dull? Never," she answered. "Always sitting there listening to my countrymen... I listen for little scraps about the great new movement over the sea, that is setting them free over there as I have been set free here."
Then came the moment that would place her name in history forever.
In 1911, California granted women the right to vote — nine years before the rest of the country.
On May 19, 1912, Tye Leung walked into a polling place in San Francisco and cast her ballot. She became the first Chinese American woman in United States history to vote. The San Francisco Call went further — declaring her the first Chinese woman in the history of the world to exercise the electoral franchise.
A reporter asked how she had decided who to vote for. "I studied. I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to know what was right, not to act blindly."
While working at Angel Island, she fell in love with an immigration inspector named Charles Schulze — a German-born man who stood six feet three inches tall to her four feet. They fell in love quietly, because they had to. California law made marriage between a white man and a Chinese woman a criminal offense.
So in October 1913, they crossed into Washington state — where interracial marriage was legal — and married there.
"His mother and my folks disapprove very much,"* Tye said. "But when two people are in love, they don't think of the future or what might happen."
When they returned to California, the Immigration Bureau pressured them both out of their jobs. Tye — who had passed the civil service exam on merit and translated for hundreds of desperate women with grace — was forced to walk away from the government she had served with distinction. Charles lost his career too.
They built a life anyway. They had four children. Tye learned bookkeeping. She kept the books at the San Francisco Chinese Hospital. For two decades she worked the night shift as a telephone operator at the Chinatown Exchange — a voice in the dark, connecting a community the rest of the city largely ignored.
When Charles died of a heart attack in 1935, she raised their children alone.
After World War Two, the same federal government that had pushed her out came back asking for her help. New laws allowed Chinese American servicemen to bring their wives to the United States. The Immigration Office hired Tye again — to help those women navigate the very same system she had once worked inside.
In 1948 she was arrested, accused of driving women to clinics for illegal abortions. She had simply been doing what she had always done — serving as the bridge between the women of her community and the institutions that ignored them. Every charge was dropped.
She kept working. She kept living. She even became locally famous as a Chinatown pinball champion.
Tye Leung Schulze died in San Francisco on March 10, 1972. She was eighty-four years old.
She had been a runaway, a rescuer, a translator, a trailblazer, a wife in defiance of unjust law, a widow, a bookkeeper, a telephone operator, a quiet underground helper to women in need — and the first Chinese American woman in history to cast a vote.
She ran from a closing door at twelve years old.
She spent the rest of her life holding doors open for everyone who came after her. ~ Laurie Espinoza, Quora
*
NO ONE COMPLETELY RECOVERS FROM BEING A CHILD
The asymmetry of power between parent and child always leaves a trace:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
– from ‘This Be the Verse’ (1971) by Philip Larkin
No one comes through childhood untouched or unscathed. One reason, says the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is the asymmetry of the relationships in a child’s world. One person is big, the other small. One knows, whereas the other learns, and one gives, whereas the other needs. We usually envision this as well-intentioned or at least necessary and innocent. But Phillips says that the imbalance of power resulting when love and dependence are interwoven with frustration and envy could be seen as a form of sadomasochism.
I came to these thoughts gradually myself. As a postdoctoral fellow in early childhood, working with parents and children aged three and younger, I confronted the asymmetry in a raw form: a baby completely dependent on an adult struggling with their own needs and anxieties. After this, I provided long-term psychotherapy to adults, and patient after patient filtered their childhood experience – the way they were nurtured, held, frightened or overlooked – through the way they organized their world now.
Becoming a parent myself provided yet another perspective: I could see the intergenerational transmission up close. Childhood never ends because it persists as an internal grammar influencing how we understand power, love and our own experience as adults. The question is not whether the asymmetry of childhood leaves behind a trace, because it does, but what we do with that trace.
As I see it, to say that no one ‘recovers’ from childhood is not to say that all are harmed. It is, rather, to suggest that being small with a powerful other leaves behind a trace. Early on, the child confronts the reality that closeness can be laced with coercion and that one’s own vitality can feel overwhelming to oneself or the other. In parenting, the line between protection and control, guidance and domination, is ever shifting. Even in loving families, children learn that someone else’s mood can tower over their world like a storm.
Phillips’s provocative argument asks us to reflect upon the residues of this asymmetry, with its intermingling of tenderness and intimidation, and how they become an aspect of our psychological structure. We all carry the emotional logic of being small, including the desire to be looked after without being overpowered, the wish to be understood without being shamed, and the worry that dependence makes us prey to someone else’s will. Childhood doesn’t end when we grow up because it persists as an internal structure shaping how we understand power, love and needs throughout the remainder of our lives.
A child does not encounter the world as a set of ideas but as a set of differences, whether size and strength, knowledge and mobility, even mood. From the beginning, the adult’s body looms large, a voice filling the room. In difficult moments, their absence is immeasurable. Before any explicit teaching, the child grasps that others can lift you, soothe you or restrain you, or disappear without notice. These contrasts are structured around who has power and who doesn’t.
This asymmetry is not inherently bad. On the contrary, it is the needed foundation of protection, learning and attachment. A child needs someone bigger, for their dependency is real, not symbolic. But because the child has no alternative way of understanding experience, they interpret everything, whether hunger or comfort or absence, as a commentary upon themselves. The adult’s attuned responsiveness is the measure of the child’s worth. The adult’s emotional withdrawal becomes evidence of failure, their irritation a mirror for the child’s badness. Asymmetry means that the child cannot resist reading the adult’s internal states as reflections of their own.
In this context, children fantasize about being the big one. The toddler who kicks, bites, commands or protests is learning about power. The experience is fraught: dependence inevitably generates frustration, frustration leads to aggression, and aggression fuels guilt. In this swirl, children start to intuit that love and dominance are not cleanly separable. At times, being cared for feels controlling, while exerting control is a plea for care.
If Phillips focuses our attention on the echoes of this early asymmetry, the analyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl widens the frame. From her perspective, our culture is built around a mostly invisible prejudice against children, which she calls ‘childism’. For her, children do not just confront the inherent imbalance of size and authority. They must also face adults who hold unconscious and culturally sanctioned fantasies about what children are. Those fantasies, which include notions of children as bad, seductive, rebellious, fragile or contaminating, shape the way adults hold them in mind and interact with them long before any conflict takes place.
Young-Bruehl’s suggestion is disturbing because it reframes what we typically think of as ‘normal parenting’. What adults usually cast as discipline and guidance tends to hide deeper anxieties, such as their own unresolved dependency, their fear of being overwhelmed or their wish to feel capable. She describes how adults regularly project onto children the traits they cannot stand to experience in themselves, whether aggression, vulnerability, sexuality, disobedience or longing. In short, the child is the repository of what the adult has disowned.
The central thrust of her argument is this: children don’t grow into adulthood in a vacuum of benevolent caregiving. Instead, they develop in an environment of unconscious adult assumptions, all of which are enacted through projections, stereotypes and defenses. The seemingly apparent ‘natural dependency of childhood’ is always shaped, in advance, by the adult’s fantasies of childhood. The child is not just small in comparison to the adult. The child is also interpreted, defined and restricted by inherited beliefs about what a child is.
Adults use children to manage their own childhood, writes Young-Bruehl in Childism (2012). They do not meet them, emotionally, as they really are but rather through the filter of their own, unresolved disappointments, humiliations, unmet longings and terrors. The child is an unwitting participant in the adult’s struggles to regulate feelings that were never made sense of in their own early life.
This doesn’t necessarily require cruelty or overt abuse of any sort, though it can certainly manifest in that form. But it also often happens in ordinary moments, such as when impatience outweighs the situation, or when anxiety is masked as moral certainty, or harshness is cast as ‘teaching a lesson’, or intrusive overprotection hides a fear of dependency.
Adults unconsciously expect children to do the emotional work that they were not able to do themselves. A parent who grew up feeling unseen may insist upon endless admiration or compliance. One who grew up fearful of conflict may insist the child be ‘good’ at any cost. The adult who felt intruded upon as a child may experience a child’s natural neediness as claustrophobic. These expectations do not rest upon who the child is, but on the adult’s private and often unarticulated history, which becomes an inherited emotional script that the child must follow.
In my work with parents of young children, this dynamic was often especially transparent, as if the compressed emotional intensity of parenting young children stripped away much of the insulation between past and present that we often take for granted. Consider a mother, capable in almost every area of her life, yet almost paralyzed by her infant’s crying. Not frightened for the baby, who she knows is safe, but disorganized by the sound of crying itself. Her baby’s helpless need resonates with something unresolved in her own history, a childhood where need was associated with weakness and weakness with contempt. In her own life, she learned to manage this feeling by becoming extremely competent. But her son’s dependence isn’t so easily managed. In its rawness, it confronts her with an aspect of herself she was not prepared to feel. She is not a bad mother. She is a person who hasn’t yet metabolized the asymmetry of her own childhood, and her baby’s cries have the extraordinary power to bring it to the fore.
Here is where Phillips and Young-Bruehl meet. Phillips describes the residues of asymmetry, with lifelong tension between the longing to be cared for and the terror of being controlled. Young-Bruehl shows how adults manage this tension by projecting it onto children.
In this way, the child is an emotional surrogate, a stand-in for the adult’s childhood self. Often, the child senses the adult’s needs long before they can give voice to their own, and so they accommodate. Many children suppress their impulses, attune to the adult’s feelings, and interpret the adult’s reactions as measures of their basic worth. Children do this not because they are obedient by nature but because the asymmetry makes adaptation feel like survival.
Adults mostly don’t set out to use children in this way. Usually it happens unconsciously, through deeply established patterns. Nonetheless, the effect is real, and the child becomes involved in the adult’s unresolved past, holding feelings that do not start with them. What appears on the surface as ‘parenting’ is often, at a deeper level, an effort to soothe an old wound, master an old fear, or correct an old humiliation – all the while using the child as the medium. This is how the adult’s emotional history becomes, in time, a central organizing force in the child’s inner world.
If adults relate to their children predominantly through the lens of their own unresolved childhoods, the child’s task is impossibly complex: they must grow a self beneath the weight of someone else’s fantasy. Inevitably, a child who is repeatedly treated as overwhelming starts to feel that way, even if some part of them instinctively resists. Or a child who is responded to as innately disobedient begins to feel that they are, in fact, difficult. And a child who is confronted with fear, contempt or moral scrupulousness learns to feel that there is danger in their own impulses, even long before they can describe them.
Because children rely entirely upon adults for survival, they usually cannot allow themselves to see that important adults are distorted or defensive. They simply assume that adults are correct. This is a primitive emotional safeguard. The emotional logic here is this: if my caregiver is wrong, I am unsafe; but if I am wrong about myself, I can be fixed, forgiven and even loved. In this context, the child pursues the only workable option: turning the adult’s projection inward.
We should not conceive of this inward turn as passive; it is creative and adaptive. Over time, the child actively constructs an internal image of themselves that is largely based on the reactions of important adults, and then organizes their behavior, expectations and emotional life around that image. If the caregiver experiences neediness as an irritation, the child will tend to suppress need. If the adult casts curiosity as threat, the child will often minimize their exploratory drive. If the adult feels that dependence is suffocating, the child will find ways to hide their longing. These accommodations feel like safety to the child, and safety feels like love, even when moments of protest or defiance break through.
Young-Bruehl’s insight is crucial in this area: the child comes to feel that their impulses are freighted with danger, their feelings too much for others, and their desires somehow contaminating; so their existence must be managed or attenuated. They follow the role that the adult’s fantasy assigns them because not stepping into it would threaten the relationship upon which their life depends – though they may push back in moments the adult rarely understands.
This could be the start of a lifelong confusion between who one really is and who one was required to be. The child sees themselves through the adult’s imagination and feels responsible for emotions that were never theirs. In time, these projections become self-perceptions. The child takes on the adult’s gaze as their own. And since all of this happens before there are words for it, the internalized image feels less like a belief and more like a fact, obvious and incontrovertible, even to the child who, from time to time, has the inchoate sense of ‘This isn’t me.’
This is where the sadomasochism of early experience, proposed by Phillips, starts to take shape: the child now pre-emptively monitors, judges and restrains themselves in the way the adult did. The asymmetry of childhood is now an asymmetry within the self. The adult’s fantasy, which was once external, now lives inside the child as a quiet but robust structure through which the child interprets the world.
