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ODYSSEUS IN BARSTOW
If you knew how much suffering awaits you,
you would stay with me, and be deathless,
croons Calypso of the Tidy Braids —
but bronze-armed Odysseus
only broods on the beach.
His gaze caresses the watery horizon.
He wants his own life, its breakable glory.
He wants to be Odysseus. We praise forever
the man who chose not to be a god.
Yet I wonder: would I choose a life
rich with the journey, yet doomed to lap
at the shore of less and less —
I could sail an infinity of sunsets,
shipwrecked in Barstow, California,
in a tract named Desert Meadows,
married beyond return
to a gun collector, TV on loud,
scrawny palm trees rasping in dry wind —
My morning walk, the hills carved in crystal.
Petting the neighbors’ dogs and cats;
returning home to read about Odysseus.
I build a monument of pebbles
to the pebbles in Barstow, California.
Memorialize a dung beetle’s march,
every cloudlet with its knife-blade shadow.
every fissure in the sun-struck ground.
I trace faces of the dead in the dust —
the silent dead who sing life’s
siren song: the joy of mere existence. Even
in Barstow, caressed by the moonlight.
~ Oriana
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ROBERT COOVER, IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: “WHY DO YOU WRITE?”
-Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
-Because art’s life is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
-Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
-Because death, our mythless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
-Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
-Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
-Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
-Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
-Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
-Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
-Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
-Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
-Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.
-Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood.
-Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in between what we have are words.
-Because, of all the arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
-Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretensions.
-Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
-Because the world is re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
-Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression.
-Because truth, that elusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
-Because writing, in all space’s unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.
-And because, alas, what else?
(From Delta #28, June 1989; republished in Conjunctions)
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ROBERT COOVER: A LIFE IN WRITING
If you find yourself trapped in a prison-house of language, you shouldn't be surprised that your jailer is a postmodern novelist. Robert Coover is standing next to me, hands thrust casually into his trouser pockets. His face is obscured by a pair of stereoscopic 3D goggles, just like the ones I'm wearing. They give him a sort of retro-futurist look, one part Blade Runner to one part campus comedy. Coover, along with such writers as Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, Donald Barthelme and John Barth, broke open the carapace of postwar American realism to reveal a fantastical funhouse of narrative possibilities.
His relentless experimentalism, combined with a sly and often bawdy humor, have made him a writer's writer, a hero to those who feel smothered by the marshmallowy welter of pseudo-literary romance that dominates contemporary fiction. Refreshingly unconcerned with psychology, sympathy, redemption, epiphanies and conventional narrative construction (or rather, concerned with undoing these things), he is relatively unknown in Britain, where three of his books (Pricksongs & Descants, Gerald's Party and Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid) have recently been released as Penguin Modern Classics.
There is, as Derrida wrote, nothing outside the text. Except that in this case there is. We are in a lab at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, playing with a Cave (computer automated virtual environment), an immersive 3D space which for many years Coover has promoted as a tool for writing. He is interested, he says, in "how you do narrative, which is typically linear, in a space that is non-linear". In a Cave that space is a room-sized cube, on to whose interior walls high-resolution projectors display images. Our LCD shutter glasses are darkening first one eye, then the other at very high speed, in synchronization with the projectors, which are displaying different images for each eye. My glasses have short stalks protruding from them, topped by little balls, which allow infrared sensors to pick up positional information and alter the image depending on where I'm looking. I have a controller that allows me to move around. It is, to use a technical term, cool.
Immersive 3D is, in some ways, not an obvious form for a writer. These tools are usually used in industry for architectural visualizations – my one previous experience of a Cave was flying through a proposed Swedish container port. The unwieldiness of the system and the fundamental oddity of the project (what does it add to my experience of "The Library of Babel" to navigate through it in the form of waist-high type?) make this the sort of "blue sky" experimentation that is unlikely to lead to widely circulated results. It could be argued that the games industry now owns the territory of "non-linear narrative", with recent releases such as LA Noire edging ever further into the territory of the novel. But this fascination with play, with formal experimentation and innovative platforms for fiction is typical of Coover, who has always been eager to push the limits of narrative, sometimes to breaking point.
Born in Iowa in 1932, he studied at Indiana University, where he received a BA with a focus on Slavic studies. After a spell in the navy during the Korean war he began his literary career in the early 1960s, publishing stories in the Evergreen Review, edited by Barney Rosset of Grove Press, a champion of experimental writing who also worked with William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Hubert Selby Jr and Donald Barthelme. In 1966 Coover published his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, which deals with the rise of a religious cult centered on the survivor of a mining disaster.
The New York Times noted sniffily that "Coover writes his first novel as if he doesn't expect to make it to a second. Everything goes in it including plots for several grim short stories and more social novels, and notes for a juicy essay." His second book, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), headed further away from conventional realism (and the comfort zone of the Times book page) with its plot about the creator of a baseball dice game who gradually becomes consumed by his make-believe league, to the point where he is unable to distinguish game from reality. But it was Pricksongs & Descants, Coover's 1969 short story collection, that cemented his reputation, standing today as one of the landmarks of postwar American fiction.
The title is a metaphor for a method that Coover has elaborated throughout his career. In manuscripts of medieval European music, the notes were physically "pricked" or marked with holes or dots. The melody (the cantus firmus) could be ornamented or counterpointed with an extemporised part, known as the descant. It's common enough for musical terms to be used to describe narrative (theme, leitmotif and so on) but Coover's usage is more precise. The collection contains his most anthologized story, "The Babysitter", which is told in a hundred or so paragraphs, each separated from its neighbours by white space. The cantus firmus is conventional. The babysitter arrives to look after two children. The parents go out. She spends the evening in their house. The parents come home.
Coover's innovation is to produce descant-like variations on the possibilities of this scenario, possibilities that open up a grand guignol underworld of sex and violence beneath this suburban surface. The father fantasizes about the girl. The girl's boyfriend and his buddy plan to come over and rape her. She plays with the little boy's penis as she gives him a bath. These events are not definitive. Contradictory possibilities exist simultaneously. The girl is raped and unraped. The father acts and does not act on his lascivious fantasies. The reader is expected to hold the story open, thereby exposing the mechanics of narrative for inspection.
The effect is like the quantum-theoretical notion of "superposition", in which an unobserved particle exists in both of two possible states, before "collapsing" on to one or other possibility. The story ends with the mother exclaiming from the kitchen "Why, how nice! . . . The dishes are all done!" but also being told "your children are murdered, your husband gone, [there's] a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked".
In an essay on Pricksongs, the novelist William Gass homes in on the way these "narrative slices" work like cards, giving "the impression that we might scoop them all up and reshuffle, altering not the elements but the order or the rules of play". As a child Coover made up "simple narrative-like games, played with dice or cards". This developed into an interest, not so much in chance process (like John Cage) but in the possibility of non-linear narrative architecture (closer to Julio Cortázar or BS Johnson), a concern that led directly to his more recent technological experiments. "By the time hypertext came along," he notes, "I was already well into it."
In the 60s, Coover experimented with marginal punchcards, a now-obsolete filing system using a series of peripheral holes, some cut clear to the edge of the card, so that when rods were slipped through the holes in a stack of cards, those cards which did not have that position punched out remained on the rod, while the target cards fell out of the stack. This meant the cards could be indexed in several ways, making it a sort of physical precursor to the idea of "tagging" a digital file.
Coover used this system to develop a thesaurus, and tried to use it for fiction-writing, creating cards for characters and narrative elements in ways that sound similar to some of the techniques later used in role-playing and computer adventure games. The problem was, as he admits, that his fictional web of inter-relations rapidly became too dense. "It took a lot of effort. You think of a character, you develop information about that character, you start to punch it for something, it leads to another thought about the character, about another type of character, and suddenly you have 15 notes that you hadn't thought of before and none of them punched."
The fictions he developed with this system often used pre-existing material such as The Arabian Nights to provide a lexicon of elements from which to work. In 2005, McSweeney's published A Child Again, a collection which included a story in the form of playing cards, which had its origin in these early punchcard experiments. Does he feel his work relates to that of the French proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel, who in the years before the first world war generated works such as Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa using a highly artificial set of formal constraints based on homophonic puns?
He agrees that he is interested in Roussel, but was never attracted to the idea of constraints as a way of generating stories. He talks about "having fun with the writing", and the formal manipulation of his source material appears to be more interesting to him than what he dismissively calls "angst writing", a term that seems to encompass most psychologically driven fiction, from Henry James to Jonathan Franzen. The use of fairytales and genre elements (recent novels spin out of noir, the western and pornography) are a way of freeing himself from the task of having to generate cards to shuffle.
He tells me a story that can serve as a sort of myth of origin. In the summer of 1960 he found himself on his own in Chicago, temporarily separated from his family. A nocturnal creature (he frequently works through the night), he was simultaneously reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and William Gaddis's monumental The Recognitions. "I really loved Augie March. The opening section, at least. But somewhere in the middle of the book the experience totally transformed, I was really ticked off. It was bad and getting worse. And I was really catching on to The Recognitions. I took Augie March and threw it across the room, and that was the last I saw of it."
Why did realist fiction make him so angry? "I didn't think of it as realistic. It used modes of response to the world that had become stultified and so were easily communicated. I learned my realism from guys like Kafka." The idea that realism is a presumptuous name for a certain highly artificial literary mode has been floating around for at least half a century, yet its implications are still widely ignored. Postmodernism, as practiced by Coover, is not simply a question of pointing out (tediously) to the reader that she is reading a novel. It's about a return to the novel's original, scandalous ability to create realities, rather than pretending to be a mirror or a movie camera. One section of Pricksongs & Descants is titled "Seven Exemplary Fictions", after the Novelas Ejemplares of Cervantes. In an introduction, Coover addresses the old master: "For your stories also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they struggled to synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities."
Coover's greatest battle with complexity is The Public Burning, a massive novel about the McCarthy era and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which appeared, after much struggle, in 1977. Coover, whose work belies the idea that postmodernism is necessarily disengaged and apolitical, had been active in campaigning against the Vietnam war, and made a short film about a 1967 campus protest against Dow Chemical, On a Confrontation in Iowa City. The authoritarian drift of US politics led him first to write a satirical novella imagining a presidential campaign by Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat (A Political Fable, 1968) and then to take a panoptical look at the anti-communist panic of the 50s. Conceived before Watergate and then completely rewritten in the wake of the scandal, The Public Burning is narrated by Richard Nixon, who struts and frets his way across a political stage dominated by a foul-mouthed, xenophobic Uncle Sam, who is locked in mortal combat with the Phantom, a shadowy and seemingly omnipresent enemy.
We're now accustomed to fictionalizations of real events and people, but in the 70s, the use of real names was a dangerous novelty. Coover's publishers were wary, as the Rosenberg prosecutor Roy Cohn had recently filed suit against CBS over the way he was portrayed in a film. "There was a lot of terror about," Coover recalled. "There were no clear precedents. I had to hire a lawyer to help me negotiate those waters. At one point he said they're never going to publish this and the thing to do is set up a company and publish it yourself." The Public Burning was finally published, and indeed made the lower reaches of the New York Times bestseller list, but then was mysteriously pulled from the shelves. Coover suspected skulduggery, and the book never had the impact on the US political scene its author hoped.
Through the 70s, Coover was living in Britain, where his interest in the fairytale brought him into contact with Angela Carter, best known for her magical realist and surreal re-tellings of fairy tales, who became a close friend. "The folk tale is very subversive," he explains. "It's different from the mythic content of a society, which is from the top down." Coover has little interest in archetypal explanations of myth and folk tales. He is more interested in breaking them open. As he wrote in the introduction to "Seven Exemplary Fictions", "The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation."
Briar Rose, written in 1996, is probably the apogee of his engagement with the form, a hilarious series of descants on the Sleeping Beauty story. It is being republished by Penguin in a volume with Spanking the Maid (1982), which performs a similar operation on that most English of forms, 19th-century sadomasochistic pornography. Beauty and her prince, like the master and the maid struggling to satisfy his exacting standards, are caught in short-circuited narrative loops that never resolve, but seem to wind down, decaying entropically until the stories come to a halt, not so much because they've ended in any "satisfactory" way, but because the wheels have fallen off.
Fictional consummation (the sense of an ending) is frustrated. Coover's characters (who are mere functions of the story) are caught up in form, battling through thickets of narrative in the hope of fulfilling their desires. "That entrapment leads to all other forms of entrapment," he explains gnomically. "Fiction is about a condition, not a process." Coover's stories are serious entertainments, devoted to play. As Cervantes put it, in his introduction to his own Novelas Ejemplares, "My intention has been to set up, in the midst of our community, a billiard-table, at which every one may amuse himself without hurt to body and soul." ~ Harry Kunzru
Robert Coover died on October 5, 2024.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/jun/27/robert-coover-life-in-writing
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WHY ELIEZER BEN YEHUDA DECIDED TO RESTORE HEBREW AND NOT ARAMAIC
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda bypassed Aramaic—a language still actively spoken by some Jewish communities—to revive Hebrew, a language without a single native speaker for nearly 2,000 years.
The decision came down to the difference between exile and sovereignty. While Aramaic was undeniably a Jewish language with a rich textual tradition, it was historically an adopted lingua franca. It represented the Jewish experience of exile, assimilation, and living under foreign empires in Babylon and the broader Near East.
Ben-Yehuda’s vision was deeply rooted in 19th-century European nationalism, which tied a people’s identity to their ancestral land and their original, indigenous tongue. Hebrew was the undisputed language of the ancient Israelites during their period of sovereignty. For Ben-Yehuda, returning to the Land of Israel without returning to the original language of the Bible was incomplete.
Transforming a sacred, ancient language into a modern, daily vernacular presented colossal challenges. The most immediate hurdle was a severe lack of vocabulary. Ancient Hebrew had words for chariots, agriculture, and temple sacrifices, but absolutely nothing for electricity, trains, newspapers, or ice cream.
To solve this, Ben-Yehuda scoured ancient texts for forgotten roots and borrowed heavily from related Semitic languages, particularly Arabic, to engineer thousands of new words. He compiled these into what would become the first modern Hebrew dictionary.
The second major challenge was intense ideological opposition. When Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem in 1881, the established ultra-Orthodox communities viewed his project as sheer blasphemy. To them, Hebrew was Lashon HaKodesh (the Holy Tongue), strictly reserved for prayer and Torah study. Using the language of the divine to ask for a cup of coffee or complain about the weather was considered a desecration. Ben-Yehuda faced ostracism, boycotts, and was even reported to the Ottoman authorities by his religious opponents.
To prove his vision was possible, Ben-Yehuda turned his own home into a linguistic laboratory. He and his wife made a strict pact to speak only Hebrew to their firstborn son, Ben-Zion (later known as Itamar Ben-Avi). The boy was kept isolated from other children to ensure he would not absorb Yiddish, Ladino, or Arabic, making him the first native Hebrew speaker in modern history.
Through sheer stubbornness, dictionary writing, and the establishment of Hebrew-language newspapers and schools, Ben-Yehuda’s obsessive linguistic experiment laid the foundation for the language spoken by millions of people today. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
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RUSSIAN FAMILIES USE AI TO 'RESURRECT' LOVED ONES KILLED IN UKRAINE
"The Special Military Operation has ended" and "Our heroes are coming home," read the billboards on the left
Rousing orchestral music plays over a video of a snowy Moscow street dotted with billboards celebrating an end to the war in Ukraine.
"The Special Military Operation is over," one fictional billboard reads, using the Kremlin-approved term for its war on Ukraine. "Our heroes are coming home."
Underneath, a beautiful, airbrushed woman pushing a stroller turns to see a man in military uniform and throws her arms around his neck in tears.
The 15-second AI-generated clip was posted on Instagram by a popular blogger with the online name Katya Jin, and the couple appear to be modeled on her and her husband.
In reality, like tens of thousands Russian soldiers, he disappeared at the front. His fate remains unknown.
AI-generated photos and videos featuring Russian soldiers have gained popularity on social media since mid-2025. They are most often posted by relatives of Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine.
In nearly all of them, the soldiers are controversially portrayed as heroes defending their country and loved ones.
Ukraine and the destruction caused by Russia's invasion is usually absent, and judging by reaction online many Ukrainians who have seen the videos have been appalled.
For some grieving families, AI content provides a way to mourn their loved ones; in some cases, deepfakes featuring deceased people are used at funerals.
Responses online to such clips are sharply divided: some say they were brought to tears, while others see the practice as unethical and deeply disturbing.
Very little is yet known about the long-term psychological and social impact of this technology on the grieving process, says Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
"Creating 'deadbots' of Russian soldiers or deepfakes of fallen Russian soldiers returning from Ukraine is extremely complex and ethically difficult to assess in a clear-cut way," she says.
BBC Russian approached Katya Jin for comment, but she did not respond to our questions.
Whether by coincidence or not, after we first reported her story, she removed her AI-generated content from Instagram and TikTok.
Until recently, she regularly posted AI videos to her 10 million TikTok followers and 50,000 Instagram followers, often alongside tutorials explaining how to make them.
Her own family's story became part of the sales pitch, and viewers could then order similar videos featuring their own loved ones.
Dozens of people said they wanted the same kind of content featuring deceased relatives. They just needed to submit photographs of themselves and their loved ones, and AI would then animate the material following specific prompts.
A couple can be shown in a specific setting or pose, and cinematic flair can then be added to the fake image. Heartfelt farewell letters can also be mocked up and placed in the hands of a deceased relative.
Many of the videos focus on soldiers killed at the front — a subject Russian authorities generally try not to draw attention to.
Usually these clips follow a set pattern: a man in uniform embraces his loved ones, then slowly walks up a staircase into a blue sky, often surrounded by angels. In others, the "ghost" of the dead soldier appears to embrace his family from heaven
'You should be ashamed'
Anna Korableva from Kamensk-Uralsky, a town east of Yekaterinburg, began making AI-generated videos with her sister in May 2025.
The aim of her "Farewell video" project, she says, is to help people cope with "unfinished farewells" and give them a chance to "embrace" husbands, parents and children again.
"In the first months of working on these videos, I cried almost every day," she told the BBC.