Once the adult’s fantasy has been internalized, something that is at first subtle begins to take up residence inside the child’s mind: a sense of inner badness that feels like a given of existence. This isn’t ‘badness’ in the moralistic sense, but instead a diffuse conviction that one’s needs are burdensome, one’s feelings are too much for important others, and one’s simple presence may be found to be lacking. It is the residue of preserving the bond with an adult who cannot abide some aspect of the child’s aliveness.
In the Deep South where I grew up, whippings were spoken of with a strange, almost ritualistic pride. Adults spoke about being whipped as if it were a rite of passage, a moral tonic, even a sign of love. And the children who suffered whippings usually adopted the same script: it kept me straight. It showed they cared, and I needed it. In this way, pain was cast as instruction, and domination was framed as devotion.
This is pure identification with the aggressor. The adult cannot tolerate the child’s dependency or disobedience, so they beat it; the child cannot tolerate the adult’s fallibility, so they interpret the beating as a necessary goodness. The whole culture participates in the alchemy. What stays with me even now is the confidence with which people insisted that whippings were good. The adult’s fantasy that children must be hurt to become decent and law-abiding had burrowed so deeply that it persisted inside the same people it injured.
I reflect upon a patient, a composite drawn from many years of clinical work, whom I will call Daniel. He came to therapy in his late 20s, overtly for anxiety, but what unfolded over months was more specific and more corrosive: a ruthless inner voice that catalogued his inadequacies with exacting precision. I felt he was a thoughtful, even gifted, man, but he felt himself to be perpetually on the edge of being found out. He had grown up with a father who was volatile. Not brutal, exactly, but given to explosions of contempt, usually triggered by Daniel’s mistakes or uncontained feelings. ‘Stop being so sensitive,’ his father might snap. ‘You’re too much.’
Over time, Daniel did what children do: he agreed. He decided that the sensitivity itself was the problem, that there was something excessive about him at his core, and that exhausting and unrelenting vigilance was the price of being tolerated in a relationship. In the therapy, what impacted me the most was the moment he began to consider an alternative: that he was not a bad child but that his father had been unable to bear his own feelings, passing this difficulty on to his son.
This inner badness is not just a marker of pathology; it is, in a way, a creative solution that allows the child to carry on. For the child, casting oneself as the source of the adult’s reactions is safer than seeing the adult as unreliable or frightening. If I’m the problem, then I can adapt. But if the adult is the problem, I have no power and am in a fraught situation. In this context, the child chooses the reality in which agency, however painful it may be, remains a possibility. Young-Bruehl observes that children instinctively protect their caregivers from recognition of harm, instead carrying the blame to sustain the story, however illusory it is, of love and safety.
Adults typically inhabit this inner architecture through compulsive attempts at self-improvement or self-criticism. Sometimes, they discover a persistent belief that intimacy is conditional, or they harbor a sense that their real self must be hidden, controled or attenuated.
The inner badness is more than just an echo of the past. It is an emotional atmosphere outlasting the childhood that gave rise to it.
By the time we reach adulthood, the internalized asymmetries of childhood no longer feel like adaptations. They are our personalities. What started as a creative adjustment to the adult’s projections becomes ways of relating, an irresistible pull toward repeating certain patterns of love, authority, closeness and self-regulation. The child who found ways to circumvent criticism now strives for perfection. And the child who felt like too much now keeps their needs small. The child who felt responsible for other’s feelings is now exquisitely attuned to every feeling around them.
Some escape the feeling of smallness by compensating and developing (or projecting) authority and achievement. For them, power becomes a bulwark against the vulnerability of dependence. Others go in the opposite direction, moving toward submission and finding a strange relief in giving up agency before it can be taken away from them. For still others, the pattern oscillates: a wish to be held closely is followed by a fear of being overpowered, with moments of assertiveness trailed by guilt or self-reproach.
I think of yet another composite, a woman I will call Maya, who attended therapy after the failure of her second significant relationship. Both relationships had followed a similar trajectory. She would meet someone, feel a rush of relief at being chosen and, over time, find herself getting smaller: deferring more often, expressing her needs less often, and building her life around her partner’s moods. Then, at some point, something would break. There would be an unanticipated moment of self-assertion, disproportionate to the occasion, that startled both her and her partner. Afterward she would feel shame, and then a renewed effort to re-establish the old pattern.
As a child, she had a mother who was loving yet subtly controlling and who experienced her daughter’s growth toward independence as a form of rejection. Maya had discovered early that closeness demanded compliance. In adulthood, she recreated this arrangement with remarkable consistency by unconsciously selecting partners who responded positively to her accommodation and, in time, periodically erupting with the angry protests she had suppressed. The asymmetry of her childhood, constituted by the sense that love and submission were joined, became the grammar of her adult relationships. Therapy was focused not merely on helping her find a better partner, but recognizing that the choice of partner was a result of something older and more internal.
Growing up in Mississippi, I watched these asymmetries play out well before any of us were adults. Our middle- and high-school hallways throbbed with racial tension, rural/urban rivalries, and the brutish hierarchy of boyhood. There was a small kid we all called Little Billy who was thin, soft in the face, and always a target. He was humiliated in the way groups of boys often distribute dominance between themselves. And one afternoon in the locker room, Billy snapped. He grabbed one of his tormentors, someone nearly a foot taller, and slammed his face into a metal locker with a force that stunned us all. For a split second, the order inverted. Billy’s smallness exploded into something volcanic and the larger boy folded. What stays with me isn’t the violence but Billy’s expression: terror interwoven with excitement, as if he had discovered a forbidden form of bigness he didn’t know how to fully embody. The roles had flipped; but the asymmetry persisted.
Phillips’s sadomasochism rears its head yet again, and again and again. It persists throughout life. Not because adult relationships are fated to cruelty, but because traces of this early dependency persist in the conflict between longing for emotional connection and fear of its costs. We tend to find ourselves drawn into dynamics that retain the atmosphere of our childhoods, whether partners who are only intermittently available or friendships built around caretaking. The familiar, though painful, often feels more workable than the unknown. Research on attachment patterns in adulthood clearly shows repetition of early relationship patterns, even when they are sources of distress.
At the same time, the search for respite can become a primary adult pursuit. Some seek it through relationships that seem to promise unconditional acceptance, whereas for others it is spiritual practices, aesthetic experiences, career success or forms of self-development. But beneath the surface often lies the same hope: to be big without being domineering, to be small without feeling ashamed, to belong without surrendering oneself.
What we call ‘personality’ is, in many ways, the residue of a child’s best efforts to manage the impact of another’s mind. The adult is followed by both sides of this asymmetry and spends the rest of their life trying to work them through without re-experiencing the old injuries.
In this context, healing doesn’t mean correcting the past. And it doesn’t mean crafting a version of yourself somehow untouched by your unresolved history. To envision that form of recovery is to misconstrue the nature of early experience: it’s not something we outgrow but is something we grow through and from. The traces left behind are structural.
What can change is our relationship to these early structures. When the old interpretation – ‘there’s something wrong with me’ – loosens its grip, the logic of being small shifts. The prejudices about our needs, our dependency, our fundamental vulnerability become available for reflection instead of repetition.
This is not primarily an intellectual process but a slow unlearning. The adult must reacquaint themselves with aspects of experience they once learned to fear, whether wanting and needing, relying upon or protesting, disappointing or being disappointed. In the end, these are not weaknesses but the basic elements of human life. Yet they may feel fraught when, early in life, they provoked withdrawal, punishment or overwhelm in someone bigger.
So the therapeutic relationship is not just a chance for insight but the mechanism of change. The early structures can only be truly restructured in relationship. When a patient takes the risk of expressing need and finds that the therapist is neither overwhelmed nor contemptuous, or when they voice protest and discover that the relationship endures, or when they disappoint and are not abandoned, something more than intellectual insight takes place. What accumulates over time is a new experience of being small in the presence of someone big who does not use that advantage against them. I have come to see this as a fundamental mechanism of change. Not the unfolding of memory, though that has its place, but the creation of a different emotional environment that begins, slowly and unevenly, to feel like a new potential way of organizing experience.
Over time, the patient forges a relationship to their own dependency no longer weighted down with shame. They come to understand that the important adult who failed to meet our needs was also struggling with their own childhood ghosts, an emotional inheritance they did not choose and could not escape. This recognition does not excuse harm, but it does contextualize it. It changes the narrative from ‘I was too much’ to ‘They couldn’t tolerate what they were feeling.’
In a sense, healing is the step-by-step redistribution of compassion away from the adult’s projections and toward the child who was forced to carry them. As this takes place, the internal asymmetry begins to soften. The part of the self that polices, manages and submits loses authority. And the part that previously carried the adult’s unrecognized fears starts to feel itself as truly human.
Ultimately, we must learn a different way of being big. Childhood teaches us that bigness is precarious. The big person can protect or intimidate, soothe or silence. The child feels this in their body long before they have words for what they are feeling, and the traces persist throughout life.
But adulthood offers the possibility of redefining what bigness means. Now, bigness may become less about the capacity to give shape to another person’s world and more the capacity to inhabit one’s own.
This new form of bigness rests on the recognition that maturity has little to do with dominance. It’s about the ability to hold one’s own needs, hurts and vulnerabilities without displacing them onto someone smaller, weaker or dependent. It entails relating to other people without insisting that they carry the ghosts of your own childhood, allowing dependency without feeling threatened by it, and providing care without insisting upon gratitude or submission in return.
In this way, adulthood is a second chance to foster experience that does not repeat the internal logic of the past. Phillips suggests that nobody recovers from the sadomasochism of childhood, and maybe he’s right. Yet we can transform what those residues become. We can develop a version of bigness that does not require diminishing someone else and that makes room for vulnerability without shame, and strength without threat.
This is the potential, and the responsibility, of becoming an adult: to become the sort of big person a small person can safely rely on, including the small person we once were.
Oriana:
Freud saw childhood smallness and powerlessness, its dependence on a powerful, fear-inspiring Big Adult, as the origin of religion. The Big Father in the Sky needed to be obeyed and appeased. Freud regarded religion as a “universal neurosis” of humanity, born of the helplessness of childhood and maintained by continued helplessness in the face of forces of nature, e.g. storms, floods, disease, and ultimately death.
What follows, though Freud doesn’t go into that, is that gaining more power over the forces of nature through technology — including medical technology — would lead to less and less dependence on religion. Wealth, which also leads to greater power, likewise lessens the need for religion. That need is greatest in people who feel helpless. This brings to mind the “first step” of the Twelve Step programs aimed at ending addiction — the admission that one is helpless over alcohol (or drugs, or certain compulsive behaviors).
Another example of fear being the basis of religion is the saying, “There are no atheists in the trenches.” (Kurt Voonnegut said that this is not an argument against atheism, but against trenches.)
Religious leaders may tell the “faithful” (often referred to as “sheep”) to comfort the poor and feed the hungry — but they are not interested in ending poverty or curing disease. On the contrary: religions depend on the continuation of misery in some form.
Internet/AI: There is a strong global trend showing that the richer a country is, the less religious its population tends to be. (The US is a notable outlier here. This phenomenon tends to be explained by invoking the notion that Americans feel less secure — when it comes to medical needs, for instance, or gun safety.
Freud saw religion as having the most appeal to the uneducated and the oppressed. Marx’s description of religion as “opiate of the masses” is well known — but I prefer the phrase that immediately follows, which states the religion is the “sigh of the oppressed soul.”
Secular ideologies share many similarities with religion.
Apologies for the digression. Let me turn to the “problem” of having been a small, helpless child.
The article describes childhood mostly as a nightmare. The author is very persuasive, but in order to make this point he has to selectively simplify a very complex situation. Except for truly abusive parents, today’s children don’t receive all that much punishment. They may indeed misbehave and get on the adults’ nerves, but they are still love objects. Even strangers are likely to treat children with affection and have a protective attitude toward them, especially when it comes to small children (teens are a separate category). Grandparents are notorious for “spoiling” children with love and generous birthday and Christmas gifts.
Still, on the whole I agree. When asked, If you could go back in time, which age would you like to be? — nobody (in my experience) chooses childhood. No one wants to be small and helpless ever again, even if one’s parents were mostly affectionate rather than punitive. Most people, it seems to me, choose being big and strong (or at least strong). And wanting to be strong can be very positive, motivating us to learn skills and become competent solvers of unavoidable daily problems.
An interesting side note. I’ve read somewhere that addicts “have been taught to be incompetent.” Teaching them better social and job-related skills may be more important than analyzing the bad things that happened in childhood. They need to form a positive vision of a future self, a metaphorically “big” and strong self, with much to offer to others. That’s why cognitive therapy supplemented with teaching social and vocational skills has proved to be successful.
Simply growing older usually also means acquiring better social skills and having fewer stressors. Older generally means richer, more in control, and overall happier than in youth. It means having learned how to deal with unavoidable stress. It means more understanding of life, which allows one to feel less guilty about matters that were genuinely not one’s fault. It means more self-acceptance, even with the flaws (the wisdom of “No one is perfect”). It means knowing how to cope with whatever life throws at us rather than falling apart. It also means knowing that help is available, and that people are more likely to be kind and helpful (we are wired to get pleasure out of helping others) rather than automatically hostile.
Yes, most of us have had various kinds of stress in childhood — a "happy childhood" seems almost an oxymoron and perhaps the most persistent social myth. But we manage to move forward, and to be reasonably happy and grateful for the good things that have also happened to us, in childhood and beyond.
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THE LABELING OF MENTAL PATIENTS COLORS PERCEPTION
Most doctors will never tell that once a psychiatric label is attached to someone, all their actions are judged through that label. Even their most normal behaviors can be interpreted as symptoms of illness.
An experiment in the early 1970’s proved exactly this. It was called the Rosenhan experiment.
In 1973, psychologist David Rosenhan wanted an answer to a deceptively simple question, could doctors reliably tell the difference between a sane and an insane person? Sounds straightforward for a trained medical professional, right? What followed was shocking.
He sent 8 perfectly sane volunteers into psychiatric hospitals across America. Several of them were medical professionals themselves. Their only instruction was to report hearing a voice saying the words empty, hollow, thud. Just this, nothing dramatic. No other symptom.
Every single one was admitted. 7 were diagnosed with schizophrenia and 1 with depression.
After their admission, they behaved completely normally. Doing things every normal individual does, washing their hands, eating their meals and talking to the staff. They stayed an average of 19 days, with the shortest stay being 7 days and the longest one being 52 days.
During their stay, no doctor nor the staff suspected the truth. However, amazingly 35 out of 118 actual patients told them they didn't belong there,
When Rosenhan published his findings, the world was shocked. One reputed hospital got so furious that they challenged him, send your fake patients and we will spot them. Rosenhan accepted their challenge.
Over the next 3 months, the hospital spotted 41 fakes out of the 193 admitted patients. But the truth was, Rosenhan hadn't sent a single person.
Both experiments proved the same thing: perception always overpowered reality.
~ Khalid Hussain, Quora
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THE NEW YORKER ON “THE WIZAARD OF THE KREMLIN”
Lawrence had written an article about Vadim, and Vadim, who respects Lawrence as a scholar, now wants to tell him his life story. So far so fictional. Vadim begins by recounting his youth as the privileged son of a Soviet-era official who was cast aside under the liberalizing Gorbachev regime; the reversal of fortune roused the young Vadim to make the most of his life. As Vadim speaks, events unfold onscreen in flashbacks: after a stint of odd jobs like selling foreign electronic goods, he became a theater director and frequented Moscow’s hipster scene. He began a relationship with a rock singer and punk provocateur named Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) who then left him for a rich young businessman (Tom Sturridge). Vadim traded his artistic calling for a flashy job in a privatized TV station and was then tapped for a political consultancy by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen)—halt!
Anyone who’s been reading the news in the past few decades knows that Berezovsky is no fictional character but a real-life Russian oligarch who fell out with Vladimir Putin and then was found dead, in Berkshire, in 2013, ostensibly from suicide. (A coroner’s inquest was inconclusive.) The movie, which Assayas co-wrote with Emmanuel Carrère, tells the story of how Berezovsky recruited Vadim as a behind-the-scenes fixer to launch Putin (Jude Law) into politics as the designated successor of the older and ailing Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis).
Once in office, Putin installed Vadim as an adviser to help consolidate his administration into an autocracy responsible for the suppression of civil liberties, for wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, and for a campaign of disinformation and interference in Western democracies. The movie is filled with other real-life figures, including Garry Kasparov (Dmitryi Turchaninov) and Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke), Igor Sechin (Andrei Zayats) and Yevgeny Prigozhin (Andris Keišs). As for Vadim, he’s based on the real-life Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Assayas makes a point of foregrounding the fictionalization of his characters. Paradoxically, though, the freedom granted by that premise is used, in the movie, not to amplify the historical record but to distract from it.
The thematic core of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the shifting connection between appearances and realities, between what’s to be done and how it’s spun. When Putin plots war against Chechnya, Vadim warns him off the conflict as a quagmire and a potential disaster, but Putin worries neither about the outcome nor about the impression it will leave: he’s planning a campaign of ruthless brutality and has no intention of waging “a humane war, like the Americans do.”
Above all, Putin favors big shows of Russian dignity and power. Vadim learns from this mentality: when Russia unleashes internet interference against Western democracies, under a program led by Prigozhin, Vadim assures him of the benefit of doing so openly and not hiding Russia’s traces: “Anything that makes you seem strong actually increases that strength.”
Despite such philosophizing, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” can only superficially be called a movie of ideas; it’s a movie of strategies rather than of ideologies, of how power is used rather than why. Assayas takes a cynical and clichéd view regarding temptation and corruption, worldly rewards of security and pleasure, even ego and pride, while having nothing to say about the transformations envisioned or the values embodied in the exercise of political authority. In a way, this void is built into the movie’s very setup: nearly the entire film is an illustration of Vadim’s narration to Lawrence, his self-portrayal to a researcher who will in turn convey it to the world.
The story takes Vadim at his word. Just as Adolf Eichmann and Albert Speer portrayed themselves not as true believers but as mere functionaries, so Vadim presents himself to Lawrence as a master of method, not of principle. What’s more, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” does the same for the character of Putin as described by Vadim. It’s hard to imagine Assayas bothering to make a two-and-a-quarter-hour feature just to show engineers of atrocities concealing their motives. Then again, the title card doesn’t promise anything more, or better: if fictionalization is the point, then Assayas should have gone all the way and flaunted the movie’s inventions.
While watching “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” I found myself thinking wistfully of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s recently released film “The Misconceived,” which he made by means of motion-capture technology and animated with video-game software, yielding a cast of realistic-looking people except for one, a young man who’s a cartoon character and reminds me of a Keebler elf.
One of the prime themes of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the relative ease with which the public can be manipulated. There’s little gap, the movie suggests, between Vadim’s youthful ambitions in the theater and his later maneuvers in statecraft (which he considers merely “a game” but also “the only game worth playing”). Yet a truly political movie about the wizard and the beneficiary of his wizardry would have had to break the frame of Vadim’s calculated confession to Lawrence, getting outside the bubble of executive power to the people whom it acts upon.
Assayas portrays the Russian populace as merely manipulated, as if voters were blank slates for effective propaganda rather than people with moral compasses, capacities for judgment and humanity, ideas and opinions that demagogues recognize and stoke.
The movie only hints at the underlying social tendencies that a populist exploits. Vadim theorizes that there are two dimensions to society, the “horizontal” of daily life and the “vertical” of authority; the freed-up Russia of the post-Soviet era offers the former but not the latter, he contends, and Putin’s candidacy can succeed by providing the missing sense of top-down order. Once Putin does take power, he schemes to make use of the same “fury” that, he asserts, made Russians in fact love Stalin’s cruelty. There’s not a word about ideology, about political principles, about what sort of society the new regime is meant to deliver.
The only doctrine is delivered by Berezovsky, who, in posh but fretful exile in the south of France, complains to Vadim about what Putin has done: “We managed to build a free country . . . for the first time in Russian history, and you have wrecked all that in just a few years. You turned Russia back into what it always was: a prison the size of a country, just like in the Soviet times.” The movie thus offers a complaint about the end results of Putinism, not about the ideas—the emotions, the enthusiasms, the resentments, the hatreds—that brought it about. As such, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is a movie of political passivity, delivering blandly detached observations to be rued from the comfort of a seat in a theater.
Assayas offers anecdotes, a feuilleton of tyranny in which the foibles of the mighty and the ruthless reveal the sentimental side of cruelty, the amusement value of ugly deeds, and the polite side of monstrous ideas. Instead of looking behind the scenes at cloistered men of power saying the quiet part out loud, Assayas’s glossily refined vision never shows them voicing their ideas at all. That failure is as much a problem of form as of substance, because to break out of the apolitical bubble of personalities is also to break out of the iridescent bubble of elegant narrative. Assayas is, above all, an urbane filmmaker, with no room for discourse so crude or interruption so abrupt as to let the winds of history waft through his film unperfumed. As ever, politics and morality alike are at the heart of cinematic form. Assayas’s aesthetic is too genteel to even imagine the specifics of loathsome doctrines. The movie fails politically to make clear what democracy is up against, and it fails artistically to imagine the unimaginable and give voice to the unspeakable. ~ Richard Brody
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-hollow-trickery-of-the-wizard-of-the-kremlin
“LOST IN THE WEEDS”
It's easy to see why director Olivier Assayas may have been drawn to Giuliano Da Empoli's novel about the machinations behind Vladimir Putin's rise to power in post-Soviet Russia. We seem to relish behind-the-scenes looks at powerful institutions, perhaps hoping that we'll enjoy the contradictory pleasures of savoring and condemning the rot we find.
Employing a strong cast led by Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov, a master manipulator who becomes a backstage force in Putin's career, Assayas presents a highlight reel of Russian history from the 1980s to the invasion of Crimea.
Assayas unifies the movie's various segments with a narration by Baranov, who meets at his country home with a visiting Yale professor (a wasted Jeffrey Wright) to whom he tells his story, a framing device that weighs the movie down.
Shifting focus and locations, Assayas introduces various important characters in the story, notably Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), an oligarch who identifies Putin as a successor to the increasingly ineffectual and doddering Boris Yeltsin. Berezovski mistakenly thinks Putin can be controlled.
It takes awhile for him to appear, but Jude Law's Putin turns out to be a powerful addition to the movie. Compact, brutal and cunning, Putin's forceful presence can be felt even when he's off screen.
Working from a screenplay by Emmanuel Carrere, Assayas finds youthful energy in the wild days just after the fall of the Soviet Union. At this point, Baranov is a young theater student who samples the libertine freedoms of the 80s and 90s.
Baranov's theatrical background proves critical to his advancement; he's assigned the role of creating the illusory reality around Putin. He becomes skilled in the use of TV and eventually the internet. He's a master manipulator who operates without conscience, a technician who wants to be part of the action.
Looking back on Dano's performance as Baranov, it's understandable that he chose to play this schemer with a low-key whispery voice. Baranov isn't a man of conviction; he's a man of prowess. Still, Dano's choice can feel a bit undercooked, and the characters surrounding Baranov can be more interesting than he, a problem the movie can't always overcome.
Early on, Baranov is smitten by a young woman (Alicia Vikander) who will crop up throughout in relationships with various characters, including a flamboyant, budding oligarch (Tom Sturridge) who lures her away from Baranov.
Some of the actors are playing real people; others -- including Dano -- portray fictionalized characters. Baranov reportedly is based on Vladislav Surkov, a former Putin confidant and advisor. I'm always a bit wary of movies that mix the real and the fictional, especially when dealing with people who are still alive.
Assayas deserves credit for creating the impression that we're watching Russian characters in a complex drama with moving parts that collide and abrade, often in ways that create an intriguing picture of undisguised deceit and corruption.
For all that, The Wizard can't quite live up to the magnitude of its subject. At 136 minutes, The Wizard of the Kremlin harbors a surfeit of betrayals and power moves, but the movie also comes across as a crowded, novelistic effort that's not without interest, but too frequently gets lost in the weeds.
https://denersteinunleashed.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-look-behind-kremlins-walls.html
THE NEW RASPUTIN (??)
Jude Law as Vladimir Putin? It sounds odd (and it is, complete with British accent and toupee). But it turns out that Law delivers the finest performance in French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ offbeat, and also definitely off- kilter film about the Steve Bannon-like Slav who gave up a career in the Russian theater and may have given the world Putin as Russia’s newest “Tsar.”
The “wizard” in Assayas’ film is Vadim “Vadya” Baranov (Paul Dano), “the new Rasputin,” a wearily soft-spoken man living in a wintry, remote home with his adolescent daughter and his dogs. A journalist from America named Rowland (Jeffrey Wright in what turns out to be a minor role) arrives in a limo and begins asking questions which introduce flashbacks to the film’s action in which we see how Baranov’s political career leads to the disastrous rise to power of a former KGB and FSB officer named Vladimir Putin (Jude Law). We also get excessive narration throughout the film.