"Over time, I learned to separate my emotions from work. I try to focus on the technical side, to make sure the video turns out beautiful and worthy of someone's memory."
According to Korableva, most requests come from the families of soldiers killed on the battlefield in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Although the Russian government does not share reliable casualty figures, the BBC, together with Russian news outlet Mediazona and a team of volunteers, has so far verified the deaths of at least 225,000 Russian soldiers in the war.
The real death toll is believed to be much higher. [Oriana: likely as high as 500,000]
Other AI-generated videos circulating online feature Russian soldiers who are still alive and on the front line. In some clips, women wrap their husbands in angel wings, symbolically shielding them from harm.
Soldiers are often depicted as angels, with Russia's destruction of Ukraine entirely scrubbed from the visualizations
Unsurprisingly, these videos – in which Russian soldiers are portrayed as defenders and angels — provoke outrage among Ukrainians who encounter them online.
"You should be ashamed to show your 'heroes' who went to earn blood money by killing our children," one Ukrainian commented.
International generative AI tools have become difficult to access from Russia, and many have struggled to create such content themselves — turning instead to AI creators like Katya Jin and Anna Korableva.
In Russia, AI-generated military-themed photos and videos can cost between 200 roubles (£2) and 10,000 roubles (£100).
The quality varies. In some videos, the AI generates figures without limbs or produces grotesquely distorted faces.
As production costs are low, some creators have been able make substantial profits.
One AI-creator, Ulyana Lebed, who is also married to a Russian serviceman, has told the BBC she earns between 150-200,000 roubles (£1,500-£2,000) a month – roughly double the average monthly wage in Russia.
To some, this practice is akin to cashing in on grief.
"Be careful that loss doesn't come knocking at your door. Some subjects should not be touched — but you just wanted to make money," one user wrote beneath an AI-generated video of a dead Russian soldier.
These AI soldier videos are part of a broader global "digital afterlife" industry, says Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska.
Posthumous avatars are already being used in museums, courtrooms and political campaigns.
So, she sees it as unsurprising that this technology becomes even more popular during wartime, when "death and loss are dominant themes".
Ethically, the political context makes such videos "deeply problematic", she says, and on a psychological level, she believes it is unclear whether AI visualizations help people deal with grief or deepen it instead.
"In a sense, we are all in the midst of a technological and cultural experiment," Nowaczyk-Basińska says.
Some who commissioned AI videos featuring deceased loved ones have told the BBC the clips did little to ease their pain.
"Could technology help me accept that I will never hug my son again? No. It's an illusion," one woman said.
"Psychologically, no, of course it didn't help — how could it?" said another woman, who had purchased an AI-generated photo of her late husband for his headstone.
However, she did hang two other AI-generated images in her bedroom.
And others suggested the videos provide a sense of connection – even if it was part of a fantasy, or virtual world.
"Thank you, AI, for this opportunity to be with my loved one," one Russian woman wrote beneath a "farewell video" of her husband. "Soon, it will be two years since you've been gone."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy24v72n19o
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MOSCOW RESIDENTS COMPLAIN OF OILY BLACK RAIN
Specks of black oil have rained down on part of Moscow after a refinery was hit during the largest Ukrainian attack since the start of the full-scale war, with close to 200 drones fired towards the Russian capital.
Columns of thick smoke billowed high into the sky and 17 people were wounded in the Moscow region, according to local governor Andrei Vorobyov.
Residents in the south-east of Moscow region told the BBC that a fine drizzle had left "unpleasant black spots" on their clothes.
Moscow authorities denied that any "oil rain" had been falling.
However, the city's official Telegram channel warned residents of the affected district to keep their windows closed and said families with children, elderly people and asthmatics should urgently leave the area.
Almost 1,000 drones and four Ukrainian cruise missiles were intercepted and destroyed across the country in 24 hours, Russia's defense ministry was quoted as saying. An oil depot was struck in the southern Rostov region, where one person was killed.
Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone strike was an answer to last week's Russian attack on Kyiv, which set ablaze a major religious landmark, the Pechersk Lavra monastery.
"We don't want this war and have never wanted it," Zelensky said. "But if Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too."
In response, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said strikes on Ukraine would be delivered "on a mass scale", adding he had been "convinced for a long time that words are not enough”.
The fire at the Kapotnya refinery was visible to motorists on the Moscow ringroad
Fires broke out as the Kapotnya refinery in south-east Moscow was hit for the third time in a month and the second time this week, coloring the sky black with smoke. Several clips show the particularly dramatic moment the top of a large silo was blown off by a huge explosion, sending the roof of the oil storage tank flying dozens of meters into the air.
A nearby shopping center also caught fire, reportedly after drone debris fell on the building. In a video verified by the BBC, a drone can be seen crashing into the upper floors of a high-rise building, with glass and debris raining down its facade and into the courtyard beneath.
In another verified video, a thick, dark, oily sheen could be seen coating the tarmac of a car park, while the ground beneath parked vehicles remains clear.
"As soon as I stepped out of my apartment building, there was this fine, light drizzle," one local woman told the BBC.
She noticed "unpleasant black spots" on her clothes and her friend's jacket, too, "ended up covered in black specks," she added. “We'll now be keeping an eye on whether our hair starts falling out because of petroleum products.”
Moscow's four airports were temporarily shut and more than 500 flights were cancelled or delayed.
Although local authorities across Russia have banned publication of images of the aftermath of drone strikes, dozens of videos were posted on social media showing drones flying across the sky in broad daylight and explosions over industrial areas on the outskirts of Moscow.
It has been a regular Ukrainian tactic to launch a large number of reconnaissance decoy drones to map out the density of air defenses and vulnerable areas, before the main air strikes begin.
Four and a half years since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war of attrition on the front line in Ukraine grinds on, out of sight for many in Russia. Kyiv's long-range strikes on targets across Russia as well as Moscow and St Petersburg are an indication of Zelensky's aim of "bringing the war home" to ordinary Russians.
A man who lives near the refinery that was hit told the BBC he was woken up when his building started "shaking" at dawn and that in the morning he smelled burning and could not breathe.
"It's all very frightening," he said. "Before, I wasn't so scared, but now it is almost a panic."
Drone attacks on Moscow — about 500km (310 miles) from the Ukrainian border — have become more frequent as Kyiv has developed its long-range capabilities. Ukraine's first successful drone strikes reached the Russian capital in spring 2023, although they were sporadic and rarely involved more than a handful of drones.
Since then, extensive air defenses have been set up around Moscow — but the number of drones used by Ukraine in its attacks has also multiplied and some have penetrated those defenses.
No air defense system can ensure total protection against massive attacks of high-tech drones. The hit rate of those that do get through is extremely low and fraught with the risk of anti-missile debris crashing to the ground.
But despite the known difficulties in halting such large-scale attacks, Thursday's drone barrage is bound to raise questions about the effectiveness of air defense systems surrounding key infrastructure in Moscow.
For its part, Russia launched more than 200 drones and multiple ballistic missiles at Ukraine overnight, Kyiv said.
Vladimir Putin, who is hosting southeast Asian leaders for a summit in the central city of Kazan, has not commented on the large-scale attack on the Russian capital.
Writing on X, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said: "One of the most popular questions asked by Muscovites this morning is 'What is going on?'"
"I can answer. Your country started a war of aggression against ours. For years, it has been killing our people," Sybiha wrote.
"Now that you know what's going on, ask Putin when he is planning to end it."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98291g5rr1o
see also:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/pure-hell-moscow-ukrainian-drones-strike-major-refinery-supplying-capitals-fuel-market
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PUTIN’S LOST HIS TEFLON
Putin's teflon is gone. His aura of a supremely competent and invariably victorious protector of his country from the presumed hostility of the malevolent outside world has been destroyed. The war of aggression he unleashed against Ukraine more than four years ago has now boomeranged back to Moscow, where today oil rain is falling across the city, after scores of Ukrainian drones struck the giant Kapotnya oil refinery for a second time in a week. What goes around comes around.
Ukraine blew a gaping hole in Moscow's multi-layered air defenses, but even more dramatically so — in ordinary Russians' sense of their permanent invulnerability, their comfortable solipsistic notion that Putin's war in Ukraine, which already has claimed the lives of more than half a million Russian men, is happening in some far-off, make-believe world and has nothing to do with their daily lives. It has everything to do with their lives now. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
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WHAT CHURCHILL SAID UPON THE NEWS OF PEARL HARBOR
”So we had won after all!... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.” ~ Winston Churchill, upon hearing the news of Pearl Harbor
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EMERSON’S GOD AS ONE’S HIGHEST SELF
Harold Bloom, in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, says that this is his favorite sentence in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”
Just as it’s startling that Enily Brontë, a parson’s daughter, would dismiss all creeds as “worthless weeds,” so it is at least somewhat surprising that a former minister would call religion “a disease of the intellect.” Given the American religiosity, it is a shock. But then Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, in spite of belonging to the nineteenth-century, still shock today’s readers.
Emerson left the ministry because he could not accept the conventional beliefs. Like Emily Brontë, he believed in the “god within,” who was also his highest self. Bloom quotes Emerson: "That is always best which brings me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. "
(I had to look up the meaning of “wen.” It’s a “sebaceous cyst,” or a plugged up oil gland, commonly known as a pimple. Imagine comparing yourself to a wart and a pimple!)
In an unpublished early poem (or a poem of sorts), again quoted by Bloom, Emerson says, "I find [God] in the bottom of my heart I hear continually his Voice therein / And books and priests and worlds I less esteem. / Who says the heart’s a blind guide? It is not. /My heart did never counsel me to sin . . . The little needle always knows the north. "
This is wonderful self-trust, or call it self-reliance: “The little needle always knows the north.” It reminds me of a sign on a T shirt: “God yes, church no.” It seems that people increasingly want a personal god, not the official one; they don’t want to be told what they should believe. Emerson believed in self-creation, which reminds me of my own Kabala-inspired poem, “The Twenty-Second Name of God”: God breaks our hearts /so we can create ourselves.
It also reminds me of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in Hirsch’s under-appreciated volume On Love: "Love is a bright foreigner, a foreign self /that must recognize me for what I truly am; /only my lover can understand me as I am /when I am struggling to create myself. "
Emerson could also be called a “process theologian.” “God is, not was.” Conventional Christianity, Emerson observes, “proceeds as if God were dead.”
He also famously said, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
Sounding very much like Nietzsche, he summons us to greatness when he laments, “Man is the dwarf of himself.”
Nietzsche could also be called a prophet of self-reliance, and his rejection of religion was the most extreme: “All religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.”
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EMERSON AND JESUS WALK INTO A BAR WITH SOMEONE WHO LOOKS LIKE YOU
~ It’s hard to get to the core of Emerson on any of this ideas but I think you can make a start at getting at what he thinks about self-reliance and religion and the spiritual within the self by tracking what he says about Jesus in his Divinity School Address (the speech that got him into a lot of trouble).
There are about a half dozen references to Jesus, and they suggest that Jesus is a man who embodies in himself the sense that he is divine and that he should display this divinity by sharing it with others who have basically forgotten that they contain sparks of the universal divinity.
Here’s the one central paragraph I think in the Divinity School Address that embodies this idea and talks about how Christianity has betrayed it. (By the way, when Emerson refers in this paragraph to the Reason he means the sort of intuitive/spiritual sense of things that we associate with the Romantic impulse. The Understanding is its opposite.)
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion: 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'
But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The Understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.'
The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain. ~ Professor John Guzlowski, a scholar of American literature
Oriana:
This
is so enlightening: the roots of Whitman’s ideas about being divine
(“Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touched from. The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”).
Of course he saw others as divine as well, which leads to an egalitarian
attitude.
What Emerson says reminds me of “Tat tvam asi”: You are that. According to a Hindu tradition, our deepest self is god, who is experiencing himself/herself by assuming human disguises.
Christians might prefer this formulation: "Your deepest self is the Christ."
And of course Jesus said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Not counting New Age fans, I think the modern stance is quite different: if there is a god, then it (“it” seems the most fitting pronoun) is a cosmic deity or force or energy, completely unlike humans, and not concerned about humans. Wallace Stevens has poems along those lines. Let me quote from “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”:
And yes, I can see how Emerson’s Divinity speech could get him into huge trouble. Are our times an improvement when we consider that a minister preaching this would get death threats from fundamentalists? Or maybe using "Mythus" rather than "Myth" would protect him, but I guess the first sentence which calls JC a prophet rather than the Divine Savior would be enough for those who put their passion into signs like "Accept Jesus or burn in hell."
Of course Christianity is a mythology, teetering precariously on top of the Judaic mythology. Once I grasped that, I reached the point of no return. It wasn't about science: I could see ways to reconcile Darwin with creationism. Educated Catholics claimed that in the book of Genesis, a "day" could last millions of years. It wasn't about the problem of evil: the Catholic explanation in terms of free will is quite appealing, if we don't insist that a horrible atrocity like the Holocaust (I mean the more general term, beyond the Jewish Holocaust) would merit an exception and some action.
But once I saw the Judaic deity as a tribal god of thunder, pretty much equivalent to Zeus and Wotan, and also knew that there were other death-and-resurrection stories in other mythologies, that was it. In antiquity, Jesus was only one of the many dying and-rising Saviors. A thought arose in my mind: "It's just another mythology" — and that was it, the end. The following Sunday I didn't bother to go to church.
What gave me special pleasure was escaping the stench of incense, which I always hated. Later I learned that incense was used to cover up the smell of blood in the temple animal sacrifice.
Later I learned the mass was constructed on the model of ritual sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple. My radiant moment of dropping belief freed me from all that butchery (be it only symbolic) and the choking smell of incense.
In the past great thinkers such as Dante and Milton accepted classical mythology as real; it was just that now the worship of the old gods was forbidden, and those gods reduced to the status of demons. Note that Milton and other brilliant minds did not say that the pagan gods didn't exist; they existed, and had some power, but worshiping them was forbidden: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
I wonder if the intellectual and ruling elites had at least some vague notion of how dangerous it is to dismiss any particular mythology as not true. If one mythology can be dismissed as "not true," what's there to stop the downfall of all mythologies (not as profound literature to be understood metaphorically, but as literal truth)?
To question the literal truth of one mythology is to question all mythologies. And let me quote Joseph Campbell here: What is mythology? — Other people's religion. ~ What is religion? — Our own mythology.
(Oriana: This is a partial repost. In the past I was more engaged in the issues of belief and non-belief.)
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LUCK: A PERISHABLE COMMODITY
Seneca, the richest man in Rome, knew luck was one of life's most perishable commodities. So he rehearsed every morning the scenario of losing his entire wealth. Every so often he'd live on bread and water alone, as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside, the harshness of privation, familiar and thus relatively harmless.
That's the whole idea: arrange your life in such a way that future's inevitable randomness no longer scares you. That you have much more upside than downside in life. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
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The barbarians are now inside the gates. ~ Max Clarke, Facebook
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THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE
Between 1200 and 1150 BCE, almost every major eastern Mediterranean city burned to the ground. The culprit wasn't a foreign army, but a fatal collapse of ancient globalization.
The thriving, interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age—which included the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia, the Canaanites, and the New Kingdom of Egypt—was shattered in a matter of decades. Writing systems like Linear B vanished, international trade ceased, and populations plummeted.
Historians long blamed a single culprit: the "Sea Peoples." Egyptian records from the reign of Ramesses III describe confederations of mysterious seaborne raiders attacking from the Mediterranean, wiping out the Hittites and coastal kingdoms before being repelled at the Egyptian border. Modern archaeology views the Sea Peoples as a symptom rather than the root cause. They were likely refugees fleeing the same crisis that was destroying the empires they attacked.
The Bronze Age Collapse was driven by a compounding series of disasters that shattered a highly integrated regional economy.
Climate Change and Drought: Pollen samples and isotopic data reveal that a severe, multi-decade mega-drought struck the eastern Mediterranean starting around 1200 BCE. The highly centralized "palace economies" of the Bronze Age relied on agricultural surpluses to feed specialized workers and ruling elites. When crops failed year after year, famine set in, and central authorities could no longer distribute food.
Earthquake Storms: Archaeoseismologists have found evidence that a series of successive earthquakes hit the tectonic fault lines stretching from Greece to the Levant during this 50-year window. Cities like Mycenae and Troy show signs of intense seismic damage, crippling infrastructure and necessitating rebuilding efforts precisely when resources were lowest.
Internal Rebellions: As famine spread and infrastructure crumbled, the lower classes turned against the ruling elites. Many of the destroyed cities show evidence of burning concentrated in the palaces and administrative centers, while surrounding residential areas were left largely intact.
Systems Breakdown: The Late Bronze Age world depended on complex trade networks to acquire tin and copper to make bronze. When drought and uprisings knocked out key nodes in this network, the entire system halted. Without bronze, armies could not be equipped and tools could not be made. The fall of one empire severed the supply lines of its neighbors, creating a domino effect that plunged the region into a centuries-long dark age.
The cyclopean walls of Mycenae, built from limestone boulders, could not protect the city from the systemic breakdown that swept the region
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SPIELBERG BRINGS US ANOTHER ALIEN ENCOUNTER
The film drops us in medias res as a numbers-geek named Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor, as always terrific) has found himself on the run, having just stolen a glowing MacGuffin Stick from Wardex, the tech company he works (or rather worked) for. Wardex is run by the more-government-than-the-government boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, going real big), who’s sent a literal army of black-suited nogoodniks to sniff out Daniel’s tail, but thankfully Daniel’s not working alone. He’s just one part of an inside group of former Wardex employees that’s splintered off due to their growing discontent with Scanlon’s unhinged methods and secrecy.
This faction is led by one Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who spends 90% of the film pacing about some sort of make-shift warehouse while talking to Daniel on the phone and, we can see in the background, building … something. Something… sinisterly suburban. Hey it is Spielberg after all.
But we’ll get to that eventually. Indeed a lot of Disclosure Day feels summed up by that sentence—“oh we’ll get to that eventually.” Spielberg and his co-screenwriter David Koepp do drop their breadcrumbs, some of them as big as a house, along the way, but Disclosure Day can be frustrating by how defiantly glued it is onto its sense of mysteriousness. When the movie slows down a bit in between its several baller action set-pieces, its hesitation to fan out its cards does seem, here and there, somewhat infuriating. Is there anything there, Steven? Are you playing the man behind the curtain again?