Viewers hoping to learn how Putin managed to install himself as permanent ruler of a horribly corrupt and frequently mired-in-war Russia (a career much admired by some in this country) are not going to be satisfied by “The Wizard of the Kremlin.” The action begins after Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika era. Boris Yeltsin, the first elected president in Russian history, is in power. Russia’s transformation from Communism to “free trade” leads to the rise of billionaires, dubbed oligarchs, with political connections. But millions of ordinary Russian citizens plunge into poverty.
Baranov’s parents were “hippies” from St. Petersburg, we are told (the film was shot in Riga, Latvia). We encounter the young Baranov as he meets Ksenia (Alicia Vikander, who played the title character in Assayas’ streaming version of “Irma Vep”). Dressed as some variation of Fritz Lang’s Robotrix from “Metropolis” (1927), she appears onstage with some sort of spaceship, undoubtedly a symbol of Russia’s new intergalactic potential.
Assayas, an eclectic French filmmaker best known for the aforementioned “Irma Vep” (1996), “Sentimental Destinies” (2000) and “Personal Shopper” (2016), has dipped into political waters before with such entries as “Carlos” (2010), “Wasp Network” (2019) and “Something in the Air” (2012). He co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Emmanuel Carrere (“The Mustache”), based on the 2012 novel by Italian think tank founder Giuliano da Empoli. But “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” whose title character is based on the real-life former Deputy Prime Minister and “grey cardinal” Vladislav Surkov, has so much explaining on its mind that it is almost all exposition.
Baranov and Ksenia get involved with rising oligarch Dimitri Sidorov (London-born Tom Sturridge), who takes a great interest in Ksenia, who, for her part, is partial to big furry hats and high life. She subsequently leaves Baranov. For his part, Baranov establishes his internet-age political shrewdness to the ambitious, “malignant dwarf” Putin. Baranov helps to create Russian “trash TV.” While the rich stash their money in Monte Carlo, the people of Russia are either “poor or filthy rich.” Were the 1999 Russian apartment bombings staged by the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service), which is described as “worse than the KGB,” to gain support for “strongman” Putin?
In any case, Putin becomes “Tsar” and “the new Stalin” after Yeltsin steps down. The nuclear submarine Kursk sinks during an exercise, and Putin at first refuses to return from his vacation. People such as the oligarch and mercenary leader Yevgeny Progovzhin (Andris Keiss) of the Wagner Group make their entrances and departures without leaving much of an impression. The film seems to tick off items on a list rather than tell a story. The exposition and narration never end. Putin’s people recruit thugs, ex-FSB workers, skinheads, religious fanatics and hooligans (Any of this ring a bell?) into their circle. Baranov performs “black magic in the service of power.” Putin invades Crimea, drops bombs.
Yes, the film is a cautionary tale for our times. But except for Law’s Putin, who seems to emit a cloud of poisonous smoke, characters seem to be not much more than names. Dano, who was recently the victim of a smear by the pointlessly vituperative Quentin Tarantino, dutifully drones the expository dialogue. When Ksenia, who returns, tells Baranov that she is pregnant, Dano passionately gushes, “I have no words,” which is both shocking, because it is personal, and ironic.
Instead of a “wizard,” Baranov is more like a dullard, introducing one embalmed player after another as if we are guests at a comically corrupt Slavic theme park overseen by a glowering mass murderer instead of Micky. If you want to see a great film about how terrifying life is in modern-day Russia, see Julia Loctev’s riveting and monumental 2024 documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow.” It may be over 5 hours long. But you can pretend it’s a streaming series. Part II is coming.
https://bostonmovienews.com/2026/05/17/a-wizard-without-mystique/
“THE COUNTRY DOESN’T REALLY RESEMBLE RUSSIA”
The country depicted doesn’t really resemble Russia. The main character isn’t very interesting, the actor playing him isn’t very good, and I’m not sure what, if anything, the film is trying to say about Putin, Russia, or anything else.
Based on Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin follows Russian history from the early-1990s until around the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. The protagonist isn’t Putin but Vadim Baranov, a fictionalized version of Putin’s longtime aide-de-camp, Vladislav Surkov, played by American actor Paul Dano.
Putin doesn’t even appear until about 40 minutes in, and that first act is the film’s best stretch. It shows the wild west of Russia in the Yeltsin era, filled with oligarchs getting wealthy and the kind of nonstop debauchery chronicled in Matt Taibbi’s The eXile. Baranov is shown making his way in the Yeltsin years, first in the theater scene and later as a TV producer, all the while smitten with a certain woman (Alicia Wikander), who’s often just out of his reach. An Italian movie about Silvio Berlusconi, Loro, had a similar structure: an underling worming his way into the despotic leader’s inner circle, and some future biopic of Donald Trump should adopt that tack. But The Wizard of the Kremlin doesn’t know what to do with Putin or his right-hand man.
The Wizard of the Kremlin was mostly filmed in Latvia. Not only is the movie mostly in English, but, shades of The Death of Stalin, very few of the actors even attempt a Russian accent. So we get Jude Law as Putin, who, despite vast intensity and a passable physical resemblance to the Russian leader, speaks with his British accent.
The film world’s currently at odds over whether Helen of Troy can be Black, and/or whether it matters that none of the major characters in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey are played by Greek actors. I’m not bothered, because The Odyssey is based on a poem that’s thousands of years old. But Putin’s a present-day figure who’ll still alive. I liked Law better as the Pope.
https://www.splicetoday.com/moving-pictures/russian-arc
“FROM A SOVIET DICTATORSHIP TO A NEW KIND OF CZARISM”
Back in olden times, the movies usually waited until political leaders were safely buried before putting them on screen. We're less deferential now. From Oliver Stone's W., which hit theaters when George W. Bush was still in office, to Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, which came out when Donald Trump was seeking his second term, filmmakers now calmly fictionalize stories about those still in power.
The latest to take a bow is Vladimir Putin. Played by Jude Law — surely Putin would be flattered — he's the dark star at the center of The Wizard of the Kremlin, an exceedingly interesting, if sometimes frustrating, new film. Based on a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, it's been adapted for the screen by two top-drawer talents: director Olivier Assayas and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Blending made-up characters and real life big shots, Assayas and Carrère offer a bouncy history of how Russia went from a Soviet dictatorship to a new kind of czarism. The wizard of the title isn't actually Putin, but his media advisor Vadim Baranov, played by Paul Dano with plump cheeks that look as hermetically polished as Teflon.
During an interview with a Yale professor played by Jeffrey Wright, the now-retired Baranov looks back on his career. It begins during the fall of communism in the Gorbachev era and continues into the lawless '90s, when Mafia-style capitalism impoverished millions but turned some schemers into billionaire oligarchs. (Oriana: One precious moment is Gorbachev being served a glass of milk to remind the viewers of his extremely unpopular anti-alcoholism campaign.)
In that time, Baranov goes from selling electronics to becoming an avant-garde theater director who falls in love with a cynical actress (Alicia Vikander). When she dumps him for an oil oligarch, Baranov realizes that the arts don't matter in the new, "anything goes" Russia. He decides that he wants to be at the heart of his times. So he goes into TV, creating trashy reality shows, and becoming a protégé of Boris Berezovsky, a real-life oligarch who owns the country's biggest channel.
Berezovsky is looking for a sturdy, malleably corrupt successor to the Russian Federation's fading president, drunken Boris Yeltsin. He settles on a balding, taciturn, slightly nondescript KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. Although Putin's at first reluctant, Baranov persuades him to run for office by arguing that Russians have always needed — indeed craved — authority from the top.
Now there's an idea that Putin can get behind. He quickly turns on the clever Berezovsky, who thought he could control his creation (always a mistake). And Baranov becomes Putin's media guru until 2014, dreaming up things like Russia's use of the internet to destabilize the West by flooding social media with extremist ideas.
The Wizard of the Kremlin contains so much sharp dialogue that I wish its story was more dramatic. While individual scenes brim with life — Assayas really knows how to evoke a society on the move — the action as a whole feels rushed, episodic and a tad abstract. For instance, Vikander's character is less a full-fledged woman than an alluring symbol of Russia's divided soul.
Yet despite all its flaws, the movie's worth seeing just for Law's portrayal of Putin, which isn't merely juicy but revelatory. In his composed posture, ironic smile and flashes of anger, we sense what makes this man tick — his canniness, brutality, rough humor, paranoia and resentment of the West, which, he believes, tries to make him feel small. Watching Law's Putin in action, I got a clearer sense of why this man — whom Baranov calls The Czar — jails or murders anyone he finds threatening and why he feels righteous about invading Ukraine.
In contrast, the wizard himself remains elusive. Based on a real-life figure named Vladislav Surkov, Baranov is opaque, perhaps even to himself. Some viewers are annoyed by this and by Dano's stylized deadpan — what is he thinking?
But the wizard's inner life isn't what matters. It's his deeds. He's one of those brainy, morally vacant political strategists you find all over the world. As he sits in his country house talking, you wonder whether Baranov ever believed in the dictatorship he was helping to create, or whether he just enjoyed seeing his ideas triumph in the real world — like staging a successful play.
In the end, The Wizard of the Kremlin is less about exposing Putin's authoritarian nature than about capturing an emblematic figure of our age. Baranov is a man who's excited by serving malevolent power, even knowing it will probably destroy him.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/15/nx-s1-5822395/the-wizard-of-the-kremlin-review-putin-russia
POWER THROUGH CHAOS
Putin wants power and Baranov believes the way to get it is chaos. He’s not wrong. Nothing like havoc to convince a country it needs a strong leader, no matter how many freedoms it has to sacrifice for the alleged privilege. Notice how “The Apprentice” parallels really kick in here as the Trump/Cohn connection mirrors Putin and Baranov.
Law gives us a Putin scarily recognizable as the isolated strongman he became, playing Trump for a patsy, wagering all on the fall of the Ukraine, projecting— like Trump— an invulnerability that the facts don’t bear out. Amid the creative chaos of “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” it’s Roy Cohn’s infamous advice to his apprentice that forecast the man Putin became: "Attack— attack— attack, admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory—never acknowledge defeat."
Tragic, isn’t it, how some things never change.
https://www.thetraverstake.com/featured/the-wizard-of-the-kremlin/
‘UNFINISHED”
Lacking certainty as to history’s final verdict, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” feels unfinished, a film whose ultimate meaning isn’t contained within its running time but in events that haven’t yet transpired.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/movies-tv/article/wizard-of-the-kremlin-review-22237218.php
Oriana:
This is not a good movie, and the reviews are a slog as well. Still, a few scenes stand out, making me glad to have seen it. One is the scene portraying Yeltsin as a terminal alcoholic who has to be tied to a chair to be able to address the nation on TV. Another is the scene of Putin’s ordering “kasha” — Russian buckwheat, a poor man’s staple, for lunch, and the cowed oligarchs all ordering kasha as well, never mind the opportunity to enjoy the most elite dishes offered anywhere in the country. And there’s Garry Kasparov’s memorable riposte to Baranov’s boasting of “sovereign democracy” — “Your ‘sovereign democracy’ is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”
Another memorable scene has Putin express his resentment of the West: “They treat me as if I were the president of Finland.”
Jude Law as Putin is superb — “I’m not interested in the Nobel Peace Prize. I want war.” I am not sure if we can ever understands super-monsters like Hitler or Putin, men to whom no lives matter. Their intellectual mediocrity combined with their satanic darkness makes their brand of evil particularly unnerving — though I guess that is what blood-thirsty dictators have in common, along with being shrewd rather than bright, and being poorly educated and contemptuous of education — particularly when it comes to history, which they’d rather make, at any cost, than learn anything from.
“The Wizard of Kremlin” cannot be called a good movie, but it manages to be frightening. It’s not labeled as a horror movie, and it doesn’t invent monsters — it just serves them up, unnervingly real.
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NOSTALGIA
Nostalgic memories score significantly higher on personal agency than everyday memories do.
The nostalgia epidemic may signal that your daily experience is increasingly being authored for you.
Anemoia, or nostalgia for a time you never lived, may reflect a longing for self-authored experience itself.
Decoding what's underneath a nostalgic pang can reveal what's actually missing in your present life.
I was zooming through the airport the other day when I saw a kid, maybe 19 or 20, wearing the exact pair of wide-leg baggy jeans I wore in 1993. I'd bought mine at a rundown suburban mall in Northern California because I thought they made me look like a guy who knew about skateboards and esoteric music. Seeing them on this kid more than 30 years later braced me for the oh-my-god-I'm-old feeling that comes with watching your youth show up in someone else's closet.