All of that is until you realize that it’s the “mysteriousness” itself that Disclosure Day is actually about about. It’s got to hit you sooner rather than later since the film’s actual plot is laughably thin—in the way that Mad Max: Fury Road is really just a car chase in one direction and then in the other, Disclosure Day is really just a bunch of scattered characters who have to find their way to the same spot so we can get to the titular disclosin’. In order for this to happen Daniel needs to get his MacGuffin Stick to Hugo, with the added wrinkle that he’s also got to rescue his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewsen), who’s been kidnapped (and kinda pseudo-brain-washed) by big bad Noah.
And meanwhile a weather reporter and shiny-set-of-chompers named Margaret (Emily Blunt, absolute aces) has started having some sort of sudden empathy seizures—ones that grant her a sixth sense of where to go and what to say in order to get her there as fast as possible. Which is important, as you’ll find out, clearly inevitably and semi-exaustingly not until the third act.
And it’s basically all car chases and space races from there. Not that I’d want to be held in any other director’s immaculate grip for such spectacle—there are at least three moments off the top of my head in Disclosure Day where you’re reminded why Spielberg is Spielberg; moments where you’re reminded that his camera-work remains unrivaled; and that oh yeah, oh right, heck and hell yeah, this is what a blockbuster is supposed to be, feel, look like and do.
But I’d be lying if the action doesn’t begin to feel a bit samey-samey too—one wonders if Spielberg had a bet with his legendary DP Janusz Kaminski on how many times they could swoop their camera around a speeding vehicle while also focusing with laser-like precision on what the characters inside said-speeding-vehicle are up to in there. It’s a great trick, one of their best, but by like the tenth time you kinda get it, ya know.
Thankfully those car chases and yes space races are merely the vehicle for Spielberg’s ideas—that’s often true in his best work but it’s fairly bald, stripped to basics, here. These ideas which are forefronted in ways that make Disclosure Day feel closer to the contemplative emotional core of A.I. than it does almost anything else in his filmography. Because the kicking of its own mystery ball down and down and yes further down the road, in a movie about spilling the beans—it’s right there in the title!—eventually becomes the film’s defining tension; hell it’s all anybody can talk about.
Daniel thinks humanity has the right to know the truth about what his company’s been covering up, while Jane, a one-time novitiate (cue a wonderful cameo from the always wonderful Elizabeth Marvel as Jane’s former mother superior), has ethical and moral fears about how the truth might unravel the whole of society. Meanwhile Noah and his underlings simply want to keep their clutches on the boundless power of black rooms that secrecy affords them, because of course they do. We see these people on the news every day. Or worse, we don’t.
It almost doesn’t even matter, the Aliens of all of this—as the aforementioned so-called final part of Spielberg’s thematically-linked Close Encounters / E.T. trilogy one would hope that you’d realized by now that yes, big black-bug-eyed aliens are indeed the secrets, the governmental beans that Daniel & Co. are out there, bouncing off the sides of locomotives in order to be spilling. (I guess we just don’t really count War of the Worlds among this “trilogy” since, for all that film’s mastery, it’s the intelligence and benevolence of extraterrestrial visitors that’s been the riff that Spielberg, as Spielberg, was always meant to play. And those big meanies in their tripods couldn’t even figure out “air” ffs.)
So what matters in Disclosure Day is never really the aliens themselves, but the metaphorical wonder of them. The awe we feel when the stars themselves scatter and reveal themselves to not be stars at all, but boundless possibility. Disclosure Day is Spielberg grappling with mystery itself—how now that we can see all of everything right in our palms, how do we find, and appreciate, magic anymore? Can we find our way back to wonder? And what would that take? One can’t help but wonder—if he hadn’t been forced to play hide-and-seek with that malfunctioning animatronic shark all those many decades ago, learning there that it’s in not seeing where believing comes from, would this have become Spielberg’s life-long preoccupation?
Who can ever say. But the shark is still working, trailing magic somehow. Disclosure Day, thrilling and really just conceptually bizarre when you come down to it, is an odd space duck of magnificent proportions. It’s a film as wrapped up in its maker’s one-man obsessions as anything by Malick on existence and wheat, or anything by Tarantino on kung-fu and feet. This is a mature auteur project from the tips of its toes to the twinkling galaxies ricocheting above the heads of its confounded, desperate, and unyieldingly hopeful characters. In a world on the brink it decides to turn on all of the cameras and all of the lights and say, simply, lights, action, go. Now hope for the best.
https://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/review-spielbergs-fascinating-strange-exciting-disclosure-day.php?utm_source=mostviewed&utm_medium=mostviewed&utm_campaign=Most%20Viewed&utm_content=in
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Oriana:
THE CHARACTER OF JANE, AND THE DISAPPOINTINGLY CLICHÉ ALIEN
At first I saw Jane as useless and extra baggage — the movie (Disclosure Day) would be more focused and concise without her. Now I still think that yes, the movie would be more focused and concise, but she enriches it with the religious aspect. Spielberg is obviously interested in the connection between religion and Extraterrestrials. Aren’t angels, devils, and god himself ETs?
With the protective nuns and the crucifix, Jane is able to resist the power of the Bad Guy (perhaps simply Satan, who can of course take any form, human or animal, just like the ETs), who wants to control her body so she can stab Daniel. Religion gives her the power to resist, but it's a terrible struggle for her (she clutches the crucifix unril her palm bleeds), while Margaret has ET-given powers and can effortlessly do miraculous things. I think Spielberg may be secretly attracted to Catholicism (which is certainly rich in imagery and pops up in literature a lot).
Jane disappears from the movie and we never miss her almost-weeping and almost-bleeding. Margaret, the Beauty with Brains, becomes the central character, and gives a marvelous performance.
I found somewhere Spielberg's own explanation of his cliché ET — because this image of what aliens look like — large head, big eyes, very skinny body — is already encoded in the pop culture. Some might say that it's too boring, too familiar, and prevents us from imagining other ways the aliens might look (note the charismatic “Rocky” in Hail Mary). Some of us expected a new and surprising image, so the cartoonish ET image was a shock of disappointment. I wonder how many others were also disappointed. I'd enjoy an alien looking like a caterpillar, a miniature galactic spiral — or perhaps a beautiful cat.
Jason Byrd Marshall:
The "action" was nonsensical — and at the end of the day — pointless — given that the goons just sort of stood there after shooting at our "heroes" for an hour. The "philosophy" and religion angle was incoherent, hollow, privileged boomerism about how we all need to listen and get along with each other. It was insulting to the very idea of science fiction that aliens with tech that can make humans into telepaths and polymaths by cardinals flying into rooms would crash land on earth (Oriana: allegedly that’s what happened in Roswell, New Mexico). The magic stick was a godawful McGuffin that can make people invisible, grant telepathic abilities, and power a TV station depending on what the plot needs.
Easily the worst goon squad work I've ever seen. They couldn't see a dude crouching behind a barely-there fence 20 yards away, nor could they shoot out the tires on their own car, nor could they (in 2026!) remotely disable or track their black goon squad car.
Why the FUCK were there so many USB drives?
Why the FUCK did Coleman Domingo have to slavishly re-create Emily Blunt's childhood house?
Why the FUCK did that house have an NES and not an N64 in 1996?
How the FUCK far away does Spielberg think Kansas City is from Washington DC?
How did Coleman Domingo manage to smuggle out a FUCKING ALIEN to the TV station in a truck when we spent the whole movie scrambling for (too many!) USB drives?
GODDAMIT.
Geekish1:
Fooop:
The only part of this movie that I'm going to remember in 3 years is the reporter who has to disclose things in real time. That performance was phenomenal, I need to look up on her.
TI-Owl:
Yes. That part made actually shifted things for me, had me think about what it would be like watching that in real life with her in the moment commentary.
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BLINDSIDE DIVORCE
More people are sharing their experience of being divorced out of the blue. Psychologists tell the BBC why a spouse might initiate a sudden split – and what this tells us about modern relationships and marriage.
Eve Simmons was in a romantic relationship for eight-and-a-half years and married for six months when her husband put a bowl of pasta on the table in front of her, with a side of "I'm not happy". It was completely out of the blue. A few days later, he told her he didn't want to try and work on their marriage.
It was, Simmons says, a "cut-throat split".
There are countless threads on Reddit and other social forums with similar stories about former spouses who say they have experienced a "blindside divorce". Sometimes, it's referred to as "sudden divorce syndrome". But what do experts say are the reasons a spouse might want a divorce out of the blue and what can a blindside split tell us about the state of modern love and relationships?
The shock of a blindside
Adam Davis (whose real name has been withheld for privacy reasons) was with his wife for 10 years and married for four when she left their house one morning to go to the shops and never returned. Concerned for her whereabouts, Davis contacted the police, who confirmed she was safe and well, but said she had no intention of getting in contact with him. Several weeks later he was served divorce papers in the post. "There wasn't any explanation, there wasn't any closure, there wasn't any goodbye," he says.
Davis started exhibiting signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when his wife left him. "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat… I couldn't concentrate at work. I struggled to do daily tasks, such as getting out of bed in the morning to just, like, showering and brushing my teeth," he says. After the initial shock wore off, "the grief set in. Because then it started becoming real, that she [had] gone".
Davis worries his blindside divorce will have a lasting impact on him and any future relationships – and even on ordinary friendships. "I've never ever had such a traumatic breakup before that just left me feeling like I can't trust people again," he says. "I go out with friends and I feel socially awkward. It did a number on my self-esteem… I feel I'm always second-guessing people's intentions now and motives."
Simmons says the shocking part of her divorce was that "there wasn't any willingness to work on it, or to fix wounds, or to even discuss what might be salvageable".
It raised the question – what's the point in marriage? "You think that you're in the safest, securest position in your life, and then it's all ripped from under your feet without a moment's notice," Simmons says.
Why a blindside divorce might happen
Firstly, it is important to highlight that there may be plenty of legitimate reasons why a partner might flee a relationship unexpectedly – such as abuse or coercive control.
In safe and non-threatening marriages, however, personality and attachment styles (the way people act and feel in relationships) might explain why some people are more likely to walk out on their spouse without any notice or reason.
"You know, there are certain personality profiles that may be more susceptible to making these decisions… [like] not being willing to compromise," says Jeffry Simpson, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota in the US.
Some research has suggested that both anxious attachment (where a person fears separation or abandonment from a partner) and avoidant attachment (where a person seeks emotional distance or fears being trapped by a relationship) styles negatively affect the cognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects of relationship quality. Other research suggests that those with avoidant attachment styles are more likely to seek alternative partners, or engage with infidelity.
"One of the things that we've seen in some of our work is that people who are avoidantly attached to their partners, are more likely to not communicate very directly or very well, and to sometimes make kind of black-and-white decisions," Simpson adds.
By contrast, a person with a secure attachment style (someone who feels trust and safety in relationships, and confidence in their own abilities), Simpson says, is "much less likely just break things off without either trying to improve them or at least letting the partner understand why it's happening".
However, in a way, "a lot of divorces are blindside divorces, because we just can't predict it very well", says Galena Rhoades, psychology professor at the University of Denver in the US, and the co-author of Fighting For Your Marriage. "[Divorce] is rarely, unfortunately, a mutual decision that people come to."
There isn't any data or research into blindside divorce yet, and ultimately, each relationship and their set of circumstances is unique. However, research on divorce in general can help shed some light on the consequences of an unexpected split – and how to deal with them.
The impacts of divorce
Today, divorce rates among younger and middle-aged adults have declined in recent decades in the US – although "grey divorce" rates, for couples aged 50 or over, have risen.
However, couples are getting married later than ever before, if at all. The number of households with single parents has increased, as has the number of children born outside of marriage.
It's fair to say that perspectives on marriage and long-term relationships have changed significantly since the late 20th Century. For most people, marriage is no longer expected, it's a choice.
Still, divorce – any divorce, not just a blindside divorce – can affect people in a number of ways. Overall, women face greater post-divorce disadvantages than men – such as decreased income, housing issues, social pressures and primary or sole responsibility for caring for children. (Despite more women balancing careers with motherhood, women contribute 35% more childcare than mothers did in the 1960s – even those women who earn more than their husbands). Divorced women may suffer from poor mental health, including stress over custody. For women in same-sex marriages, emerging research suggests that the material losses after divorce may be smaller.
For men, the risks are subtly different, studies suggest. Research shows that while men are more likely to recover financially than women after a divorce, they are likely to be less wealthy than men who remain married. Men may also face a higher risk of severe health problems after divorce, compared to women. Their mental health risks include a higher suicide risk after a marital separation, compared to married men, and compared to women. Men are generally more likely than women to rely on their spouses for intimacy, social support and relationships with friends and family, which may put them at risk of social isolation after a divorce.
"Women are relationally-oriented, meaning that they tend to maintain and form new emotionally connected friendships," Rhoades says. "Men are more likely to struggle emotionally or socially, because they don't have the same interpersonal, or social resources that women tend to have."
For women, a blindside divorce might be particularly surprising because of the role they assume in romantic relationships, Rhoades says.
"Oftentimes, women wind up being in the role of initiating conversations – almost being the barometers for how the relationship is going… it's why blindside divorce, especially coming from the husband, can be surprising, because women are quite cued into the balance in the relationship, or how things are going for each partner," says Rhoades.
For blindside divorces, having less time – or no time – to prepare for the separation may also make it harder to deal with both practical consequences, such as having to find housing, but also the mental consequences of the shock.
Davis says that after the initial shock wore off, he started to feel intense grief – with the lack of closure making it feel more severe. To save himself from the "depths of despair", he started exercising and eating well. Eve took to her mum's sofa and relied on friends and family for support.
Both also found therapists to help them work through the emotional fallout of their divorces.
Reflecting on each of their marriages, both Simmons and Davis concluded that there were differences in communication styles.
"Like lots of relationships, we had problems," Simmons says. "It wasn't perfect, because relationships aren't… it wasn't plain sailing. And we had been together for a long time, since we were in our early twenties," Simmons says.
Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University in the US, says that the current state of marriage in the US is a "mixed bag". In his book, The All or Nothing Marriage, he argues that our changing expectations and beliefs around marriage have had two consequences.
"First, it has made marriage more fragile. Many of us are disappointed in a level of marital connection that would have been entirely sufficient for our grandparents," he says. "But second, it has made the best marriages better than ever. We aspire to connect on a deeper psychological level than in earlier eras, and those marriages that deliver on those aspirations are profoundly fulfilling."
Interestingly, some data survey analysis published in November 2025 showed that US high schoolers are less likely nowadays to say that they want to get married – with 67% of the country's 17-18-year-olds saying they'll choose to get married one day, down from 80% in 1993.
Boys are more likely to say they'll get married than girls.
Finkel takes a cautious approach to interpreting gender differences around marriage and divorce, as the reasons for the divergence are not fully clear.
"My read of the evidence is that women are far more likely than men to initiate divorce," says Finkel. "There's a lot of speculation about what drives this gender difference, but I don't feel confident in claiming that any of them has especially strong support."
Could modern dating explain blindside divorce?
In the Western world, people have an abundance of options, which has certainly changed the trajectory of modern love and marriage.
Take dating apps for example, which given rise to the accessibility of casual sexual relationships. Their popularity has coincided with the shifting average age of marriage, and the drive for people to have a career before they "settle down".
Even though dating app user numbers have declined, they're still high – in the UK, it is estimated that there will be 12 million users on dating apps by 2028. The majority of revenue from the global dating app industry comes from the US, with three in 10 US adults saying they have used a dating app.
Dating apps can lead to "choice paralysis", or "overload" as users are exposed to an "abundance" of potential partners. While this abundance might make it seem more likely that a person would find a partner, research suggests that it may in fact have the opposite effect – where people are more likely to be single.
US psychologist Barry Schwartz famously wrote about this paradox, and why more is less. More choice does not equate to more freedom, he argues in his Ted Talk. Instead, he says, people may feel more responsibility and more blame if dissatisfied with a choice made.
There is also a phenomenon called alternative monitoring. "The more you're thinking about alternatives, whether that's a past love, or someone at work that you're somewhat attracted to – or in this day and age – all of the availability of other potential partners, it can actually make it harder to commit to your relationship and do the work that long-term relationships take," Rhoades says. Research suggests that alternative monitoring precedes both breakups and infidelity.
Of course, it can also lead to a reluctance to commit – hence the "fear of labeling" and the use of terms like "situationships" (a loosely-defined, ambiguous romantic or sexual relationship which lacks commitment).
"There does seem to be this throwaway culture," Simmons says. "[The idea that] I've been with someone for a very long time, but there's going to be something better around the corner, and it's going to be very attainable, require minimum effort, and it's going to solve all my problems. And I don't know if that's partly the dating app culture [or] social media lead as well, because we're in this [state of] constant consumption," she says.
Ultimately, relationships take work, commitment and effort. "Happy relationships don't just deliver themselves," Finkel adds. "They require wise investment of time, attention and resources," he says.
And for the lovers out there, all hope is not lost. A large, recent study across 90 countries showed that people still value romantic love when considering a long-term relationship, including in countries where arranged marriages are still prevalent. The study found that romantic love acts as a commitment device – meaning that romantic love is "universally perceived" as a force which encourages people to foster commitment in their relationships.
Life after a blindside divorce
Davis is currently still going through his divorce and is beginning the process of trying to move on. "I can't even hope to reconcile," he says. While he can speculate and consider the reasons why his wife might have wanted a divorce, he has not yet had an explanation from her.
Simmons is now in a happy relationship and recently gave birth to a child. Looking back, she says, there were signs that her and her ex-husband weren't the most compatible. But that's hindsight for you
She ended up writing a book inspired by her blindside divorce called What She Did Next, speaking to dozens of men and women who have had a similar experience.
"In all of the cases that I have learned about, without a doubt, the person who was blindsided has classed [it] as the best thing that ever happened to them… They have got everything that they have wanted in the end," Simmons says.
“Relationships don't [always] work out, and that's okay.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260605-what-blindside-divorce-tells-us-about-modern-love
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ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI ON TRUMP’S 80TH BIRTHDAY
I found this birthday message for you outside Trump Tower: “You sold me your soul. You got what you wanted. The tower. The power. The money. The name in gold. But you left a trail behind you, and it leads to the ninth circle. Goethe said any soul, while still living, can be saved. Will yours? Happy Birthday ~ Mephistopheles.”
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“I already feel the nostalgia of that moment in which I shall feel nostalgia for this moment.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges, from “Madrid, July 1982” (tr. Anthony Kerrigan)
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WHY MALE FERTILITY IS IN DECLINE
Sperm quality appears to be declining around the world but is a little discussed cause of infertility. Now scientists are narrowing in on what might be behind the problem.
"We can sort you out. No problem. We can help you," the doctor told Jennifer Hannington. Then he turned to her husband, Ciaran, and said: "But there's not much we can do for you."
The couple, who live in Yorkshire, England, had been trying for a baby for two years. They knew it could be difficult for them to conceive as Jennifer has polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition that can affect fertility. What they had not expected was that there were problems on Ciaran's side, too. Tests revealed issues including a low sperm count and low motility (movement) of sperm. Worse, these issues were thought to be harder to treat than Jennifer's – perhaps even impossible.
Hannington still remembers his reaction: "Shock. Grief. I was in complete denial. I thought the doctors had got it wrong." He had always known he wanted to be a dad. "I felt like I'd let my wife down."
Over the years, his mental health deteriorated. He began to spend more time alone, staying in bed and turning to alcohol for comfort. Then the panic attacks set in.
"I hit crisis point," he says. "It was a deep, dark place."
Male infertility contributes to approximately half of all cases of infertility and affects 7% of the male population. However, it is much less discussed than female infertility, partly due to the social and cultural taboos surrounding it. For the majority of men with fertility problems, the cause remains unexplained – and stigma means many are suffering in silence.
Research suggests the problem may be growing. Factors including pollution have been shown to affect men's fertility, and specifically, sperm quality – with potentially huge consequences for individuals, and entire societies.
A hidden fertility crisis?
The global population has risen dramatically over the past century. Just 70 years ago – within a human lifetime – there were only 2.5 billion people on Earth. In 2022, the global population hit eight billion. However, the rate of population growth has slowed, mainly due to social and economic factors.
Birth rates worldwide are hitting record low levels. Over 50% of the world’s population live in countries with a fertility rate below two children per woman – resulting in populations that without migration will gradually contract.
The reasons for this decline in birth rates include positive developments, such as women's greater financial independence and control over their reproductive health. On the other hand, in countries with low fertility rates, many couples would like to have more children than they do, research shows, but they may hold off due to social and economic reasons, such as a lack of support for families.
At the same time, there may also be a decline in a different kind of fertility, known as fecundity – meaning, a person's physical ability to produce offspring. In particular, research suggests that the whole spectrum of reproductive problems in men is increasing, including declining sperm counts, decreasing testosterone levels, and increasing rates of erectile dysfunction and testicular cancer.
Swimming cells
"Sperm are exquisite cells," says Sarah Martins Da Silva, a clinical reader in reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee and a practicing gynecologist. "They are tiny, they swim, they can survive outside the body. No other cells can do that. They are extraordinarily specialized.”
Seemingly small changes can have a powerful effect on these highly specialized cells, and especially, their ability to fertilize an egg. The crucial aspects for fertility are their ability to move efficiently (motility), their shape and size (morphology), and how many there are in a given quantity of semen (known as sperm count). They are the aspects that are examined when a man goes for a fertility check.
"In general, when you get below 40 million sperm per milliliter of semen, you start to see fertility problems," says Hagai Levine, professor of epidemiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sperm count, explains Levine, is closely linked to fertility chances. While a higher sperm count does not necessarily mean a higher probability of conception, below the 40 million/ml threshold the probability of conception drops off rapidly.
In 2022, Levine and his collaborators published a review of global trends in sperm count. It showed that sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018, from 104 to 49 million/ml. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year.
Levine argues this acceleration could be down to epigenetic changes, meaning, alterations to the way genes work, caused by environmental or lifestyle factors. A separate review also suggests epigenetics may play a part in changes in sperm, and male infertility.
"There are signs that it could be cumulative across generations," he says.
The idea that epigenetic changes can be inherited across generations has not been without controversy, but there is evidence suggesting it may be possible.
"This [declining sperm count] is a marker of poor health of men, maybe even of mankind," says Levine. "We are facing a public health crisis – and we don't know if it's reversible."
Research suggests that male infertility may predict future health problems, though the exact link is not fully understood. One possibility is that certain lifestyle factors could contribute to both infertility, and other health problems.
"While the experience of wanting a child and not being able to get pregnant is extraordinarily devastating, this is a much bigger problem," says Da Silva.
Individual lifestyle changes may not be enough to halt the decline in sperm quality. Mounting evidence suggests there is a wider, environmental threat: toxic pollutants.
A toxic world
Rebecca Blanchard, a veterinary teaching associate and researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, is investigating the effect of environmental chemicals found within the home on male reproductive health. She is using dogs as a sentinel model – a kind of early-warning alarm system for human health.
"The dog shares our environment," she says. "It lives in the same household and is exposed to the same chemical contaminants as us. If we look at the dog, we could see what's going on in the human."
Her research concentrated on chemicals found in plastics, fire retardants and common household items. Some of these chemicals have been banned, but still linger in the environment or older items (read more about this in BBC Future's story on "forever chemicals"). Her studies have revealed that these chemicals can disrupt our hormonal systems, and harm the fertility of both dogs and men.
"We found a reduction in sperm motility in both the human and the dog," says Blanchard. "There was also an increase in the amount of DNA fragmentation."
Sperm DNA fragmentation refers to damage or breaks in the genetic material of the sperm. This can have an impact beyond conception: as levels of DNA fragmentation increase, explains Blanchard, so do instances of early-term miscarriages.
The findings chime with other research showing the damage to fertility caused by chemicals found in plastics, household medications, in the food chain and in the air. It affects men as well as women and even babies. Black carbon, forever chemicals and phthalates have all been found to reach babies in utero.
Climate change may also negatively impact male fertility, with several animal studies suggesting that sperm are especially vulnerable to the effects of increasing temperatures.
Heatwaves have been shown to damage sperm in insects, and a similar impact has been observed in humans. A 2022 study found that high ambient temperature – due to global warming, or working in a hot environment – negatively affects sperm quality.
Poor diet, stress and alcohol
Alongside these environmental factors, individual problems can also harm male fertility, such as a poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, stress, and alcohol and drug use.
In recent decades there has been a shift towards people becoming parents later in life – and while women are often reminded about their biological clock, age was thought not to be an issue for male fertility. Now, that idea is changing. An advanced paternal age has been associated with lower sperm quality and reduced fertility.
There is a growing call for greater understanding of male infertility and new approaches for its prevention, diagnosis and treatment – as well as an increased awareness of the urgent need to tackle pollution. Meanwhile, is there anything an individual can do to protect or boost their sperm quality?
Exercise and a healthier diet may be a good start, since they have been linked to improved sperm quality. Blanchard recommends choosing organic food and plastic products free of BPA (Bisphenol A), a chemical associated with male and female fertility problems. "There are small things that you can do," she says.
And, says Hannington, don't suffer in silence.
After five years of treatment and three rounds of ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection), an IVF technique in which a single sperm is injected into the center of an egg, he and his wife had two children. For people who have to pay for fertility treatments themselves, such a procedure may however not be affordable. In the US, a single round of IVF can cost upwards of $30,000 (£24,442) and insurance coverage for IVF can depend on the state you live in and who your employer is. And Hannington says he still feels the mental toll of his ordeal.
"I'm grateful for my children every day, but you just don't forget," he says. "It will always be part of me."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is-causing-a-male-fertility-crisis
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FATHER’S DRINKING AFFECTS FETAL DEVELOPMENT
Paternal drinking has been associated with a range of developmental and cognitive issues in children
A father's alcohol consumption has long been overshadowed by the focus on what a mother drinks. But that could be about to change following new research.
For more than 50 years, scientists have warned about the risks of drinking alcohol in pregnancy. Recent research has found that a mother's consumption of as little as one drink a week may affect a child's brain development, cognitive function and behavior, and facial shape, while for decades, public health campaigns have repeatedly said that there's no safe amount of alcohol for mums to drink while pregnant.
The scientific consensus seems pretty clear – that prenatal alcohol exposure can cause a variety of problems (although some questions remain around the precise risk of light compared to heavy drinking, for example). Potential harms include neurodevelopmental impairments as well as particular facial features most commonly associated with foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), but also behavioral, cognitive and learning problems, such as speech delays.
The effects cover a broad spectrum, which is part of why FASD is now the preferred description to "fetal alcohol syndrome", or FAS.
But as the risks of maternal alcohol consumption have become better-documented, another potential contributing factor to FASD has remained largely overlooked: how much the father drinks. Research on fertility and reproduction "has been so woman-focused, so maternal centric, that we've not really done our due diligence on the male side", says Michael Golding, a developmental physiologist at Texas A&M University who researches alcohol exposure and foetal development.
Yet researchers like Golding have suspected a paternal role for a long time. "For years now, we've been hearing stories from women who said, 'I never drank during pregnancy, but now I have an FAS kid – and my male partner was a chronic alcohol abuser'," he says. But such stories often were dismissed as mothers being forgetful, if not outright lying.
Recent research, however, raises an intriguing – and possibly game-changing – possibility: these mothers were right all along.
The idea that a father's alcohol consumption before conception could have an impact on the offspring may seem far-fetched. But recent population studies have found that babies whose fathers drank are at a higher risk for various poor health outcomes. One 2021 observational study of more than half a million couples in China, for example, found that the risk of birth defects – including cleft palate, congenital heart disease, and digestive tract anomalies – was higher if the father drank before conception, even when the mother did not drink. Another population study from China compared 5,000 children with congenital heart defects to 5,000 without. Again, while overall risk remained relatively low, it found that babies were nearly three times more likely to have a congenital heart defect if their father drank – defined as having more than 50ml (1.7fl oz) of alcohol per day in the three months before pregnancy – than if he didn’t.
It's important to note that the overall risk of birth defects still remained relatively low. In the 2021 study of various birth defects in China, for example, the most-impacted type – cleft palate – was found in just 105 babies of the 164,151 whose fathers drank. But this made cleft palate 1.5 times more likely among offspring of fathers who drank, than if the fathers didn't drink.
"Our finding suggests that future fathers should be encouraged to modify their alcohol intake before conceiving to reduce fetal risk, considering a paternal drinking rate of 31.0% substantially elevated the risk of birth defects," the researchers wrote.
In July 2024, meanwhile, a study found that if fathers drank alcohol before conception, fetal growth appeared to be impacted.
Still, pinpointing whether the father's alcohol consumption actually caused these issues, as opposed to just being correlated with them, is difficult. While researchers of both studies controlled for confounding factors, such as if the father also smoked, it isn't possible to account for every single potential contributor. "Human studies are extremely messy – there are a lot of confounding factors there," says Golding. "What is the individual's diet? Do they exercise? There are a whole bunch of things there that make it incredibly difficult."
Meanwhile, setting up a randomized controlled trial (RCT), the gold standard of scientific research, isn't exactly an option when it comes to alcohol consumption and pregnancy. Even if it were ethical to tell some fathers to drink before conception, knowing it might have a negative impact on the offspring, it's unlikely that those who were normally teetotalers would start imbibing – or, in a theoretical control group, that those who frequently drank would completely stop.
But you can set up such an RCT for animals – specifically, mice.
Which is what Golding did. First, his team mapped the physical abnormalities associated with FASD in humans, such as smaller eyes and a reduced head size, on to a mouse model. Then they divided mice into groups where just pregnant mothers were given alcohol; where only the fathers were, pre-conception; and where both parents were. When they compared the features of the offsprings, they found a clear theme.
If a mouse mum consumed alcohol in pregnancy, her offspring showed some of the physiological symptoms of FASD that might be expected. But some changes in both cranial-facial patterning and in overall growth got worse when both parents drank. More surprisingly still, some abnormalities in the jaw, teeth spacing, eye size and eye spacing – all symptoms of human FASD – were more pronounced if the father drank compared to if the mother did.
Golding was taken aback. "I told my students to do it again," he says with a chuckle. They did and got the same outcomes, as they have every time they've replicated the study since.
In July 2024, his team published two more studies that underscored paternal alcohol effects on mice offspring. One found that, at midlife, those mice whose parents had both been exposed to alcohol had signs of increased cellular aging in the brain and liver, a possible result of something else they found – markers of mitochondrial dysfunction, which occurs when the tiny organelles that produce energy within our cells stop working correctly.
This was true whether the alcohol-exposed parent was the mother or the father, but was most dramatic if both parents were exposed. This could help explain the results of observational studies on humans, where people diagnosed FASD have found to be hospitalized more often than those without FASD and have a life expectancy that is 42% that of the general population.
Golding's team also found that the face shape of a mouse changed according to how much alcohol its father had consumed. "The take-home message… is that male alcohol use is not going to have a yes/no impact on children; it will have graded effects where the more a man drinks, the worse the outcomes," he says.
Golding isn't the only researcher to find a link between paternal alcohol consumption and FASD-like outcomes in mice. Other studies have found that the offspring of alcohol-exposed male mice are more likely to show fetal growth restriction, metabolic defects and various differences in genetic expression, compared with mice that were not given alcohol. At University of California Riverside, Kelly Huffman, a psychology professor with a background in developmental neuroscience, has been running experiments that have also found that the mouse offspring of alcohol-exposed dads are more likely to show certain outcomes.
The effects aren't as strong as when the mothers are given alcohol after conception. "Which makes sense – remember, these babies have never been [directly] exposed to alcohol," Huffman says. "But look." On screen, she pulls up images of the mouse offspring's neocortexes – the part of the brain involved in higher functions. In control mice whose parents weren't exposed to alcohol, the primary somatosensory cortex – part of the brain that responds as it receives input from the mouse's whiskers – was in a distinctly different area to the primary visual cortex, which interprets visual cues. There was a clear boundary between them, with no overlap.
In the mice whose fathers, but not mothers, were exposed to alcohol, this region looks very different. "They're all mixed up," Huffman says.
Not only were the mice's brains organized differently, but their behavior and motor skills differed too. Offspring of alcohol-exposed fathers were more likely to fall and take missteps, more hesitant to move around, and took longer to learn how to stay on spinning bars. "They don't improve at the same rate," Huffman says. "Their learning trajectory is a little slowed. That has to do, we think, with perhaps a little hyperactivity, and just problems with sensory motor integration."
Given that the pups aren't being directly exposed to alcohol in utero, how could this be happening? The most common explanation is a mechanism of genetic changes known as epigenetics. In this, bits of the genome are switched "on" or "off" without any physical changes to the DNA sequence. Instead, they work through processes that modify the ability of the DNA being read by the cellular machinery, through processes such as DNA methylation, where chemical groups are attached to bits of the DNA molecule. Research has found that alcohol disrupts the normal DNA methylation of sperm, which may go on to change how genes are expressed in the resulting embryo.
Golding has also found evidence in mice that paternal alcohol use can lead to other changes in sperm that affect fetal growth. He and his colleagues have found that chronic alcohol use alters the ratio of inherited fragments a type of genetic material called RNA in sperm.
While the epigenetic effects of paternal alcohol consumption is a relatively new field of research, the consequences of other paternal forms of exposure are better-documented. In both humans and in mice, there's particularly good evidence when it comes to smoking and the effect it has on inherited genetic material. The offspring of fathers who smoke are more likely to have birth defects, develop leukemia, and have excess body fat, for example, possibly also due to epigenetic processes.'
Despite the role that male drinking appears to play, most researchers agree a mother's alcohol consumption plays a larger role in fetal development than alcohol consumption by fathers.
"The alcohol in the blood of the woman is passed directly across the placenta into the fetus, so that's a very direct effect" on development, says Elizabeth Elliott, a pediatrician and professor of child and adolescent health at Australia's University of Sydney. She has been a long-time FASD researcher and is the senior co-author of a recent academic review of FASD. "It affects the brain and the part of the brain that determines the development of the face, and it affects the development of all these organ systems, the lungs, in the heart, the ears and the eyes, and so on."
It's worth noting, of course, that humans aren't mice. Mouse models can, and often do, provide us with some ideas of what might be happening in terms of human processes, but they don't mean this is definitely what's happening. Much more research is needed before we can determine the contributions of a father's alcohol consumption in humans with any certainty.
Still, the role that a father's drinking could play should not be ignored, Elliott and others say. While the research is still ongoing, Elliott believes it's time for public health campaigns to address this more directly. It's not just because the father's consumption might cause harm, she says. It would also have "real benefit… because we know that one of the key determinants of a woman drinking in pregnancy is if her male partner [if she has one] is drinking in pregnancy", she says. "It would be a win-win."
Based on the research so far, how much alcohol is "safe" for a father – not a mother – to drink if he knows his partner may conceive?
We don't have that data. But Golding, for his part, believes that a "very, very occasional drink" is probably fine – especially if a father reduces his drinking in combination with other factors that we know can improve health outcomes for offspring, like exercising and eating well. Still, he adds, "If it were my sons, I would tell them to stop drinking altogether."
While the exact impact of paternal drinking has yet to be teased out, researchers agree on one thing.
"There's this enormous burden that's put on women," says Golding. "But male health is important to fetal development. There is a responsibility of both parties here to support and provide for the health of the baby.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240801-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-the-overlooked-risk-of-fathers-who-drink
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HOW TO DO LESS FOR YOUR CHILDREN
Are you an intensive parent? Intensive parents run themselves ragged minding and serving their children. They may feel compelled to drive their kids everywhere they need or want to go, serve as their alarm clock and calendar, choose their extracurricular activities, make sure they get to those activities, monitor their schoolwork, guard them from every possible harm, and on and on. They may do all this not just for young children, but even for teenagers.