But that wasn't what happened. What it felt like was closer to recognition, except I couldn't figure out exactly what I was recognizing. I definitely do not want those pants back, and I don't particularly miss 1994, which I mostly remember as a time of crippling insecurity. The feeling was for something underneath the pants, some quality of experience I could suddenly feel the absence of—like the way you walk into a room and know something has been moved even though you can't say what.
Anemoia
I've been kicking this feeling over for weeks, partly because I keep seeing versions of it everywhere. The internet has decided that 2026 is the new 2016. There's even a full Wikipedia page devoted to it!
Then there's the sumptuous word anemoia, coined by the writer John Koenig, for the experience of feeling nostalgic for a time you never lived through. Millions of young people have seized on it recently because it names an ache they've been harboring without language to anchor it. They're buying film cameras, joining phone-free social clubs, building entire identities around decades that ended before they were born.
The usual explanation—that nostalgia is comfort food we reach for when the present gets hard—is true enough, and decades of research back it up. But it doesn't account for what I felt as I sprinted toward my boarding gate. That feeling wasn't warm and fuzzy the way nostalgia is supposed to be. It felt pointed, like my mind was trying to get my attention about something I hadn't noticed going missing.
Now I think I understand what's going on here.
When You Were Holding the Pen
When researchers study the content of nostalgic memories, a pattern emerges that most people don't notice: The self is almost always the protagonist. What I mean is that these aren't primarily memories of being comfortable or content or wrapped in warmth. They're disproportionately memories of acting on your own volition— organizing the road trip with a paper map, calling a friend on a landline to talk for two hours about nothing, walking into a record store with no idea what you were looking for, and spending 45 minutes finding it. The scenes your psyche considers worth preserving are the scenes where you were the one holding the pen.
A companion finding makes this richer. Experimental work at the intersection of nostalgia research and self-determination theory has suggested that when people's sense of autonomy is constrained—when they're put in situations where their ability to choose feels restricted—nostalgia fires almost reflexively, like a little alarm tripped before the conscious mind has registered what set it off. The mind senses a deficit in authorship and dips into the archive for evidence that you were once a person who caused things to happen.
And that breadcrumb lit something up for me. Because if nostalgia is what fires when the mind senses it's lost the ability to choose, I had to ask myself why that alarm has been going off so much lately.
The Curated Self
Most of us treat nostalgia as a feeling about the past, and in some obvious way, it is. But I've been convinced that it has just as much to do with the present; it's a signal you've lost more authorship over your own experience than you realize. And the reason that signal is firing so relentlessly right now has less to do with the passage of time than with how much of your daily experience has been written for you without your noticing.
Just consider how much. A recommendation engine chooses what you'll listen to on your commute. GPS tells you exactly how to get where you're going, and neuroscience research has shown that relying on it actually changes the brain, shifting you from building your own internal map to simply following the next prompt. AI drafts your emails in your voice—and your voice drafted by a machine is a contradiction that would have been incoherent five years ago.
A computer scientist named Max Hawkins noticed a version of this in the mid-2010s: his life had become so algorithmically optimized that a machine could predict his tomorrow from his yesterday. His solution was to build apps that randomized everything, from where he lived to what he ate to what events he attended. Hawkins did this for two years before he understood that the problem was never which system was directing his life. The real problem was that a system was directing his life.
I understand his experience a little too well. Nearly 10 years ago, my job as head of business marketing for Instagram was to make the platform attractive to advertisers, which meant I spent more time inside the product than I ever wanted to. We tuned the advertising algorithm so finely that I ended up buying things through the platform I never knew existed, let alone needed. I'd open my closet and realize: I didn't build it—Instagram did. So when I left the company, I deleted the app along with it. And, for better or worse, my closet feels like mine again.
Field Research
This is what makes that beautiful word anemoia so interesting. When a 19-year-old in London tells a reporter she's "nostalgic for a time when we were still doing things in the real world"—a time she was five years old, if she experienced it at all — she's talking about something far more specific than vintage aesthetics. She inherited a world where the basic ingredients of self-authored experience were replaced by systems that choose, find, and fill the spaces of boredom for you. She has never fully inhabited the mode of experience she's mourning, which is precisely why that mourning burns so hot.
Research bears this out in an unexpected way: One of the most reliable triggers of nostalgia is boredom, which psychologists increasingly define as the feeling of having lost control over your own attention. That's a jarring description of what it feels like to scroll numbingly through your feed for an hour and absorb none of it.
It's tempting to think of film cameras and vinyl records as mere fashion trends. But they're more accurately artifacts from a world in which humans steered their own attention, and that girl in London is studying them the way you'd study the remnants of a language your grandparents spoke but never taught you. Even the social memories nostalgia retrieves are wrapped up in this. They're rarely scenes of being passively surrounded by people. They are memories of architecting the connection yourself, organizing the dinner, making the call, driving across town because you felt like seeing someone or doing something. And that alone was enough.
Reading the Signal
So what do you do when that pang of nostalgia, or anemoia, hits? The drive is to chase it, to buy the baggy jeans, the vintage records, plan the unplugged weekend, romanticize whatever era the feeling attaches itself to. But the memory is really a container, not a destination. I've started conjuring up three questions, and they've changed how I hear the signal:
What quality of experience is hiding behind this memory? The song, the city, the smell, the decade: These are all packaging. What's inside? Is it an open-ended possibility? Bounded attention? Connection I built with my own hands? Name that quality, and you've found what's actually missing.
Where in your current life has that quality disappeared? Your first instinct will be to focus on when you lost it. The more useful question is where it's absent right now. Is it something about your mornings? Your commute? Your friendships? Nostalgia is almost always about what's missing now, not about some vague fondness for the past.
What's one thing you could author this week? You really don't need to overhaul your life. You need to pick up the pen in one specific place. Choose your own music, intentionally, for the long drive. Leave your phone in another room during dinner. Call someone when you're thinking about them instead of texting. Show up somewhere without GPS or a plan.
I keep thinking about that kid in the airport, as I see hordes of his doppelgängers everywhere. I finally understand that my weird feeling wasn't for 1993 or about those stupid pants. It was my mind, in the only language it had available, telling me that somewhere along the way I'd handed over the pen more than I realized. A guy in baggy jeans just happened to walk past at the moment I was ready to hear it.
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A TREASURE, OR JUST JUNK TAKING UP SPACE? NO DEMAND FOR FINE CHINA
One of the perils of my job is the church rummage sale. I always try to talk churches out of them because they are a lot of work, they don’t raise much money, and they burden the church with a lot of junk to get rid of.
The worst junk is the sets of china that always turn up. Inevitably someone donates grandma’s old dinner service and wants to put a $200 price tag on it. Yes, I know she got it as a wedding present in 1935. Fine, she fed the governor off it. No one wants it now.
One time I served a church that had a set of dishes that had survived years of rummage sales. When it didn’t sell someone would put it (and the $200 price tag) back in the attic for another year.
On my last day at that church I took the entire set to a rage room and smashed it into smithereens. Later I felt guilty so I donated $50. They were overpriced but it kept the peace.
So why does nobody want this? It doesn’t match modern tastes or eating habits, and worst of all it isn’t dishwasher safe. To top it off we’ve been trained to think of these as valuable when a thrift shop would have a hard time getting rid of this set for $20.
It was sure fun to smash though! ~ Robert Hill, Quora
Oriana:
Having once participating in a china-smashing orgy, I confirm that it’s great fun!
If you think that’s too radical, donate your “heirlooms” to the local thriftstore. There are still buyers — I’ve known people who want to display fine china, but never use it. I say get rid of it! And get rid of the credenza in which they are supposed to be stored. Donate it to a thriftstore, and get some tax refund too. Less is more.
By the way, the phrase "Less is more" was coined by Robert Browning back in 1855. And he knew it in an era when there were still servants to wash that fine china!
Saints and sages always knew: what you own, owns you.
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THE GREAT MIGRATION MYSTERY
At some point before 1680 the English educator Charles Morton made the startling discovery that swallows were living on the Moon. As he explained in his Compendium physicae, it was obvious, when you thought about it. Everyone knew that swallows disappeared in the winter; but no one seemed to know where they went. Morton had looked everywhere. They didn’t seem to hide in their nests, in the clefts of trees, or even at the bottom of ponds.
He therefore reasoned that they must be somewhere else, where no one could find them – namely, the Moon. And why not? Morton was well aware that Galileo had found mountains and seas on the Moon 70 years before; and he had probably also read Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), in which an imaginary traveler meets a race of birds on its surface.
The swallows’ journey was less arduous than might have been imagined, Morton argued.
According to his calculations, they flew at an average speed of 125 miles per hour for two months. During their trip, they encountered no air resistance and were unaffected by gravity. They were sustained by excess body fat, stored away during the summer months, and spent most of the time asleep, waking up only when they felt the lunar cold.
It was, of course, the most appalling hogwash. That Morton – an otherwise brilliant man – should have proposed such a fanciful solution to the mystery of the swallow’s whereabouts was the result of an intense battle over the nature of scientific reasoning, which had been raging for centuries – and which is still raging today.
Hidden hirundines
Like so many of the most challenging problems, the ‘swallow problem’ hadn’t seemed all that difficult at first. Keen observers of nature, the earliest Greeks were aware that swallows disappeared. Indeed, so proverbial was the swallows’ absence that poets and playwrights used them as a shorthand for the coming of winter and the return of spring. In Works and Days, Hesiod noted that, when the ‘shrill-voiced’ swallow came ‘to call men to the dawn’, the time for pruning vines had passed; while in Aristophanes’ Birds, its appearance was a sign that people should ‘sell their warm tunic and buy some light clothing’.
Common sense told them that swallows migrate abroad – although where they could not say. Given that some lived in Egypt all year round, as Herodotus had noted, they assumed it must be somewhere hot.
The trouble began with Aristotle. Unlike many earlier philosophers, whose approach had been essentially anecdotal, his attempt to understand the natural world was based on a structured methodology. He would first observe an animal as carefully as he could and then endeavor to infer general truths about the species, based on what he had seen. This represented a dramatic advance.
But insofar as swallows were concerned, his fondness for generalization led him to an unusual conclusion. In his Historia animalium he noted that some swallows had been found ‘in hollow places, almost stripped of feathers’. From this, Aristotle reasoned that, while some swallows, which live near to the places of which they are ‘permanent’ inhabitants, migrate, others, which live further away, choose to hibernate instead, hiding themselves in the hollows of trees during winter months.
For many years, Aristotle’s argument had little impact – especially among the Romans. Eclectic by inclination and syllogistic by temperament, they often preferred to place their trust more in particulars they knew from experience than in any generalities they might infer. In common with earlier Greek writers, Marcus Varro – a noted lover of birds – recognized that swallows were ‘strangers’ (advenae); while Pliny the Elder had no doubt that they migrated to ‘neighboring countries’, such as Egypt or Libya, where they sought ‘sunny retreats … on the mountain sides’.
Buttressed by the Christian adoption of swallows as an allegory of the soul, such sensible views enjoyed wide currency in the centuries which followed. In the early seventh century, for example, Isidore of Seville noted simply that the swallow ‘flies across the sea and dwells there in the winter’. So too, in the 12th century, the Aberdeen Bestiary observed that ‘the swallow flies across the sea, as the truly penitent long to quit the sorrows and commotions of this world’.
With the rediscovery and translation of Aristotle’s works in the mid-13th century, however, the myth of the hibernating hirundine reared its head again. Sanctioned by the authority accorded to the Stagirite’s name and strengthened by the widespread adoption of his inductive methodology, it soon gained status as an established fact, embellished with all manner of speculation. In his Quaestiones super De animalibus (1258), for instance, the scholastic philosopher Albertus Magnus not only repeated the fantasy that swallows hibernated during the winter, but went on to suggest that they actually stopped breathing while hidden.
Neither the coming of the Renaissance nor the Voyages of Discovery did anything to dent the popularity of Aristotle’s thesis. Though classical texts were now read with a more critical eye, the hibernation of swallows continued to enjoy widespread acceptance. In the third volume of his Historia animalium (1551), the Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner repeated Aristotle’s views unquestioningly; while in the Shepheardes Calender (1579), Edmund Spenser observed that spring begins when the swallow ‘peeps out of her nest’.
Indeed, even more ridiculous versions of Aristotle’s theory began to appear. The most extraordinary came from the Swedish archbishop, Olaus Magnus. In Historia de gentibus septentrinalibus (1555) Magnus reasoned that, since swallows could often be seen diving into pools to drink, they hibernated not in hollows or nests, but underwater. At autumn’s end, he explained, they gathered over lakes and rivers, before plunging headlong into the depths and allowing themselves to sink to the bottom. There they remained, immersed in mud, until the coming of the spring. According to Magnus, this was a fact well known to fishermen. Whereas the inexperienced dragged them up in nets in the vain hope of reviving them, the old hands – who knew that they could not survive the experience – let them be.