The practice of intensive parenting was first named and described by the sociologist Sharon Hays, though in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) she called it intensive mothering, acknowledging that mothers, far more often than fathers, take on parental burdens. She defined it as adherence to the belief that a good mother is devoted first and foremost to her children and provides care that’s ‘child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive’.
Intensive parenting began to proliferate in the 1980s among wealthy families with resources to support it and then trickled down to others. By the mid 2010s, surveys revealed, most parents in the United States agreed with most of the tenets of intensive parenting, even if they lacked the time and money required to abide by those tenets (similar attitudes show up from Britain to Sweden to Japan, even if the details vary).
Not surprisingly, other research has found that parents who hold strong intensive parenting beliefs experience more anxiety and guilt than those who don’t. If you are attuned to every problem your child might face and believe your child’s future depends on your continuous protection and guidance, you are likely to feel anxious indeed. And if you can’t realistically do all that you think you should do, or if you blame all your child’s foibles on yourself, you will feel guilt.
Over the years in which intensive parenting has proliferated, children as well as parents have become increasingly anxious and depressed. Elsewhere, I and colleagues have summarized multiple lines of evidence that overprotection, too much guidance, and too little independence underlie the rise of young people’s mental health problems. Research indicates that doing less for children and expecting and allowing them to do more for themselves is good for parents and children alike. What follows are some steps you might take to decrease your parenting burdens and empower your children to do more.
If you have internalized contemporary societal beliefs about all you ‘should’ do for your children, you may feel anxious or guilty about doing less. One way to combat those feelings is to remind yourself regularly that the goal of child-raising is to enable young people to become fully functioning independent adults. To achieve that, your children must become ever more able to care for themselves and ever less dependent on you.
Mammals, including our young human mammals, are born completely dependent on parents for survival, but they are also born with instinctive tendencies to exert as much independence as they can. They are born with drives to explore and play in ways that allow them to learn about their environment and practice skills essential to adulthood. When you do less for your children, you are freeing them to follow their natural drives to do more for themselves, to take greater control of their own lives.
Enable independent adult-free play
As I have expounded upon in my book Free to Learn (2013), children are innately motivated to play away from adult control, especially with other children. That’s how they learn to make their own decisions, negotiate with peers, make friends, create rules, solve problems, and in other ways take charge of their own lives. When we adults intervene in play, we undermine it.
Playworkers (professionals who enable children’s play) in the UK have a great term for unhelpful adult intervention in play: they call it the ‘adulteration’ of play – as when an adult imposes overbearing rules on a previously fun game or turns the situation into a lesson.
Independent play is essential for children’s happiness as well as learning. Much of the joy of play, away from adults, derives from the sense of independent accomplishment. Children acquire from adult-free play what psychologists call an internal locus of control: that is, a sense that they can solve their own problems, control their own destinies. Numerous studies have shown that people of any age who have a strong internal locus of control are much less likely than others to suffer from anxiety or depression in response to life’s inevitable challenges and setbacks.
Encourage participation in chores
Beyond play, children are also naturally motivated to be helpful. Research has shown repeatedly that little children want to help. In a classic study, Harriet Rheingold observed children, ages 18 to 30 months, interacting with their mother or father as the parent conducted routine housework, such as folding laundry, sweeping the floor and clearing the table. She found that all these toddlers – 80 in all – voluntarily helped do the work, without being asked. In Rheingold’s words: ‘the children carried out their efforts with quick and energetic movement, excited vocal intonations, animated facial expressions, and with delight in the finished task.’
It is best to start expecting and accepting such help while children are very young, even before their ‘help’ is truly helpful. Cross-cultural research has shown that in cultures where parents routinely allow little children to ‘help’, the children continue to help, voluntarily, as they grow older and the help becomes real. If you wait until your children are older to ask them to help, it may be harder to get their compliance. By then they may have developed the attitude that all work is your responsibility, not theirs.
As with independent play, chores too can be good for children’s immediate and long-term happiness. Nobody wants to be always a recipient and never a giver, and that applies to children as well as adults. It is empowering and feels good to be part of the home team, contributing to the home economy. Moreover, becoming an independent adult is less scary if you’ve been learning to play your part in a household throughout your childhood and adolescence.
Of course, it’s always valuable to discuss, as a family, who will take responsibility for which chores and so, when possible, allow your children to pick their own. Part of autonomy is choosing how you will contribute to the household. Volunteering to do something feels great; being ordered to do the same thing does not. As they get older, you’ll probably find your children like to take on increasingly complex and challenging tasks. Not just washing dishes, but cooking dinner, for example.
Rather than banning activities, teach safety rules
Much of the increased work of modern parenting derives from fears. Media attention to rare tragedies has led parents, and society at large, to believe that children are at great risk if not guarded constantly, especially outdoors. This is why parents feel they must drive their children everywhere, rather than let them walk, bike or take public transportation, and must monitor essentially everything their children do.
A major fear, which began to accelerate in the 1970s and ’80s, is ‘stranger danger’ – the fear of a child being abducted or even killed by a stranger. In fact, such cases have always been and still are exceedingly rare. Studies by the US Department of Justice in 1997 and 2011 revealed an average of about 100 abductions of children by strangers per year, of which fewer than 8 per cent resulted in death. That may sound like a lot, but with roughly 74 million children in the US, 100 abductions per year amounts to fewer than 1.5 abductions by strangers per million children, and roughly 0.13 deaths per million from such abductions; stranger abductions are also rare in other countries like the UK and Australia. (For comparison, the probability of a person being hit by lightning in any given year is approximately one in a million.)
Of course, every such case is tragic for the family concerned, but if we controlled our children’s lives to avoid all such statistically rare dangers, we would not allow them to do anything. There is some danger in everything we or our children do. To avoid all danger would be to avoid life. To guard against overprotection, it is important to avoid what my colleague Lenore Skenazy refers to as ‘worst-first thinking’ – that is, the tendency to imagine the very worst that could happen and then to act as if that is likely to happen.
Another parental fear inhibiting children’s independence is that of traffic. In most neighborhoods, traffic is a more realistic danger than strangers, but children can be taught how to deal with it safely. In past decades, even in big cities with much traffic, children as young as five or six regularly walked to school and to friends’ houses without adult accompaniment, without mishap.
Teaching children safety rules is a far better way to assure their long-term wellbeing than depriving them of the skills and confidence they gain from independent activities. Look both ways before you cross the street; if a stranger tries to entice you into their car, don’t do it; there is safety in numbers, so, when possible, it’s better to walk with friends. Before allowing a young child to walk independently to a routine destination, it may be good to walk with the child at least once, pointing out potential dangers and how to keep safe along the way. In today’s world, a mobile phone can add to children’s safety; a child can call for help if needed.
The value of teaching safety rules applies not just to strangers and traffic, but to all sorts of activities you might otherwise ban for your children. Children can be taught how to use sharp knives safely, how to use the oven and, in our digital age, how to avoid entanglements on the internet. When you help your child engage safely with the world in which they’re growing up, you facilitate their march toward adulthood.
In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter (2016), the esteemed developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik encourages us to think of being a parent as a relationship, not a job. It is, admittedly, a job when children are infants; infants need essentially constant care. But as children grow older, we should recognize and honor their abilities and needs to do ever more for themselves. Parents who respect children’s needs for more independence find that their children return the favor and respect the parents’ needs for more free time.
As in any loving and caring relationship, two-way communication is essential. One of the best ways to foster your child’s independence is to ask: ‘What would you like to do, independently, that you haven’t done before?’ I have learned from parents that this question can lead to responses that are freeing for parent and child alike: ‘I would really like to start walking to school by myself,’ or ‘I would love to cook dinner sometimes for the family.’
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-do-less-for-your-children?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=9abaa83027-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_06_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838173901
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THE TIMELESS SPECTER OF WESTERN DECLINE
The modern West—the United States; Europe; some members of the British Commonwealth such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and, in the post-war period, a few Westernized countries such as Israel, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—has never been so wealthy and yet so seemingly lost.
Westerners have rarely been so globally dominant, but they are increasingly unsure and vulnerable. They remain outwardly strong but inwardly fragile. Abroad, they are privately envied and publicly despised. They are proudly affluent but also wracked with guilt and neurotically afraid that they are in decline.
What defines a contemporary Western nation? Most of the shared characteristics of these otherwise ethnically and geographically diverse countries are familiar. They are now consensually governed, guaranteeing a level of freedom rarely seen outside the West.
Market-based economies and the widespread affluence they produce are taken for granted. The Judeo-Christian tradition remains the dominant creed, or at least is tolerated in a manner unknown in most of the Islamic world and Communist China. Despite growing polarization between the Right and the Left, most still embrace the tolerant values and heritage of the European Enlightenment. Coups, insurrections, and revolutions are almost nonexistent in the contemporary West.
As for the dominance of the West, it by almost any measure remains the global success story. Almost all the world’s technological breakthroughs are achievements of Western science and engineering, or at least of Western-trained scientists. The resiliency of its unique heritage and the singular scientific progress it has made in the roughly 250 years following the onset of the Industrial Revolution continue to offer Western nations enormous material advantages.
The West comprises no more than 15 percent of the world’s population. Yet in terms of overall gross domestic product, the United States, the nations in the European Union, Canada and Australia, and the Westernized Asian countries annually produce well over $60 trillion worth of goods and services, dwarfing the combined output of China, Russia, and India and accounting for half the world’s aggregate gdp. In terms of market capitalization, eight of the ten top global companies are American. Their collective market value is roughly $20 trillion, or more than the annual gdp of China.
In terms of per capita gdp, almost all of the fifty top-ranked countries are Western—with a few exceptions in the form of Middle Eastern petrostates, along with some small international havens for investment and tax avoidance. The West’s dominance in per capita gdp is reflected in superior average Western household income, as well as in unmatched Western life-expectancy rates. Each year some 7–8 million non-Western immigrants arrive legally in Western countries, along with an unknown number of illegal entrants, who likely numbered in the many millions per year until 2025. In contrast, only about 3 million annually leave Western nations. And most of these expatriates emigrate from one Western country to another.
As far as defense spending goes, even in the decades of reduced defense budgets, the United States by itself can afford to spend more on defense than China, Russia, and India combined. In sum, even in the age of Chinese ascendance, Western nations by a variety of benchmarks remain the freest, most affluent, most powerful, and most desirable places to live in the world.
Why, then, is the West—at the current pinnacle of its wealth, power, and freedom—so often self-described as in decline, or even engaged in slow-motion suicide? As it turns out, the now-pessimistic West is beset by the same inherent challenges of success that have recurrently plagued its long 2,500-year history.
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The West has always had a schizophrenic attitude to its material progress, which, since the age of the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod, is inevitably also damned as ensuring moral regress. Despite the devastating twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C., the Greek city-states of the later fourth century rebounded to achieve levels of affluence not seen in their four-centuries-long past. Yet such bounty was not typically celebrated with the kind of triumphalist oratory familiar to the prior fifth century, emblematized by Pericles’ confident review of Athenian majesty in his Funeral Oration (430 B.C.).
Instead, fourth-century literature is often censorious. Writers and orators decry the lack of sophrosyne (self-control and moderation), while criticizing the deleterious effects of increased leisure and wealth. The reactionary orator Isocrates (436–338 B.C.), after praising the early courage of the much-poorer Athenian polis that defeated the Persians, contrasted it with the decline of the city in his own age, far more affluent but feckless:
[N]othing of either good or of evil visits mankind unmixed, but . . . riches and power are attended and followed by folly, and folly in turn by license; whereas poverty and lowliness are attended by sobriety and great moderation.
Similarly, during the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, enormous riches, gained through overseas plunder, tribute, indemnities, and enslavement from global conquests, poured into the Italian peninsula at levels never seen before in Europe. And it was no accident that grouchy Republican and early Augustan writers all described the windfall as a crisis, defined by the erosion of morals, of the old Italian agrarian ethos, of citizenship, and of patriotism. The sybarite poet Catullus self-reflected: “Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome to you: you revel in and desire leisure excessively—idleness has, in times past, ruined both kings and glistening cities.”
A common subtext of Livy’s moral history of Rome is the warning that prosperity undermines civic virtue. Earlier, Sallust argued that the riches that flowed from the destruction of Carthage after the celebrated victory were more deleterious to Rome than if the Carthaginians had remained as a rival: “Ease and wealth . . . became a burden and a trouble.
At first the love of money, and then that of power, began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil.” The pessimist Tacitus, who chronicled the increasing corruption of the early-imperial Roman elite, cited newfound wealth as the prime culprit: “Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.”
Such abundance, confined under non-Western monarchs and potentates to a small ruling class, was far more widely shared among the Roman public. Later on, historians and classicists of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fixated on the ensuing “decadence.” They further cited excessive wealth as a Western disease across time and space, prompting affluent societies to indulge in utopian policies and pathological behaviors that would endanger their very survival.
Western suicide, not death from foreign invasion, became the stock warning. The popular historian Arnold Toynbee warned that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Edward Gibbon likewise cited internal decay, not foreign conquest, as the culprit in the Western Roman collapse: “The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”
We see the same cycles of ascendance and decline in the West today. A relatively poor but far more pragmatic California generation of the 1950s and 1960s saw that vastly expanded water storage and transfer across the immense state were essential for a rapidly growing population if California was to ensure and improve its standard of living and economic growth. What followed were Herculean efforts to create the two mammoth Central Valley and California Water Projects.
In contrast, two generations later, a California that was—in part due to this inherited and brilliantly designed system of north-to-south water transfers and allotments—vastly wealthier and dreamier undertook a series of ultimately disastrous state vanity projects, such as the long-delayed, overbudget high-speed-rail misadventure; the inept Solyndra solar fabrication plant; the frequently combustible Vistra Moss Landing battery-storage facility; the now-dismantled Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert; and vast, inefficient solar and wind farms that displaced prime farmland in the Central Valley.
All these debacles consumed billions of dollars for little economic return. And they shared other common denominators. Such experiments were not needed, given existing efficient and time-tested transportation and energy-generation alternatives; instead, they took the place of infrastructure projects that were pragmatic and favorable in cost–benefit terms, such as expanding freeways and nuclear power plants.
Moreover, they were ideologically driven as part of climate-change utopianism and other boutique agendas, perhaps most recently epitomized by California’s still-unfinished landscaped freeway overpass for animals, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, at a cost of $114 million and counting.
That boondoggle of a bridge, merely two hundred feet long and now in its fourth year of construction, was designed to facilitate the trek of coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions over U.S. Route 101 into the hilltop suburban backyards of Los Angeles. In contrast, Depression-era Californians simultaneously built both the 4,200-foot Golden Gate Bridge and the mammoth 22,000-foot San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges in less time. The current animal pathway was conceived at a time when oil refineries were fleeing the state, water shortages were chronic, budget deficits mounted, gasoline and electricity prices reached record levels, homelessness and crime were rampant, and 300,000 Californians a year were picking up and leaving.
The poet Horace (“Worse than our grandparents’ generation, our parents’ then produced us, even worse, and soon to bear still more sinful children”) or Livy (“We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them”) might have attributed California’s moral erosion to an inert but affluent generation that had inherited, among other things, the most sophisticated and successful system of interdependent reservoirs, aqueducts, and dams in the world.
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A final reason for mass immigration, today as in the classical past, is to substitute for a citizen body that fails to replace itself naturally. Since the origins of the West, politicians have voiced a constant warning about declining fertility and the inability of prosperous Western republics to perpetuate themselves—a malady again attributed to growing affluence, as child-rearing was seen as an obstacle to satisfying the appetites of an increasingly good life. This was especially true in periods with widespread availability of slave labor and inflows of free foreign laborers.
Infertility was a rising concern in the Greek polis, as it became again during the late Roman republic and early empire. The Greek historian (and resident of republican Rome) Polybius warned Romans in the second century B.C. that Greek infertility—again, a dividend paid by affluence and leisure—had been a prime catalyst of Hellenic decline:
"In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics . . . . For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew."
Moralists in the time of Augustus and the later Julio-Claudian emperors usually framed the demographic crisis in the context of increasingly widespread divorce, promiscuity, abortion, female emancipation, and fears that non-Italian slaves and residents would soon outnumber Italian Roman citizens. These concerns had led the first emperor Augustus to enact the lex Julia and lex Papia Poppaea—laws designed to promote fertility by punishing the childless and unmarried through the denial of legacies, while offering the carrot of financial incentives to encourage marriage and larger families.
Like their classical predecessors, all contemporary Western societies (with the exception of Israel) suffer from declining fertility. The European Union’s current fertility rate has crashed to about 1.3, while the once-fertile United States is not much better at 1.6. The affluent Westerner, ancient and modern, assumes that the better life becomes, the more it must be enjoyed in the here and now—without the bother of raising children.
But an increasingly affluent and leisured society can only for a while afford that millions of its youth should opt out of marriage and child-rearing to pursue greater financial opportunities and to gratify material appetites created by unprecedented collective prosperity. As in the ancient world, Western leaders issue empty sermons and sometimes financial incentives for youth to marry and raise children.
And they sometimes echo ancient thinkers in warning about the ultimate fate of a childless society: an aging and shrinking population, a dearth of soldiers and a risk-averse military composed of only-child soldiers, greater social isolation, unsustainable retirement costs, a more lethargic population, and a greater likelihood of reliance on socially disruptive immigration.
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Similarly, the ancients were burdened with massive public debt. Fourth-century Athenian literature is rife with complaints about the inflation of the currency, the unsustainability of the dole, and the abuse of social-welfare entitlements. The fifth-century practice of subsidized theater attendance had devolved by the fourth century into paying citizens to vote. The comic dramatist Aristophanes and the orator Lysias railed against the misuse of public entitlements and the growing insolvency of the state.
At Rome, Juvenal famously warned of bread and circuses, the ancient opiate of the masses: Long ago, when we stopped selling our votes, we cast away our cares; for the public, who once gave out military command, high civil office, legions—everything—now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.
The ancient critique of massive entitlements and subsidies was centered on the corruption of urban life and the growth of the landless unemployed. And such welfare programs were seen as one of the prime reasons for the insolvency of the state treasury and a contributor to manpower shortages in the army.
More importantly, redistributive payments to the urban poor were perceived as the inevitable result of radical consensual government that endlessly expanded subsidies to yet another claimant group. In a now timely and prescient warning about how “equality” naturally leads to “equity,” Aristotle connected equality in voting with further unsustainable demands to be made equal in all other aspects of life: “Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” Plato saw the desire to expand mandated equality as an interminable process that eventually becomes nihilist: even donkeys and horses would expect to be treated as if they were free citizens.
Few contemporary Western nations have found any solutions to resolve their unfunded liabilities or unsustainable social-welfare programs. Most governments seek only to avoid a financial collapse on their watch, through cutting defense spending, increasing taxes, or lowering interest rates, as they pass the burden on to their successors. America’s current national debt is roughly $39 trillion, projected to cost nearly $3 billion a day in interest, or over a trillion dollars annually, by the end of 2026—larger than the U.S. defense budget.
The once-indomitable British Navy has been slashed to about fifteen major combat ships, only four of which are deployable—many fewer than the forty or so admirals in the Royal Navy, and a shadow of the nearly nine hundred ships that a much poorer Britain manned in World War II.
A recurrent theme in fourth-century Athenian literature is this paradox of an affluent citizenry nonetheless paralyzed by an insolvent state—and thus always seeking ways either to cut navy and hoplite forces or to find new, less expensive means of self-defense. A common topos is the realization that fourth-century Greeks could never match the martial feats of their impoverished ancestors.
So the fourth-century Athenian orator Demosthenes often despaired that a relatively poor Athens in 480 B.C. helped galvanize just thirty or so city-states (of the 1,500 poleis in the Greek-speaking world) to defeat the huge Persian armada at Salamis. But 142 years later, in 338 B.C., another foreign army had descended into Greece under Philip II with a mere thirty thousand troops yet proved unstoppable against city-states far more affluent—but squabbling, divided, and weaker. Demosthenes saw that the poverty of an earlier Greece made it far easier to mobilize for the collective defense:
There was something, men of Athens, something which animated the mass of the Greeks but which is lacking now, something which triumphed over the wealth of Persia, which upheld the liberties of Hellas, and which never lost a single battle by sea or by land; a spirit whose extinction today has brought universal ruin and turned Hellas upside down.
Another characteristic of perceived decline is the desire to internationalize the West: the idea that the Westerner, having solved all the challenges of his own culture, is ready to extend his enlightened values and superior political systems over the world at large—insidiously surrendering his autonomy and self-interest in the bargain. It is often a vain conceit that a supposedly rational West can persuade other cultures and civilizations to adjudicate global disagreements in the same sober and judicious fashion as a Western deliberative body.
An accelerant of these larger trends was a complacent “end of history” consensus common after the 1989 liberation of Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the Cold War ended, Western military readiness and deterrence were deemed passé—and remained so at least until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Even earlier, in the wake of two catastrophic twentieth-century intra-Western European wars and amid a costly forty-five-year Cold War and nuclear standoff, Western European and Westernized Asian nations increasingly relied more on international organizations—and the U.S. military—than on their own shrinking armed forces to ensure their own security.
At about the same time as the end of the Cold War, globalization—a euphemism for Westernization—transcended the expansion of world trade and investment and soon led to a homogenized consumer culture, near-instant communications, and far greater international travel. Many Westerners believed that globalized investment and an infectious popular culture would naturally implant democracy and personal freedom in even the tradition-bound societies of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Yet the fact that a radical Islamist wears Levis, Nike Air Force One sneakers, and hoodies, communicates on the latest iPhone, and types on an Apple MacBook Pro does not ensure that he also accepts the Western notions of consensual government, separation of church and state, and equality of women.
Many Westerners, however, went even further—somewhat in the spirit of Alexander the Great’s ecumenical “brotherhood of man” agenda to meld East with West—and argued that such initial superficial homogeneity would eventually lead to all national identities ceasing to matter amid a universal cosmopolitanism.
“Citizen of the world” is a Greek term sometimes associated with Socrates, who reportedly believed himself not just an Athenian but also a citizen of all the city-states and those of foreigners as well. As if on autopilot, the increasingly modern democratized world was eventually supposed to operate in harmony on the Westernized principles of a “rules-based international order”—without much worry about who or what would enforce edicts from a League of Nations–like global body of experts.
Perhaps the most disturbing symptom of an affluent Western society is the rise of oikophobia (hatred of one’s own household), the warping of signature Western self-criticism into destructive self-loathing. It ranges from the mild—such as President Barack Obama’s observation that the United States was no more exceptional a nation than Greece or the United Kingdom, despite economic, political, and military data that clearly proves America to be the preeminent nation in the world—to abject self-hatred.
This more toxic version was evident in a recent Philadelphia demonstration against U.S. action in Iran, where protestors—some of them visitors from the Middle East—chanted for Iran to win the war and Americans to die: “For every U.S. soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!”
Only in a rich capitalist economy could thousands of protestors, day in and day out, mass to harass Tesla dealerships, parade in “No Kings” demonstrations, skip class for pro-Hamas campus rallies, or swarm city streets to root for enemy Iranian forces to kill their own.
These social-media-fed demonstrations and vicious attacks on one’s own nation are perhaps the updated, or rather degenerated, versions of Aristophanes’ bitter anti-war comedies such as Lysistrata and Peace, staged in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. They bear a similar relationship to Tacitus’s virulent commentary on Roman imperialism in Britain, voiced through the indigenous leader Calgacus: “They make a desert and call it peace.” His native mouthpiece succinctly—but not quite fairly, given the benefits of Roman rule for the conquered—summed up Roman expansionism as “robbery, slaughter, plunder.”
All these pathologies are the side effects accruing from the bounty of private property, free markets, and capitalism. And when such largesse is combined with the vast personal freedom guaranteed by consensual governments, the result is a Western paradox: the most successful economic and political systems in the world can prompt their own decline, not by failure but by spectacular successes that breed laxity, complacency, indulgence, guilt, and utopianism.
In the hope that forgoing what is now materially and legally possible will stave off these vices, politicians and leaders, today as in the past, have called for a return for simpler, more time-honored morality, to rediscover traditional religion, and to distrust the fads of the out-of-touch and ethically bankrupt elite—so often in vain.
So in the West of today there re-arises a long, familiar air of unreality. The more that today’s Westerners, like their ancient predecessors, are divorced by their affluence from the cruelty of the wild world and the innate savagery of human nature, the more that the public believes it has transcended the age-old struggle to live just one more day.
The result is that the Westerner is liberated to enact heaven-on-earth agendas, often high-minded, but ultimately suicidal.
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-timeless-specter-of-western-decline/
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BOYS AND THE “RED PILL”
My 17-year-old son isn’t much of a TikTok enthusiast. There was a time when he watched basketball content and followed some musicians he likes, but a few weeks ago, he deleted the app. Stating he just didn’t use it anymore, it was almost as if he had ghosted it.
But I wondered why after he mentioned something to me in late January, after TikTok changed its ownership structure for US users: “Good news on TikTok: less porn. Bad news: lots of red pill content.”
If you’re not familiar with the term “red pill,” it’s a nod to the “Matrix” movies — referring to men waking up to the “harsh truth” that men are oppressed by a feminist society. In a nutshell, it’s fringe content that positions men as victims of a society that favors women.
I’m lucky that my son was never one to lose time scrolling.
He’s always preferred to shoot hoops or hang with his friends, and he deleted the app on at least one other occasion because he found the repetitive content annoying. (If you identify as a male adolescent, good luck “curating” your algorithm. People often give that advice, but he found that it’s completely unrealistic in teen boy world. You get what they give you.)
Dr. Katie Hurley is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and the author of several books, including her new release, “Breaking the Boy Code: The New Playbook for Raising Resilient Boys.”
I took a deep dive into the manosphere for my new book, “Breaking the Boy Code: The New Playbook for Raising Resilient Boys” because I couldn’t find practical solutions for parents and educators dealing with this “boy crisis.” We need more than scary headlines and alarming statistics.
The “red pill” content I explored becomes more intense over time, including racist and misogynistic themes, but it can take a while. In the beginning, the lines between self-help and radical thought are blurry at best.
Netflix recently called attention to this growing problem in “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” a documentary focused on some of the biggest influencers in this space. That attention helps make parents aware of the threats to boys online. But I wanted to know more about the impact on our boys.
I learned that 73% of adolescent boys regularly encounter masculinity-related content and nearly 1 in 4 experience high levels of exposure, according to a 2025 Common Sense Media survey of over 1,000 US male adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17. Fourteen percent of boys with high digital masculinity exposure experience low self-esteem, and 39% of that group report feeling “useless at times” and 34% think they’re “no good.”
Though this data makes a connection between high exposure to manosphere content and poor mental health, a lot of attention tends to focus on the actions boys are influenced to take, such as chiseling their jaws with actual hammers and injecting peptides into their skin. Those suggestions sound awful — but what about the impact on their mental health?
About six months ago, out of curiosity, I did my best to take the red pill on TikTok.
Diving into the manosphere as a middle-aged woman
I didn’t hide my identity or create a fake account to launch myself headlong into the manosphere. I simply searched terms and hashtags that might lead me toward masculinity influencers. I saw a lot of videos encouraging boys to buy a specific hair care brand, use a small hammer or other hard object to tap along the jawline for a more chiseled look, and how to use tape on their eyelids to develop the “hunter eyes” look. Some of them were alarming. But it was the unspoken effects of this content that stayed with me.
What I noticed was disturbing and saddened me. Here’s what I saw.
Low self-esteem and insecurity oozed out of boys. Both in videos they create and comments they post on other threads, boys, and middle school boys in particular, asked questions about their appearance, claiming to seek honest feedback. Though crying is discouraged by masculinity influencers as weak, many boys fought back tears as they tapped away at their jawlines while talking about what they need to change about both their appearance and personality.
Seeking validation by asking commenters to rate their perceived improvements and sharing photos in comment sections to gain feedback from another creator’s followers show the intense insecurity some boys face during this period of development.
The manosphere has a playbook that results in monetization for the chosen few. The reason it’s important to understand the mechanisms behind the manosphere at the top (think Clavicular and Andrew Tate) is because their content and ideology trickles down but the money trickles up.
Watch enough of this content and you’ll learn that the keys to becoming a “man” include hyper independence, strong leadership, financial stability, assertiveness skills and an ability to provide what they refer to as “containment.” Masculine men will contain women by “unemploying” them and handling all problems so they can relax at home, free from worldly stressors.
They present this information as if it’s well-studied, and there’s always a solution for boys and young men who are only just learning this version of masculinity. Course packs, coupon codes for herbal supplements, jaw trainers, and creatine and entrance codes into sports betting and day-trading apps abound in the manosphere.
It’s packaged as self-help but targets the lonely and disenfranchised, and the cost of improvement is high — financially and emotionally.
Belonging, purpose and mattering drive boys toward this content. After reading through scores of comments on videos that ranged from benign (shower twice a day) to downright dangerous (bone smashing), I noticed a common thread: These boys are looking for belonging, purpose and mattering. They want to feel understood. Although anger is a common emotion in these spaces, channeling that anger toward a common enemy (girls and women) builds connection. In these negatively charged spaces, some boys feel like they belong and they matter.
The fear of rejection is pervasive. Boys who engage with this content regularly are told to be stoic, tough and aggressive, to take control. But it’s easy to see that this message only lands at surface level. Frustrated when the masculinity advice doesn’t work, boys rant about rejection using misogynistic language with violent undertones. Fear turns to rage quickly, especially when other boys cheer them on.
Many boys and men aren’t buying it. After months of scrolling through masculinity content, it took a lot of puppy videos to get my “for you” page back to something that didn’t raise my blood pressure. In the process of flooding my feed with positive content, I noticed something: There are quite a few teens and young men sharing solid life advice and critiquing masculinity influencers. The attention economy favors the outrageous, so the so-called “soft masculinity” creators (like Ben Hurst and Jordan Stephens) don’t have the same reach just yet. But they’re out there, trying to add some balance to conversations about masculinity, and that’s a step in the right direction.
What should parents do?
Redefining role models in a time when digital influence is magnetic is difficult but not impossible. I often tell parents that it’s a series of seemingly small changes that makes a big difference. Try these tips:
Promote in-person helping: Volunteering together is underrated. When families do good together, they find all kinds of connections, role models and friends whom they wouldn’t have otherwise met.
Teach critical thinking skills: Teach boys to question the authenticity and validity of content. Does the post mention #ad or #spon? What does that mean? If a post claims scientific evidence, is the evidence linked, and did he read it and determine that it qualifies as scientific (peer-reviewed, reputable scholarly journal)?
Foster the gut check: Empower boys to unfollow accounts that make them feel bad about themselves, helpless or hopeless. Boys need to learn to trust the emotional and physical cues that tell them how content affects them. Take time to understand each platform.
Many platforms say they are working hard to offer safe and supervised experiences for younger social media users. I reached out to both TikTok and YouTube to get a better sense of the steps they’re taking to help teens enjoy a safer experience in their apps.
Both platforms created helpful guides for caregivers. TikTok created a Guardian’s Guide to help caregivers understand the user experience and the available safety features. YouTube teamed up with the American Psychological Association to create A Guide to Healthy Screen Habits for Teens.
Spokespersons for both platforms also urge caregivers to use the latest tools provided by the apps to help kids learn to use digital platforms in a healthy way.
YouTube shared that they now have three distinct experiences to match developmental stage: YouTube Kids (0-12), kid accounts (this is a managed onramp supervised by parents), and teen accounts (13-17; autoplay is automatically set to “off”).
A TikTok spokesperson stated that teen accounts have more than 50 safety, privacy and security settings automatically enabled, including no access to direct messages for users 13 to 15 and no livestreaming for those under the age of 18. They also have a family pairing program to help parents scaffold digital safety skills by managing content, safety and well-being settings.
One piece of advice for parents
In total, I spent just about six months popping in and out of these spaces to try to understand how boys end up there and why they stay. If there’s one piece of advice I can offer to parents of boys, it’s this: In the absence of connection, belonging and feeling understood in their lives, boys will look elsewhere to meet these needs.
If you want your sons to come to you, you need to create brave spaces inside your family where they can be honest and you can listen without problem-solving and validate what they’re going through. None of this is easy, and all of them need a soft landing, no matter how tough they might seem.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/health/breaking-boy-code-book-wellness
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ARGUMENTS AGAINST CHRISTIANITY
Christianity can be framed as a religion that applauds failure, recasting the desires we fail to grasp into evils as a coping mechanism, and presenting their denial as objective goods.
Christianity valorizes poverty for those who can’t buy the sports car they really want, but now proclaims that having one is actually greedy, folding their arms and denouncing successful people for selling their soul. Those who make such arguments tend to believe humanity desires wealth and power above all other things and that these desires are good.
Nietzsche’s philosophy is rooted in establishing this as the driving force of human life. He calls it the Will to Power and it remains one of the most influential ideas in modern philosophy, saturating modernism, post-modernism and other intellectual currents.
Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
"Wherever I found a living thing, there I found the Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.
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For critics like Nietzsche, Christianity is a slave morality. He saw it as uniquely disgusting and I’m probably understating his hatred of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Antichrist:
“This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.”
Nietzsche saw the early Christian ethos as an urge to destroy civilization, driven by lower orders who waged unremitting spiritual warfare against human greatness. Men and women who could not become great themselves, but as a multitude could bring down the mighty. This is why Nietzsche sees socialist ethics as originating in Christianity.
This line of thinking sees the growth of Christianity as rooted in moral cowardliness. Instead of valorizing greatness, which almost all parents teach their children and schools relentlessly promote, Christianity inverted this hierarchy by sanctifying the inability to achieve our dreams as some form of holiness. This revolution of values thereby poisoned Western morality and permanently damaged it.
Before this so-called inversion, Roman emperors were elevated into divinity. By contrast, Christians elevated a man condemned as a criminal, bleeding and naked, into godhood. One represents the hierarchy of power whilst the other was crucified and his friends abandoned him. Christians decided a crucified man should be deified and not an emperor.
The next part of the argument is decisive. Very few people today behave according to the New Testament’s moral claims. We have jobs. We seek pay raises. We want big houses. We teach children about success. We buy gifts that are expensive. We wear good clothes. We hoard wealth. We want endless promotions along the hierarchy of jobs and careers.
Nobody would find it acceptable for a school to teach children that making money is wrong. The idea of school applying Christian ethics into every facet of its teaching would seem too absurd for many who profess Christian belief. That’s why the religion is often boiled down to disputes about social morality.
Instead of having students revise for exams so they can be proud and get a good job, it would seem like madness for a school to teach them not just charity and humility, but to actively arm them with a belief that actively hates worldly success. I don’t know of any parent who would tolerate such an ideology being taught to students.
1 John 2:16: For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.
Not even clergy reject ambition. Priests aim to be bishops who will become cardinals and popes. They gain authority and glory, living in palaces and preaching to rulers. Kings hardly give up thrones. Presidents are adorned in civic honors. Artists and philosophers seek immortality. Sportsmen raise their arms in triumph as arenas roar their names. By all accounts, Nietzsche was right. Humanity is ruled by the Will to Power.
It can even be argued that Christianity is ruled by a deformed Will to Power. Incapable of attaining riches, its followers denounce wealth. Humility becomes its own power which feeds a broken ego with endless self-pity until the entire world is denounced.
1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Like a form of armor, the true believer is protected from feelings of failure. Elevating himself into beatitude, morality becomes his currency as poverty is exalted and riches are denounced. Some parts of the New Testament read like a revolutionary battlecry.
Luke 6:24-26 But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
This is a significant moral attack against Christianity and it was so strong that the Medieval church not just campaigned against this idea, but launched relentless crusades to obliterate the theology of poverty. This was because it saw such a belief as fundamentally threatening its power.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is based around these strange disputes from centuries ago. All various heresies in the Medieval period assaulted the Papacy by claims of poverty. They accused the church of rejecting the gospel for riches. These heresies included Catharism, Waldensians, Lollards and Bogomils amongst countless others.
Whilst they all had different theological systems, most were united by vows of poverty that stirred up the common folk against established powers and launched widespread rebellions. Papal envoys and allies found it almost impossible to argue against them on claims of poverty. It essentially was a class war dressed in Christian theology.