The wanderer returns
By the beginning of the 17th century, however, Aristotle’s hold had begun to weaken. Following the publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), a new approach to scientific reasoning had taken hold. Whereas, in the past, there had been a tendency to generalize wildly from a few haphazard observations and to accept the authority of tradition, it was now recognized that no proposition could be regarded as true which was not based on verifiable facts.
An important center of this new method was Cambridge, where a group of naturalists began to form around John Ray. Of these, the most noteworthy was Francis Willughby. Applying Bacon’s method to the study of ornithology, he realized that, if birds were to be properly understood, it was necessary to observe them systematically for himself; and to this end, he traveled the length and breadth of Europe in search of suitable specimens.
In his Ornithologiae libri tres (1676) – published under Ray’s supervision shortly after his death – he challenged received wisdom, including about swallows. Having found no evidence for hibernation, he rejected the notion that they spent the winter either in the hollows of trees, or at the bottom of lakes. He had no doubt that they migrated to warmer climes; and – now that improvements in shipbuilding and navigation had made transoceanic crossings normal – he had no difficulty believing that they might travel long distances.
Not everyone was convinced, though. Even among those of an empirical bent, there were many who continued to cling to the myth of hibernation. Some felt that Willughby’s reasoning was at fault. That he had failed to observe a hibernating swallow for himself was not enough to rule the possibility out, they argued – especially when there were plenty of country folk who were prepared to swear that they had seen birds dragged up from the bottom of lakes.
Carl Linnaeus had no hesitation in repeating Magnus’ theory of mudbound hibernation in his Systema naturae (1758); and, a little later, Samuel Johnson boldly asserted that swallows ‘certainly sleep all the winter …in the bed of a river’. Others simply thought hibernation a more likely choice for a ‘domestic’ bird like the swallow, which nested in the eaves of houses. In The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), Gilbert White refused to believe that so potent a symbol of the English countryside could ever leave its shores.
Such doubters were soon put straight, however. Recognizing that observation could not prove a negative, John Hunter set out to test the hibernation theory experimentally. He first equipped an icehouse with artificial roots and a makeshift pond. Into this, he released 20 swallows at the end of autumn and waited to see if – and where – they would hibernate: all, however, died. It was grisly proof that Aristotle – and his method – had been wrong all along.
The swallow has landed?
This still left a problem. If swallows did migrate, where did they go? The mystery was infuriating. After such a bitter struggle to overcome the errors of Aristotelian science, it was galling that the Baconian method should have fallen short at the last hurdle. Everyone wanted to know the answer. In ‘The Swallow’ (1797) the poet Charlotte Smith imagined an ‘Indian sage’ who could speak the language of birds and wished that she, too, could ‘know from what wide wilderness’ swallows ‘came across the sea’.
Induction was not the only form of scientific reasoning, however. At the same time as Bacon had outlined his method in the Novum Organum, René Descartes had argued that, since the senses could be deceived, knowledge should not be based on observation alone, but deduced from first principles. This insight was particularly relevant to mathematics; but there were some who believed that deductive reasoning could also be brought to bear on the natural sciences.
Charles Morton was among them. Though his idea that swallows flew to the moon was patently ridiculous, it was a sensible enough attempt to solve a problem that had eluded inductive reasoning by deductive means. Given the extent of scientific knowledge in the late 17th century, each step of his argument was perfectly logical; and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it was difficult to disprove. It certainly wasn’t any less plausible than any other explanation – as many poets pointed out. In ‘Saturday; or, the Flights’ (1773) John Gay wrote that the moon was ‘where swallows in winter’s season keep’. Resignedly, John Dryden reflected that:
… whether upwards to the moon they go,
Or dream the winter out in caves below,
Or hawk at flies elsewhere, concerns us not to know.
In like fashion, Alexander Pope recognized that the swallow might just as easily be ‘in the moon’ as anywhere else.
Not until the 19th century was the mystery finally solved – by observation. As British rule in India became more established and European colonialism extended across the southern hemisphere, naturalists were able to witness swallows taking up their winter perches. By 1864, Algernon Charles Swinburne was able to assert with confidence that swallows fly ‘to the sun and the south’.
But how swallows find their way to the other side of the world is still something of a conundrum. Though it has recently been shown that they navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field, the means by which they perceive its fluctuations has not yet been established. Some have suggested that their eyes might be equipped with special receptors; others that hearing might be involved. The truth, however, remains elusive. Even after centuries of debate, we are still far from understanding the flighty swallow. As Charlotte Smith sighed in her poem:
Alas! how little can be known;
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/great-migration-mystery
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THIS PAINT COULD COOL YOUR HOME AND HARVEST WATER FROM THE AIR
As global temperatures rise and water scarcity worsens, a nanoengineered paint developed by researchers in Australia aims to tackle both — with the stroke of a brush.
For University of Sydney scientists Chiara Neto and Ming Chiu, these growing pressures sparked an idea: a rooftop coating that could cool buildings and harvest water from the air.
That work evolved into startup Dewpoint Innovations, founded in 2022 with ambitions beyond cooling paint to a broader rethink of how infrastructure is designed: If rooftops across a city could reflect heat and collect water, they could become part of the climate solution.
In a warming world, cities are becoming heat traps. Concrete and rooftops absorb the sun’s energy, raising temperatures, leading to what’s known as the urban heat island effect — where cities experience higher temperatures.
That is the first challenge Dewpoint Innovations is targeting: “Our paint will significantly reduce the heat load the sun puts on cities,” said Chiu, co-inventor and chief technology officer at Dewpoint Innovations.
To achieve that effect, the specially engineered nanomaterials use a process called passive radiative cooling to reflect most of the sun’s energy and release heat back into the sky — allowing roof surfaces to stay cooler than the surrounding air without using energy.
Typical commercial white paint reflects around 70% to 80% of incoming sunlight, said Distinguished Professor Baohua Jia, a nanotech expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who is unaffiliated with Dewpoint Innovations.
Dewpoint’s coating demonstrated solar reflectance of up to 96% in a six-month outdoor trial reported in 2025. That higher reflectivity means less heat was absorbed, keeping roof surfaces up to 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than the surrounding air and reducing heat transfer into buildings.
In a three-month field trial in Sydney in late 2023, Dewpoint’s roof paint stayed up to 30 degrees Celsius cooler than a standard dark roof — translating to an estimated reduction of up to 34% in household cooling energy use.
For Jia, those results point to a broader potential. She believes Dewpoint’s roof coating offers a scalable way to curb the urban heat island effect. “This technology can potentially drastically reduce ambient urban temperatures, ease heat stress and reduce reliance on air conditioning, making it a tangible tool for climate adaptation in dense urban areas,” she said.
Water from air
“One of the amazing properties of having a surface that is maintaining a cooler temperature, while the rest of the environment is increasing in heat, is that it also encourages any moisture in the air to condense on its surface,” Dewpoint chief executive officer Perzaan Mehta told CNN.
It’s the same basic process that causes water to form on the outside of a cold glass.
While still in the development phase, in early trials, the system demonstrated that it could collect 74 liters (19.5 gallons) of water per day from a 200 square meter (2,153 square foot) roof. Metha said this is roughly the amount used by a five-minute shower in areas that have more water abundance.
It cannot replace a home’s full water supply, but Mehta said it can serve as a supplemental source: “It’ll help reduce the burden, but it’s not the miracle cure.”
Through modeling data collected so far, Dewpoint has found that a minimum relative humidity of around 70% is needed for water collection to work — like that found in coastal, tropical areas such as Singapore or the Amazon Basin in South America.
“In the tropics, you’re going to get much better performance, and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of the international interest from our products,” Mehta said.
Jia said passive water harvesting is one of the most exciting, fast-growing trends in the radiative cooling field. While performance varies with humidity, wind and temperature, she said, ongoing field optimizations are improving water yield consistency, even in semi-arid regions.
Dewpoint sees its water capture system being used in a variety of ways: the water could feed into existing rainwater systems for irrigation or be filtered for drinking and household use.
Beyond human applications, the cooling technology could also help support wildlife, Chiu said, by reducing heat stress underneath animal shelters and providing water during droughts.
Between 2019 and 2020, drought and extreme heat fueled months of bushfires across Australia, devastating ecosystems and affecting around 80% of the population. During the crisis, images of firefighters giving water to dehydrated koalas helped shape Chiu’s thinking around atmospheric water capture.
“Water capture systems could be deployed as constructive features in the middle of nowhere to generate water from the air so wildlife can have access to drinking water when they need it and they couldn’t find it anywhere,” Chiu said.
DESIGNING CITIES THAT FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE
“There is a future where you’d be able to purchase this paint and apply it on your roof,” Mehta said.
Dewpoint is currently preparing for more extensive trials of its paint on Australian rooftops and potentially overseas, with the goal of commercializing the product for distribution through Haymes Paint, an Australian-owned company.
Andrew Brewer, group merchandise and product manager of Haymes Paint, told CNN it is excited to bring this sustainable technology to market.
Brewer noted the barrier to entry into an already-established industry can be tough: “Project builders default to known products,” he said, adding that adoption will depend on independently validated performance, whether the energy savings justify the upfront cost and compatibility with standard application methods.
“Over the longer term, as sustainability and heat management increase in importance in construction, we foresee increased demand for products that contribute to a cooling effect,” Brewer added.
In a three-month trial in Sydney, Dewpoint’s roof paint stayed up to 30°C (86°F) cooler than a standard dark roof, reducing estimated cooling energy use by up to 34%.
Mehta said that, “In general, we expect to be at a similar price point to functional paints, which tend to be 50-100% more expensive than regular paint,” noting that pricing will be market specific.
Other highly reflective, ultra-white paints are in development to help cool buildings and cut down on air conditioning usage. Researchers are even tapping into machine learning to create an AI-designed cooling paint — that could enable buildings to stay between five to 20 degrees Celsius (41 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than traditional paint during midday exposure.
Radiative cooling products still face challenges like durability over time, reduced performance in cloudy or variable weather, slightly higher upfront costs and a lack of standardized testing and building codes, Jia told CNN. But these are actively being addressed, she added, with improvements in materials, design and manufacturing expected to make the technology more reliable and widely adopted
As research and industrialization continue, Jia says the field of passive radiative cooling will play “an increasingly vital role in cooling cities, cutting carbon emissions and securing water supplies, all without consuming precious energy or relying on artificial refrigerants.”
Dewpoint’s ultimate vision is to see its paint become integral to urban planning and development: “I think it would be fantastic to see Dewpoint as part of the toolkit that city planners and architects have going forward,” Mehta said, “and have products like ours become part of the regulatory framework of how we think about cities being designed.”
Red Cross workers carry the coffin of a person who died of Ebola at a health center in Rwampara, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on Wednesday, May 20.
As a deadly Ebola outbreak tears through northeast Democratic Republic of the Congo, many first responders are turning a critical eye on events that preceded the crisis: layoffs of health workers funded by the United States, shortages of critical medical supplies and a steep reduction in American support for global aid programs.
The World Health Organization says more than 170 deaths are thought to be linked to this outbreak, with nearly 750 suspected cases so far and it’s warning that “we know the scale of the epidemic in DRC is much larger.” It also said this strain of the virus – for which there is no specific vaccine or treatment – could have been circulating for months before it was detected.
There are several reasons for this delay, WHO says: the unusual strain of the virus, weak health infrastructure in the rural area where it originated and ethnic conflict in the region that hampered testing. But the tardy response has also shed an uncomfortable light on the real-world costs of the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid and its withdrawal from WHO, the global health body tasked with managing outbreaks of this kind.
While the Trump administration is keen to point blame elsewhere, aid workers and experts said US funding cutbacks and layoffs in multiple areas have hampered the world’s ability to respond to Ebola.
The Trump administration’s cuts are four-pronged: It withdrew funding from WHO, dissolved the US Agency for International Development (USAID), made cutbacks at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is in the process of reducing the total health aid it gives to DRC and Uganda, the countries at the center of the epidemic. All of those moves have weakened global health systems that are vital for effective responses to outbreaks like this one, experts told CNN.
“When you add up all of those elements, it’s hard to see how there could not have been an effect on the surveillance and response capacities in these countries,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research and polling organization.