Catholicism won by burning the heretics, destroying their armies, and frightening others, but it still held the notion of gospel poverty with suspicion. Even Francis of Assisi was initially viewed as trouble. This is because the debate about poverty is endless and threatened to destroy monastic wealth and any sort of rank or order in society.
Of course, the New Testament is clear that Jesus owned basically nothing and preached material poverty. The major focus of his ethical teachings are directed towards greed and hypocrisy. That’s why the theology became so toxic for the Medieval church. ~ Quora, 4-24-26
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CAN WE PREDICT THE NEXT GLOBAL CRISIS?
Spotting the events that might lead to a major period of upheaval is notoriously difficult. Could artificial intelligence be the crystal ball we need?
Four hundred years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, tossing your enemy out of a window was a dramatic way to make a political statement. On 23 May 1618, in the chancellery of Prague castle, a group of Protestant nobles accused two Catholic royal governors of ignoring their rights. The heated confrontation culminated in the ejection of the Catholic governors and their secretary from a third story window.
Remarkably, the three men survived the defenestration – thanks to the outstretched arms of angels who swooped in to catch them, if the Catholics were to be believed. According to a Protestant version of events, it was a rather less glamorous pile of manure that broke their fall.
The tussle should have been little more than a footnote in the centuries of simmering, bloody hostility between these two Christian factions in medieval Europe. But it would prove to be far more consequential.
The incident triggered the Protestant-led Bohemian revolt against the Catholic Habsburg emperor, which mutated into one of the most destructive wars in European history – the Thirty Years' War. The grueling three decades of conflict would drag in more than a dozen nations and claim millions of lives in the widespread devastation, famine and disease that followed.
It's one of many examples throughout history of an event having unexpectedly far-reaching consequences.
History is replete with examples: the East German official who misspoke during a press conference and sent thousands rushing to the Berlin Wall, hastening the end of the Cold War; Archduke Franz Ferdinand's driver taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo, placing him in the path of an assassin and igniting the powder keg that sparked the First World War. The Tunisian fruit seller who set himself on fire after his scales were confiscated by police, triggering the Arab Spring uprisings that engulfed six countries and deposed four state leaders.
Looking back, the warning signs were there to see. A range of factors can provide the tinder for a cataclysmic event. The challenge is knowing, in advance, which spark will catch.
But predicting how and when major world events might unfold is something researchers hope sophisticated artificial intelligence models will one day be able to achieve. They believe that with enough data, it should be possible to map how the ripples caused by seemingly minor incidents build into the tidal waves that can shift financial markets, spark revolutions or lead to war. Already, AI technology is providing hints of what might be possible.
Using the past to predict future crises
The idea of predicting the future based on patterns extracted from the past is far from new. In the first half of the 20th Century, Russian American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin pioneered a data-led approach to explain why past empires imploded. To do so, he attempted to quantify societal instability across the ages, gathering data on "micro-events", such as political assassinations or riots, and "macro-events", such as civil wars and revolutions.
In the case of Ancient Rome, he used his data to make the case for what he believed caused the empire's downfall: excessive materialism and hedonism leading to decadence and "over-ripeness".
Today, complexity scientist Peter Turchin is upholding the spirit of Sorokin's work at Oxford University's World History Lab in the UK. For more than a decade, Turchin and his team of researchers have amassed 80,000 pieces of qualitative and quantitative data from societies stretching back to Palaeolithic times in an effort to explain the past and predict the future.
"We're looking for moments of crisis," says researcher Samantha Holder, who works on the project. From the late Bronze Age collapse to the dissolution of the Habsburg Spanish Empire, crises are given a score to reflect their geographical reach and intensity. This data is analyzed for patterns with the help of predictive computational models – a process which doesn't currently use AI but soon could do.
Revolutions, Turchin's team have found, tend to stem from a confluence of factors including parts of the population becoming poorer and a growing number of elites vying for a limited number of ruling positions. "If these things happen at the same time and the state has a financial crisis, revolution and civil wars become more likely," says Holder. She cites the French Revolution as an illustrative example.
Turchin used these methods back in 2010 to predict that 2020 would be particularly chaotic. A period of intense political instability would be brought on by a "dark triad" of social maladies: too many elites jostling for power, falling living standards and a weak fiscal state, he warned. After a global pandemic that sent shockwaves through the world economy and an intense period of political turmoil, Turchin appeared prescient.
At present, the team uses AI to assist in the collection and classification of vast historical data sets. But they hope to use AI on the prediction side in future. "Machine learning algorithms… could enhance the mathematical modeling we are doing," says Jakob Zsambok, a research assistant who also works with Turchin. "We are looking in this direction.”
Berlin wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall had been brewing for some time, but a few misspoken words sparked the event that signaled the end of the Iron Curtain
Critics including the late anthropologist David Graeber have cast doubt on the notion that we might be able to use history to predict the future. And random, one-off "Black Swan" events that can trigger periods of upheaval are, by their very nature, impossible to predict. But in many cases, there are warning signs that precede these triggers.
Modeling chaos
Unsurprisingly, governments and the military are two of the players that have paid most attention to this field so far.
In 2020, a secretive US intelligence project used an AI called Raven Sentry to predict attacks from the Taliban in Afghanistan. The AI tool was fed data on historical violence in the region combined with real-time intelligence including weather data, social-media posts, news reports and commercial satellite images, according to a paper published by a journal of the US Army War College. The model reportedly achieved 70% accuracy, roughly comparable to human analysts, "just at a much higher rate of speed”.
One of the defense contractors involved in the effort, Rhombus Power, claims to have used generative AI to predict Russia's invasion of Ukraine by analyzing open-source data including satellite imagery, movements at missile sites, and local business transactions. Those predictions, however, were not made public beforehand, so it has not been possible to verify the companies claims.
Other researchers are also developing neural networks aimed at predicting food crises, in some cases using climate data alone. But some researchers remain skeptical about the reliability of AI to make such predictions.
The UK's Alan Turing Institute for AI, for example, assessed the level of maturity for AI-driven prediction technology. Their conclusion? On the whole, it’s probably not quite there yet.
"One of the challenges in building something like this is that it's not easy to get the right AI training data to predict future conflicts," says Anna Knack, a senior research associate at the Turing Institute, who specializes in national security and conducted the analysis. "The problem is, when we think about things like the Arab Spring or 9/11 or Iran or Kashmir, all that information sits in fragmented places all around the intelligence community.”
"It's really hard to predict even the current thinking of some of our state leaders," continues Knack. Her report concluded that, right now, the two most promising ways AI could help are in tracking conflict risk indicators more accurately and identifying possible outcomes immediately after a shock takes place.
Almost as useful as knowing when a disaster will strike, is understanding the potential ripple effects, says Eugene Chausovsky, senior director at The New Lines Institute in the US, a research and policy think tank that conducts forecasting. "Where could this crisis impact, not only geopolitically, but economically?"
Over the past year, Chausovsky and his team have been simulating versions of the Strait of Hormuz crisis we're currently living through. In partnership with AI startup, Mantis Analytics, they have used AI to augment their analyses – assessing downstream impacts on energy markets, semiconductors and agriculture.
AI tools have "enabled us to massively expand the data streams that we work with," says Chausovsky – from open-source monitoring to global news to "statistical databases on everything from trade to energy to critical minerals". This helps to improve the accuracy of the simulations they run.
They have also experimented with having AI take part in simulations of conflicts alongside human experts, with bots taking turns to play state leaders. Right now, "You lose some of the nuance and the complexity that you may have at the human level," says Chausovsky. Interestingly, the AI also tends to be more conservative than human players – refraining from taking escalatory action, for example.
The United Nations Development Program is already deploying AI to help it assess the impact of major disasters and events. After the 2023 Herat earthquake in Afghanistan, it used its AI-powered Rapid Digital Assessment tool to estimate how much damage and debris might be at any given location, enabling it to deploy rescue efforts more precisely
The UN has also been investing in AI early warning as part of what it calls "proactive crisis management". It combines historical and near real-time data on a Crisis Risk Dashboard to identify potential violent hotspots before things escalate. In Sri Lanka, for example, it monitors hate speech and macroeconomic data, while elsewhere it might look at displacement of populations or migration.
The next financial crash
Financial regulators are also hoping AI can give them a headstart on potential problems. They have access to "incredibly granular, essentially real time data on who owns what throughout the financial system", says Antonio Coppola, assistant professor of finance at Stanford University. This, combined with AI techniques like deep learning, could be used to better inform how financial markets can be regulated.
Part of a financial regulator’s role is considering policy interventions to prevent or mitigate financial crises. Rather than predicting crises, Coppola's current work is focused on "if this big wave of stress comes along, where are the problems going to be? Who exactly is going to get in trouble?"
In a recent proof of concept paper, Coppola built a model trained on a large-scale data set made up of financial portfolios covering about $40tn (£30tn) of wealth in the shadow banking system. Shadow banks provide services similar to commercial banks but exist outside of normal financial regulations and harbor a significant amount of financial risk. The shadow banking system contributed to the liquidity crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic, for example.
Coppola found that by training the AI model on 20 years of data up to 2019, it was able to accurately forecast which markets experienced the largest selling of financial assets in 2020, and which investors contributed the most to the market downturn.
The results proved to be 10 times better than traditional methods informed by economic theory, according to Coppola. But he hastens to add that AI should not replace traditional economic modeling. Rather, it could supplement it.
Next, Coppola is looking at how these AI models could incorporate unstructured data like news headlines to improve their accuracy. Other researchers are already examining how AI could be used to predict the financial crises themselves, but the area is still in its infancy.
Predicting a financial crash is only part of the problem – getting anyone to pay attention to the warnings is another issue entirely.
While it may take some iterations before AI is accurately predicting crises, it is already racking up successes in the lower stakes arena of forecasting tournaments, where participants stake bets on the likelihood of different world events taking place – from sporting to political. AI startups are creeping up the league tables, although humans are, for now, still ranking top.
But there is also the possibility that AI itself could precipitate the next global crisis. Many economists are already predicting an AI bubble that if it bursts could be ruinous for financial markets, while tech bosses have warned of the wider societal disruption the technology might cause.
With that in mind, I asked the AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude about the probability that AI itself could cause a future global crisis. (A 2024 study found that, despite their tendency for hallucinating false information, combining predictions from multiple AI chatbots can achieve accuracy on par with human forecasters.)
In response to my queries, Claude declined to give a specific number while Gemini gave it "a 50/50 toss-up”.
ChatGPT, however, put the probability that AI "contributes to a serious global crisis at some point this century" at "roughly 20-40%". It put the likelihood of an existential crisis at less than 5%.
For now, it seems, we'll have to wait and see'.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260421-can-we-predict-the-next-crisis
WHY FUNERALS KEEP AFRICA POOR
a funeral in Ghana
Consider, for a moment, a funeral in Ghana.
Suppose you’re an elderly Ghanaian—let’s say you’re Kofi, age 74, an Akan. One day, you do as all humans must and die. Perhaps you die at your modest bungalow in a northern suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. What happens next?
A few things. First, your immediate family will discover that you’re dead; and, in order to deal with the logistics of your death, they call the head of your extended family: the abusuapanyin. This is not your closest surviving relative. The Akan are matrilineal, and the maternal line “owns” the body, so the abusuapanyin is the most senior male on your mother’s side. And he’s the one who will take charge of the arrangements from this point forward. In consultation with him, your body is taken to the nearest hospital mortuary, where it’s embalmed and placed in a refrigerated unit.
Your body is going to remain in that refrigerated unit for a long time. Typically it will be weeks or months; sometimes bodies can stay refrigerated for an entire year. Why so long? Because the longer that he body stays in the mortuary, the more time the family has to raise funds for a funeral truly befitting your status. And, since the hospital charges escalating fees for each additional week that your body is stored there, keeping your body refrigerated for a long time is itself a mark of prestige.
Eventually, your family decides that they’ve raised the funds they’re going to raise. So they pick a Saturday—the funerals of Christian Ghanaians are always held on Saturdays—and plan a lavish event that will, in fact, stretch across three days. They hire a graphic designer to produce large colorful banners bearing your name, your photograph, your dates of birth and death, and the time and place of your funeral: these are hung on walls and fences at intersections around the city. They rent a venue, hire a large staff—caterers, a DJ or live band, a photographer, maybe a videographer, perhaps even dancing pallbearers—and choose a funeral cloth for the family to wear. And if your family can afford it, or wants the community to believe that they can, they commission a craftsman to carve you a “fantasy coffin” shaped like something you enjoyed or admired in life: perhaps a cocoa pod, a school building, a crab, a paintbrush, or a giant blue teapot.
And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.
This all sounds, you’ll notice, very expensive. And it is.
A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.
So how do people pay for these remarkably expensive events?
Sometimes they’ll have insurance of some kind: funeral insurance, where the payout is earmarked for the funeral costs, is one of the most popular financial products in sub-Saharan Africa—often, in fact, more popular than health insurance. And much of the time, family members will pay for funerals with loans from others. About a quarter of households in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, pay for funerals by going into debt.
And, if it comes to it, families will just cut back on living expenses to cover the funeral costs. In Zimbabwe, households that cannot afford to bury their dead will sell their belongings or even cut back on food. (Zimbabwe has the second-highest rate of death from malnutrition in the world.) This is actually a remarkably common thing. Out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause. And it doesn’t seem to be a new thing. As early as 1853, a visitor to coastal West Africa noted that “even the poorest will pawn and enslave themselves to obtain the means of burying a relation decently, according to the ideas of country.”
This all seems very strange.
Those of us who live in the rich world tend to expect that spending follows a sort of Maslovian progression. Poor people spend money on the necessities; as people get richer, they spend on things further and further removed from the logic of survival, until eventually they are willing to allocate resources to things like dog longevity. But with African funeral spending, this pattern is inverted. Why do some of the poorest people in the world bankrupt themselves to pay for extremely lavish funerals?
The standard answer to this is that exorbitant funeral spending is “part of the local culture,” and particularly reflective of a “reverence toward elders.” And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of why it’s part of the culture—in fact, why it’s part of so many distinct cultures across very different parts of Africa. Why is heavy funeral spending such a pronounced part of life? And if this is merely a reflection of “reverence toward elders,” why do so many elderly Africans complain that far more attention is given to their funeral than to caring for them while they’re alive? (So common is this sentiment that the Akan have a saying: abusua do funu, “the family loves the corpse.”)
The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.
The kinship tax
African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.
So what are kinship societies?
You can think of modern societies as large collections of individuals, their lives structured by impersonal institutions like states and corporations. Kinship societies are much older: they are, in fact, the oldest and most durable type of human society. In a kinship society, life is centered on the extended family: the “clan,” the lineage, the tribe—a group that often includes many people who aren’t actually related. These kinship networks don’t act anything like nuclear families in modern societies. They are highly functional organisms: most of the functions provided by states in the modern world—protection from harm, credit, dispute resolution, eldercare, social insurance—are instead provided by the kinship network. If you fall sick, the kinship group will care for you; if you need cash, the kinship group will lend you money; if a stranger wrongs you, the kinship group will avenge you.
Of course, a kinship network isn’t a charity. It’s more like a mutual aid society that you’re born into and can’t leave: what the kinship group gives, the kinship group must also take. A huge amount of life in kinship societies is structured by the obligations that people owe to their kin.
The most extreme example of this is the obligation to fight and kill for your kin group if it comes to it: thus the blood feuds and vendettas that characterize intensely kin-oriented societies, from Appalachia to the Somali steppe.
But you also owe things to your kinship network on a more day-to-day level: we can call these sharing obligations. Just as you pay taxes and fees to the various impersonal institutions that govern life in the rich world, you must make regular contributions to the collective welfare of your kin. But there’s a crucial distinction. In a modern society, you will know, more or less, what you owe and when you’ll owe it; but with sharing obligations there’s no such clarity. The demands from your kin—hospital bills, loan requests, funeral expenses—simply come up.
And you can’t really say no to these obligations. The mutual obligation that defines intensive kinship really is essential to the functioning of everyday life in kinship societies. A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.
And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.
The result is a constant process of redistribution from the most productive members of a kinship group to the least productive. This informal redistribution is a constant feature of life in African societies: 93 percent of Kenyan entrepreneurs agree that success in business leads to financial demands from family and friends. South Africans even have a name for the sharing obligations that define African kinship groups: “the black tax.”
This is, of course, a bad deal for the ambitious and productive within the society. But because refusal is impossible, sharing obligations lead to all sorts of attempts at obfuscation. One experiment found that rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans fully collateralized by their savings. Sometimes people get around sharing obligations by working far from home. As one businesswoman in Nairobi attested:
I sell second-hand clothes without anyone knowing, far from home. I hide from my friends because I believe not all friends will be happy with my success, and from family to create a picture that I have no money, for them to work hard for their own money. My previous business, a street-side restaurant, failed due to my in-laws using me for money, yet I wanted to expand it.
The relentlessness of sharing obligations also makes it nearly impossible to accrue savings over time. Thus we see that in KwaZulu-Natal individuals will go out of their way to invest their surplus in non-sharable goods, like roofing or fencing, instead of accumulating liquid savings that their families might claim.
Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies
Of course, this type of obfuscation is a significant problem for the kinship network. If the productive members of the group can defect—removing their resources from the common pool—then the whole system of mutual obligation begins to unravel. If a productive individual can simply withdraw from sharing obligations, then the network must demand more from those who remain, increasing the incentive to defect: so the entire delicate machinery of mutual obligation collapses in a slow cascade. This is the death spiral for kinship networks.
So from the perspective of the kinship network, wealth is a threat. Those who become wealthy have an incentive to defect; and while social sanctions can punish those who defect explicitly, it’s much harder to police those—like the businesswoman in Nairobi—who defect quietly. The safest bet is to prevent people from becoming too rich in the first place.
So, over time, societies based around intensive kinship have developed strategies to make defection difficult. The most important of these is the ritualistic destruction of individual wealth. This is why kinship societies seem to have so many rituals—public feasting, elaborate gift-giving, potlatch—that seem so strange and wasteful to the outside observer. The expense that you incur is a sort of guarantee that you won’t be able to transcend the bonds of kinship.