In one specific example, the International Rescue Committee, which has humanitarian responders on the ground in the DRC, said US funding cuts contributed to delayed detection of the virus.
“Weakened disease surveillance systems following severe health funding cuts in eastern DRC are contributing to the rapid escalation of the latest Ebola outbreak,” the IRC said in a statement. Heather Reoch Kerr, the group’s country director for DRC, added: “Years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts have left many health facilities without adequate protective equipment, surveillance capacity, or frontline support needed to respond quickly and safely.”
A senior State Department official claimed on Tuesday that none of the changes under the Trump administration hampered its efforts to respond to the outbreak. This official said that it had responded swiftly once the outbreak was identified by the WHO and that “the Ebola management programs carried over” and funding awards carried over after the dismantling of USAID.
“There was no specific person or program associated with USAID in this region that would have detected this or contributed to a detection framework here,” the official told reporters. They claimed that “numerous staff who have worked on these issues” were retained from USAID.
The CDC’s incident manager for the Ebola response, Dr. Satish Pillai, said Tuesday that the CDC has worked in the area for decades, with 100 staff in Uganda and nearly 30 staff members in DRC. The agency said it has also brought hundreds of people into the emergency response that it launched this week.
Health officials now say the first death thought to be linked to this outbreak occurred in Ituri Province in northeast Congo on April 20. But the outbreak wasn’t officially declared until May 15, after a delay in detection since testing for the rare Bundibugyo strain couldn’t be carried out locally. Samples had to be transported more than a thousand miles away to a lab in Kinshasa for confirmation, according to humanitarian workers in the region.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday blamed the World Health Organization for being “a little late to identify this thing,” while acknowledging the other complicating factors.
“It’s a little tough to get to it, because it’s in a rural area, so it’s kind of confined in a hard to get to place in a war-torn country, unfortunately,” he said.
But experts note that the cutoff of US funding to WHO prompted staff reductions at the global organization, and no other donor country has filled those WHO funding gaps. (Other countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, also cut foreign aid in 2025 for global health and development.)
Despite the State Department comments, two former USAID officials told CNN that many of the people with experience responding to outbreaks of viruses like Ebola, as well as the relationships with local health officials, were fired in the dismantling of USAID.
One of the former USAID officials, who worked in the DRC, noted that although USAID didn’t have health programs in Ituri Province, it still could have helped to serve as “the glue” to coordinate health officials, NGOs and donors'
“You can have a ton of experts come in … but if you can’t actually get people out or pay health workers or supply them with the things that they need, there’s a real limitation there, and that’s what we lost with USAID,” the former official explained.
The IRC said emergency responders are already on the back foot, having to prioritize airlifting basic protective equipment – like gloves, masks and hospital gowns – to healthcare facilities.
In the past, those facilities would have had supplies already stocked.
Before last year, the US government funded a range of the organization’s outbreak preparedness activities in eastern DRC, but the IRC said much of that funding ended in March 2025. IRC’s Vice President for emergencies, Bob Kitchen, acknowledged that the US is now mounting an emergency response but “with a very small checkbook.”
Speaking from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Greg Ramm of the nonprofit Save the Children summed up the gravity of the situation: “None of us have enough funding.”
Ramm and other experts have warned that many more people will die if the broader health system collapses, which is why it’s critical that people with Ebola seek treatment and that health facilities remain open to treat other diseases like malaria and malnutrition.
The State Department said that it “mobilized an initial $23 million in bilateral foreign assistance to immediately bolster each country’s own response, supporting surveillance, laboratory capacity, risk communication, safe burials, entry and exit screening, and clinical case management” and would fund “up to 50 treatment clinics, and associated frontline costs being established in Ebola-affected regions of the DRC and Uganda.”
‘Stripping money away from CDC’
The CDC is leading the US response to the outbreak, alongside WHO and national health authorities in the affected countries.
“We are incredibly short-staffed across the board,” one CDC expert working on the response told CNN, noting that numerous CDC experts have been fired, quit or retired without being backfilled over the past year and a half.
The agency’s global staffing and public health infrastructure around the world have taken a hit.
That’s in part because much of the CDC’s global work is funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program – but the State Department has withheld roughly $700 million from the CDC for the PEPFAR program this year, according to health policy analyst sources. Some malaria funding has also been withheld, sources said.
“They have been relentless in the last year – the political leadership and State Department – about stripping money away from CDC, saying that we have too many staff overseas,” the CDC source told CNN.
The source explained that money for the HIV/AIDS program helps pay for public health teams and infrastructure, like labs and surveillance systems.
The same staff and systems that help stop HIV epidemics are also those that often halt other epidemics, the source said, adding: “Our funding and our teams in east Africa, central Africa are definitely depleted.”
Asked about withheld funding, a State Department spokesperson disputed it and said, “PEPFAR funds for HHS and CDC to support US health foreign assistance programs continue to flow from the Department of State.”
Dismantling USAID diminished available workers
Previous responses to Ebola outbreaks also relied heavily on USAID partners, according to infectious disease physician Dr. Fiona Havers, formerly an epidemiologist at the CDC who was deployed to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak in 2014. For example, USAID contract workers handled setting up clinics, importing ambulances, contacting people with suspected cases and staffing isolation facilities.
But last year, the Trump administration canceled thousands of foreign aid work contracts, as it dismantled USAID and folded the few remaining programs under the State Department.
“It’s not just the funding piece. … All of those aid groups have had their programs shut down, their clinics closed, the community health workers fired,” Havers told CNN. “Those groups are no longer available, or available in much more diminished capacity” to pivot to the Ebola response.
The former USAID officials said there has been a loss of goodwill between the US government and the local health authorities and partners on the ground because of the way funding was so suddenly cut last year.
“In DRC, we were the largest health donor, and we really had a convening power, and people looked to us, but they also relied on us for management and oversight,” the first former USAID official said. “We lost all respect and credibility.”
The second former official recalled when Elon Musk quipped last year that he had “accidentally canceled” funding to fight Ebola during an outbreak in Uganda, which he then claimed had been “immediately” restored. The former USAID official said that the cancellation of that funding meant that “everything stalled while the outbreak continued” in 2025. A year on, almost everyone on the USAID team that worked on that most recent outbreak has been fired, the former official said.
The Trump administration’s exit from WHO also means the US no longer receives information through those official reporting channels, although informal contact has continued.
“Withdrawing from the WHO just means that the US government and CDC are generally more out of the loop with information flows,” Havers added. “They’re not part of the conversation in the same way that they were, and I think that makes America less safe.”
The senior State Department official lambasted WHO for the delay in identifying the outbreak and praised the US response so far, which they said has also included the deployment of Disaster Assistance Response Teams to the DRC and Uganda.
Although the US government is mobilizing emergency funding for Ebola right now, health policy analysts told CNN that there are expected to be further cuts to global health programs in the future.
CNN has reported that the Trump administration plans to redirect $2 billion in funding intended for global health programs to cover the cost of closing USAID, according to a copy of the congressional notification obtained by CNN. That plan includes $647 million in funding reductions for global health security.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/22/africa/ebola-us-aid-cuts-drc-uganda-intl
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HOW PREGNANCY REWIRES THE MOTHER’S BRAIN
Becoming a parent is a life-altering experience. It’s also a mind-altering experience, according to new research—literally. Brain scans of new moms showed that the areas involved in processing social information got re-wired after their first pregnancy, and those changes lasted for at least two years. The changes may help new moms bond with and take care of their babies.
The findings, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, provide the first evidence that pregnancy causes long-term changes in the human brain. But they’re not altogether surprising.
Puberty (which, like pregnancy, involves raging hormones) is known to reorganize adolescent brains.
Change can be good
Postdoctoral researcher Elseline Hoekzema and her colleagues at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona compared the MRI scans of 25 women before and after their first pregnancies.
They discovered the moms’ gray matter volume was reduced in a few areas. (Gray matter consists of uninsulated neurons that process information, and the cells that support them.) Neither first-time fathers nor men and women who never had children experienced brain changes during the study, so the researchers think it’s the pregnancy itself that causes the rewiring.
The brain regions that changed in first-time mothers are involved in understanding the thoughts, emotions, desires, and motivations of others.
And although having a lower volume of gray matter in those areas might sound like a bad thing, it’s not—Hoekzema thinks it might mean the pathways there are getting fine-tuned into a specialized and more efficient network.
Changes in those brain areas may help the new mom to recognize what her infant needs, to form a healthy mother-infant bond, and for the baby to grow up emotionally healthy.
Indeed, the changes and the mothers’ bonds to their babies seem to be linked. Seeing photos of their babies activated many of the same areas that changed during pregnancy.
The researchers followed up on the study participants two years after giving birth, and found the changes still held.
“I would suspect that the changes may be permanent,” says Hoekzema, “but this is pure speculation at this point.”
“Pregnancy brain”?
During pregnancy, many women report feeling forgetful or less mentally sharp. Hoekzema and her colleagues tested women’s memory before and after pregnancy and didn’t notice any changes. However, they didn’t measure those things during pregnancy, so their study doesn’t actually support or refute the common notion of “pregnancy brain”.
New questions
Hoekzema and her colleagues have a lot of questions that they hope to answer next. What happens when a woman gets pregnant a second time? Do the structural changes lead to changes in brain activity and performance? And could they possibly be used to predict postpartum depression?
“This study has opened up a complete new line of investigation, and I imagine we will be studying this for many years to come,” says Hoekzema, who was actually pregnant with her first child while analyzing the data, and is now pregnant with her second child.
“I have to say honestly that at first I was a little intimidated by these changes,” she says. “However, having actually experienced this once, I indeed have the impression that pregnancy and motherhood has changed me, but in subtle ways. I am still me, but a bit of a different version.”
https://www.popsci.com/pregnancy-re-wires-brains-moms-to-be/
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CHEWING IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN
While it's widely known that chewing more improves digestion, research suggests it can also boost our brains and even help fend off Alzheimer’s.
For once chewing a shallot 722 times before swallowing it, Horace Fletcher was dubbed "The Great Masticator". The American self-taught nutritionist believed food should be chewed "until it is completely liquefied" and it "practically swallows itself". Fletcher even estimated that vigorous chewing could have saved the US economy of the early 20th Century more than half a million dollars a day (roughly $19.5m in today's money), because the average person would have ingested half a pound (227g) less food daily.
Fletcher's doctrine may have been a little extreme, "but in some aspects, he was actually right", says Mats Trulsson, professor in the department of dental health at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
Chewing more can provide a wide range of health benefits, from improving digestion and helping people consume fewer calories to alleviating stress and anxiety and improving cognition by solidifying memory skills and boosting attention span. As there is a correlation between tooth health and Alzheimer's disease and dementia, some experts argue that improving patients' dental health could even help reverse mental aging.
THE HISTORY OF CHEWING
Like most animals, humans have "had teeth and jaws for millions of years," says evolutionary and ecological biochemist Adam van Casteren at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. But they've gone through many changes throughout prehistory.
The earliest hominins, who lived roughly six to seven million years ago, had teeth similar to those of apes today; especially helpful for eating "lots of large, fleshy fruit" abundant in the forest habitats that our early ancestors lived in, says Van Casteren. But as rainforests gave way to more woodlands, open habitats and even savannah-like ecologies, hominins had to contend with "more mechanically challenging foods", says Van Casteren, such as seeds, nuts, and tubers. So they evolved to favor an increase in molar size, with bigger jaws and faces to house all those teeth, alongside the larger muscles needed to power them.
With the development of tools, food processing, and agriculture, as well as fire to cook food, we also stopped needing such lengthy bouts of mastication, explains Van Casteren. Today, humans spend roughly 35 minutes chewing every day, compared to 4.5 hours for our closest ape relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos and 6.6 hours for gorillas and orangutans.
Despite these evolutionary changes, the purpose of chewing remains the same. "We mammals are such complicated chewers because we want to get as much energy out of our food to power our warm-blooded metabolisms," says Van Casteren.
AN IMPORTANT FIRST STEP
At the most basic level, chewing breaks food down into small particles and moistens them with saliva so that they can be easily swallowed. "It's the first phase of digestion," says Andries van der Bilt, a pioneer in the field of oral physiology and chewing, who worked as a researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands for over three decades.
Not only does chewing increase saliva production and the amount of digestive enzymes like amylase that help break down food, it also triggers the gut and pancreas to secrete juices that will help process food further, too. "If you don't chew, the gut is not prepared to handle food," says Trulsson.