You can think of funerals as another wealth destruction ritual. The genius of it is that it can’t be evaded: it is a public ceremony virtually dedicated to the immolation of wealth. In private, you might be able to evade your sharing obligations by hiding your earnings or your savings; but in public, at the funeral, the claims that your kin make on your wealth are at their most visible and least avoidable. You can’t simply not show up to your uncle’s funeral; and, if you show up, you will obviously be expected to contribute a handsome sum.
And this logic is even more powerful for those who are suspected of shirking their kinship obligations. It’s at the funeral where you must signal your willingness to honor sharing obligations most loudly. The lavishness of the funeral is a costly signal of continued commitment to the system of mutual obligation that holds the kinship group together. The point is that it’s expensive and incommensurate with your means.
This is why Ghanaian funerals, for example, have tended to grow only more lavish with time. In the past, most members of a kinship group lived within a relatively small radius, and the decomposition of the body placed a natural limit on the resources that could be marshaled in time for the ceremony; so the body was buried within a few days, and those who couldn’t make it would be accommodated with a “second burial” later on. (The second burial is still practiced in places like Igboland in eastern Nigeria and in large parts of rural Cameroon.)
But in the second half of the twentieth century, this dynamic changed. There was a huge increase in migration, either to major cities or to other countries, and airplanes made it possible for people to work abroad and return home on a regular basis; and refrigeration allowed bodies to be preserved for much longer. And so the old limitations on funeral expenses were blown open. Migrants were generally suspected of shirking their kinship obligations, and so were eager to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the kinship group: and the funeral, where this loyalty could be made tangible and public, was the perfect place to do it.
And so in the second half of the twentieth century a huge funeral economy emerged in Ghana. Bodies could be refrigerated indefinitely in hospital mortuaries, and since the fees escalated with each passing week it became prestigious to refrigerate bodies for a long time; by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
Modernity is about not doing what your family says
There is, I think, something quite pathological about the funeral ritual. The obligations of intensive kinship make it extraordinarily difficult for people to build savings, reinvest in their businesses, or make the financial decisions that would most benefit themselves and their children. Every surplus is claimed before it can compound.
Kinship networks certainly do provide a number of important welfare functions: people want to see their relatives fed and housed and cared for, and a kinship network is, among other things, a mechanism for accomplishing that. But it’s hard not to notice something darker. The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.
The obvious incentive, then, is to hobble the most productive: the demands that the kinship group makes on its most productive members are not simply demands for solidarity but demands for a kind of enforced mediocrity. People comply with these demands not only out of genuine loyalty but also out of fear of what happens if they refuse.
This dynamic, you’ll notice, isn’t really compatible with durable economic growth. Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture. In large part, this is because kinship loyalties crowd out loyalties to impersonal institutions: this lack of impersonal social trust is why African societies have so few large firms, for example. But it’s also because the glue that holds together kinship society is the occasional immolation of built-up wealth.
There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals.
Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.
I don’t think that African societies are ripe for social transformations of the kind just described; loyalties to strong states won’t supplant loyalties to kinship networks anytime soon. But for the most productive people trapped inside these kinship networks, I do think that technology offers something like an escape hatch. Mobile phones and bank accounts held under a single name are tools that help these people put a wall between what they earn and what their family knows they earn. In many cases these technologies are remarkably liberating. Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.
There’s a lot to be said, then, for one of the most underappreciated virtues of modern financial systems: privacy. Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want. There is something cold about this, of course, but also something deeply emancipating. In a world where your relatives can see and lay claim to everything you earn, anything that makes your income a little less legible to them is also, quietly, an engine of economic development.
And so the lavish funeral, in the end, is not a strange cultural quirk of African life, but the most visible manifestation of a social order oriented toward the destruction of accumulated surplus. And until the grip of that social order loosens, much of the wealth that Africa produces will continue to go, quite literally, into the ground.
https://substack.com/@doks/p-193713307?utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e233_tv2_tp1_a1demonlaj0ujf
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WHY HUMANS CAN’T LIVE 200 YEARS
Even
if science cured all disease tomorrow, you wouldn't reach 200. The
ultimate ceiling on human life is dictated by a microscopic countdown
clock ticking inside nearly every cell.
The primary barrier to living two centuries is a mechanism known as the Hayflick limit. In the 1960s, biologist Leonard Hayflick discovered that normal human cells can only divide about 40 to 60 times before they simply stop. This limit is controlled by telomeres, which are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides to repair or maintain tissue, a tiny portion of its telomeres is snipped off. Once these caps become too short, the cell can no longer safely replicate without risking catastrophic DNA damage.
When cells hit this limit, they do not always undergo apoptosis (programmed cell death). Instead, many turn into senescent cells, often referred to as "zombie cells." These exhausted cells linger in the body and secrete a toxic mix of inflammatory proteins that degrade surrounding healthy tissue. Over decades, the accumulation of senescent cells leads to systemic inflammation and tissue breakdown.
Furthermore, the human body relies on a finite reserve of stem cells to regenerate vital organs, blood, and skin. By the time a person reaches a century of life, this stem cell pool is severely depleted. The body essentially loses its physical ability to rebuild itself. Bones become brittle, blood vessels stiffen, and organs shrink, regardless of lifestyle or diet.
Extensive demographic and biological modeling published in recent years suggests that the absolute maximum human lifespan is somewhere between 120 and 150 years. Researchers track a metric called "physiological resilience," which is the body's ability to return to a baseline state of health after a stressor like a minor illness or physical exertion. The data indicates that this resilience completely flatlines by age 150. At that point, the body loses all capacity to maintain homeostasis. A minor shift in environmental temperature or a tiny change in blood pressure would be enough to cause total systemic failure.
Living to 200 would require completely redesigning human biology from the genetic level up to bypass the Hayflick limit, endlessly replenish stem cells, and perfectly clear senescent cells, rather than simply treating the diseases of old age. ~ NovaPrism, Quora
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FOCUSED ULTRASOUND IMPROVES PARKINSON’S SYMPTOMS
In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine co-authored by Vibhor Krishna, MD, associate professor of neurosurgery at the UNC School of Medicine, researchers show that a new focused ultrasound treatment improved dyskinesia and motor impairment in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease is a common neurological disorder characterized by the loss of dopamine neurons in the brain. Patients with Parkinson’s disease can be effectively treated with medications such as levodopa. However, some patients develop dyskinesia – involuntary movements – and motor impairment.
Dyskinesia is an involuntary movement of any region of the body that can occur with long-term use of levodopa. At the same time, motor impairment is characterized by the return of debilitating Parkinsonian symptoms as medication effectiveness declines.
“Focused ultrasound is an exciting new treatment for patients with certain neurological disorders,” said Krishna, who also is vice chair of inpatient operations in the UNC Department of Neurosurgery.
“The procedure is incisionless, eliminating the risks associated with surgery. Using focused ultrasound, we can target a specific area of the brain and safely ablate the diseased tissue.”
Patients who receive focused ultrasound treatment can go home the same day after treatment. This treatment was FDA-approved for patients with essential tremor in 2016, and now this pivotal trial has led to FDA-approval of focused ultrasound ablation to treat dyskinesia and motor impairment in Parkinson’ disease.
“Almost twice as many patients achieved improved motor function or reduced dyskinesia in the focused ultrasound group than those who underwent a sham procedure,” Krishna said. “In addition, we observed that 75% of patients in the focused ultrasound group maintained their results for up to one year after the treatment.”
For this pivotal trial, the researchers randomly assigned 94 Parkinson’s disease patients with dyskinesias or motor impairment to undergo either focused ultrasound ablation or a “sham” procedure.
The primary outcome was a response to therapy at three months, defined as a decrease of at least three points from baseline either in the score on the Movement Disorders Society–Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale, part III (off medication state), or in the score on the Unified Dyskinesia Rating Scale (on medication state).
Sixty-nine patients were assigned to undergo ultrasound ablation, and 25 underwent the sham (control) procedure. In the focused ultrasound group, 65 patients completed the primary-outcome assessment, while 22 in the control group completed the study. In the focused ultrasound group, 45 patients (69%) had a response, as compared with 7 (32%) in the control group.
The adverse effects related to ablation of the globus pallidus were infrequent and included speech difficulty, visual disturbance, and gait difficulty – in one patient each. There was one serious adverse event documented one week after the treatment in one patient.
“Our research aims to optimize focused ultrasound treatment to minimize risks and maximize improvements,” Krishna said.
“We observed that clinical outcomes after focused ultrasound ablation can be site-specific. Specifically, we observed two distinct hotspots in the globus pallidus that correlated with improvements in dyskinesia and motor impairment respectively. In the future, we aim to investigate whether these findings can lead to a personalized approach to treating Parkinson’s disease with focused ultrasound.”
https://neurosciencenews.com/parkinsons-focused-ultrasound-22793/
Original Research:
“Trial of Globus Pallidus Focused Ultrasound Ablation in Parkinson’s Disease” by Vibhor Krishna et al. NEJM
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CBD MAY SLOW ALZHEIMER’S BY CALMING THE BRAIN’S IMMUNE SYSTEM
CBD may tackle Alzheimer’s on multiple fronts by cooling brain inflammation linked to the disease.
Summary:
CBD may be doing far more than just easing pain or anxiety — new research suggests it could help fight Alzheimer’s disease by calming the brain’s runaway immune response. In experiments using Alzheimer’s mice, scientists found that inhaled CBD reduced key drivers of neuroinflammation, a damaging process increasingly linked to memory loss and brain degeneration.
CBD and Brain Inflammation
Inflammation is part of the body's natural immune response. In the brain, immune cells normally help protect neurons and clear away harmful debris. But when inflammation becomes chronic, it can begin damaging healthy brain tissue instead. This ongoing immune overactivation, often called neuroinflammation, has been linked to Alzheimer's disease and several other neurological disorders.
In a new study published in eNeuro, researchers led by Babak Baban from Augusta University investigated whether CBD could help calm this damaging inflammatory response in the brain.
The team used a well-established mouse model of Alzheimer's disease and delivered CBD through inhalation. They then examined how the compound affected immune activity and inflammatory signaling in the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord.
Using a variety of molecular and genetic tests, the scientists found that CBD lowered the activity of several important regulators involved in neuroinflammation. The treatment was also associated with reduced levels of proinflammatory molecules, which are substances that can worsen inflammation and contribute to tissue damage.
The researchers also identified specific immune-related pathways that appeared to interact with CBD. These findings suggest the compound may influence multiple biological systems involved in Alzheimer's disease.
"Alzheimer's work has long centered on plaques and tangles," says Baban. "But our study shows that chronic autoinflammation is also a core driver of the disease. What's exciting is that CBD not only calms this immune overactivation but, in earlier work, we've shown it can also help clear plaques and tangles through a different mechanism. Together, this points to a multitarget approach with real therapeutic potential."
A Growing Interest in Multi-Target Alzheimer's Treatments
Scientists have increasingly explored treatments that target more than one aspect of Alzheimer's disease at the same time. Because the condition involves many overlapping biological changes, including inflammation, protein buildup, and neuron damage, researchers believe a multi-target strategy may prove more effective than focusing on a single pathway alone.
Although the findings are promising, the study was conducted in mice, not humans. More research and clinical trials will be needed before scientists know whether CBD could become a safe and effective treatment for people with Alzheimer's disease.
Brain of an Alzheimer's patient (left) vs normal brain
Still, the results add to growing evidence that controlling brain inflammation may become an important part of future Alzheimer's therapies.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260528082507.htm
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NEW APPROACHES TO TREATING INFLAMMATION
~ Medications that mitigate inflammation caused by a variety of diseases including rheumatic arthritis may also compromise a person’s immune system, but a new approach points to a possible solution to this problem.
Researchers have discovered a mechanism that might alleviate inflammation by suppressing the migration of a type of white blood cells called neutrophils. The cells migrate within tissues in order to kill pathogens but may also cause excessive inflammation, resulting in tissue injury and other adverse effects.
The scientists identified a genetic molecule called miR-199, a type of “microRNA,” which reduces the migration of neutrophils, therefore potentially relieving inflammation without compromising the immune system.
“This is important because various challenges lie in the balance of dampening detrimental inflammation while preserving immunity,” said Qing Deng, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University.
The researchers used a genetic-screening method to identify eight microRNAs that suppress neutrophilic migration, including miR-199. They found that miR-199 directly suppresses the action of an enzyme called cyclin-dependent kinase 2, or CDK2, in turn dampening the migration of neutrophils.
Although CDK2 is well known for its role in regulating a cell’s life cycle – the process of a cell replicating its DNA and dividing to generate two cells — its link to neutrophil migration was previously unknown.
“This work suggests miR-199 and CDK2 as new targets for treating inflammatory ailments and introduces an avenue of the function for CDK2 outside the cell cycle regulation,” Deng said.
Findings are detailed in a paper appeared online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Alan Y. Hsu, a doctoral student in Purdue’s Department of Biological Sciences, was the paper’s lead author.
Recently, microRNAs have been used in clinical trials to treat cancer and infection. They also are used as screening tools to identify the underlying mechanisms of diseases and cell behavior. However, the role of microRNAs in regulating neutrophil migration is largely unknown.
“The absence of this knowledge potentially leads to missed opportunities in harnessing microRNAs and their targets in restraining neutrophilic inflammation,” Deng said. “Our research results expand the current understanding of neutrophil migration and suggest a novel strategy to manage neutrophilic inflammation.”
The research was performed in zebrafish and also in human neutrophil-like cells.
“Our results reveal previously unknown functions of miR-199 and CDK2 in regulating neutrophil migration and provide a new direction in alleviating systemic inflammation,” Deng said.
The research has implications for diseases including rheumatic arthritis, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.
Findings showed miR-199 hinders neutrophil motility and directly targets CDK2. Although no previous studies have investigated the role of miR-199 in neutrophils, its role in suppressing inflammation and cell migration has been reported in cancer cells. “Here, we provide evidence that miR-199 is a suppressor of cell migration in white blood cells, expanding its role beyond cancer biology,” Deng said.
Surprisingly, she said, miR-199 predominantly regulates the cell cycle-dependent kinase CDK2 in “terminally differentiated neutrophils.”
“When we say a cell is terminally differentiated that means the cell will not divide anymore,” she said. “The cell cycle is active in stem cells and cancer cells. But when cells change their gene expression to become neutrophils with immune-defense functions, they fight infections and die. So, it is unexpected that genes promoting cell cycle and cell division, such as CDK2, would regulate neutrophil function.”
The work is ongoing, and the next step is to understand the detailed molecular mechanisms for how CDK2 suppresses neutrophil migration and lethal inflammation. ~
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GUT MICROBIOME CAN REVEAL RISK OF PARKINSON’S
The signature changes to the microbiome could help doctors spot patients at risk of Parkinson’s years before they display clear symptoms
Changes to microbes that live in the gut can identify people at greater risk of Parkinson’s disease long before symptoms develop, according to work that also raises hopes for new therapies.
Researchers discovered signature changes in the gut microbiome that are more pronounced in people with a genetic risk for Parkinson’s and even more stark in those diagnosed with the disease.
The signature could help doctors spot patients at risk of Parkinson’s years before they display clear symptoms and suggests that healthier diets and treatments that reshape the microbiome might prevent or delay the disease.
Prof Anthony Schapira, the head of clinical and movement neurosciences at University College London and lead investigator on the study, said it was the first time a microbial signature in Parkinson’s patients had been seen in people with a genetic susceptibility but had yet to develop symptoms. The signature appears to become stronger as the disease progresses.
“These same changes can be found in a small proportion of the general population that may put them at increased risk,” Schapira said.
Cases of Parkinson’s have doubled in the past 25 years, with more than 8.5 million people globally now living with the condition. The disease causes progressive brain damage, leading to tremors, slow movement and stiff and inflexible muscles. Patients often experience depression, anxiety, sleep and memory problems, and difficulty with balance.
Parkinson’s is driven by neurons dying in part of the brain called the substantia nigra. The loss of the nerve cells leads to a fall in dopamine in the brain, which is responsible for many of the disease’s symptoms. There is no cure, but medicines that bolster dopamine can help, alongside physiotherapy and surgery.
The UCL team analyzed clinical and fecal data from 271 Parkinson’s patients, 43 people with a risk gene for the disease but no clinical symptoms, and 150 healthy people.
More than a quarter of the gut microbes, or 176 species, differed in those with Parkinson’s disease compared with the healthy group. The changes were not driven by medication. A similar pattern was seen in those genetically predisposed to Parkinson’s but who did not have symptoms.
The scientists corroborated the findings in further medical data from 638 people with Parkinson’s and 319 healthy controls from the UK, South Korea and Turkey. A small proportion of healthy people had the microbiome signature, suggesting they were potentially at risk of the disease, according to Nature Medicine.
It is unclear whether the microbial signature drives Parkinson’s or vice versa, or both, but Schapira said changes in the microbiome could alter the production of a protein called alpha-synuclein, which plays an important role in damaging neurons in the disease.
“Certain bacteria cause inflammation in the gut wall that increases alpha-synuclein, which is then transported up the vagus nerve from the gut to the brain and then into the brain cells affected in Parkinson’s,” he said. The vagus nerve carries information between the brain and major organs.
Further work and clinical trials are needed to understand how gut microbes are linked to Parkinson’s and whether reshaping the microbiome could shield against the disease, but dietary changes may help. In the study, people with the abnormal microbiome signature ate more processed foods and saturated fats rather than fruit, vegetables, fiber, fish and lentils.
Claire Bale, an associated director of research at Parkinson’s UK, said the study added to growing evidence that the gut microbiome was important in Parkinson’s. “The findings indicate that changes in the microbiome may occur in the very early stages of the condition and that the extent of these changes may correlate with disease progression,” she said.
“Over the past decade, we have seen the impact of physical activity on managing symptoms and potentially slowing the course of the condition. Our growing understanding of the gut microbiome offers similar hope that dietary modification could benefit those living with Parkinson’s.”
ending on beauty:
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
~ Wallace Stevens
Image: Night-blooming cereus, Stephanie Blevins
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