The act of breaking food particles into smaller pieces also increases their surface area, which means digestive juices can act on them more efficiently, says orofacial neuroscientist Abhishek Kumar, who works with Trulsson at the Karolinska Institutet. This is important for gut health. Bigger particles tend to linger in the gut longer, giving microorganisms more time to ferment them. This causes "feelings of bloatedness, fullness, constipation, and other symptoms", Kumar says.
Improving absorption and feelings of fullness
The act of chewing helps release nutrients in food, allowing our bodies to absorb them more effectively. In a 2009 study, for instance, 13 healthy adults were asked to chew a small handful of almonds 10, 25, or 40 times. When researchers collected samples of participants' poo, they discovered that the more people chewed, the less fat they excreted, suggesting that the absorption of energy from the nuts was up to a third higher. (In the early 1900s, in fact, Fletcher believed chewing more helps produce poo of superior quality – "quite dry" and smelling of a "hot biscuit".)
What's more, chewing 40 times left participants feeling fuller for longer. A separate 2013 study echoed this satiety link: when 21 participants chewed a chicken-nugget sized slice of pizza either 15 or 40 times before swallowing, those in the latter group experienced a significant reduction in hunger. They also had higher levels of CCK and GIP, two hormones that coordinate digestion in the gut, alongside suppressed levels of the "hunger hormone" ghrelin.
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Fletcherism
So-called "Fletcherism" became a curious diet fad that swept through parts of Europe and the US in the 1900s and was practiced by many notable figures. Some Asian cultures also espouse good chewing, including traditional Chinese medicine. Japan's health authorities once even introduced a Kamingu 30 campaign, encouraging citizens to chew every bite 30 times before swallowing.
~ ~ ~
Chewing more means you're also likely to consume less food, according to two separate meta-analyses that reviewed nearly 50 studies.
That's because it takes around 20 minutes for the body to adjust its production of hunger-related hormones and send signals to the brain that you're full – and chewing buys you more time. It's one reason why so many dieticians and doctors advocate slow and mindful eating over wolfing down a meal, especially if you're trying to shed some pounds. A survey of 92 children in Brazil found that those who were obese "performed fewer mastication sequences and ate faster" compared to children of normal weight.
One good way of slowing down your eating rate, in fact, is to eat more textured foods. Many studies recommend choosing solids over liquids (think oranges rather than orange juice), and high-viscosity foods over low-viscosity ones (oatmeal and flaxseeds instead of white rice or pasta).
"The texture of food can affect how full we feel, and therefore potentially help those struggling with obesity to lose weight by reducing their food intake," says Kumar.
A boost for brain health
Nutrition and digestion aside, researchers are increasingly uncovering that chewing plays an important role in other aspects of our wellbeing – especially brain health – as we get older.
"There is growing interest in the 'bite–brain axis,' which proposes that mastication is directly linked to brain health," says Kumar. Tooth loss, for instance, has also been linked with a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Memory is affected, too. In a survey involving more than 28,500 people older than 50 across 14 European countries, participants with good chewing ability or those without dentures performed better on a battery of cognitive tests. They demonstrated significantly better word recall, verbal fluency, and numeracy skills than those with chewing problems. In one study of 273 healthy people between the ages of 55 and 80, scientists found that those who retained a greater number of their natural teeth had better semantic memory (linked to knowledge and facts of the world) and long-term memory.
But why does chomping ability have anything to do with memory? Some researchers point to the multiple neural circuits connecting our chewing apparatus to the hippocampus – the region of the brain responsible for spatial learning and making new memories, which is one of the first to be damaged by Alzheimer's.
Others suggest that chewing, especially moderately hard substances, may increase blood flow to the brain, as Japanese researchers demonstrated in experiments with gum chewers. "The theory is that chewing works like a pump, pumping blood to the brain," explains Trulsson. This keeps the brain sharp and working well, he says.
To determine whether poor chewing ability can actually cause cognitive decline, and whether rehabilitation is possible, Trulsson's team is currently running an experiment replacing patients' missing teeth with implants and then studying their brain function before and up to a year after the procedure. MRI brain scans will also be used to examine if white matter lesions, a marker of poor brain vascular health, shrink with treatment.
"Wouldn't it be really cool if you can rehabilitate the brain by rehabilitating the dentition?" says Trulsson, who has recruited over 80 patients for his trial so far.
Heightening alertness
In some instances, chewing has also been found to improve concentration in the general population. One meta-analysis, comprising 21 studies, detected a weak but statistically significant improvement in attention levels of gum-chewing participants compared to non-chewers during some cognitively demanding tasks. (This research was funded by gum manufacturer Mars Wrigley, suggesting a potential conflict of interest.)
In an unrelated study of 80 participants, chewing improved alertness levels by 10% during a series of cognitive tasks. Gum-chewers also performed better on an intelligence test.
Scientists "don't really know exactly how it works," but the link between chewing and heightened attention is fairly strong, says Trulsson. There's a caveat, though: "The effect will probably not last for more than 15 to 20 minutes", although researchers aren't sure why.
Another experiment – in young adults who were asked to perform four computerised tasks simultaneously – also found significantly better alertness (nearly 20% higher) in gum chewers. Interestingly, this was accompanied by reductions in self-reported anxiety, stress and salivary cortisol levels (a common biomarker of stress).
Lowering stress
Outside the lab, chewing is a good stress-reliever too. When a group of Turkish researchers studied 100 nursing students preparing for mid-term exams, they found that students who chewed gum for at least 30 minutes daily experienced lower levels of stress, anxiety and depression. This was regardless of whether they began chewing gum 15 days or two days before their exams. For two separate groups of women undergoing elective gynecological surgery in Korea, chewing on gum helped alleviate their pre-operative anxiety. It also had this effect on 73 Turkish children who were having an intravenous cannula inserted.
Chewing seems to be a natural reflex in stressful times, says Jianshe Chen, an oral processing researcher at Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. "When some people are stressed, they start to chew unconsciously." Teeth grinding or bruxism, which uses the same jaw muscles as chewing and affects roughly one in 10 adults, is commonly triggered by stress and anxiety.
But the scientific data here is more contentious. Chen, for instance, says the evidence linking chewing to a calmer state of mind is "scattered". We're "still short of systematic studies" that confidently point to a strong association, he says. Another study, led by the same Korean researcher above, for instance, found that gum-chewing did little to alleviate the anxiety pregnant women felt as they were wheeled into the operating theater for an elective caesarean section. It also failed to dent the stress levels of those working on an insolvable word puzzle.
One thing's for sure, though – eating often elevates our mood. And chewing, a crucial part of this process, releases flavors in food, and combined with texture and aroma, makes "your eating experience much richer and more pleasant," says Chen, who also studies the sensory perception of food. So, according to this logic, chewing your food better could boost your mental health, too. But rather than choosing sugary gum, you might want to consider chewing a healthy, textured snack before a stressful task.
Don't overdo it, though. Unlike Fletcher, most experts don't think there is a magic number for chewing. "Chew in a normal way until you feel it's okay to swallow, which will be different for different people," says Van der Bilt. "Just enjoy your food."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260514-the-hidden-health-benefits-of-chewing
Oriana:
There is also chewing gum sweetened with xylitol, which is good for oral hygiene.
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COFFEE LINKED TO LOWER ANXIETY
A new study suggests that regularly drinking four cups of coffee a day could have a positive impact on mood and stress levels.
Changes in mood and stress were also associated with changes in gut bacteria and the levels of certain metabolites.
Most of the mood and gut changes occurred alongside drinking both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee.
Coffee doesn’t just impact your energy levels first thing in the morning; it also influences the makeup of the gut microbiota, which in turn could influence mood and stress levels.
“Coffee is more than just caffeine,” said study author John Cryan, PhD, Principal Investigator at APC Microbiome Ireland, in a press release. “It’s a complex dietary factor that interacts with our gut microbes, our metabolism, and even our emotional well-being.”
Research has already established that there is a two-way relationship between the gut and the brain, known as the gut-brain axis. This means that changes in the brain can lead to changes in the gut, and vice versa.
Other research has suggested that gut microbes react to coffee, as well as associating different levels of coffee consumption with certain health outcomes. These include reduced risks of some chronic diseases, lower rates of all-cause mortality, and a lower risk of depression.
The study began with a comparison of one group of 31 non-coffee drinkers with 31 coffee drinkers. Coffee drinkers were people who regularly consumed between 3 and 5 cups of coffee a day.
How coffee reshapes the gut
The researchers found that when participants returned to drinking coffee after the 14-day abstinence period, both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee were associated with improvements in mood.
The participants’ questionnaires revealed lower levels of stress, depression, and impulsivity after returning to either type of coffee.
Caffeinated coffee alone was associated with reduced anxiety and improved vigilance, attention, and blood pressure. In contrast, decaffeinated coffee was associated with improvements in learning, memory, physical activity, and sleep.
Interestingly, the researchers did not note any differences between the coffee drinkers and the non-coffee drinkers at the start of the study and after the abstinence period when it came to many of these factors. This included blood pressure, stress, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, and physical activity.
Alongside the changes in mood and cognition, the researchers also observed several changes in the guts of the participants
During the 2-week abstinence period, they noted changes in levels of certain metabolites, which are small molecules that are produced during the process of metabolism.
These levels largely returned after the participants started drinking coffee again, although levels of metabolites closely associated with caffeine did not rise for those drinking decaffeinated coffee.
Overall, the researchers identified nine key metabolites that were closely associated with coffee drinking. These included theophylline, caffeine, and selected phenolic acids, and were “strongly linked to microbial species and cognitive measures.”
There were also clear differences between the gut microbiomes of coffee drinkers compared with nondrinkers. There were higher levels of specific species of bacteria associated with positive effects of coffee.
“Our findings reveal the microbiome and neurological responses to coffee, as well as their potential long-term benefits for a healthier microbiome,” said Cryan in the press release. “Coffee may modify what microbes do collectively, and what metabolites they use.”
Medical News Today asked Cryan if it was possible that the coffee drinkers had less stress and depression after drinking coffee again due to the psychological impact of being able to return to a habitual behavior rather than this being driven by the coffee itself.
“We included both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, and both groups showed improvements in stress and depression. This suggests that non-caffeine factors, including psychological or behavioral effects, may play a role,” he said.
“However, only caffeinated coffee reduced anxiety and psychological distress, indicating that caffeine-specific biological effects are also involved,“ he added.
“Taken together, the findings suggest that the observed benefits are likely due to a combination of factors, biological effects of coffee compounds — including caffeine and (poly)phenols — microbiome-mediated mechanisms, and psychological effects linked to routine and expectations,” Doctor. John Cryan said.
The study also only investigated the effects of instant coffee. MNT asked Cryan whether different coffee types or preparation methods might provide different results.
“Different coffee types and preparation methods can significantly influence the chemical composition of the final drink,” he said. “The brew method affects levels of caffeine, (poly)phenols, and other bioactive compounds such as diterpenes and chlorogenic acids.
“In our study, we focused on controlled interventions using standardized caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee to isolate biological effects. However, instant coffee may differ from freshly brewed coffee in its polyphenol profile and processing-related compounds, which could influence how it interacts with the gut microbiome and metabolism,” Cryan explained.
Caffeinated coffee alone was associated with reduced anxiety and improved vigilance, attention, and blood pressure. In contrast, decaffeinated coffee was associated with improvements in learning, memory, physical activity, and sleep.
“While we would expect broadly similar directional effects across coffee types, the magnitude and specific microbial or metabolic responses may vary depending on preparation method,” he continued. “This is an important area for future research, particularly in the context of personalized nutrition and microbiome responses.”
For now though, this study provides additional insight into the mysteries of the gut microbiome and the role that one of the world’s favorite drinks may have to play in health.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/coffee-gut-brain-axis-mental-health-brain-health#Only-caffeinated-coffee-linked-to-lower-anxiety
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ending on beauty:
EURYDICE DANCES
I dance alone. This is not a complaint.
“Shall we dance?” I ask,
and all my selves and names
gather into the single bouquet
of my swaying body.
I place my weight
on one side, to spare
my injured, my heroic
knee – it’s even more
passionate that way,
my one-knee tango,
dancing on scar tissue.
from the tango of the eucalyptus grove.
I hold my life in my arms;
while the music lasts, we last.
I hold my death in my arms;
every night I marry myself.
“You are mine,” I sing
to everything that sings
and hums and croaks;
that dances on one leg,
hangs by one last leaf –
“Love me tender,” I croon
to the candle, a nun,
and the humming river of cars
in the street on the rim
of the ravine –
lights and shadows passing,
kissing as they pass.
~ Oriana
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